CHENNAI/NEW DELHI: In the last few years, spiritual and religious fervour have become a visible part of the public discourse after the Supreme Court’s verdict of the Babri Masjid demolition that finally culminated in January with the ‘Pran Prathishtha’ of the Ram Mandir.
But while the case was laid to rest for the general public, another remains in full view. It’s the long-standing dispute over Kashi’s Gyanvapi mosque built by the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb in 1669. As the legal case is developing at record speed, historian and writer Vikram Sampath’s latest book, Waiting for Shiva: Unearthing the Truth of Kashi’s Gyan Vapi (`699; BluOne Ink) attempts to weave the spiritual, scriptural, and legal histories of one of India’s most venerated sites, Kashi. Launching the book in Bengaluru recently, Sampath, though a historian himself quips that ‘we shouldn’t live too much in the past’. And so even amid a dispute, which many see as a controversy blurring the lines of secularism and democracy, Sampath says it has much contemporary relevance. “It’s not a controversy, it’s a contemporary issue, I would say,” he tells CE.
When he came across the issue, there was little about the case in the public forum. “It was by chance that I met advocate Vishnu Shankar Jain. His father and he have been fighting the Gyanvapi case for years and I realised that there is so little that the common masses know even though there are case updates every day,” remarks Sampath, adding, “It’s a historian’s responsibility to put all these documents out in the public realm. The book, in fact, was born almost accidentally.” However, he admits that creating a narrative from all the disparate sources available was a challenge. “Piecing the disconnected sources together into a common narrative which made sense to the reader was a huge challenge,” says Sampath.
He began this project with the intention of writing the legal history and later expanded the scope of his work. “It takes a larger canvas, which looks at the scriptural and the spiritual significance of Kashi in the Indian consciousness with historical records of the past, accounts of travellers, British colonial records, and court documents, both pre and post-Independence because the place has always been one of contestation,” he adds.
The legal dispute, claiming that the mosque has been built on the remains of a part of the ancient Kashi Vishwanath temple, has been in court since 1991 but gained traction in 2023 when a local court ordered a survey of the Gyanvapi mosque by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). After the survey, ASI reported that a Hindu temple did exist before the construction of the mosque. On January 31, a local court allowed Hindus to offer prayers in the southern cellar of the Gyanvapi mosque.
Sampath was actually gearing up for his next book on Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan when he decided to put that project on the back-burner. The book’s completion within a remarkably short span of six to seven months is a deviation from Sampath’s typical multi-year projects. “This book required burning the midnight oil over the last five months,” shares Sampath, for whom Waiting for Shiva is not just a historical account but a nuanced exploration of the interplay between religion, myth, and legal history. “I’ve tried to be objective without flowing into emotions. There are lots of fables in Puranic literature where the truth is told, but it is embedded within fantastic tales. Skanda Purana talks of Shiva’s exile and how he tries to come back to Kashi. This may sound like a story but written in the 12th or 13th century, this shows people were chronicling the destruction of the Shiva linga. A lot of this needs to be deductive logic,” highlights Sampath.
The prolific writer wants to bring the idea to the public discourse that the fight for Gyanvapi is not a recent one. “This has been going on for 2,000 years. Shrines kept rising and falling, but the Hindus never gave up on it. This book is the story of resilience, resurrection, and reclamation in the wake of historical odds,” says Sampath. He also emphasises a pan-India narrative when it comes to Kashi Vishwanath’s history. “In the reconstruction of the Vishwanath temple, all parts of India contributed. In Karnataka, we had the Hoysala ruler who donated an entire village so the money from that would go to the pilgrims to pay the jizya tax to go for the tirtha yatra. People never gave up on the site. Today, when people say, ‘Let’s not bother about it and build something else’, I think that is doing injustice to our ancestors. One has to continue to reclaim what is rightfully ours,” says Sampath, who has started the Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research to foster alternative scholarships in Indian history.
Is it phallus worship?
The oft-repeated derisive remark is that the Shiva linga is actually the phallus or male genitalia of Bhagwan Shiva that is worshipped. Hindus are often mocked and ridiculed for what is considered a decadent and indecent form of worship. Colonial literature and their faithful inheritors in the present times abound in such references. A story from the Skanda Purana mentions Shiva roaming around naked, holding his linga in his hands. Due to someone’s curse, it fell to the ground and started growing and burning the whole world. The Shakti or Devi had to intervene and take the form of a yoni (womb or female genitalia) to bring it under control. Anyone who takes this literally and not as a metaphor can well ridicule Hindus as worshippers of the phallus, which is disgusting according to them. Some Western interpreters also look at Lingopasana or the worship of the linga as a fertility cult. They assume that the Hindus worship the linga for reasons of fertility or for the fear of being sterile. But since this interpretation is so unrelatable for common Hindus in general as that is not running through their minds while worshipping a Shiva linga, it is hardly contested, though these notions remain rooted in academic ivory towers or agenda-driven discourses. So, the linga in these interpretations becomes nothing but Shiva’s phallus or genital organ. But if you ask a common worshipper, they certainly don’t have that perspective. The linga is not worshipped because it’s an organ of Shiva or due to its angatva. The sacredness or status of a deity implied by the linga is not because it is a part of Shiva’s body. Instead, the linga is worshipped as Shiva himself or due to the shivatva of the linga.
(Excerpted with permission from Vikram Sampath’s Waiting for Shiva: Unearthing the Truth of Kashi’s Gyan Vapi, published by BluOne Ink)