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On 15 May 2026, the Madhya Pradesh High Court delivered a verdict declaring the Bhojshala-Kamal Maula Mosque complex a site of Hindu character and granted exclusive worship rights to the Hindus. The Court also quashed the April 2003 ASI order, allowing Muslims to offer 52 days of Friday namaz at the place. Commenting on the verdict, AIMIM President Asaduddin Owaisi said: ‘…the Court ignored the 1935 Dhar State Gazettee, 1985 Waqf registration and the Places of Worship Act….’ Whether the Court did so is a matter for another discussion. But Mr Owaisi, why did you not consider the 1034 CE installation of Vagdevi at the heart of Bhojshala by Raja Bhoj, or the 1305 invasion of Dhar by Alauddin Khilji’s general Ain-ul-Mulk Multani, killing its King Mahalakdeva and turning the Hindu religious character of this very place into a Muslim one?
Are you not aware of the partial destruction of Bhojshala? After taking over Dhar, the Sultanate forces scraped off the Sanskrit and Prakrit writings inscribed on slate slabs on the prayer hall floor. The figurative carvings on pillars and ceilings were partially defaced. The addition of mihrab (prayer niche in a mosque indicating qibla: the direction of the Kaaba towards which the Muslims must face while praying) to its western wall. Shifting the ritual axis of the building from east-facing to west-facing. And that it was only after the death of Kamal al-Din (Kamal Maula), known as a sufi saint, that this converted structure became associated with his dargah.
But then, how can you be aware of all this when you are following the ‘YouTuber Historian’, Ruchika Sharma? Sharma, who has called the name Bhojshala a 20th-century misnomer (wrong name given to something). In Sanskrit, shala refers to a hall, a house, or a hall of purpose. That is why we have pathshala (school). So, Bhojshala is nothing but Bhoj’s hall.
Raja Bhoj, who ruled the Parmar kingdom of Malwa from approximately 1010 to 1055 CE and built its capital at Dhar, is remembered as a scholar king. His major works include ‘Samarangana Sutradhara’ (architecture and engineering, including a famous chapter on mechanical and flying devices), the Rajamartanda (a commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras still studied today), among others.
Bhoj built the Bhojshala as the intellectual centre of his kingdom. A proof of which can be found in the ‘Dhar Prasasti of Arjunavarman’, a Sankrit inscription preserving the play Parijatamanjari-natika composed by the court poet Madana under King Arjunavarman Parmar (reigned 1210-1216 CE), which describes Bhojshala as the ‘ornament of the eighty-four squares of Dharanagari’. This 84 isn’t a random number. In Indian thought, it signifies a sacred totality marker. 84 siddhas, 84 yogasanas and of course 84 lakh species of birth. It must be noted that under the Parmars, this Bhojshala was not just another hall, but simultaneously a Saraswati temple, a residential Sanskrit college, a debate hall for visiting scholars from across India and a royal scriptorium where manuscripts were composed and copied.
The May 15 verdict is of the Vagdevi/Devi Saraswati. In Sanskrit, the word vak means speech, but it means much more than the act of talking. In the Vedic worldview, vak is the creative power of utterance, the principle that calls reality into being. The Rig Vedas’s Vak Sukta (10.125) is a first person hymn in which Vak herself declares that she is the queen of the cosmos, that through her all eat the food that feeds them, that she brings forth the father at the head of the world. In such a scenario, how could she not have spoken the truth?
The truth that made the statue of Vagdevi evacuate from Bhojshala before Mulk’s army reached Dhar, most likely evacuated by a small group of trusted priests and royal officials and taken into the surrounding countryside and entrusted to a custodial lineage, till it was taken by Major John Walter Watson (a British officer serving in the Political Department in Central India under the Bhopawar Agency Administration) from its Indian custodians and sent to the British Museum, where it entered the Museum’s collection in the late 1870s or 1880s. However, Devi has remained absent from the public display ever since.
It so happened between 1905 and 1912 that British and German Indological scholarship was documenting the Bhojshala. And KK Lele, Superintendent of State Education in Dhar State, reported the discovery of the Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions at the site. Eugen Hultzsch published the Dhar inscription of Arjunavarman in Epigraphia Indica in 1905-06. Captain E Barnes reported that the structure was a mosque ‘known among the Hindu population as Raja Bhoj ka Madrasa’. CE Luard’s Dhar State Gazetteer of 1908 called it Raja Bhoj’s school.
These two developments led to the first demand for restoration. Around two decades later, the local Hindu residents of Dhar, armed with the Sanskrit inscriptional evidence, the ‘Dhar Prasasti of Arjunavarman’ and a photograph of the Vagdevi statue available in the British Museum, formally demanded that the Bhojshala masjid be reconverted into a mandir. Reconverted, not converted – the seculars.
The Maharaja of Dhar himself was a Hindu and sympathetic to the demand. But under the British paramountcy, he was subject to the ‘advice’ of the ‘British Resident’, who advised him to ban entry to the edifice for a while. As a result, the Maharaja, constrained, complied – but except for permitting Hindus to enter on Vasant Panchami and Muslims to enter one day in the year.
This laid the first compromise in the Bhojshala matter. Still, I would say this was a balanced move, but what followed this was gruesome.
After independence, in 1952, the Collector of Dhar district issued a formal letter to the Hindu Maha Sabha in which he wrote: ‘I am directed to request you kindly to inform the Hindu Maha Sabha that the building called Bhoj shala situated at Dhar cannot be given to either the Hindu or the Muslim communities for conversion into a temple or a fullfledged mosque and that this being an archaelogical monument the right of entry to it would be conceded to all sections of people for purpose of sight seeing. The Muslim community may also be kindly informed, if necessary, that while the Muslims may continue to say their Friday prayers in the building, no effects must be kept there and nobody should use any part of it for residence’.
(Collection of Dhar. May 1, 1952. Dhar State Huzur Durbar Office File 1935-36)
Folks, per the letter, the Hindus were stopped from performing their Vasant Pachmi Puja, while the Muslims were allowed to offer their namaz. But what did Mr Owaisi call erroneous (wrong)? The May 2026 judgement and not this absolutely discriminatory letter.
Further, in 1997, the then Congress Government of Madhya Pradesh under Chief Minister Digvijay Singh (1993-2003) imposed a near-total ban on entry to the Bhogshala compound and the entry of the Hindus was reduced to just one day (Vasant Panchami) per year. It must be noted that the Kamal Maula dargah continued to function normally.
In the final months of Singh’s tenure as the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, in April 2003, an Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) order came as a twist. Maybe to show that the Congress party was not anti-Hindu but secular. The order permitted the Muslims to offer namaz every Friday – 52 days per year, while opening the gates of the compound for only one day (Vasant Panchami) for the Hindus.
To me: this order implicitly treated the building as a mosque with occasional Hindu Festival access, rather than a temple with occasional Muslim accommodation.
If you wonder why. I can tell. Hear me out. Three years later, on February 3, 2006, the Vasant Panchami fell on a Friday for the first time under the new order. Both communities asserted their right to use the site simultaneously. The administration deployed thousands of police personnel. Time-sharing arrangements were attempted, but they failed. What resulted was this: stone pelting between Hindus and Muslims that escalated into nothing but full communal disturbance. Just once, an adjustment had to be made, but for some, it is just not possible to leave what comes naturally to them. Shops damaged. Vehicles banned. Curfew imposed. People injured.
But I think this brought the case into the eyes of those who wanted justice. As a result, in 2022, the Hindu Front for Justice, represented by Advocate Vishnu Shankar Jain and his father Hari Shankar Jain, filed a comprehensive petition in the Indore Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. The petition demanded what no government since 1935 had been willing to grant: a fundamental declaration of the religious character of Bhojshala, not just a procedural adjustment of access. The petition was specific in its demands: a declaration that Bhojshala is a Saraswati temple; unrestricted Hindu worship rights; quashing of the 2003 ASI order; directive for a scientific ASI survey; directive for repatriation of the Vagdevi from the British Museum.
In 2024, the ASI conducted a survey for 98 days and gave its report in over 2000 pages. The report declared clearly the pre-Islamic Hindu temple character of the structure. It confirmed the partially erased Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions, including portions of Madana’s kurma-shatak, verses from Bhoj’s plays and grammatical compositions in naga-bandha arrangement and further asserted the architectural evidence of east-facing temple converted to west-facing mosque. The ASI report also confirmed the buried sculptural fragments and inscriptional remains beneath the current floor beneath the current floor level.
This report was accepted after two years (2024 and 2025) of thorough arguments in the HC, in which the Muslim side (this included the Maulana Kamaluddin Welfare Society) was also given an equal opportunity to put their point across, paving the way for the Hindu victory.
That from 1305 to 2026, across 721 years, the Hindu memory of Bhojshala was carved in oral tradition, then in the British archaeological documentation, then in the 1935 demand suppressed by the British Resident, then in the long post-Independence administrative compromise and finally in the 2022 petition that demanded nothing but justice. And I believe, for us, we have received justice, but clearly, Mr Owaisi has ignored the history of Bhojshala very conveniently.
