Meenakshi Jain. Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples: Episodes from Indian History. Aryan Books. Price Rs 995. pp 405.

The late Sita Ram Goel, dharmic warrior, Hindu activist and author of several books on Islamic iconoclasm in India, was the first writer to rout Left historians with evidence. His seminal work – Hindu Temples: What Happened To Them – published in two volumes, destroyed these historians’ attempt to present India’s Islamic rulers as benign despots who destroyed temples merely out of the need for plunder and political dominance. Worse, they inserted deliberate lies into the narrative by suggesting that Hindu rulers were doing much the same thing, destroying and desecrating temples well before Muslim rulers invaded India. So, the bad example was set by Hindu rulers.

Anyone with an iota of commonsense would reject such a-historic assertions out of hand for the simple reason that the destruction of idols is central to the Muslim faith, while there is no such requirement in the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions of India. Idol destruction began at the time of the Prophet himself, when he destroyed 360 idols in the Kaaba after returning victorious to Mecca. Since then, rare was the Muslim ruler in north India who failed to destroy idols whenever he could. If today the best Indian temples are in south India and not north India, it has Islamic iconoclasm to thank.

Meenakshi Jain, Senior Fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research, is one of the few intrepid modern historians to take the Sita Ram Goel enterprise forward by delving deep into the traumatic period of Islamic and colonial rule. Her books include Rama And Ayodhya, The Battle for Rama, Sati, and a three-volume study titled The India They Saw: Foreign Accounts of India from the 8th to Mid-19th Century. The Battle for Rama has been ignored by mainstream historians because it clearly establishes the validity of the Hindu claims for a Ram temple in Ayodhya.

If Sita Ram Goel made Islamic iconoclasm irrefutable, in her latest book, Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples: Episodes from Indian History (Aryan Books, Rs 995, Pp 405), Jain takes the story deeper and documents the efforts a defeated Hindu people made to save their deities and rebuild their temples whenever they got the opportunity. There are several score full-fledged and mini-stories of how Hindus protected their religious heritage with minor and major acts of defiance and determination over centuries, sometimes hiding their deities or burying them to prevent the iconoclasts from destroying sacred idols.

From the first Islamic depredations dating back to the invasion of Sind by Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 CE and going all the way to the eighteenth century, when British colonialism ended Mughal hegemony, which allowed for a small resurgence in temple-building, Jain gives us a panoramic view of the Big Truth. She gives the final lie to the Leftist effort to find false equivalence between some temple desecrations by Hindu rulers and the vastly unimaginable scale of Muslim destructiveness.

Jain points out how some historians, in order to justify Islamic iconoclasm, reduced Hindu temples to “pre-eminently political institutions”, thus making them justifiable targets for Islamic attack. But missing from this argument is any real example of Muslim rulers destroying mosques using the same logic – to establish political supremacy. Writes Jain: “Temples have been downgraded to transactional institutions concerning king and deity alone, divested of all sacredness. The millions who thronged to them over the centuries have simply been erased from history.” But “if temples were symbols of royal authority, the reasoning apparently did not apply to mosques.”

Jain’s Flight of Deities contrasts the Islamic need to destroy temples and idols with cases of Hindu kings who merely appropriated deities in order to establish their supremacy. The case of Vatapi Ganesh is instructive. When the Pallava King Narasimhavarman defeated the Chalukyan ruler Pulakesin II in the battle of Vatapi (642 CE), his general brought back the image of Ganesh from there and installed it in his birthplace of Tiruchenkattankudi near Thanjavur (Tamil Nadu). Twelve hundred years later, in the eighteenth century, the south Indian musical trinity of Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Shyama Shastri immortalised the Vatapi Ganapati by composing soulful lyrics in the elephant god’s honour.

Concludes Jain: “In the overwhelming number of cases of image appropriation, victorious Hindu kings instated them in grand temples. Muslim rulers destroyed entire temples, and where that was not possible, disfigured the images.”