Hindu Temple Quotes

I watched the rows and rows of chappals left by devotees outside the Hindu temple and wondered if the homeless boys who sometimes steal our chickens ever steal them, and if they do, are they punished, and if so by whom?

It was not until I began meeting people of other faiths in their most sacred spaces that I learned how bruised some of them were by Christian evangelism. Worshippers at the Hindu Temple returned to the parking lot after one of their major festivals to find Christians by their cars with pamphlets demeaning their holiday. Muslims were used to Christians saying malicious things about the Qur'an. Native Americans were tired of being asked what God they prayed to. The shared consensus is that Christian evangelists are not very good listeners. They assume they are speaking to people with no knowledge of God themselves. They are disrespectful to other people's faith.

Not specifically. "Demons have been on Earth as long as we have. They're all over the world, in their different forms – Greek daemons, Persian daevas, Hindu asuras, Japanese oni. Most belief systems have some method of incorporating both their existence and the fight against them. Shadowhunters cleave to no single religion, and in turn all religions assist us in our battle. I could as easily have gone for help to a Jewish synagogue or a Shinto temple, or – Ah. Here it is.

It is very possible (and perfectly okay) for someone who is Catholic, Muslim, Atheist or Jewish, for example, to still find the Buddha’s teachings inspirational. You can love Jesus, repeat a Hindu mantra, and still go to temple after morning meditation. Buddhism is not a threat to any religion, it actually strengthens your existing faith by expanding your love to include all beings.

Leaving footwear outside is not enough. To enter the temple of God, you have to leave yourself outside.

Beside the refined, almost Greek, simplicity of Chaucer's poetry, the ornamented verse of the contemporary north-western poet rears like A Hindu temple, exotic and densely fashioned.

The hell is not something which is full of trash, because one can adjust and find comfort in trash after some time. The hell is when our little temple of purity gets surrounded by trash.

Thousands of Hindu temples were plundered, And it still goes on. The SPH #Nithyananda Paramashivam is putting an end to it #UnitedNationsRecognisesPersecutionOnTheSPHNithyanandaAndKailasa

You may look for God in sacred places like churches, mosques, synagogues, buddhist or hindu temples, but you can only find it in your heart, 'cause it is supposed to be your most sacred place.

I hate the churches of the world, however, that have become havens for heretics. I resent a TV church that, in many cases, has become a den of thieves. I would love to see the divine Lord take a whip and have at it in the religion of our time. I sometimes pray imprecatory psalms directly on the heads of certain people. But mostly, I pray for the kingdom to come. Mostly I pray for the gospel to penetrate the hearts of the lost. I understand why John Knox said, “Give me Scotland or I die. What else do I live for?” I understand why pioneer missionary Henry Martyn ran out of a Hindu temple exclaiming, “I cannot endure existence if Jesus is to be so dishonored!

In 1902 before the site of the steel plant was even located, Jamsetji when abroad, described his dream city of steel to his son Dorab in a letter: ‘Be sure to lay wide streets planted with shady trees, every other of a quick-growing variety. Be sure that there is plenty of space for lawns and gardens. Reserve large areas for football, hockey and parks. Earmark areas for Hindu temples, Mohammedan mosques and Christian churches.’ Two decades after Jamsetji penned these lines, J.R.D. first visited Jamshedpur. The dream had come true. In the intervening years men of steel had raised a city out of a jungle.

NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens—this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.I

I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one's arrival to God, because of the while of the reedy nadaswaram and the beating of drums, because of the patter of bare feet against stone floors down dark corridors pierced by shafts of sunlight, because of the fragrance of incense, because of flames of arati lamps circling in the darkness, because of bhajans being sweetly sung, because of elephants standing around to bless, because of colourful murals telling colourful stories, because of foreheads carrying, variously signified, the same word - faith. I became loyal to these sense impressions even before I knew what they meant or what they were for. It is my heart that commands me so. I feel at home in a Hindu temple. I am aware of Presence, not personal the way we usually presence, but something larger. My heart still skips a beat when I catch sight of the murti, of God Residing, in the inner sanctum of the temple. Truly I am in a sacred cosmic womb, a place where everything is born, and it is my sweet luck to behold its living core. My hands naturally come together in reverent worship.

Several of the early Turkic sultans were energetic iconoclasts and made a point of building their mosques from the rubble of destroyed temples, in some of which can still be seen the defaced sculptures of their Hindu and Jain predecessors.

We are of the earth very earthy, and we are not satisfied with contemplating the Invisible God. Somehow or other we want something which we can touch, something which we can see, something before which we can kneel down. It does not matter whether it is a book, or an empty stone building, or a stone building inhabited by numerous figures. A book will satisfy some, an empty building will satisfy some others, and many others will not be satisfied unless they see something inhabiting these empty buildings.

It seems to begin before dawn with the Muslims, when a mosque at the edge of the mangrove forest softly announces, in a lullaby voice, the morning call to prayer. Not to be outdone, the local Christians soon crank up pop-sounding hymns that last anywhere from one to three hours. This is followed by cheerful, though overamplified, kazoo-like refrain from the Hindu temple that reminds Less of the ice cream truck from his childhood. Then comes a later call to prayer. Then the Christians decide to ring some bronze bells. And so on. There are sermons and live singers and thunderous drum performances. In this way, the faiths alternate throughout the day, as at a music festival, growing louder and louder until, during the outright cacophony of sunset, the Muslims, who began the whole thing, declare victory by projecting not only the evening call to prayer but the prayer itself in its entirety. After that, the jungle falls to silence. Perhaps this is the Buddhists' sole contribution. Every morning, it starts again.

For instance, detractors trumpet that Aurangzeb destroyed certain temples without acknowledging that he also issued many orders protecting Hindu temples and granted stipends and land to Brahmins. They denounce that he restricted the celebration of Holi without mentioning that he also clamped down on Muharram and Eid festivities. They omit altogether that Aurangzeb consulted with Hindu ascetics on health matters and employed more Hindus in his administration than any prior Mughal ruler by a substantial margin.

These conquests were often marked by violence and the destruction of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sites. In what would become the capital of the new Delhi Sultanate, the slave general Qutb ud Din Aibak destroyed as many as twenty-seven temples before building the Qutb Minar.

Therefore the whole apparatus of piety, Hindu and Moslem alike—the temple and mosque, idol and holy water, scriptures and priests—were denounced by this inconveniently clear-sighted poet as mere substitutes for reality; dead things intervening between the soul and its love—

The Sanskrit Brihatsamhita, written perhaps in the sixth century, warns, ‘If a Shiva linga, image, or temple breaks apart, moves, sweats, cries, speaks, or otherwise acts with no apparent cause, this warns of the destruction of the king and his territory.’ Acting on this premise that religious images held political power, Hindu kings targeted one another’s temples beginning in the seventh century, regularly looting and defiling images of Durga, Ganesha, Vishnu, and so forth. They also periodically destroyed each other’s temples. Some Hindu kings even commissioned Sanskrit poetry to celebrate and memorialize such actions.

This poem declares the absence of a Hindu canon. This poem declares itself the Hindu canon. This poem follows the monkey. This poem worships the horse. This poem supersedes the Vedas and the supreme scriptures. This poem does not culture the jungle. This poem jungles the culture. This poem storms into temples with tanks. This poem stands corrected: the RSS is BJP’s mother. This poem is not vulnerable. This poem is Section 153-A proof. This poem is also idiot-proof. This poem quotes Dr.Ambedkar. This poem considers Ramayana a hetero-normative novel. This poem breaches Section 295A of the Indian Penile Code. This poem is pure and total blasphemy.

The soul, all-perfect and ever perfect, is compelled by the law of evolution to incarnate repeatedly in progressively higher lives— retarded by wrong actions and desires and accelerated by spiritual endeavors—until Self-realization and God-union are attained. Having then transcended the Lord’s delusion, the soul is forever freed. “Their thoughts immersed in That (Spirit), their souls one with Spirit, their sole allegiance and devotion given to Spirit, their beings purified from poisonous delusion by the antidote of wisdom— such men reach the state of non-return” (Bhagavad Gita V:17). In the Bible it is similarly written: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out” (Revelation 3:12)

Our senses were assaulted with colours, smells and noise. We saw a million saris, and never once did I see the same pattern repeated twice. We saw poverty that both humbled and disturbed us. We bartered with street traders for Indian prices, not tourist prices. We stopped by the side of the road and watched an old man crushing sugar canes so that we could drink the juice. It was the most delectable and flavourful drink we have ever tasted. We walked barefoot around the Swaminarayan Akshardham, the largest Hindu house of worship in the world, and were absolutely awed. The whole temple echoes with spirituality and we could have spent an entire day there. I saw a village of dirty black bricks, no rendering, just filth and grime, and right in the middle an exquisite and elegant white temple, freshly painted and unblemished. We drove from Jaipur to Delhi. The previous day the road had been closed due to the Jat caste protests. Thirty people died, ten women reported being raped and buildings and cars were set on fire

The person who makes God his Beloved, what more does he want? His heart becomes awakened to all the beauty there is within and without. To him all things appeal, everything unfolds itself, and it is beauty to his eyes, because God is all-pervading, in all names and all forms; therefore his Beloved is never absent. How happy therefore is the one whose Beloved is never absent, because the whole tragedy of life is the absence of the Beloved, and to one whose Beloved is always there, when he has closed his eyes the Beloved is within, when he has opened his eyes the Beloved is without. His every sense perceives the Beloved; his eyes see Him, his ears hear His voice. When a person arrives at this realization, then he, so to speak, lives in the presence of God; then to him the different forms and beliefs, faiths and communities do not count. To him God is all-in-all; to him God is everywhere. If he goes to the Christian church or to the synagogue, to the Buddhist temple, to the Hindu shrine, or to the mosque of the Muslim, there is God. In the wilderness, in the forest, in the crowd, everywhere he sees God.

Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there’s an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth. They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared, the warrior told her he had fulfilled his quest. ‘Now that I have found Truth,’ he said, ‘what shall I tell them at the palace about you?’ The wizened old creature smiled. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘tell them that I am young and beautiful.

When people in this country ask me what it means to be an untouchable, I explain that caste is like racism against blacks here. But then they ask, “How does anyone know what your caste is?” They know caste isn’t visible, like skin color. I explain it like this. In Indian villages and towns, everyone knows everyone else. Each caste has its own special role and its own place to live. The brahmins (who perform priestly functions), the potters, the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the washer people, and so on—they each have their own separate place to live within the village. The untouchables, whose special role—whose hereditary duty—is to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all. They must live outside the boundaries of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils. There are thousands of other such restrictions and indignities that vary from place to place. Every day in an Indian newspaper you can read of an untouchable beaten or killed for wearing sandals, for riding a bicycle.

Varanasi is the holiest city in Hinduism in India, which is a very unique city in india. The land of Varanasi (Kashi) has been the ultimate pilgrimage spot for Hindus for ages. Often referred to as Benares, Varanasi is the oldest living city in the world. Ganges in Varanasi is believed to have the power to wash away the sins of mortals. Ganges is said to have its origins in the tresses of Lord Shiva and in Varanasi, it expands to the mighty river that we know of. The city is a center of learning and civilization for over 3000 years. With Sarnath, the place where Buddha preached his first sermon after enlightenment, just 10 km away, Varanasi has been a symbol of Hindu renaissance. Knowledge, philosophy, culture, devotion to Gods, Indian arts and crafts have all flourished here for centuries. The holy city has many other temples also. The Tulsi Manas mandir is a modern marble temple. The walls of the temple are engraved with verses and scenes from Ramcharitmanas, hindi version of Ramayana, written by Tulsidas ji who lived here. Varanasi has produced numerous famous scholars and intellectuals, who have left their mark in respective fields of activity. Varanasi is home to numerous universities, college, schools, Madarsas and Pathshalas and the Guru Shishya tradition still continue in many institutions. The literary tradition of languages, dialects, newspapers, magazines and libraries continue to even this day. In varanasi one must have to do Boat Ride.

That the petitioner No. 2 is the founder President of an Institution, namely, “ Institute for Re-writing Indian (and World) History “. The aim and objective of that institution, which is a registered society having register no. F-1128 (T) as the public trust under the provision of Bombay Public Trust Act. Inter alia, is to re-discover the Indian history. The monumental places of historical importance in their real and true perspective having of the heritage of India. The true copy of memorandum of association of the aforesaid society / public trust having fundamental objectives along with Income tax exemption certificate under section 80-G (5) of I.T. Act, 1961 for period 1/4/2003 to 31/3/2006 are filed herewith as marked as Annexure No.1 and 2 to the writ petition. 5. That the founder-President of Petitioner’s Institution namely Shri P. N. Oak is a National born Citizen of India. He resides permanently at the address given in case title. The petitioner is a renowned author of 13 renowned books including the books, titled as, “ The Taj Mahal is a Temple Place”. This petition is related to Taj Mahal, Fatehpur- Sikiri, Red-fort at Agra, Etamaudaula, Jama- Masjid at Agra and other so called other monuments. All his books are the result of his long-standing research and unique rediscovery in the respective fields. The titles of his books speak well about the contents of the subject. His Critical analysis, dispassionate, scientific approach and reappraisal of facts and figures by using recognised tools used in the field gave him distinction through out the world. The true copy of the title page of book namely “The Taj Mahal is a Temple Palace” . written by Sri P. N. Oak, the author/ petitioner No. 2 is filed as Annexure –3 to this writ petition.

Elephanta caves, Mumbai-- I entered a world made of shadows and sudden brightness. The play of the light, the vastness of the space and its irregular form, the figures carved on the walls: all of it gave the place a sacred character, sacred in the deepest meaning of the word. In the shadows were the powerful reliefs and statues, many of them mutilated by the fanaticism of the Portuguese and the Muslims, but all of them majestic, solid, made of a solar material. Corporeal beauty, turned into living stone. Divinities of the earth, sexual incarnations of the most abstract thought, gods that were simultaneously intellectual and carnal, terrible and peaceful. ............................................................................ Gothic architecture is the music turned to stone; one could say that Hindu architecture is sculpted dance. The Absolute, the principle in whose matrix all contradictions dissolve (Brahma), is “neither this nor this nor this.” It is the way in which the great temples at Ellora, Ajanta, Karli, and other sites were built, carved out of mountains. In Islamic architecture, nothing is sculptural—exactly the opposite of the Hindu. The Red Fort, on the bank of the wide Jamuna River, is as powerful as a fort and as graceful as a palace. It is difficult to think of another tower that combines the height, solidity, and slender elegance of the Qutab Minar. The reddish stone, contrasting with the transparency of the air and the blue of the sky, gives the monument a vertical dynamism, like a huge rocket aimed at the stars. The mausoleum is like a poem made not of words but of trees, pools, avenues of sand and flowers: strict meters that cross and recross in angles that are obvious but no less surprising rhymes. Everything has been transformed into a construction made of cubes, hemispheres, and arcs: the universe reduced to its essential geometric elements. The abolition of time turned into space, space turned into a collection of shapes that are simultaneously solid and light, creations of another space, made of air. There is nothing terrifying in these tombs: they give the sensation of infinity and pacify the soul. The simplicity and harmony of their forms satisfy one of the most profound necessities of the spirit: the longing for order, the love of proportion. At the same time they arouse our fantasies. These monuments and gardens incite us to dream and to fly. They are magic carpets. Compare Ellora with the Taj Mahal, or the frescoes of Ajanta with Mughal miniatures. These are not distinct artistic styles, but rather two different visions of the world.

On a break from the tour, I went south to Bali, a place the choreographer Toni Basil, whom Eno and I had met during the Bush Of Ghosts sessions, had recommended as being transporting and all about performance. I rented a small motorcycle and headed up into the hills, away from the beach resort. I soon discovered that if one saw offerings of flowers and fruit being brought to a village temple compound in the afternoon, one could be pretty certain that some sort of ritual performance would follow there at night. Sure enough, night after night I would catch dances accompanied by gamelan orchestras and shadow-puppet excerpts from the Hindu Ramayana--epic and sometimes ritual performances that blended religious and theatrical elements. (A gamelan is a small orchestra made up mainly of tuned metallic gongs and xylophone-like instruments--the interplay between the parts is beautiful and intricate.) In these latter events some participants would often fall into a trance, but even in trance there were prescribed procedures. It wasn't all thrashing chaos, as a Westerner might expect, but a deeper kind of dance. As In Japanese theater, the performers often wore masks and extreme makeup; their movements, too, were stylized and "unnatural." It began to sink in that this kind of "presentational" theater has more in common with certain kinds of pop-music performance that traditional Western theater did. I was struck by other peripheral aspects of these performances. The audiences, mostly local villagers of all ages, weren't paying attention half the time. People would wander in and out, go get a snack from a cart or leave to smoke a bidi cigarette, and then return to watch some more. This was more like the behavior of audiences in music clubs than in Western theaters, where they were expected to sit quietly and only leave or converse once the show was over. The Balinese "shows" were completely integrated into people's daily lives, or so it seemed to me. There was no attempt to formally separate the ritual and the show from the audience. Everything seemed to flow into everything else. The food, the music, and the dance were all just another part of daily activity. I remembered a story about John Cage, who, when in Japan, asked someone what their religion was. The reply was that they didn't have a strict religion--they danced. Japanese do, of course, have Buddhist and Shinto rituals for weddings, funerals, and marriages, but a weekly thing like going to church or temple doesn't exist. The "religion" is so integrated into the culture that it appears in daily gestures and routines, unsegregated for ordinary life. I was beginning to see that theatricality wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either.

But it was neither the awesomeness of the towers nor the gorgeous complexity of the carvings that accorded the Madurai Meenakshi Sundareswara Temple its uniqueness. It was the idea. Among the multitude of Hindu shrines, it was the only one dedicated to Shiva and Parvati, not in their familiar forms as the destroyer-restorer and his ever-present consort, but as the romantic god Sundareswara and the fish-eyed beauty Meenakshi

(It is suggested that while the Vedic era saw only the worship of a formless and imageless God, the conduct of rituals and the propitiation of the river and mountain and tree gods of local tribes, all of which were ‘portable’ and not confined to a fixed spot, it was the arrival of the Greeks under Alexander in the fourth century BCE that brought into India the idea of permanent temples enshrining stone images of heroes and gods.) Again, while the Hinduism of the Vedas emerged from mantras and rituals, including elaborate sacrifices, the Puranas promoted their values entirely on the basis of myths and stories. By developing the concept of the saguna Brahman to go with the exalted idea of the nirguna Brahman, the Puranic faith integrated the Vedic religion into the daily worship of ordinary people. Using the seductive power of maya (illusion), the nirguna Brahman of the Vedas took the form of saguna Brahman or Ishvara, the creator of prakriti, the natural world and the God or Bhagavan of all human beings.

[Ellora] is one of the finely crafted marvels of the real, transcendent Artisan [i.e., God]. —Aurangzeb describing the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist temples at Ellora

​I stood there, on the gatehouse with the floodplain of the Kahan River in front of me and with raindrops softly pocking the stone parapet around my feet, and I looked and I thought.  Pakistan is a complex land, far more complex than its portrayal in the media would suggest, and Rohtas is the perfect example of its convoluted, tangled past.  It was built by a Pashtun hailing from the other side of the subcontinent in order to prevent a deposed fellow Muslim ruler from returning from exile and to keep another Muslim tribe suppressed and docile.  It contains the private residence of a later Moghul Emperor’s Hindu general and an abandoned Hindu temple, all but swallowed up by an encroaching jungle, and was later captured by the Sikhs who ruled over a large swathe of what is now Pakistan from 1799 to 1849; the nearby gurdwara testified to their presence.  Even the style of the fort’s construction told the same story: it contained elements of Persian, Afghan, Hindu and Turkish architectural forms.  The fort is a relic from a previous era, a time before the concept of the nation-state, a time when empires rose and fell, when warlords could carve out kingdoms for themselves which might last for a decade or for three centuries, a time of profound cultural and religious ferment.

When he arrived in Calicut on India’s Malabar coast, he re-established contact with Europe via the familiar Middle Eastern route used by travellers and merchants. It was a feat of seamanship, but in other respects his visit was not entirely auspicious. When he was taken to a temple by the local Brahmins, Vasco assumed that they were long-lost Christians. He fell on his knees in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary. It turned out to be the Hindu goddess Parvati. Meanwhile the Muslim merchants in the port were distinctly unfriendly, and, after a scuffle, Vasco decided to beat an early retreat and sail off home.

There had been earlier incidents of sacrilege by placing heads and other parts of the anatomy of cows in Hindu temples,

Hindu architecture and sculpture achieved their highest perfection in Mysore under the patronage of Hindu kings from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. The temple at Belur, an eleventh-century masterpiece completed during the reign of King Vishnuvardhana, is unsurpassed in the world for its delicacy of detail and exuberant imagery.

it was a fine line for me between making fun of my culture—which is a fine line I straddled the entire show—and just allowing it to be as silly and ridiculous as it is. How much can I get away saying without insulting, you know? I still get emails from people saying, “You really insulted your culture by saying this and that,” but that’s the nature of comedy. You’re never going to make everyone laugh, and someone’s going to be offended by all the colloquiums that you bring to light about your own cultures. So the dance sequence was one of those moments where I was like, Oh, this could go really badly, but it ended up being really fun. And there were certain things that I said on the show that I wish I could unsay now, given the current political climate, but it’s nothing so life-changing. It was a different time where people were not so sensitive to the divisiveness around us… and there was a lot more tolerance between people. We were not so offended by making fun of each other. Everything we said was not the end of the world. There’s only one line—and I don’t even remember it [entirely], but it was something about a prostitute—I wish I could take back. [Ed. note: It is “Madhuri Dixit is a l-leperous prostitute! ” in an exchange with Sheldon from season two, episode one, “The Bad Fish Paradigm.”] But even though Raj made fun of India, he was very [proud to be] Indian. He wore his culture on his sleeve. There’s a scene that rarely ever gets brought up, but it’s a very beautiful scene where Howard and Raj are sitting in a car together in front of a Hindu temple and talking about religion and science. Raj wants to show Howard how he can make an amalgamation between spirituality and science and what that means to him. I thought, Why don’t more people talk about that instead of him insulting his culture? But that’s just the nature of things.

Despite worries about idolatry, images have been important in multiple traditions. For Hindus, worship includes darśan (pronounced dar-shan), which means seeing and being seen by a deity at a temple, and followers of other traditions have venerated many gods. To glimpse the astonishing variety of supernatural beings imaged in material form you might tour a museum near you, or search a museum's online collection for keywords like "religion" "god," or "goddess." At the British Museum, for example, you can find images from Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Christian traditions, as well as everything from a bronze Egyptian cat representing the goddess Bastet made about 30 BCE to a fifteenth-century Aztec eagle from Central America carved in volcanic rock and associated with the solar god Tonatiuh.

I once entered a Hindu temple in India, and saw people praying to the fire and throwing papers at it. I asked the local priest why they were doing that, and he said it's a common practice in their religion, Hinduism. I smiled and replied that it has nothing to do with Hindu teachings although it is religious indeed.

Untouchables were not allowed inside Hindu temples, and black Mormons in America, by way of example, were not allowed inside the temples of the religion they followed and could not become priests until 1978.

After the earliest temples of the Mekong delta, probably the next oldest group of Hindu temples in South-east Asia lies in the highlands of central Java, on the Dieng plateau.

By the close of the eighth century, the entire landscape of South-east Asia was dotted with newly built Hindu and Buddhist temples and shrines to the imported gods and religions of South Asia.

But even as this largest ever Hindu temple was being erected in Cambodia, another set of Indian ideas was travelling westward. The effect of these ideas – more practical and utilitarian than the arts which were transmitted eastwards – would be even more revolutionary than those which

What the monothesists dismiss as polytheism and idol worship are natural to the normal human psyche. Moreover, honouring that which was honoured by one's ancestors keeps one rooted in one's history and culture. Cults which encourage one to denounce one's ancestors as barbarians or infidels, and one's past history as an age of ignorance, render one rootless and make one into a menace to one's neighbours. The Bible provides ample evidence of the normal people reverting to polytheism and idol-worship again and again, and the persistent and violent wars which the prophets had to wage for reimposing Jehovah on them. In any case, a religion stands in need of a philosophical defence only when it is already on a course of decline, and an inner dissatisfaction starts gnawing at the heart of its more perceptive adherents.

HINDU TEMPLE In this spiritual abode the smell of incense, the sight of lighted diya (clay oil lamp), the ring of temple bell, the singing of prayers, the reciting and hum of mantras, all create an environment of divine feel and resonance to have moments with the divinity. The sanctity of the place is defined.

Yogyakarta, Indonesia (Java Island) Known as Jogja to locals and a small but steady flow of backpackers that fill up the budget accommodation in alleyways close to the town's main train station. The town itself has always had a reputation for attracting arts dealers from across Asia and is home to many impressive galleries and several significant palaces and monuments that show off different aspects of Islamic and Javanese culture and history. It is also very close to two of Indonesia's most important and impressive religious sites. Firstly the magnificent Borobodur, the worlds largest Buddhist monument outshines even Angkor Wat in terms of its size and grandeur. At sunrise especially it is a truly awe-inspiring sight. The other one is the Hindu temples at Prambanan which are equally important and it is easy to visit both Borobodur and Pramabanan on the same day although prepare for some fairly hefty entry fees of around US$20 at each site.

Since 9/11, the level of terror attacks has only increased. In late 2001, terrorists launched a suicide attack on the Parliament in India, intended to cause anarchy. In 2002, a Passover Seder in a hotel in Netanya, Israel, was bombed, killing 29 and injuring 133. In the same year, a café was suicide bombed in Jerusalem, a Hindu Temple in Ahmedabad, India was attacked, and a Bali nightclub was bombed, killing 202. In 2004, four simultaneous attacks took place in Casablanca, killing 33. On March 11, 2004, multiple bombings took place on trains in Madrid, Spain, killing 191 and injuring 1,460. Al Qaeda claimed credit, particularly so after the near-term Spanish elections turned out of office an administration working with the U.S. in Iraq.

Since 9/11, the level of terror attacks has only increased. In late 2001, terrorists launched a suicide attack on the Parliament in India, intended to cause anarchy. In 2002, a Passover Seder in a hotel in Netanya, Israel, was bombed, killing 29 and injuring 133. In the same year, a café was suicide bombed in Jerusalem, a Hindu Temple in Ahmedabad, India was attacked, and a Bali nightclub was bombed, killing 202. In 2004, four simultaneous attacks took place in Casablanca, killing 33. On March 11, 2004, multiple bombings took place on trains in Madrid, Spain, killing 191 and injuring 1,460. Al Qaeda claimed credit, particularly so after the near-term Spanish elections turned out of office an administration working with the U.S. in Iraq. In 2005, 36 Christians in Demsa, Nigeria, were killed by Muslim militants; al Qaeda bombed London’s Underground, killing 53, and injuring 700; 64 died at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh; 60 died in bombings in Delhi; and 60 died in a series of coordinated attacks on hotels in Amman, Jordan.

Politically, Pakistan is a state which was deliberately created, not on an economic, linguistic, or racial basis, but on that of religious unity. This does not mean, however, that religions other than Islam are not tolerated or their adherents persecuted. On the contrary, I saw the churches and temples of many religions, including a Jewish synagogue, a Hindu temple, and the Towers of Silence on the top of which Parsees expose their dead to be devoured by vultures.

Jinnah had, among other things, criticized the singing in government schools of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Mataram’. Composed by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the poem invoked Hindu temples, praised the Hindu goddess Durga, and spoke of seventy million Indians, each carrying a sword, ready to defend their motherland against invaders, who could be interpreted as being the British, or Muslims, or both. ‘Vande Mataram’ first became popular during the swadeshi movement of1905–07. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose named his political journal after it. Rabindranath Tagore was among the first to set it to music. His version was sung by his niece Saraladevi Chaudhurani at the Banaras Congress of 1905. The same year, the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati rendered it into his language. In Bengali and Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati, the song had long been sung at nationalist meetings and processions. After the Congress governments took power in 1937, the song was sometimes sung at official functions. The Muslim League objected vigorously. One of its legislators called it ‘anti-Muslim’, another, ‘an insult to Islam’. Jinnah himself claimed the song was ‘not only idolatrous but in its origins and substance [was] a hymn to spread hatred for the Musalmans’. Nationalists in Bengal were adamant that the song was not aimed at Muslims.The prominent Calcutta Congressman Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to Gandhi that ‘the province (or at least the Hindu portion of it) is greatly perturbed over the controversy raised in certain Muslim circles over the song “Bande Mataram”. As far as I can judge, all shades of Hindu opinion are unanimous in opposing any attempts to ban the song in Congress meetings and conferences.’ Bose himself thought that ‘we should think a hundred times before we take any steps in the direction of banning the song’. The social worker Satis Dasgupta told Gandhi that ‘Vande Mataram’ was ‘out and out a patriotic song—a song in which all the children of the mother[land] can participate, be they Hindu or Mussalman’. It did use Hindu images, but such imagery was common in Bengal, where even Muslim poets like Nazrul Islam often referred to Hindu gods and legends. ‘Vande Mataram’, argued Dasgupta, was ‘never a provincial cry and never surely a communal cry’. Faced with Jinnah’s complaints on the one side and this defence by Bengali patriots on the other, Gandhi suggested a compromise: that Congress governments should have only the first two verses sung. These evoked the motherland without specifying any religious identity. But this concession made many Bengalis ‘sore at heart’; they wanted the whole song sung. On the other side, Muslims were not satisfied either; for, the ascription of a mother-like status to India was dangerously close to idol worship.

While Gandhi had been pursuing Hindu–Muslim harmony in the North, the movement for the emancipation of ‘untouchables’ carried on in the South. The focal point remained Vaikom, the temple town whose roads were closed to lower castes. Among the new volunteers was E.V. Ramasamy, a radical Congressman with a deep antipathy to the caste system. Ramasamy threw himself into the struggle, being arrested twice. His commitment earned him the appellation Vaikom Virar, the valiant hero of Vaikom.

As far as I am concerned, a Hindu temple should be publicly listed as a company. After all, it supplies a product that people buy—peace of mind and reassurance—and unlike other companies that need to constantly refine or come up with better products, a temple’s product has not changed in a millennium, and never will.

The great erotic sculptures of Khajuraho are not depictions of life but emblems of the union of Shiv(a) and his Shakti, which result in the creation of all that is. The tourist is titillated by the linga that he sees around temples; his guide who is likely to be a divinity student, tirelessly repeats that they are emblems of universality, but his earnest insistence falls on deaf ears. The tourist assumes that the Hindus are as lecherous as he is.

Harris and her sister were also exposed to a range of religious traditions in their youth. They went to a local Baptist church with Shelton and a Hindu temple with Gopalan.

I consider myself as a Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Zarathust etc. but foremost as a ''Human. One that visits mosques, synagoges, churches and temples of all kinds with the most sacred being my own temple. Now to exclude one piece of puzzle of the whole is to exclude the whole entirely. For the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

Aurangzeb was also a religious bigot, a man who could not tolerate people of other faiths. He destroyed Hindu temples and reimposed the hated jiziya tax on non-Muslims. When this tax was first announced, the Hindus of Delhi gathered in large numbers in front of the Red Fort to protest against it. The emperor set his elephants against them and many were trampled to death.

[T]he demonization of Mahmud [of Ghazni] and the portrayal of his raid on Somnath as an assault on Indian religion by Muslim invaders dates only from the early 1840s. In 1842 the British East Indian Company suffered the annihilation of an entire army of some 16,000 in the First Afghan War (1839-42). Seeking to regain face among their Hindu subjects after this humiliating defeat, the British contrived a bit of self-serving fiction, namely that Mahmud, after sacking the temple of Somnath, carried off a pair of the temple's gates on his way back to Afghanistan. By 'discovering' these fictitious gates in Mahmud's former capital of Ghazni, and by 'restoring' them to their rightful owners in India, British officials hoped to be admired for heroically rectifying what they construed as a heinous wrong that had caused centuries of distress among India's Hindus. Though intended to win the latters' gratitude while distracting all Indians from Britain's catastrophic defeat just being the Khyber, this bit of colonial mischief has stoked Hindus' ill-feeling toward Muslims ever since. From this point on, Mahmud's 1025 sacking of Somnath acquired a distinct notoriety, especially in the early twentieth century when nationalist leaders drew on history to identify clear-cut heroes and villains for the purpose of mobilizing political mass movements. By contrast, Rajendra Chola's raid on Bengal remained largely forgotten outside the Chola country.

Many Jains worship at Hindu temples and participate in Hindu festivals. These issues are, of course, greatly complicated by the fact that the status of "Hinduism" as a unified religious tradition is itself doubtful and contested, and that "Hindu identity" is a historically recent phenomenon. The modern tendency is probably in the direction of a Jain identity separate from that of Hindus, but this transformation is far from complete and will probably never be completed. There appear to be, moreover, countervailing forces. For example, my own general observation is that, as religious politics has become increasingly important in India, large numbers of Jains have identified with the Hindu nationalist viewpoint with hardly a second thought.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw Protestant evangelicalism enter India. And while Christian missions did much good – in education, uplifting the marginalized and exposing failures even of the Company – as far as Indian elites were concerned, they were a thorn in the side. In Travancore, for example, converts from low castes, empowered by their new identity, now aspired to equality with their ex-superiors. As a Dewan argued, by ‘violating the existing social distinctions’, the new Christians were bound to ‘annoy the high castes’, who demanded retribution. For generations, battles would be fought on dress, access to roads, temples, and even government buildings, and much of the reform Travancore grew famous for owed to this tension with missionaries, and the confidence they gave disempowered segments. Missionaries, however, also tended to magnify the evils they saw, to gain financial sympathy at home, for example. In 1848, thus, it was alleged that Travancore had a ‘professed torturer’, an expert in ‘twenty-three modes’ of abuse, on its payroll. In 1855 the state was described as ‘a perfect pandemonium of torture and misgovernment’. But the core problem was a clash of moralities, causing even the maharajah ‘great uneasiness’.77 As a Hindu king his duty lay in preserving the way things were; or as he said: ‘As my kingdom was in my predecessors’ time, so let it remain, and so let it descend to my heir.’78 His critics, however, wished to smash that caste-based order with a new conception of justice. Which side prevailed at any given moment depended also on higher-ups – Resident Cullen was sympathetic to the maharajah, while the infamous governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, showed personally an evangelical bent.

Secular culture cannot be created by building domes on the walls of temples. There is no guarantee of peace if you follow Babar and Aurangzeb." "It is our good fortune that we saw the grand temple of Lord Shri Ram in our lifetime." “The temple was demolished by the invaders. Puja was going on in Gyanvapi Temple for hundreds of years but it was banned in 1993 by the UP government (SP) at that time.

Very early on, the Hungryalists had announced, rather brashly, their lack of faith and what they thought of god. To them religion was an utter waste of time, and they made no bones about this. In fact, in one of their bulletins, they had openly denounced god and called organized religion nonsense. Many of the Hungryalists, with their sharp knowledge of Hindu scriptures, had been challenging temple elders on the different rituals and modes of worship. This came as a shock to many, in a country where religion was very much a part of everyday life—a matter of pride and culture even. On the other hand, Ginsberg was evidently quite taken with religion in India and sought out sadhus and holy men wherever he went in the country. While this might have been because he was in search of a guru, he seemed to be fascinated, in equal measure, by the sheer variety that religion opened for him in India—from Kali worship to Buddhism. But like the Beats, the Hungryalists came together in denouncing the politics of war, which merged with their larger world view.

[M]osques and shrines carried very different political meanings than did royal temples in independent Hindu states, or temples patronised by Hindu officers serving in Indo-Muslim states. For Indo-Muslim rulers, building mosques was considered an act of royal piety, even a duty. But all the actors, rulers and ruled alike, seem to have recognised that the deity worshipped in mosques or shrines had no personal connection with a Muslim monarch. Nor were such monuments thought of as underpinning the authority of an Indo-Muslim king, or as projecting of sovereign authority over the particular territory in which they were situated.

One often hears that between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, Indo-Muslim states, driven by a Judeo-Islamic “theology of iconoclasm,” by fanaticism, or by sheer lust for plunder, wantonly and indiscriminately indulged in the desecration of Hindu temples. Such a picture, however, cannot be sustained by evidence from original sources for the period after 1192. Had instances of temple desecration been driven by a “theology of iconoclasm,” as some have claimed, such a theology would have committed Muslims in India to destroying all temples everywhere, including ordinary village temples, as opposed to the highly selective operation that seems actually to have taken place.

The origin of the Pasch eggs is just as clear. The ancient Druids bore an egg, as the sacred emblem of their order. In the Dionysiaca, or mysteries of Bacchus, as celebrated in Athens, one part of the nocturnal ceremony consisted in the consecration of an egg. The Hindu fables celebrate their mundane egg as of a golden colour. The people of Japan make their sacred egg to have been brazen. In China, at this hour, dyed or painted eggs are used on sacred festivals, even as in this country. In ancient times eggs were used in the religious rites of the Egyptians and the Greeks, and were hung up for mystic purposed in their temples. From Egypt these sacred eggs can be distinctly traced to the banks of the Euphrates.

WHY IS TODAY SPECIAL IN HINDUISM? Today is the day (as per Hindu calendar) that Abhirami Bhattar prayed to Parashakti and manifest Amavasya (new moon day) as full moon day (Poornima) Subramaniya Iyer, who was then known as Abhirami Bhattar, was an ardent devotee of Devi Parashakti from the village that was famous for its Shiva temple, called Amritaghateswarar-Abirami Temple, Thirukkadaiyur. Once when the Maratha rule, king Serfoji I visited the Thirukkadavur temple on the day of the new moon (Amavasya). On noticing the peculiar behaviour of Subramaniya Iyer who was a temple priest, he inquired the other priests about the individual. One of them remarked that he was a madman while another rejected this categorization explaining to the king that Subramaniya Iyer was only an ardent devotee of Goddess Abhirami. Seeking to know the truth himself, Serfoji approached the priest and asked him what day of the month it was. Whether it was a full-moon day(Poornima) or a new-moon day(Amavasy). At that moment, Subramaniya Iyer was doing the Tithi Nithya Aaradhana in the SriChakra Navaavarana krama and was worshipping the Devi as Poornima Tithi. Subramaniya Iyer who could see nothing else but the shining luminant form of the Goddess before him answered that it was a full-moon day (Poornima) while it was in fact a new-moon day(Amavasya). The king rode off informing the former that he would have his head cut off if the moon did not appear on the sky in the night. A huge fire was lit and Subramaniya Iyer was erected on a platform supported by a hundred ropes. He sat upon the platform and prayed to the Goddess Abhirami to save him. The ropes were cut off, one after another in succession on completion of each verse of his prayer. These hymns form the Abhirami Anthadhi. On completion of the 79th hymn, the Goddess Abhirami manifested herself before him and threw her earring over the sky such that it shone with bright light upon the horizon. The area around the temple sparkled with bright light. Overcome with ecstasy, Subramaniya Iyer composed 21 more verses in praise of the Goddess. The king repented his mistake and immediately cancelled the punishment he had given to Subramaniya Iyer. He also bestowed upon the latter the title of Abirami Pattar or "priest of Goddess Abhirami". There are a hundred stanzas plus a காப்பு (Kāppu, protection) verse for lord Ganesha and a final பயன் (Payaṉ, outcome), thus a total of 102 stanzas that are included in Abhirami Anthadhi. The author praises Abhirami as his own mother, regrets his mistakes, speaks of the divine play of mother and father Paramashiva, and her simplicity & mercy. It is believed that recitation of each stanza will result in the specific achievement of the devotees. Here is one of the famous stanzas of Abhirami Anthadhi: " மணியே, மணியின் ஒளியே, ஒளிரும் அணி புனைந்த அணியே, அணியும் அணிக்கு அழகே, அணுகாதவர்க்குப் பிணியே, பிணிக்கு மருந்தே, அமரர் பெரு விருந்தே. பணியேன், ஒருவரை நின் பத்ம பாதம் பணிந்தபின்னே." - செய்யுள் 24 " Maṇiyē, maṇiyiṉ oḷiyē, oḷirum aṇi puṉainta aṇiyē, aṇiyum aṇikku aḻakē, aṇukātavarkkup piṇiyē, piṇikku maruntē, amarar peru viruntē.- Paṇiyēṉ, oruvarai niṉ patma pātam paṇintapiṉṉē." - stanza 24 Pearl like you are, You who are the reddish aura of the pearl! You are like the pearl studded chain who adds beauty to the chain, You are pain to those who do not fall at your feet while the panacea for pains of those who fall at your feet, the nectar of Gods, After worshipping at thine lotus feet, Will I bow before any other, Now and now after. The beauty of Abhirami Anthathi: காப்பு starts as ″தார் அமர் கொன்றையும்...″ and பயன் ends as ″... தீங்கு இல்லையே″ (தாயே)

Wittkower's response - which resonated for decades - to the manifest lack of robustness of modern civilization was to reassert the absolute difference between the past and the present: premodern societies were oriented, and they knew hierarchy. Wittkower argued, on the basis of the texts by Alberti and Palladio, that the architecture of the Italian Renaissance materialized a mathematical program: a system of ratios that pictured the invisible structure of the cosmos. Architecture placed the human body within this system. It is hard to see the difference between this and Sedlmayr's view except that the one believes that man's image was best framed by forms based on the divinely measured proportions of the human body, and the other believes that man's image was best framed by an image of divinity itself. Wittkower recovers a religious conception of architecture but detached from Christianity: the Renaissance church as a Hindu temple, as it were.

Hinduism’ is thus the name that foreigners first applied to what they saw as the indigenous religion of India. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu: there are none. We have no compulsory dogmas. This is, of course, rather unusual. A Catholic is a Catholic because he believes Jesus was the Son of God who sacrificed himself for Man; a Catholic believes in the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth, offers confession, genuflects in church and is guided by the Pope and a celibate priesthood. A Muslim must believe that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His Prophet. A Jew cherishes his Torah or Pentateuch and his Talmud; a Parsi worships at a Fire Temple; a Sikh honours the teachings of the Guru Granth Sahib above all else. There is no Hindu equivalent to any of these beliefs. There are simply no binding requirements to being a Hindu. Not even a belief in God.

Christian church, a Muslim mosque, a Buddhist monastery or a Sikh gurudwara are spaces designed to bring the community together and focus on a common goal—confess sins, reaffirm submission, awaken to desires and delusions and learn from the songs of the sages, as the case may be. But a Hindu temple is the house of a deity. We go to see them and be seen by them,

The remains of what might be the earliest temple dedicated to Hindu worship have been located through excavations at Besnagar.

The destruction of temples even by Hindu rulers was not unknown, but Mahmud’s was a regulated activity and inaugurated an increase in temple destruction com-pared to earlier times.

This would suggest that the destruction of temples by Hindu rulers was known and recorded, but such acts were viewed as more characteristic of the Turushkas.

Unlike Alexander’s Greeks, Muslim invaders were well aware of India’s immensity, and mightily excited by its resources. As well as exotic produce like spices, peacocks, pearls, diamonds, ivory and ebony, the ‘Hindu country’ was renowned for its skilled manufactures and its bustling commerce. India’s economy was probably one of the most sophisticated in the world. Guilds regulated production and provided credit; the roads were safe, ports and markets carefully supervised, and tariffs low. Moreover capital was both plentiful and conspicuous. Since at least Roman times the subcontinent seems to have enjoyed a favourable balance of payments. Gold and silver had been accumulating long before the ‘golden Guptas’, and they continued to do so. Figures in the Mamallapuram sculptures and the Ajanta frescoes are as strung about with jewellery as those in the Sanchi and Amaravati reliefs. Divine images of solid gold are well attested and royal temples were rapidly becoming royal treasuries as successful dynasts endowed them with the fruits of their conquests. The devout Muslim, although ostensibly bent on converting the infidel, would find his zeal handsomely rewarded.

[M]osques in Mughal India, though religiously potent, were considered detached from both sovereign terrain and dynastic authority, and hence politically inactive. As such, their desecration would have no relevance to the business of disestablishing a regime that had patronised them. Not surprisingly, then, when Hindu rulers established their authority over the territories of defeated Muslim rulers, they did not as a rule desecrate mosques or shrines, as, for example, when Shivaji established a Maratha kingdom on the ashes of Bijapur's former dominions of Maharashtra, or when Vijayanagara annexed the former territories of the Bahmanis or their successors. In fact, the rajas of Vijayanagra, as is well known, built their own mosques, evidently to accommodate the sizeable number of Muslims employed in their armed forces. By contrast, monumental royal temple complexes of the early medieval period were considered politically active, in as much as the state-deities they housed were understood as expressing the shared sovereignty of king and deity over a particular dynastic realm. Therefore, when Indo-Muslim commanders or rulers looted the consecrated images of defeated opponents and carried them off to their own capitals as war trophies, they were in a sense conforming to customary rules of Indian politics. Similarly, when they destroyed a royal temple or converted it into a mosque, the ruling authorities were building on a political logic that, they knew, placed supreme political significance on such temples. That same significance, in turn, rendered temples just as deserving of peace-time protection as it rendered them vulnerable in times of conflict.

the Rajput rulers of Mewar did not just see themselves just as kings but as the custodians or guardians of the Hindu civilization embodied in the temple of Eklingji. The deity Shiva was considered to be the real king of Mewar,which is why the rulers did not call themselves ‘Maharaja’ or Great King. They called themselves Rana which means ‘Custodian’ or ‘Prime Minister’. Mewar suffered huge losses and faced extreme hardship but its rulers still did not give up their fight against the sultans. On three different occasions, its capital Chittaur was defended to the last man and even after the capital fell, the fight continued in the hills.

Gujarat's temple of Somnath [...] had been fortified in 1216 to protect it from attacks by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa. Recorded instances of Indian kings attacking the temples of their political rivals date from at least the eighth century, when Bengali troops destroyed what they thought was the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, Kahsmir's state deity under King Lalitaditya (r. 724-60). In the early ninth century Govinda III, a king of the Deccan's Rashtrakuta dynasty (753-982), invaded and occupied Kanchipuram in the Tamil country. Intimidated by this action, the king of nearby Sri Lanka sent Govinda several (probably Buddhist) images that the Rashtrakuta king then installed in Śiva temple in his capital. At about the same time the Pandya King Śrimara Śrivallabha (r. 815-62) also invaded Sri Lanka and took back to his capital at Madurai, in India's extreme south, a golden Buddha image -- a symbol of the integrity of the Sinhalese state -- that had been installed in the island kingdom's Jewel Palace. In the early tenth century, King Herambapala of north India's Pratihara dynasty (c.750-1036) seized a solid-gold image of Vishnu Vaikuntha when he defeated the king of Kangra, in the Himalayan foothills. By mid-century the same image had been seized from the Pratiharas by the Chandela King Yasovarman (r. 925-45), who installed it in the Lakshmana Temple of Khajuraho, the Chandelas' capital in north-central India. In the mid eleventh century the Chola King Rajadhiraja (r. 1044-52), Rajendra's son, defeated the Chalukyas and raided their capital, Kalyana, in the central Deccan plateau, taking a large black stone door guardian to his capital in Tanjavur, where it was displayed as a trophy of war. In the late eleventh century, the Kashmiri King Harsha (r. 1089-1111) raised the plundering of enemy temples to an institutionalized activity. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, kings of the Paramara dynasty (800-1327) attacked and plundered Jain temples in Gujarat. Although the dominant pattern here was one of looting and carrying off images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu kings destroying their enemies' temples. In the early tenth century, the Rashtrakuta monarch Indra III (r. 914-29) not only demolished the temple of Kalapriya (at Kalpi near the Jammu river), patronized by the Rashtrakutas' deadly enemies the Pratiharas, but took special delight in recording the fact.

Perhaps it was the Radha Parthasarathi in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh that caught their eye: a vibrant temple built in the shape of a chariot and painted entirely in the dainty shade of watermelon-pink, complete with wheels and a quartet of colossal stallions that towered over its visitors. Or perhaps it was the Sri Sri Radha Parthasarathi Mandir in New Delhi that stopped them in their tracks: a stunning and sprawling complex dominated by lace-white pointed oval domes and embellished with wooden, marble, and stone lattice carvings, which houses the 1,764-pound Astounding Bhagavad Gita, the “largest principle sacred text ever to be printed.

Hindu civilisation is the only great classical culture to survive intact from the ancient world, and at temples such as Madurai one can still catch glimpses of festivals and practices that were seen by Greek visitors to India long before the rise of ancient Rome. Indeed, it is only when you grasp the astonishing antiquity, and continuity, of Hinduism that you realise quite how miraculous is survival has been.

Thousands of Hindu temples were plundered, And it still goes on. The SPH #Nithyananda Paramashivam is putting an end to it

Thousands of Hindu temples were plundered, And it still goes on. The SPH #Nithyananda Paramashivam is putting an end to it

Although the dominant pattern here was one of looting and carrying off the images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu kings destroying their enemies’ temples.

Is this at last the locus Dei? There are enough cathedrals and temples and altars here for a Hindu pantheon of divinities. Each time I look up one of the secretive little side canyons I half expect to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny spring—the leafy god, the desert’s liquid eye—but also a rainbow-colored corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure disembodied intelligence, about to speak my name.

Several of the capitals in the cloister of the great Spanish Cluniac monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos are clearly Moorish in style, and sometimes seem to be Seljuk in their decorative vocabulary. Another Romanesque church just over the Spanish border at Atienza has a mysterious Kufic inscription reading al-Mulk lillah, ‘the Kingdom Belongs to God’.9 The Green Man, with vines emerging from his mouth, another staple of Romanesque art, also arrived in Europe at this time, ultimately deriving from the Hindu kirtimukha mask heads of Indian temples, transmitted westwards by Arab sculptors.10

With colored sand, Buddhist monks create mandalas—intricate geometric and cosmic diagrams that can take weeks to craft—and then destroy them in minutes, to reflect the transitory nature of material life.4 The colossal Buddhist temple on the island of Java at Borobudur and the Hindu-Buddhist temple complex at Angkor in Cambodia are believed by some to be three-dimensional architectural mandalas and are still among the largest religious structures in the world.

To the Hindu mind there was no real gap between animals and men; animals as well as men had souls, and souls were perpetually passing from men into animals, and back again; all these species were woven into one infinite web of Karma and reincarnation. The elephant, for example, became the god Ganesha, and was recognized as Shiva’s son; he personified man’s animal nature, and at the same time his image served as a charm against evil fortune. Monkeys and snakes were terrible, and therefore divine. The cobra or naga, whose bite causes almost immediate death, received especial veneration; annually the people of many parts of India celebrated a religious feast in honor of snakes, and made offerings of milk and plantains to the cobras at the entrance to their holes. Temples have been erected in honor of snakes, as in eastern Mysore; great numbers of reptiles take up their residence in these buildings, and are fed and cared for by the priests.

To a European brought up on Greek and aristocratic canons of moderation and simplicity, this popular art of profuse ornament and wild complexity will seem at times almost primitive and barbarous. But that last word is the very adjective with which the classically-minded Goethe rejected Strasbourg’s cathedral and the Gothic style; it is the reaction of reason to feeling, of rationalism to religion. Only a native believer can feel the majesty of the Hindu temples, for these were built to give not merely a form to beauty but a stimulus to piety and a pedestal to faith. Only our Middle Ages—only our Giottos and our Dantes—could understand India.

This remarkable narrative has to be assessed beyond merely the colourful details added later by imaginative biographers. What the dialogue actually represented—and that is the reason why it was projected as such an important part of Shankara’s life—was to assert the primacy of thought over ritual, at a time when precisely the opposite seemed to be given more importance by Hindus. The sixth and the seventh centuries CE saw a revival of Hinduism, and the relative decline of Buddhism. However, a part of this revival was excessively focused on Puranic mythology, and the mechanical performance of Vedic ritualism. Somewhere in all of this, there was a divorce from the loftiness of thought that was the essential substratum of the Hindu vision. In the pursuit of how exactly to perform a ritual as per precise Vedic injunctions, the glorious mystical insights of the Upanishads had been overwhelmed. Temples were flourishing, but there was a disconnect between the motions of worship and the philosophical foundations underlying it. There was the need to once again reassert the jnana marga to salvation, to relink Hinduism to its metaphysical insights, and restore to it the grandeur of thought and contemplation. That was the manifest purpose of Shankara, and there could be no better metaphor to project it than his victory in a debate over Mandana Mishra. Indeed, there is little doubt that Mishra’s defeat must have made a major impact on the beliefs and practice of Hinduism across India. Even without modern means of communication, the progress of the debate and the intricacies of the arguments, witnessed by thousands of people, would have spread by word of mouth to tens of thousands more across the length and breadth of the country. The debate, when seen in the historical context of the evolution of Hinduism, further institutionalised, at the highest level of learning, the importance of dialogue, discussion and discourse—not coercion, violence or acrimony.

Arun Shourie argues that although ‘the Mahabharata and the Ramayana describe warring states they are the epics of one people [emphasis mine]’,33 and, indeed, in the Ramayana, Rama goes across the subcontinent, from Ayodhya in the north to Sri Lanka at the very southern tip. Shourie bolsters his reasoning by a fascinating study of many Hindu rituals which clearly indicate this pan-Indian consciousness. ‘Only Namboodiris from Kerala are to be priests at Badrinath, those in the Pashupatinath temple at Kathmandu are always from South Kanara in Karnataka, those at Rameshwaram in the deep south are from Maharashtra. … Every Diwali the sari for the idol of Amba at Kolhapur comes from the Lord at Tirupati. The Sankalpa Mantra with which every puja commends the prayers in the deities, situates the yajyaman (the person organizing the puja) with reference to the salients and sacred rivers of the entire land.’34 Commenting on this, Dr Koenraad Elst says: ‘From hoary antiquity, the Sankalpa locates the Hindu worshipper in time and space, notably in Bharatvarsha, in a decreasing scale of geographical regions down to the city or region where the ritual is performed.’35 The truth is that, although it may be expedient for some people to deny an ancient Hindu civilisation, such a civilisational awareness was millennia old, and has had a lasting and verifiable impact on the evolution and, indeed, the very character of India. To admit this is not to invite ‘xenophobia’ or ‘cultural paranoia’. Nor is it the febrile imagination of Hindu enthusiasts. It is, simply, borne out by the facts of history, and cannot be controverted by superimposing the political attitudes of today on the cultural integrations of the past. Sudhir Kakar, one of India’s most respected psychologists—and certainly no Hindutva-vadi—writes: ‘Indian-ness is about similarities produced by an overarching Indic, pre-eminently Hindu civilization, that has contributed the lion’s share to what we would call the “cultural gene-pool” of India’s peoples.’36 The fact, or memory or acceptance, of such a civilisation can be devalued, marginalised, forgotten or ignored, but it cannot be erased.

Falsified history nurtures its own mythologies. A breed of writers and intellectuals still persist in trying to portray the Islamic invasion as some kind of great syncretic carnival, where the invaders came and partook of the local sweetmeats, and the conquered had a happy morsel of biryani, while both sat down to work out the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb that we so value today. The bathos of this imagined utopia works only on the ignorance of facts or deliberate distortion. The case of Amir Khusrau (1253–1325 CE) is instructive. Many people believe that he was a mystic, a Sufi poet, the spiritual disciple of his contemporary, the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya; he is regarded as the progenitor of Hindavi, a language that moved away from Persian and dipped liberally into Braj Bhasha, the language of the common masses; he is seen as having enabled Khari Boli, the precursor to the Hindi spoken today; he is also widely known as the ‘father’ of Urdu and the qawwali, and possibly the inventor of the sitar and the tabla; his admirers have given him the title of ‘Tuti-e-Hind’ or the Parrot of India; his love for India has been extolled; and his qawwalis are still very popular across India. But there is another aspect to Amir Khusrau. He was a prominent member of the court of five Sultans who ruled from Delhi, the most important among whom was Allauddin Khilji. In this capacity, he wrote extensively about their conquests and victories and their destruction of the temples of the infidels. In his book, Khaizan ul Futuh, he describes how ‘the kick of Islam’ destroyed the beautiful temple of the dancing Shiva at Chidambaran. When Malik Kafur, Allauddin’s general, attacked the Chidambaran temple—to exactly quote Amir Khusrau’s triumphant language—‘the heads of brahmans and idolators danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet, and blood flowed in torrents. The stone idols called Ling Mahadeo, which had been established a long time at the place and on which the women of the infidels rubbed their vaginas for satisfaction, these, up to this time, the kick of Islam had not managed to break. The Musalmans destroyed all the lings and Deo Narain fell down, and other gods who had fixed their seats there raised their feet and jumped so high that at one leap they reached the fort of Lanka.’10 The same tone and language is there in his descriptions of other such desecrations. Amir Khusrau is an interesting case study. Undoubtedly, his creative output shows that he had assimilated some aspects of Hindu civilisation (his mother was a Hindu), especially in the areas of language and music. At the same time, he provides sufficient proof of his approval of the destruction of Hindu temples and his hostility to the faith of the infidels. Unfortunately, those who seek to whitewash history, dwell only on his contribution to the composite ‘secular’ culture of India. This distortion of history through deliberate amnesia is wrong and needs correction, because it is becoming increasingly futile to hide the truth. The correct appraisal would be to appreciate his cultural contributions to the ultimate development of a syncretic culture, while accepting that this did not change his hostility to the Hindu religion, nor did it represent any reduction or mitigation in the continued destruction by Muslim rulers of Hindu religious and cultural artefacts.

Unlike Amartya Sen, who downplays the destructive religious evangelism of Muslim rule in India, he minces no words about what kind of impact it had. In an interview to the newspaper The Hindu in 1998, he said: ‘I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realize that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilization of that world was mortally wounded by those invasions. The Old World was destroyed. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.’14 Next year, he reiterated his views in an interaction with the magazine Outlook: ‘The millennium began with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. This is such a big and bad event that people have to find polite, destiny defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims “arriving” in India, as though the Muslims came in a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of the idols and the temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves. … The architectural evidence—the absence of Hindu monuments in the north—is convincing enough. The conquest was unlike any that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history.’15 In the same interview, Naipaul argues that the Muslim conquerors succeeded in ‘the grinding down of Hindu India’. The loot and plunder and destruction, and their religious hostility to non-believers, was not restricted to the original foreign invaders, but a feature of the entire period of Islamic rule.

They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of the idols and the temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves. … The architectural evidence—the absence of Hindu monuments in the north—is convincing enough. The conquest was unlike any that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history.’15 In the same interview, Naipaul argues that the Muslim conquerors succeeded in ‘the grinding down of Hindu India’. The loot and plunder and destruction, and their religious hostility to non-believers, was not restricted to the original foreign invaders, but a feature of the entire period of Islamic rule. He cites the example of Vijayanagara in this context. ‘Let us consider two last dates. In 1565, a year after the birth of Shakespeare, Vijayanagara in the south is destroyed and its great capital city (Hampi) laid waste. In 1592, the terrible Akbar ravages Orissa in the east. This means that while a country like England is preparing for greatness under its great Queen, old India in its sixth century of retreat, is still being reduced to non-entity. The wealth and creativity, the artisans and architecture of the kingdom of Vijayanagara and Orissa must have been destroyed, their lights put out.’16 Naipaul’s larger point is that such depredations dealt a body blow to the creative impulses of the Hindu civilisation. ‘This is where we come face to face with the Indian calamity. When places like Vijayanagara and Orissa were laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current was broken. We have no means of knowing what architecture existed in the north before the Muslims. We can only be certain that there would have been splendours like Konark and Kanchipuram.’17 In an article in the UK newspaper, the Guardian, writer-historian William Dalrymple attempts to rebut Naipaul’s outspoken views. Naipaul’s ‘jaundiced’ view, he argues, was due to the influence of the ‘imperial historiography of Victorian Britain’, where the British sought to paint the Muslims as plunderers to bring out their own ‘civilizing mission’. Vijayanagara, he says, was ‘heavily Islamicised by the sixteenth century’. This can be inferred by the fact that ‘the Hindu kings of Vijayanagara appeared in public audience, not bare-chested as had been the tradition in Hindu India, but dressed in quasi-Islamic court costume’, symbolic, according to him—on the authority of American Sanskrit scholar, Philip Wagner—‘of their participation in the more universal culture of Islam’.

Vijayanagara had adopted ‘many of the administrative, tax-collecting, and military methods of the Muslim sultans that surrounded it—namely, stirrups, horse-shoes, horse armour, and a new type of saddle’. Its architecture also showed evidence of the use ‘of the arch and the dome of the Islamic north’.15 Reciprocally, Hindu influences were also discernible in the Islamic sultanates, with whom the Vijayanagara kingdom on occasion entered into strategic alliances. I am not, however, clear what these arguments prove. Because the kings of Vijayanagara did not appear bare-chested in public, or because they used stirrups or horseshoes, and because, where they felt politically necessary, they aligned themselves with one Muslim sultanate to finesse the other, was Vijayanagara not a Hindu kingdom? Or that, when it was defeated, the Muslim sultans did not savagely destroy the city and, in particular, attack its remarkable temples? To quote a few instances of Hindu–Muslim syncretism in architecture, in dress or in administrative practices, is more an acknowledgement of the unavoidable fusions wrought over centuries, and not a change in the mindset of Muslim conquerors against kafirs and their practice of destroying Hindu cultural and religious artefacts. It is a moot point too whether the Vijayanagara kings, on conquering a Muslim sultanate, would have as relentlessly destroyed mosques. Historical records clearly bring out that Krishnadevaraya (1509–1528 CE)—the most illustrious ruler of Vijayanagara and among the greatest kings India has seen—respected all faiths. He was himself a Vaishnavite, but extended wholehearted patronage to Shaiva, Jain and other sects. He employed Muslims in his army, encouraged them to settle in the capital city and erected a mosque in 1439 for them to pray. For the Muslim officers in his court, he placed a copy of the Koran before his throne so that they could perform the ceremony of obeisance before him without sinning against their religious injunctions, even though the Vijayanagara kingdom was formed with the aim of protecting Hindus and Hindu culture from Muslim attacks. Christian Portuguese also found residence in the capital. The Portuguese traveller, Barbosa, who visited Hampi during Krishnadevaraya’s rule, wrote: ‘The king allows such freedom that every man may come and go and live according to his own creed, without suffering any annoyance and without enquiry whether

Motivated apologists have other unconvincing theories also. One of these, propounded by the late Professor Mohammad Habib of the Aligarh Muslim University, sought to extenuate the extent of savagery by arguing that it was motivated by the ‘lust for plunder’, which any conqueror would display. In his book, Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznin, first published in 1924, he discounted, therefore, the repeated destruction of Hindu temples. It could be true that temples were attacked because they were also the repositories of great wealth; but it is stretching the imagination to believe that fanatical hostility against non-believers was not a motivation. The unfortunate fact is that this attempt to downplay Islamic religious bigotry was sanctified by people of intellectual eminence and erudition like Jawaharlal Nehru. In his book Glimpses of World History, Nehru writes in a letter to his daughter Indira, that Mahmud Ghazni was ‘hardly a religious man’, and that he admired the architecture of Hindu temples.1 However, he omits to mention what Professor Habib himself acknowledges, that Mahmud gave instructions to burn down hundreds of temples. It is also argued that the Turkic invaders cannot be singled out for attacking those of another faith; Hindus too destroyed Buddhist and Jain places of worship. However, I do not believe that Hindus ever attempted the destruction of Buddhist and Jain religious sites anywhere near the level of desecration wrought by the Muslim conquerors. There may have been some cases of violence between the Indic faiths, but—as I have painstakingly argued earlier—the overwhelming historical evidence establishes beyond the slightest doubt that Buddhism and Jainism flourished in India within the overall broad-based world view of Hinduism, and that Hindu kings—far from being hostile to these two faiths—were both patrons of their viharas and monasteries, and even professed believers in their doctrine.

A.K. Warder, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, University of Toronto, who has no interest in whitewashing either side of the conflict, writes: ‘The Turkish conquests of more than half India between 900 and 1300 were perhaps the most destructive in human history. As Muslims, the conquerors aimed not only to destroy all other religions but also abolish secular culture.’2 Will Durant, the well-known chronicler of civilisations, is as categorical: ‘The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history … its evident moral is that civilization is a precious thing whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians.’3 The degree of physical destruction is vouched for by noted art historian Heinrich Zimmer too, who laments that in north India ‘very little survives of the ancient edifices that were there prior to the Muslim conquest: only a few mutilated religious sites remain.’4 Amartya Sen concedes that ‘the slash and burn culture of the Muslim invaders … devastated several cities and ruined many temples, including particularly famous ones in Mathura, Kanauj, and (Somnath).’5 He also acknowledges the account of the Arab–Iranian traveller Alberuni who accompanied Mahmud to India, of this carnage. ‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed these wonderful exploits, by which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions.’6 However, he believes that the Hindutva movement is deliberately highlighting Muslim destruction ‘through motivated selection and purposefully designed emphases as well as frequent exaggeration’.7 He is in a hurry to move away from the barbarism of the Muslim invasion to the undeniable and welcome syncretic elements of Hindu–Muslim culture that developed much later and over time. It is possible that some politically affiliated sections of Hindu society are seeking to deliberately dwell on Muslim atrocities of the past in order to create religious divisions and exploit them for their own benefit. Such an approach is wrong and needs to be countered. However, it is equally wrong to gloss over history and falsify it for present-day ‘secular’ imperatives.

One excess leads to another, and votaries of the other extreme depict Muslim rule as only one of devastation and destruction, completely devaluing the significant cultural exchange that was also partly its consequence. Both sides then deliberately discount historical truth, and shadow-box with the fictions they want to live with. The sane alternative is to accept history as it happened, acknowledge the traumatising impact of the Muslim destruction of Hindu civilisation, recognise the inestimable loss that it caused to the collective assets—physical and intellectual—of a very significant part of our history, and accept that a great deal of that destruction was due to the religious fanaticism of the Islamic rulers. Hindus were ruthlessly subjugated and institutionally discriminated against by the Muslim state. The advent of Islamic rule broke the continuity and evolution of a great civilisation; it disrupted the creative rhythm of that remarkable period of history; it destroyed a great deal of its cultural artefacts; and, it provided the first example in Indian history until then, of such widespread and violent religious intolerance. True secularism can only arise from a reconciliation with history, not suppression of truth, for that only serves to strengthen the extremism of the counter narrative. As Amish Tripathi argues: ‘Denial invariably leads to repressed truth finding expression in the ugliness of hatred and anger, as we see in some parts of India today. It’s healthier in the long run for societies to accept, confront and then learn to handle the truth.’24