Gyanvapi Mosque , Jaitpura- Varanasi

The Gyanvapi Mosque is located in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. It was constructed by Aurangzeb c. 1678, a decade after his demolition of an old Shiva temple.

Pre-mosque history
Vishweshwar temple
The site had a Vishweshwar temple devoted to the Hindu deity Shiva. It was built by Todar Mal, a premier courtier and minister of Akbar, in conjunction with Narayana Bhatta, a pre-eminent Brahmin scholar of Banaras from Maharashtra, during late 16th century. The temple contributed to the establishment of Banaras as a vaunted center of Brahminic assembly, drawing scholars across the subcontinent esp. Maharashtra, for adjudicating a spectrum of disputes concerned with Hindu religious law.

Architectural historian Madhuri Desai hypothesizes that the temple was a system of intersecting iwans —a borrowing from Mughal architecture— with prominent pointed arches; it had a carved stone exterior.

Pre-temple History
What might have existed at the site prior to this temple is debated by scholars. Such history has been extensively contested by the local Hindu as well as the Muslim population. Desai notes the multiple histories of the original temple and tensions arising out of the location of Gyanvapi to have fundamentally shaped the sacred topography of the city.

Recent accounts of the history of the mosque, as purveyed by Hindus, center around a litany of repeated destruction and re-construction of the original temple which is situated in contrast to the timelessness of the lingam. The original temple, located the current site of the mosque, was allegedly uprooted by Ghurids in 1193/1194 CE, upon the defeat of Jayachandra of Kannauj; the Razia Mosque was constructed in its place, a few years later. The temple would be rebuilt by a Gujarati merchant during the reign of Iltutmish (1211–1266 CE) only to be demolished by Hussain Shah Sharqi (1447–1458) of the Jaunpur Sultanate or Sikandar Lodi (1489–1517) of the Delhi Sultanate. During Akbar’s rule, Raja Man Singh got the temple re-constructed, but it again fell victim to Aurangzeb’s intense religious zealotry.

Historicity
Diana L. Eck finds medieval chronicles to affirm the Hindu notions of an Adi-Vishweshwar premises being the original home of the lingam; however, scholars have critiqued Eck’s non-contextual usage of medieval sources. Hans T. Bakker finds the temple destroyed in 1194 to be indeed located in current-day Gyanvapi precincts but devoted to Avimukteshwara; however, he speculates that the Razia mosque was not constructed in its place but atop the adjacent “Hill of Vishweshwar”, which would force the Hindus —sometime around the late 13th century— to reclaim the vacant Gyanvapi site for a temple of Vishweshwar. This new temple would again be destroyed by the Jaunpur Sultanate, apparently to supply building materials for mosques at their new capital.

In contrast, Desai, in her reading of medieval literature, rejects the existence of any Vishweshwar temple in early-medieval Banaras; she alongside other scholars argue that it was only in the Kashikhand that Vishweshwar would be featured as the major deity of the city for the first time and even then, for centuries, it remained one among the many sacred spots of Banaras. Vishweshwar would succeed Avimukteshwara to become the principal shrine of the city only after sustained patronage of Mughals, beginning from the late sixteenth century. She perceives the Hindu claims as part of a meta-narrative about Hindu civilization being continually oppressed by Muslim invaders, which was reinforced via colonial apparatuses of knowledge production.

Jaitpura, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh 221001