New Delhi: It was a book launch like no other. The lighting of the lamp was accompanied by chanting of Sanskrit verses about shubh muhurat — auspicious time — by two priests on stage, and the author began by asking the audience to raise their hands and shout ‘Har Har Mahadev’.
The book was Waiting for Shiva: Unearthing the Truth of Kashi’s Gyan Vapi and the author was historian Vikram Sampath. It was launched by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman at Pradhan Mantri Museum and Library auditorium on Monday.
The audience included economist and historian Sanjeev Sanyal, spiritual leader Sakshi Shree, author Anand Ranganathan, and dozens of history students from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
The book is an impressive tome that brings together historical, religious, archaeological, and legal arguments to the ongoing Hindu reclamation project in Varanasi. Sampath says that Hindus have been waiting for Shiva just like the Nandi bull waits for a darshan in temples. In the book, Sampath bemoans the historians’ denial and denunciation of the umbilical cord India has with its civilisational ethos.
Speaking about why he wrote the book, Sampath said, “I almost felt that it was a historian’s burden, nay, responsibility to ensure that all the facts about Kashi Vishwanath were put together in the form of a book.”
The book comes when the Lok Sabha election is around the corner and the Gyanvapi issue is at the centre of public discourse. The timing of the book is neatly poised between Ayodhya pran pratishtha and the election. Last month, the Varanasi district court allowed Hindus to offer prayers inside the ‘Vyas Ka Tehkhana’ (sealed basement area) of the Gyanvapi mosque complex.
Sampath praises the resilience of the Hindu community that kept recovering to rebuild the Kashi temple despite repeated demolitions. The book attributes this to the non-institutionalised framework and the multiplicity of the Hindu sects. But the same resilience was missing among the Buddhists who depend on the monastic order to sustain their faith.
“Hindus never gave up. Shrines fell, shrines rose but the Hindus of Kashi never gave up and that is the resilience and courage that this book tries to bring out,” he said.
The book will also be released in South Indian languages of Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu—to ensure Kashi’s pan-India acceptance. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that 20,000 copies of the book have already been sold, and it has now gone for a second reprint.
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Documentation – inherent part of Hindu way of Life
Much like the Ayodhya Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid dispute, the Gyanvapi temple-mosque is also caught in a legal dispute over evidence. Narratives of faith and collective memory often appear to clash with the modern-day demand of hard evidence about the existence of the ancient temple at the exact site and also its demolition. Temple and mosque advocates have pored through and marshalled historians’ books, travellers’ chronicles, and religious scriptures to buttress their claims.
But minister Sitharaman was quick to tell the audience that there is plenty of evidence if one were to look with an open mind.
“From stones to copper plates to palm leaf inscriptions, Hindus have been documenting the history and prior to documentation, oral narration was a part of Hindu way of living with Veda pandits reciting and mentioning about the ancient temple sites,” she said, congratulating Sampath for the book.
“Stones all over India speak about our gods. Wherever they dig for some secular purpose, building a tank, road, drainage, you get murtis of Bhagwan, you get stones, which tell about how rulers of that era built temples and pillars there,” said the minister.
Emphasising the importance of documentation, Sitharaman said it’s because of documentation that people know about the repeated turbulence by way of Islamic invasions and demolitions (in context of Kashi), asserting that every time Kashi was rebuilt, it was documented.
“You can’t search for Kashi and get Kashi, you probably search for something else and will get Kashi,” she said as the audience clapped.
Calling today’s generation ‘fortunate’, Sitharaman said that among seven Moksha Nagaris, three—Ayodhya, Kashi, and Ujjain—are getting reconstructed.
It all started at the Pondy Lit Fest when Sampath met advocate Vishnu Shankar Jain and their conversations led to a book on ‘unearthing Gyanvapi’.
Sampath calls it “serendipity” as he also met publisher Blue Ink’s Praveen Tiwari at the literature festival. And the trio together reached a consensus that, unlike Ayodhya, the story of Kashi Vishwanath temple “had not reached the common masses.”
During the course of the conversation, Jain, who has been representing Hindus in the Gyanvapi survey case, spoke about the ‘threats’ he allegedly received for pursuing the case.
He is the son of advocate Hari Shankar Jain, who fought the Ram Janmabhoomi case of Ayodhya. Vishnu Jain’s bio on X (formerly Twitter) reads that he wants “restoration of Kashi and Mathura.”
And during the panel discussion, he spoke about how important it was for the Kashi story to reach the masses and “liberate civilization” and “reclaim history”.
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Need for alternate history
Book launches these days are becoming a common site to mock and criticise Jawaharlal Nehru, and historians Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib. This was true at the launch of Waiting for Siva as well – the panelists and the audience were primed and ready to lap it all up.
A PhD student from JNU asked about an article by South Asian history professor Audrey Truschke, accusing the historian of having “concocted a story about Aurangzeb patronising many temples in the Indian subcontinent.”
“Truschke cited someone called Jnan Chandra but when I looked at Jnan Chandra’s article, there were no footnotes and he wrote for the [Journal of the] Pakistan Historical Society,” he said, adding, “How to constantly be alert of this tendency?”
This question led to a further discussion about the need for alternate history with Sampath saying that the only alternative was — to create a body of alternate scholarship.
“It’s easy to demonise Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib in non-left circles. They have spent their entire lives to create that body of work. The question is, what are we going to replace their books with? Unless you create an alternative scholarship, there is no hope,” said Sampath.
He said he has started a small research organisation, Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research, which will give fellowships across India to young and budding scholars with knowledge of Indian classical languages who will write Indian history from a nationalistic perspective.
The panel discussion was interrupted by Ranganathan, who asked everyone to turn their heads. At the other side of the packed auditorium was a portrait of a “thoughtful” Nehru looking downward.
Mocking the first PM, Ranganathan said, “See this man Jawaharlal Nehru. He is looking down because he does not want to meet the eyes of Vikram and Vishnu Jain. He is drawn like that in a thoughtful pose because he is thinking which book to ban next. You know the things we know about Chacha Nehru that he was a beacon of freedom of speech and expression. If only they actually knew the truth.” The audience broke into laughter.
The Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya where the book launch took place was earlier the home of Jawaharlal Nehru.
(Edited by Prashant)
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