Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Gujarat today (May 11) to mark 75 years of the inauguration of the restored Somnath temple. Modi posted on social media, “…while the attackers have faded into the dust of history, the soul of Bharat endures. Somnath stands tall and eternal.”

Located in Prabhas Patan, Veraval, Somnath is an important Hindu pilgrimage site. According to the temple’s website, it is “the holy place of the First Aadi Jyotirling Shree Somnath Mahadev and the sacred soil where Lord Shri Krishna took his last journey…”

By most historical accounts, the temple faced several attacks from raiders, with the most damaging by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026 CE. This history of Somnath has often been used to divide Hindus and Muslims. The British attempted this as far back as 1842, when a British official claimed to have “avenged the insult of Hindus” by bringing back the “sandalwood gates of Somnauth” from Afghanistan. The gates later turned out to be neither of Somnath nor of sandalwood. Here’s a brief history.

In 1842, the British Army suffered losses in its Afghanistan expedition. A retaliatory strike was carried out, and it is during this time that the “gates of Somnath” carried away by Mahmud of Ghazni surfaced in a big way. The British brought back a pair of wooden gates from Ghazni, claiming they were the original gates of Somnath taken by the invader. British Governor General Lord Ellenborough framed this exercise as the “avenging of an insult”.

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On November 16, 1842, he issued a proclamation “to all the Princes and Chiefs, and people of India”, which read: “Our victorious army bears the gates of the temple of Somnauth in triumph from Afghanistan…That insult of eight hundred years is at last avenged.”

He added: “I have ever relied with confidence upon your attachment to the British Government. You see how worthy it proves itself of your love, when, regarding your honour as its own, it exerts the power of its arms to restore to you the gates of the temple of Somnauth, so long the memorial of your subjection to the Afghans.”

Upon examination, the gates were found to be made of deal, an inexpensive pinewood, and not of Indian design. The UK’s National Army Museum says the gates “turned out to have been made in Ghazni.”

Ellenborough’s actions were criticised in England, and even a motion was moved in the House of Commons in March 1843 that “this House…is of opinion that the conduct of Lord Ellenborough in issuing the General Orders of the sixteenth of November 1842, and in addressing the letter of the same date to all the chiefs, princes, and people of India, respecting the restoration of the gates of a temple to Somnauth, is unwise, indecorous, and reprehensible.”

While the motion was rejected, Lord Ellenborough came in for much censure. Among his more eloquent critics was Thomas Babington Macaulay, who had earlier served in India. In his House of Commons speech on March 9, 1843, he said Ellenborough’s actions could be seen as supporting idolatry, insulting the “Mahometans”, and also opening the British administration to ridicule. “We have sometimes sent them [India] governors whom they loved, and sometimes governors whom they feared; but they never before had a governor at whom they laughed. Now, however, they laugh…”

Controversy persisted

Despite all this, the theory of the gates persisted, and resurfaced in 1951 ahead of the restored temple’s inauguration. In April 1951, Radio Pakistan (Peshawar), carried a broadcast that gates from Afghanistan were being carried to India for the ceremony. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had to write to his Pakistani counterpart, Liaquat Ali Khan, about the rumours.

According to The Nehru Archive, the broadcast on April 17, 1951 claimed that, “Independent tribes from Quetta to Chitral numbering about 33 lakhs had decided to prevent the Kabul Government from returning to India, at the instance of the Prime Minister of Afghanistan, Shah Mahmoud Khan, the portals of the Somnath temple, which had been carried by Mahmud of Ghazni with him as a mark of victory achieved by Islam.”

Four days later, Nehru wrote to Khan that, “The story of the gates of Somnath temple being brought back to India from Afghanistan is completely false… nothing of the kind is being sent from Afghanistan to India. Nevertheless, the Pakistan Press has been full of this story.”

He said the “broadcast from Peshawar in Pushto on the 17th April is an example of extreme irresponsibility and falsehood”, and asked the Pakistani PM to look into it.