PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
Another cellar was found in the mosque, which seemed much like the remains of an old temple. But the team had simply not anticipated what they were g… - Vikram Sampath
" "Another cellar was found in the mosque, which seemed much like the remains of an old temple. But the team had simply not anticipated what they were going to discover next. It was going to shake up the entire matter and create a nationwide sensation. As the day was drawing to a close the team reached the wazu khana, which was situated on the eastern side of the mosque. The wazu khana is an ablution pond where worshippers wash themselves and rinse their mouths before praying at the mosque. The plaintiff advocates noticed a well-like structure in the middle of the wazu khana. The wazu khana had been covered from all four sides by a nine-inch wall. When they demanded that the water levels there be reduced so that it could be inspected from inside, the mosque officials and the defendant side flew into fits of rage. ‘Now don’t overdo things. Enough is enough, we will not comply to everything that you ask us to do. We have cooperated enough and thus far, and no further’, they screamed. ‘It became so clear to everyone,’ Hari Shankar Jain says with a mysterious smile, ‘that there was something there that they wished to hide. Else, till now, they had been grudgingly opening up cellar rooms and even the central premises. But it was clear as broad daylight that on our making this demand, some raw nerve had been touched.’
English
Collect this quote
About Vikram Sampath
Vikram Sampath is an Indian historian and author of four books.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Vikram Sampath
I was thereafter invited for talks and lectures at several places and during one such exposition on the Interregnum period of Haidar and Tipu, when I began quoting verbatim some of the letters of Tipu, all hell broke loose in the hall. A section of the hitherto civilized audience broke up in sloganeering, hurling paper rockets at the podium and forcing the organizers to hurriedly terminate the session and usher me inside. Amidst the din, a man reached out to my bewildered and hassled father who sat among the audience with a terse message: ‘He is your only son, advise him well if you wish to have him around you for long!’ If this kerfuffle felt like a scene from a Bollywood film, it sadly was not, but was part of my father and my lived experience. The aggression of that evening stunned us, deeply impacting my mother’s already precarious health. In our naivety, we believed that historiography meant telling the truth as it was. But its intense sociopolitical weaponization was something that we were both unaware of and yet to be confronted with.
Tipu Sultan, in the early part of his reign i.e., 1783, is thus also seen as an arbiter between warring sects and also someone who permitted the procession and festivities at Melukote with pomp.29 Interestingly, this was barely a month or two before committing the cruellest atrocity on the same Sri Vaishanava community by massacring 700 families of the Mandyam Iyengars, who shared the same gotra of Bharadwaja with that of the Mysore Pradhans who were acting on Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni’s behalf.
PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
Towards the end of 1926, the first English biography of Savarkar titled The Life of Barrister Savarkar was published in Madras under a curious pen name ‘Chitragupta’. In Hindu mythology, Chitragupta is the accountant of Yama, the God of Death, who keeps a meticulous debit and credit account of every soul’s sins and virtues. There have been various allusions about who the author is—from Congress leader C. Rajagopalachari, the revolutionary V.V.S. Aiyar to Savarkar himself writing under a pseudonym. The identity of the author continues to remain a mystery.
Loading...