In 1026, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni raided the Hindu temple of
Somanatha (Somnath in textbooks of the colonial period). The story
of the raid has reverberated in Indian history, but largely during
the raj. It was first depicted as a trauma for the Hindu population
not in India, but in the House of Commons. The triumphalist
accounts of the event in Turko-Persian chronicles became the main
source for most eighteenth-century historians. It suited everyone
and helped the British to divide and rule a multi-millioned
subcontinent. In her new book, Romila Thapar, the doyenne of Indian
historians, reconstructs what took place by studying other sources,
including local Sanskrit inscriptions, biographies of kings and
merchants of the period, court epics and popular narratives that
have survived. The result is astounding and undermines the
traditional version of what took place. These findings also contest
the current Hindu religious nationalism that constantly utilises
the conventional version of this history.
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