We give below, state-wise and district-wise, the particulars of Muslim monuments which stand on the sites and/or have been built with the materials of Hindu temples, and which we wish to recall as witnesses to the role of Islam as a religion and the character of Muslim rule in medieval India. The list is the result of a preliminary survey. Many more Muslim monuments await examination. Local traditions which have so far been ignored or neglected, have to be tapped on a large scale.
We have tried our best to be exact in respect of locations, names and dates of the monuments mentioned. Even so, some mistakes and confusions may have remained. It is not unoften that different sources provide different dates and names for the same monument. Many Muslim saints are known by several names, which creates confusion in identifying their mazars or dargahs. Some districts have been renamed or newly, created and a place which was earlier under one district may have been included in another. We shall be grateful to readers who point out these mistakes so that they can be corrected in our major study. This is only a brief summary.
Sita Ram Goel
It should be kept in mind that the list below doesn’t include all the temples destroyed by Muslims and which were converted to mosques. The below is the list of mosques and Darghas where evidences exists of having been made after destroying the temples at these locations. In many mosques, Muslim rulers were able to eradicate all signs of temples, and hence not given in below list. Also the list is based on the list prepared by Sitaram Goel in 1990, hence the list correspond to the geography of the state and districts as it existed then.
Anyone is free to visit the below list of mosques and see the remnants and materials of Hindu temples. Archaeological Survey of India should conduct an excavation of below mosques to find out more about the ancient temples in these locations and possible mass graves around the mosque sites.
A Hindu temple remains so till eternity as PranaPratishta is done during the consecration. And being perpetual minors the property rights of the Deity are never abated as per law. Our Gods are lying mutilated in Hindu temple sites across Bharat awaiting resurrection and revival of worship. Be part of the movement to #ReclaimTemples
As it dawns now, the glee of the morning sun here is seldom accompanied by the saccharine tweets of the parrots and sparrows. The cacophony of the chirrups of the birds craves to trail the blissful hymns that used to be rendered with a precision that could match only with the movement of the Sun and Moon.
The gatekeepers assigned to an eternal duty of preserving the temple, gaze down inscrutably into the river. Nestled in the most picturesque landscape of nature, the river flows inaudibly between two temples as if it were the to reminisce the horrors it has witnessed throughout. Called Pinakini – the divine bow of Lord Shiva, it is now colloquially called Penna, a declension apparent not just in its name but also in its state of affairs.
Time as the witness, the inscriptions wail of the forgotten glory this hamlet in the southern part of Andhra Pradesh held before.
It is a small village close to the now district head-quarters of the Cuddapah district in Andhra Pradesh. The place is called Pushpagiri – A mound of flowers.
Aloof from the parochial lines of discordant beliefs in Hinduism, Pushpagiri has become a centre of intellectual theology under countless kingdoms. In its bosom of faith, it nurtured the ideology of Shaivism and all its primaeval theories with the same fervour as Vaishnavism. When the Hindu world was being torn between the mutually exclusive philosophies about the supremacy of Gods in the same Pantheon, Pushpagiri has tried to persuade the masses to traverse to the thinking of ‘transcendental theology’. The two temples, one for Lord Shiva and another for Lord Vishnu on either bank of the Pinakini river stand as a (partially) living testimony of this catholic notion.
Legend has it that to extricate his mother Vinutha from the shackles of slavery of his stepmother Kadruva, Garuda has embarked on a journey to the heavens to conquer Lord Indra and fetch the holy nectar of Ambrosia. Garuda while returning from the heavenly abode passed by the hamlet then called – Kampalle, where he unintentionally spilt a drop into a local pond formed by the river Pinakini.
The pond was thus granted divine powers of transforming back to their youth, all those that took a dip in it. Consequently, people began to throng the pond for a dip in its waters. Appalled by the prospect of all human beings becoming immortal, the Devas approached God Vishnu who instructs Garuda to cover up the pond with a rock from a nearby mountain.
The megalith Garuda placed on the pond, started floating like a flower – Pushpa in Sanskrit. To stop the pond from surfacing again, the supreme trio (God Brahma, God Vishnu and God Shiva) trampled the rock into the land. Consequently, the name Pushpagiri which in Sanskrit would mean a flowery mound.
Legends aside, Pushpagiri also has a considerable amount of veritable history around it. The Śrīśaila Khaṇda of Skanda Purāna and Rasaratnākara of Satyanātha vouch to this place where significant worship was happening and was mentioned as ‘Dakśina dwāra’ for the celebrated temple of Şrīşailam. This was attested by the inscriptions that abound the place from the time of Ikşvāku dynasty circa 2nd Century CE. From this period on, the list is long and illustrious, including Karikāla Chōla of Chōla dynasty has seemingly imparted significant importance to the site when he ruled the Pottapi nādu.
Hero-stone (Veeragallu) of one of the warriors – Chola Dynasty
In time, this piece of land has reduced to a feudatory under bigger dynasties. Nevertheless, Geography helped and Pushpagiri retained its exclusivity both spiritually and politically. The temple complex has started attracting endowments from the rulers incessantly; Somadeva of Vaidumba dynasty, Chiddana Devaraja of Pallava dynasty, Yadava Singana of Kesa dynasty, Krishna Vallabha of Rāshtrakūta dynasty, Gangaya Sāhini and Ambadeva under Kākatiya dynasty and the Musunuri Nāyaks of Vijayanagar dynasty.
While these kings left inscriptions to the next generations to commemorate their contributions, some significantly contributed with their artistic providence, Gangaya Sāhini and Ambadeva built the Trikuteswara complex as a tribute to Lord Shiva for bestowing them with three daughters.
Musunuri Nāyaks built the Chennakeshava temple which exudes splendid architecture.
While it is common for the kings to be boisterous even in their devotion, Pushpagiri stands away from the crowd. A tantric saint Aghora Shivāchārya, apparently a Shaivite saw it apt to build the gateway-tower (Gopuram) for the Vaishnavite Chennakeshava Swamy temple.
There has been a surfeit of cults around the region of Pushpagiri. Beliefs and traditions date to times immemorial starting from the most traditional Vāmāchāra to the most recent Sāmyāchāra. The temples illustrate the slow and steady progress of Hindu beliefs in this region as the kings started embellishing the temple walls with sculptures that reflect their allegiance. The oldest of these reliefs start with Lakulīşa, a form of Lord Shiva that yields the caduceus symbolising the rising flow of the Kundalini Shakti to the zenith. This clearly demonstrates the presence of the Rasa Śaiva, Veera Pasupatha and Shakteya cults belonging to Vāmāchāra tradition.
Image of Lord Lakulisa with the Caduceus
The river: Pinakini, the mighty river that is fabled to have emanated from the bow of Lord Shiva meanders through the gorges of Gandikota which is close-by and enters the domain of Pushpagiri from the West and turns briefly South and again changes to the East at Pushpagiri. In this process, four of its tributaries mingle with ‘Penna’ – Pāpāgni, Kumudvati, Valkala and Māndavya. This has seemingly enhanced the spiritual status of the place and has begotten it the coveted name “Panca Prayāga”.
Docked in the natural beauty – coupled with a vibrant economy – fuelled by the constant supply of water and resources the region flourished and if you enhance it with a centre for spiritual development, you have the best of all the worlds. People thronged to the place, kings revered and built monuments, Sages clamoured for spiritual development and it gave rise to one of the most vivacious yet dormant cultures. At its crowning moment, Pushpagiri had as many as 1116 temples dedicated to various forms of both Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu. Some of the notable ones can be listed as below:
… and many more. There are at least 100 sanctums and abandoned Nandis that vouch to the fact that they were once revered in a temple.
Mutilated image of a saint – Possibly Buddhism beyond recognition
The story was supposed to have a happy ending until faiths that thought themselves as the most superior of all stepped in. It was a night of horrors. The carnage went on relentlessly as the statuaries were handicapped, crop fields destroyed and the mighty river seemed to stand still – forsaken. The cacophony of parrots and sparrows got muted in the tacit cries of the most revered of deities. Time itself has ostensibly cowered to transpire. But as it mustered the courage to move on, a day of destruction ensued. The river dolefully ferried the remnants of the culture once so esteemed into the Bay of Bengal. Thousands of monuments destroyed, sanctums desecrated and temples vandalised. History etched on rock and preserved in memories has been expunged in a bloody inundation of prejudice and intolerance. A new faith that challenges the very foundations of so many other moralities has taken their place.
Hero-stone (Veeragallu) of one of the warriors – Chola Dynasty
Today, the monuments stand there as a sore testament of what rivaling beliefs can do to civilization – uncared and unwanted. Most of the temples cannot even afford a proper Pūja (worship) and the river as usual flows in all serenity but sans the rhythmic chants, the cacophony of birds and morning glee of the first ray of the sun.
While the destruction of Hindu temples by Muslim invaders gets most of the discussion spotlight, and understandably so, an exposition of anti-Hindu iconoclasm by anti-Dharmic forces would remain incomplete if it did not mention the Christian iconoclastic campaigns against Hindu society. Therefore, this brief essay correctly positions Hindu-Christian encounters as not the intercultural meeting of two distributed groups but instead a story of Hindu survival against the crusading spirit of anti-idolatry.
With that in mind, the tragic story of Goa resembles the religious nature characteristic of the destruction of Hindu temples by Muslim invaders. Indeed, and much to the chagrin of secular revisionists of Indian history, the story of Hindu survival in Goa against Christian conquistadores is rooted in the intransigence of proselytism, even though secularists would have laymen believe it to be originating from Brahmanical stubbornness that should have otherwise been receptive to the messages of Christ. Or emanating from the impatience of a heathen population already content with their ancestral traditions; or from other re-contextualizations of similar deconstruction.
In truth, the campaign against Hindu heathenry was driven by the old Judeo-Christian hostility against idolatry (Henn, 2014). Such hostility provided Christian conquistadores the perfect theological justification for both colonial conquest and the destruction of Hindu temples (Henn, 2014). In other words, not primarily a political and/or economic justification, but a staunchly religious one, as something contentious secularists purposefully hesitate to categorize. For the Hindus of Goa, this meant a ferocious and humiliating experience of subjugation. By the second half of the sixteenth century, Portuguese-Catholic forces “launched a ferocious iconoclastic campaign against Hindu culture in India that seemed to bring an end to all ambiguities and confusions regarding the identities of gentiles and Christians” (Henn, 2014, p. 40). This ferocious campaign was “directed primarily against Hindu temples and images, and affected above all India’s western coast” (Henn, 2014, p. 40).
Steeped in the old Judeo-Christian hostility against idolatry, and likely against anything outside the Abrahamic fold that embodied a cultural sophistication not sanctioned or approved by monotheistic centralization, the iconoclastic campaign devastated Goa between 1540 and 1560 (Henn, 2014). These two decades were marked by a demoralizing devastation of Hindu Goa; all Hindu temples, shrines, and images were destroyed or removed (Henn, 2014). Furthermore, the performance of public Hindu rituals was banned and actively suppressed (Henn, 2014). By 1600, most Hindus who did not convert to Christianity were either expelled or fled Goa (Henn, 2014).
Like the mosques built on top of destroyed Hindu temples by Muslim invaders, purposefully embodying architectural expressions of conquest over heathenry, so too did the Christian foreign intruders destroy Hindu temples in order to replace them with Christian images and monuments of victory (Henn, 2014). In this regard the destruction of Hindu temples by both Muslim and Christian invaders converge in that their anti-idolatry campaigns go from “a war against images [to] a war between images” (Henn, 2014, p. 40). For Goa, the significance of this change meant that the destruction of Hindu temples was outstandingly systematic, resulting in a drastic alteration of its architectural landscape.
The campaign to eradicate Hindu images was so intense that Portuguese Christians “did not just target singular and outstanding religious landmarks” (Henn, 2014, p. 41). Instead, they “systematically destroyed all Hindu temples, shrines, and images,” replacing them with Christian equivalents, which went on to birth a distinct European-Christian architectural development largely devoid of the previous traditional Hindu form that once ornamented the land praised as the Kashi of Konkan (Henn, 2014, p. 41). To quote the Portuguese poet Camoes, “Goa [was] taken from the infidel [in order to] keep severely in check the idolatrous heathen” (Henn, 2014, p. 40). And Goa was indeed taken from Goan Hindus, their images and monuments destroyed, and their public performance of Hindu rituals banned. In fact, Christian explorers like Afonso de Sousa came to India with premeditated plans to attack and destroy Hindu temples (Flores, 2007; Henn, 2014).
Premeditation of this sort affected even the Hindus of Sri Lanka, another focal point unsurprisingly driven by the old Judeo-Christian hostility against idolatry (Flores, 2007). For example, when Portuguese Christians destroyed the ancient Hindu temples of Tirukkovil and Palukamam, they adversely, and purposefully, affected Shaivism in the region (Flores, 2007). Possessed by the conviction of having an exclusive access to an absolute truth, the meeting of heathenry with monotheistic centralization was usually a history of the former attempting to survive the salvific cruelty of the latter. One may find many other examples from a deeper study of similar interactions. Yet the theme of such encounters, whether they were between Hindus and Muslims or Hindus and Christians, remained the same: destruction of heathenry in favor of a fanaticism obsessed with salvific preaching that soon but naturally turned iconoclastic.
Flores, J. (Ed.). (2007). Re-exploring the links: History and constructed histories between Portugal and Sri Lanka. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
Henn, A. (2014). Hindu-Catholic encounters in Goa: Religion, colonialism, and modernity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
