Destruction of the Kashi Vishwanath temple and Aurangzeb’s order of 1669

01The temple before

Kashi had lost its Vishwanath temple to raiders before, under Qutb-ud-din Aibak in the 1190s and again in later centuries. The temple Aurangzeb found had been rebuilt in Akbar’s reign, around 1585, with the help of Raja Todar Mal and the scholar Narayana Bhatta. It stood beside the Gyanvapi, the well of knowledge, at the centre of the city of Mahadev.

02The order and the demolition

The Maasir-i-Alamgiri, the official chronicle of the reign completed by Saqi Mustaid Khan in 1710, records under April 1669 that the emperor ordered the governors of all provinces to demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and to put down their teaching and worship. Under 2 September 1669 it records that news came to court that, by the emperor’s command, his officers had demolished the temple of Vishwanath at Benares. The Gyanvapi mosque was built on the temple’s plinth, using its western wall.

03Rebuilding

For more than a century Vishwanath was worshipped without a great temple. In 1780 Rani Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore built the present temple close to the old site, and in 1835 Maharaja Ranjit Singh had its shikharas covered in gold. The Shri Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor, opening the temple to the Ganga, was inaugurated on 13 December 2021. The Gyanvapi site is now before the courts; in a survey ordered by the Varanasi district court, the ASI reported in 2023 that a large Hindu temple stood there before the mosque.