The Rebuilding of the Somnath Temple

What stands at Prabhas Patan today was built between 1947 and 1951. Almost none of it is old, and the people who built it were explicit that they were making something new on an old site.

1947

Vallabhbhai Patel, deputy prime minister of the new Indian union, visited the ruined site after the accession of Junagadh in 1947 and undertook that the temple would be rebuilt. He died in 1950, before it was finished.

The trust

K. M. Munshi, a writer and lawyer who was then a minister, carried the project through. The work was placed under a trust and financed substantially by public subscription rather than from government funds. That distinction mattered a great deal in 1951, and it is the reason the project was arranged that way in the first place.

The building

The architect Prabhashankar Sompura worked in the inherited temple-building tradition of his family and designed the new shrine in the Kailash Mahameru Prasada form, a tall spired Nagara plan of the kind the medieval temples of Gujarat and Rajasthan had used. It is a reconstruction in the sense of a new building in an old idiom, not a restoration of surviving fabric.

11 May 1951

Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, performed the installation of the linga on 11 May 1951. The invitation, and his acceptance of it, produced the argument set out in this entry's companion article.

For what happened at the site nine centuries earlier, see the entry on the raid of 1026.

The rebuilding raised a constitutional question in the year it was finished, and the people arguing about it were the people who had just written the constitution.

The objection

Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister, held that the government of a secular state had no business rebuilding a place of worship, and that the head of state attending the installation would compromise that principle. His objection was to the participation of the state, not to the temple.

The answer

The project had already been arranged so that it could survive exactly that objection. It was run by a trust and paid for largely by public subscription rather than from the treasury, which allowed its supporters to say that the state was not rebuilding anything.

Rajendra Prasad attended and performed the installation on 11 May 1951 in what was described as his personal capacity. The formula distinguished the man from the office, and it did so at a ceremony everyone present understood to be national.

Why it mattered then

India in 1951 was three years past partition and one year past a constitution that guaranteed freedom of religion without establishing one. What the state could and could not do at a religious site had no settled answer yet, and this was the first large test of it.

K. M. Munshi, who ran the project, argued that restoring a destroyed shrine was an act of national repair rather than of religious establishment. Nehru did not accept the distinction. The disagreement was aired and never resolved, and both men remained in the same cabinet.