Somnath Temple

A history of demolition

The sequence is long and disputed in detail, but the outline is not. A temple has stood on this coast since at least the early medieval period. It was sacked by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026, an event that entered both Persian and Indian historical memory and has been retold, embellished and politicised ever since. It was rebuilt, and destroyed again — under the Delhi Sultanate, under Gujarat's sultans, and finally under Aurangzeb in the seventeenth century.

Historians disagree sharply about the scale of the 1026 raid, what was actually there to be looted, and how much of the later narrative is nineteenth-century construction. What is not in dispute is that the site was repeatedly attacked and repeatedly rebuilt, over roughly a thousand years, by people who kept coming back.

That persistence is the actual story of Somnath, and it is more interesting than any single sacking.

1951 — the rebuilding as statement

The present temple was begun immediately after independence, driven by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and completed in 1951. India's first President, Rajendra Prasad, performed the installation ceremony — over the objection of Prime Minister Nehru, who thought a secular state should not be rebuilding temples.

That disagreement is worth knowing about, because it is one of the founding arguments of the Indian republic conducted over a specific building. Somnath is not a neutral site and has never pretended to be.

The reconstruction was done in the Chalukya or Solanki style — the Gujarati Nagara idiom — by traditional temple architects working from śilpa texts rather than modern design. It is a twentieth-century building executed by eleventh-century method, and it is very good.

The arrow pillar

On the sea wall behind the temple stands the Baan Stambh, the arrow pillar. An inscription on it states that there is no land in a straight line between this point and the South Pole.

Check it on a globe and it is essentially correct — the meridian running south from this stretch of the Gujarat coast crosses open ocean all the way to Antarctica. Whoever placed the marker understood the geography well enough to make a claim that holds.

The inscription's age is uncertain and it is probably not as old as popularly claimed. But standing at the wall with the Arabian Sea in front of you and knowing there is nothing between you and the ice is a genuine thing, whatever the date on the stone.

What to see, and when

The temple sits directly on the shore, and the sound of the sea is constant inside it. This is unusual and it changes the atmosphere entirely — most great Indian temples are inland and enclosed.

Aarti at 07:00, 12:00 and 19:00. The evening one, with the sea behind, is the one to be there for.

The light and sound show runs 20:00–21:00 outside the monsoon, projected onto the temple itself, and covers the destruction-and-rebuilding history.

The Somnath Museum nearby holds fragments of the earlier temples — carved stones recovered from the site — which makes the layered history concrete rather than narrative.

Bhalka Tirth, a few kilometres away, is where Krishna is held to have been struck by a hunter's arrow and to have died, and Dehotsarg on the Hiran river is where he was cremated. For a coastline this size, it carries a great deal.

Somnath in a Gujarat itinerary

Somnath is rarely visited alone, and the pairings are good.

Dwarka, 230 km up the coast, is one of the four original Char Dham and holds the Dwarkadhish temple — and Nageshwar, near Dwarka, is another of the twelve Jyotirlingas. Two Jyotirlingas and a Char Dham on one coastal drive.

Gir, the only place in the world with wild Asiatic lions, is about 45 km inland.

Junagadh and Girnar are within reach, which brings in the Jain tirths — Girnar is where Neminath, the twenty-second Tirthankara, is held to have attained liberation. See the Jain tirths guide.

Palitana, the hill of nine hundred temples where nobody may sleep, is around 200 km northeast and is the single most extraordinary religious site in Gujarat.