On the intervention of the National Minorities Commission in 1983, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has been prevented from carrying on any e… - Praful Goradia

It is strange that what a writer on Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti and the Dargah Sharief at Ajmer has said about the role of Raja Jaichand should have precipitated our visit to Kannauj on August 2, 2001. Equally strange is the fact that our interest in this great capital city of ancient Hindustan was first aroused in 1983 by Dr N .K. Bezbaruah, the versatile grand old man of Assam. He then told us how proud he was to claim direct lineage from one of the chosen Kannauj Brahmins, who were invited specially to introduce Hinduism amongst the Ahoms who had captured power in Assam and had set up their capital city at Sibsagar in the 13th century. Incidentally, the Ahoms belonged to the Shan race whose base was in Thailand. The doctor was bemoaning the paradox of his clan being, on the one hand, so proud of its Hindu ancestry and, on the other, a few sons of the same proud families taking to gun s and terrorism, as it were, against the rest of Hindustan.

Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat, 1526-37, was the iconoclast of Vidisha, preceding Aurangzeb. He captured the town and about the first thing he did was to desecrate the Vijay Mandir claiming that the conquest ofBhilsa was in the service of Islam. The episode is recorded in Mirat-I -Sikandri. About 200 years earlier, Sultan Alauddin Khilji, 1293, had also enjoyed the 'devout' pleasure of damaging Vijay Mandir. The honour of being the first iconoclast, however, went to Sultan Shamsuddin Iltutmish, 1234, yet another half a century earlier. This episode is described with relish in Tabqat-I-Nasiri.

The excuse given was that the Bhojshala was, in any case, a protected monument and barricading it would be the best way to secure its protection. Incidentally, there was no threat from anyone either damaging or demolishing the structure. The discriminatory order of entry 52 times a year to one community, and only once a year to another and none to the rest is based on an extraordinary precedent. The author understands that-in 1935 on the insistence by some local residents of Dhar, which was then a princely state, that the Bhojshala was a Hindu institution -the temple of Goddess Saraswati, on the one hand, and a school, on the other. A photograph of the deity's image which adorned the temple is reproduced in this book. The idol is still on display in the British Museum in London. A part of the Sanskrit inscription which is engraved on a wall of the Bhojshala is also reproduced. It is called Dhar Prasasti of Arjunavarma: Parijatamanjari-natika by Madana.