9. Ghazni to Alamgir
In his Mathura: A District Memoir, Growse has recorded his exhaustive survey and research about Brajbhoomi. He was so overhelmed by the vandalism that visited the area repeatedly, that he wrote feelingly, although his home was in far away England. To quote:
thanks to Muhammadan intolerance, there is not a single building of any antiquity either in the city itself or its environs. Its most famous temple-that dedicated to Kesava Deva (Krishna) – was destroyed in 1669, the eleventh year of the reign of the iconoclast Aurangzeb (Alamgir was also his name). The mosque (idgah) erected on its ruins is a building of little architectural value.
Mahmud Ghazni was however the first iconoclast to vandalise Mathura. That was in 1017 AD about which Growse wrote:
If any one wished to construct a building equal to it, he would not be able to do so without expending a hundred millions diners, and the work would occupy two hundred years, even though the most able and experienced workmen were employed. Orders were given that all the temple should be burnt with naphtha and fire and levelled with the ground. The city was given up to plunder for twenty days. Among the spoils are said to have been five great idols of pure gold with eyes of rubies and adornments of other precious stones, together with a vast number of smaller silver images, which, when broken up, formed a load for more than a hundred camels. The total value of the spoils has been estimated at three millions of rupees; while the number of Hindus carried away into captivity exceeded 5,000.
Today Balkrishna is worshipped in a little room which appears like a servant quarter attached to the back of the idgah. Pathos can be experienced by any visitor, whether a devotee or otherwise.
To go back to Aurangzeb, over two centuries after the desecration, Growse felt that:
of all the sacred places in India, none enjoys a greater popularity than the capital of Braj, the holy city of Mathura. For nine months in the year, festival follows upon festival in rapid succession and the ghats and temples are daily thronged with new troops of way-worn pilgrims. So great is the sanctity of the spot that its panegyrists do not hesitate to declare that a single day spent at Mathura is more meritorious than a lifetime passed at Benares. All this celebrity is due to the fact of it being the birthplace of the demi-god Krishna.
Not only the city of Mathura, but with it, the whole of the westem half of the district has a special interest of its own as the birthplace and abiding home Vaishnava Hinduism. It is about 42 miles in length with an average breadth of 30 miles and is intersected throughout by the river Jamuna. In the neighbourhood Gokul and Brindaban, where the divine brothers Krishna and Balaram grazed their herds. He continues: Almost every spot is traditionally connected with some event in the life of Krishna or of his mythical mistress Radha.
To paraphrase William Shakespeare, not all the scents of Arabia would suffice to wash away the sins of Ghazni and Alamgir at Mathura. And since it is not posible to claim back what was destroyed long ago, the return of the Idgaah and the shuddhi of Krishna janmabhoomi or the birth place of Krishna, is the only alternative