Ramarajya: Envisioning the Future and Entrenching the Past 99destroyed again in the early sixteenth century by Sikandar Lodi. Bir Singh
Deo of Orchha, who was made king by Jahangir in the place of Bir Singh's
elder brother for the favor he did to him by killing Abul Fazl, Akbar's
friend and adviser, who had tried to block Jahangir's succession to the
throne, built the temple around 1615. Auangzeb destroyed this in 1669
and is said to have taken the idols to Agra to bury under the steps of a
mosque "so that people might trample upon them forever." He then built
a mosque on the site. A few British administrators, such as Frederick S.
Growse, took interest in the temple to "detest the bigotry of the barbarians
who destroyed it." A group of businessmen who had purchased the site in
the early 1940s began construction of a new temple in 1953.^105
The garbha griha (sanctum sanctorum) of the present Keshavadev Katra
was completed in the early 1960s. The door that opens through the com-
mon wall of the idgah and the temple is said to have been the main entrance
of the destroyed temples. The taikhana (basement) of the idgah, which the
above door leads to, is believed to store paintings and idols. This belief
is held as the proof that this was the site of the original temple. The Shri
Krishna Janmasthan Trust (SKJT) was established on February 21, 1951,
and there were disputes over the ownership of the land and sharing it
between the temple and the mosque. Several court cases were pending
until 1968 when the SKJT and the Shahi Idgah Trust struck a compromise
with two conditions: that the idgah would be surrounded by a 20-foot wall
on the north and the south, and that there would be no windows on the
side of the temple. If there are bickerings between the two bodies now,
they are mostly small and trivial.^106
Likewise, the Vishwanath temple is believed to have been destroyed by
Qutubuddin Aibak, the commander of Mohammad of Ghor, after defeat-
ing the Raja of Kannauj in 1194. An affluent Gujarati merchant rebuilt the
temple during Shamsuddin Iltumish's regime (1211-1226 C.E.) only to be
demolished again during the rule of either Hussainshah Sharqui (1447-
1458) or Sikandar Lodi (1489-1517). Raja Mansingh of Jaipur built the tem-
ple during Akbar's rule, but orthodox Hindus boycotted it, as he had let
Akbar marry his sister and Jehangir his daughter. Raja Todar Mai rebuilt
the temple with Akbar's funding at its original site in 1585. Aurangzeb
is believed to have pulled down that temple in 1669 and constructed the
Gyanvapi mosque. Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore rebuilt the temple on an
adjoining plot in 1777, and an image of lingam was placed inside for wor-
ship. In 1839 Maharaja Ranjit Singh donated 22 maunds of gold from his
exploits in Afghanistan to plate the domes of the temple. The mosque
with its minarets and the temple with its domes are virtually twin struc-
tures.^107
In the final analysis, however, monuments stand mystified "when poli-
tics denies scholarship the right to restore the historical record, or worse,
remakes history for authoritarian ends."^108 Having built a psycho-political