The insidious rise of Hindu nationalism over the past century and its grip on India today is a result of a complex web of factors. To varying degrees, and in no particular order, the phenomenon can be attributed to the erosion of secular politics, the long-term organisational work of the Sangh Parivar, the complicity of the liberal elite and upper castes, the disconnect of public intellectuals from the masses, the capitulation of mainstream media and institutions, the nexus between religious majoritarianism and big business and more.But as any student of philosophy would tell you, if you cannot argue from first principles you cannot argue at all. First principles – the foundational ideas – of Hindu nationalism are what keeps it alive and kicking.Interestingly, 2026 marks the anniversaries of two distinct events in the history of India whose colonial interpretations as accepted and borrowed by the Hindu Right make up its foundation that has nurtured and shaped its politics. One thousand years ago, in 1026, Mahmud of Ghazni stormed into north India, plundered the Somnath temple in Gujarat and broke the idol.He did so with the help of a large contingent of Hindu commanders and soldiers who formed a core part of his invading army. Together they desecrated, looted and left with the riches that would have sustained them and financed their larger political objectives far to the west.Five hundred years ago, in 1526, and after a string of failures back home, Babur arrived from the Fergana valley in Central Asia to try his luck anew and won the empire of Hindustan at the Battle of Panipat. He rode in with his family and kin, including sisters, aunts and distant relatives, and carved out a kingdom, established a dynasty that would intermix with the local Hindu elite, and made India his home.Babur on horseback, Baburnama, 16th century, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.If Time were a landscape, we are exactly as near to (or far from) the founding of the Mughal empire as our ancestors in Mughal India were from the raid of Mahmud of Ghazni. It would be a crude misrepresentation of India’s complex medieval past to lump these two events under neat, soppy labels like ‘Muslim invaders’, ‘Foreign conquerors’, or ‘Hindu trauma’. Unless the misrepresentation is deliberate and part of a political project.Bunch of insecuritiesThere is an eerie continuity amongst a long line of Hindu nationalists in terms of how they have looked upon India’s Muslims, both past and present. Their anti-Muslim prejudice underwrites their politics. It is the bank guarantee. In his 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva, Vinayak Savarkar, the progenitor of modern Hindu nationalism from which the RSS and its political branch the BJP have emerged, imagines India as an ancient Hindu civilisation suffused with a “pan-Hindu consciousness” whose “very undisturbed enjoyment of peace and plenty” was disrupted when “she was rudely awakened on the day Mohammad of Gazni [sic.] crossed the Indus and invaded her.”According to Savarkar, “that day the conflict of life and death began,” and it welded the Hindus into a nation against a “common foe”. This framing of India’s past was institutionalised by Keshav Hedgewar when he founded the RSS in 1925 with the aim of organising the Hindu society. The Indian nationhood, the Hindu nationalists exhorted, should be based on the cultural and religious heritage of Hindus.Madhav Golwalkar, successor of Hedgewar and the longest-serving chief of the RSS, wrote in 1939 that “ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindusthan [sic.], right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting to shake off the despoilers.”It was a narrative that continued to gain traction in post-Independence India when, in 1992, it took a violent turn in Lal Krishna Advani’s rath yatra that led to the illegal demolition of the Babri Masjid by storm-troopers of the Sangh Parivar. While a shocked country watched the destruction of the 16th century mosque, Advani remembered the Ayodhya movement as “a potent symbol of a national awakening” which, by his own admission, triggered “the phenomenal growth of the BJP between 1989 and 1996.”Also read: To Counter BJP’s Politicised History, India Must Promote Historical MulticulturalismIn his Independence Day speech in 2023, exactly a hundred years after Savarkar’s articulation of Hindutva, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also spoke of “a thousand years of subjugation”. He renewed Savarkar’s pitch and equated the whole of medieval Indian history with British colonialism. “We got ensnared in slavery,” Modi claimed, “and whoever came, looted us, and ruled over us. What an adverse period it must have been, that thousand-year span,” he egged the audience on from the ramparts of the Red Fort – a monument of the era he thought of as adverse, built by people he likened to looters.The problem with these formulations is that they have no basis in history. They are designed to reduce the many voices of a complex millennium to an anxious monotone of victimhood, vengeance, and a non-existent religious binary. Oddly, they are also a mirror image of how the British colonialists had liked to view and manipulate India’s past.Constructed memoriesIn 1038, merely twelve years after Mahmud’s raid on Somnath, the Kadamba raja of Goa set out on a pilgrimage to the temple by sea. His Goa-to-Somnath cruise along the western coast of India suffered a broken mast which forced him to dock at a nearby port. An Arab merchant named Taji Mohamed came to the raja’s rescue and repaired the royal vessel.As a pay-off, Taji’s grandson was appointed to an administrative office and was permitted to build a mosque—an act that forged a deep, multi-generational alliance between the Hindu Kadamba rulers and the local Muslim trade community. If one were to believe in the prescriptions of Savarkar and Golwalkar, this was the “common foe”, the “despoiler”, who had to be “fought off gallantly” by Hindus, especially in the aftermath of what Mahmud had perpetrated just a few years ago.Upon reaching Somnath, the Kadamba raja found the temple actively functional. He performed a Tula-purusha ritual, weighing himself against gold and distributing that wealth. He issued an inscription that furnished various details of his visit. Curiously, the royal inscription does not mention Mahmud’s raid. Nor does it record any sign of destruction of the temple. There is also no comment on the patron who might have rebuilt it.Had the temple been destroyed, surely some mention of the raid – which, according to Savarkar, had triggered “the conflict of life and death” – would have been made by the visiting Hindu king at a time when the wound is believed to have been fresh. But there is “a puzzling silence” on this matter, as eminent historian Romila Thapar puts it.In her landmark book Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History, Thapar explains that the absence of any memory of Mahmud’s attack in the inscription “could suggest that the temple was not destroyed but desecrated, since it seems to have been repaired fairly quickly and revived as a place of pilgrimage so soon after the raid.”A view of the Arabian Sea from Somnath, Gujarat, October 2015. Credit: Sneha G. Gupta, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsThe inscription of the Kadamba raja is not the only historical source within India that is silent on the subject. Equally puzzling is the silence of Sanskrit inscriptions pertaining to Somnath and the surrounding areas in Gujarat which, otherwise, do not fail to offer a long and fascinating peek into the local ambience of the time. They record the official version of dynastic history, various aspects of administration and other matters thought to be of significance.Also read: For the BJP, Rewriting History Is Part of a Toolkit To Brighten Its Political FortunesFor example, a Chaulukya king’s 12th century inscription relates to the appointment of a governor to protect Somnath, not so much from ‘Muslim invaders’ or ‘Foreign conquerors’ but from the lesser rajas and pirates active in the region who, as a means of acquiring quick wealth, were in the habit of plundering pilgrims going to the temple. Earlier inscriptions attest to this phenomenon and point to disturbed conditions existing locally even prior to the raid of Mahmud.In another instance from the 12th century, an inscription states that the chief priest at Somnath persuaded the Chaulukya king to rehabilitate the temple, which was dilapidated because of its age. There is not even an oblique reference to Mahmud’s plunder here, and the reason given is the deterioration of the temple owing to neglect and mismanagement by the kusachiva, the “wicked” ministers in charge of the administration.In contrast, there are inscriptions that reveal close contact between local elites including Somnath’s priests and Muslim immigrants both of Persian and Arabic descent. This relationship was a common feature of the region’s socio-cultural milieu at the time and in subsequent periods. A significant bilingual Sanskrit-Arabic inscription, dating to 1264, records a parcel of land from the estates of Somnath being granted to a Persian merchant from Hormuz named Nur-ud-dinFiruz to build a mosque in the vicinity of the temple.Extensive endowments were provided for the maintenance of the mosque and any surplus income was allowed to be donated to the “Makha and Madina dharmasthanas”, i.e. Mecca and Medina. These transactions took place only two centuries after Mahmud’s incursion and it would seem that neither the local rulers nor the priests of Somnath were reeling from a ‘Hindu trauma’ or were troubled by any associations linked to the raid. It demonstrates that cultural exchange and economics were the primary drivers of society at the time while religion played a lesser role.The absence of any reference to Mahmud’s attack on Somnath does not imply it did not happen; instead, it likely occurred on a much smaller scale than commonly believed. “Within India, Mahmud’s raids had little effect we can discern,” historian Audrey Truschke writes in her book India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent. “No contemporary surviving Brahminical (or other Hindu) source mentions any of Mahmud’s attacks. His raids were seemingly a non-event in Indian history at the time,” she concludes.This does not exonerate Mahmud but locates him in a wider historical context where attacks on temples, both by ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ kings, were common and often driven by political and economic reasons than by religious iconoclasm alone.Also read: How India Turned a Turkish Invader into a Saint Revered by Hindus and Muslims AlikeRichard Eaton’s meticulous study of temple desecration in pre-modern India provides numerous examples of how “attacks on images patronised by enemy kings had been thoroughly integrated into Indian political behaviour” long before and after Mahmud arrived on the scene. For instance, it is quite revealing that around the time when Mahmud was planning his pillage of Somnath, Chola king Rajendra I was already desecrating temples of neighbouring kingdoms and furnishing his capital with idols he had looted. A century earlier, the Rashtrakuta monarch Indra III not only destroyed the temple of Kalapriya but also took special delight in recording the fact, Eaton informs us.Unlike today, temples in pre-modern India were not just religious places. In many cases, they were repositories of great wealth, hubs of business and trade and symbols of local political power. Consequently, they frequently found themselves caught in the crossfire of imperial politics where religion, whether of the aggressor or the victim, was often secondary. Thapar writes, “In thesehostilities, there was no single host and no single enemy. There were many groups at different levels of the social hierarchy who had their own relationships with a large range of others.” She asks, “Can we then continue to speak of a ‘Hindu’ reaction to the event created by the ‘Muslim’, or should we not attempt to sift the actions and the reactions according to social groups and specific situations?”Hindu nationalists rage that Mahmud’s attack on Somnath was “a civilisational wound” that every Hindu remembers. To that, one must ask which Hindus and in what era. Collective memory is not always spontaneous or an evolved experience; some are deliberately invented and imposed, sometimes centuries after the event itself. They are often exhumed to create zombies serving a grand political quest.A crooked lensWe would not even know of Mahmud’s raid on Somnath if it had not been for sources outside India. Upon returning to Ghazni, Mahmud and his court chroniclers got to work. In their eyes, the Somnath campaign had been a spectacular success and, as a top-up, Mahmud had also attacked and looted an Islamic ‘heretic’ centre on his way back – a twin dividend that had to bepublicised far and wide in the Islamic world.Mahmud had only recently converted to Islam and his newfound religious zeal to declare himself as “the great Ghazi”, the champion of Islam, spilled over into the Turko-Persian chronicles in the aftermath of the Somnath event. In reconstructing the raid many centuries later, this archive was privileged by the British Raj over other sources, including those from the very land where the crime was committed.In her discussion of these records of Ghaznavid intellectuals, Truschke points to both their promise and peril. “The promise is that Persian- and Arabic-medium authors documented events that others did not. But the peril is that they did not always tell the truth,” she writes. Thapar agrees, “The authors of [these] narratives were poets and court chroniclers. Fantasy would be almost a requirement in the case of the former. The latter would write to please and legitimise the reigning Sultan,” she notes.Court chronicles as a genre have a clear agenda. In the case of the Turko-Persian chronicles, they also often contradict each other and document the Somnath event with distinct embellishments. If one completely trusted them, one would quickly reach rather bizarre conclusions. For instance, the historian Gardizi describes that Mahmud broke the idol at the Somnath temple.According to him, it was not a Sivalingam but an icon of su-manat (a portmanteau of Somnath as rendered in Persian), referring to a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess whose worship was opposed by Prophet Muhammad. It is said that he had called for the destruction of the idol of Manat after which it was secreted away to Gujarat for safe-keeping in a land where idol worship was considered normal.So the claim goes that by destroying this idol at Somnath, Mahmud fulfilled a long-held wish of the Prophet and his followers. In another such flight of fancy, the poet Farrukhi glorifies Mahmud for having set the Somnath temple aflame and “emptied the lands of India of fighting men and horrendous elephants.”The British colonialists latched onto the Turko-Persian representation of the event, especially Firishta’s sweeping account which had been translated early on into English, and used it as a shovel to excavate the medieval centuries, not as history but as a quarry from which usable outrage could be scooped out. For the first time in India, the attack on Somnath was spoken of as the foundational event that had allegedly created hostility between Hindus and Muslims.They ignored Indian sources – an intellectual crime that stemmed from their erroneous periodisation of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British in which the ‘Hindu period’ was studied only on the basis of Sanskrit texts, the ‘Muslim period’ on the basis of Persian texts, and the British by using English language sources.The objective of this historical misrepresentation was twofold: to manufacture and project antagonism between Hindus and Muslims; and, to demonise Indo-Muslim rulers so that the British – their immediate successors in ruling large parts of the subcontinent – might look good by comparison. Through this elaborate exercise, the British reinforced the popular myth from the time of the Crusades that Islam was a religion of barbarism as compared to the civilising qualities of Christianity.Also read: Decolonising Ourselves into a Hindu RashtraBut the brilliance of this framework was its usefulness. If India had always been divided into belligerent religious camps, then colonial rule could be presented as a necessary referee. The Empire became the solution to a (fictitious) problem it had helped define. A civilisation that had existed through a multiplicity of entanglements, migrations, alliances, resistance movements, inventions and accommodations was reduced to a sequence of religious boxes.From this crooked lens, as applied on India’s past, the vision of the two-nation theory emerged. It was vehemently opposed by the secular anti-colonial nationalism led by Mohandas Gandhi,Jawaharlal Nehru and others of the Congress, but found great favour with both Hindu and Muslim religious nationalisms which were more interested in forging religious identities and creating nation-states with dominant religious majorities than questioning the presence of colonial power in India. In that, they were mirror images of each other and they proceeded to craft their respective ideologies in the Empire’s image.History as sloganThe Hindu Right did not invent the colonial narrative that India constituted a Hindu nation and a Muslim nation perpetually at war with each other. Its achievement is something more politically sophisticated. It inherited the narrative, polished it, amplified it, and transformed it into a mass political language. A civilisation that sees itself as wronged is easier to marshal than one that sees itself as complicated.Hindutva’s bid has been to recolonise India’s past and inject it with grievance. Since political majorities do not mobilise around complexity, and grievance makes for better politics, athousand years have been reduced to a single uninterrupted ‘trauma’ and centuries have been made to collapse into an imaginary wound.It is, therefore, insincere that Prime Minister Modi, a product of Hindutva, should call out others for their “Macaulay mindset”. The Hindutva movement, which speaks endlessly of decolonisation, has spent decades gazing into a colonial mirror, admiring its own reflection. It promises liberation from the intellectual architecture of the British Raj yet it has quietly moved into one of its oldest buildings and hung up new curtains. The furniture remains much the same.Speaking at an official event held in Somnath to “commemorate 1,000 years of unbroken faith,” the prime minister said that “those who came with the intent to destroy Somnath have today been reduced to a few pages of history. [The] temple, meanwhile,” he added, “still stands tall by the vast sea.” It is amusing that Mahmud’s otherwise unremarkable raid on Somnath, which had long faded into oblivion as we have seen, was resurrected and immortalised by Hindu nationaliststhemselves under the tutelage of British colonialists.Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses a crowd in Somnath, Gujarat during the Somnath Swabhiman Parv on January 11, 2026. Photo: PTI.As for the structure of the temple, it was “still standing tall by the vast sea” even just a few years after Mahmud’s attack, as confirmed by the Kadamba raja of Goa. It only fell into disrepair, as the Sanskrit inscriptions of the time inform us, due to declining patronage and mismanagement by the local ministers in Gujarat. It would seem that proponents of Hindutva, including the regime that governs India today, derive their understanding of India and its past from a large languagemodel – like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok or such others – developed and trained solely on the thoughts and works of the British Raj.The source of their sources is intensely colonial. Consequently, their idea of India, which threatens to subjugate the country, is not merely a farce but an unwitting declaration of a deep-seated insecurity. It should fill every thinking Indian with revulsion and shame.Shivendra Singh is a writer based in Lucknow. He thanks Romila Thapar, Richard Eaton, Audrey Truschke and Ruchika Sharma for their works, without which this essay would not have been possible.