A comment on the Somnath temple soap on Indian TV

The below post is reproduced from the 10 July 2011 blog post on 'The Times of Bullshit'

The Story of the Story of Somnath

After seeing this poster at a food-court, I resolved to watch Shobha Somnath Ki after I got home. I did manage to watch almost a whole episode which is quite commendable given how boring it is—like most other Indian TV shows, they really don’t have anything to say and end up stretching the most mundane incidents across the 20-odd minutes of airtime (the only exception I can think of now is Sarabhai vs Sarabhai which is an Indian take on Everybody loves Raymond and is pretty funny).

The show itself is based on a Gujarati legend on the infamous sacking of the temple of Somanth by Afghan marauder, Mahmud of Ghazni. While its best to be circumspect about the show’s history (on their website, Zee calls Mahmud a ‘Mughal emperor’ which is interesting given that he died a good 300 years before the founder of the Mughal empire was even born) the history behind how the sacking of Somanth came to be such a hot button issue in modern India is rather interesting.

In 1839, the British Army embarked on campaign in Aghanistan (which was to end in utter ruin for the British, but let us not digress). During the campaign, India’s Governor-General decided that the returning army should bring back the gates from the tomb of Mahmud in Ghazni which were believed to have been taken from Somnath during his raid. This in turn set off a huge debate back in Britain with the Opposition accusing the Government of ‘appeasement’. Back in India, the GG’s gesture hardly received the sort of attention he was hoping for–the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica mentions that Hindu sepoys showed “the most chilling indifference to the belauded restoration”. To top things off, the matter ended in extreme embarrassment for the Governor-General when it was discovered that the Gates had nothing to do with Somnath in the first place at all and were from Egypt or some such place.


The "Gates of Somnath" which are till today stored somewhere in the Agra Fort [See here for more pics on the topic]

In spite of these initial blunders, however, British efforts to make Somnath a communal issue did have some measure of success as time went by. At Independence, for example, a significant section of the Government/Congress led by Patel wanted the Indian Government to re-construct the temple. Nehru, though, put his foot down and while the temple was still rebuilt, it was done privately and the government had nothing to do with it. It is this temple that Amitabh Bachan urges you to visit in an ad for Gujarat Tourism which is currently being aired.

In more recent times, Advani found the symbolism of Somnath to be so useful that he kicked of his 1989 Babri Masjid Yatra from the temple town. Across the border, Pakistan has even named a missile after Mahmud which is more than a bit ironic because Mahmud has also raided parts of the Punjab which now make up the bulk of Pakistan.

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Small note on the show’s tagline: Mahmud, the show’s villain, who was a Persian speaker, would have understood almost all of it—saazish, ziyaadaa, tez and ummeed are all Persian loan words into Hindi. The show's hero, warrior princess Shobha, on the other hand, wouldn't have got anything but her own name. Funny how language/culture works, no?