This January, 1000 years ago, a raiding army from Ghazni arrived at the beach at Veraval, where they destroyed a temple of Shiva that was facing the Arabian Sea. It was the first of many times that an invader has attacked a shrine for its riches and symbolism, and it would not be the last. It is about the aftermath of this episode that is worthy of Somnath's revisiting here violence's aftermath being repeated through a thousand summers, through Kumarapala's reconstruction, through the patronage of Ahilyabai Holkar in the 18th century, through Sardar Patel's post-war reconstruction that opened the doors of Somnath in 1951. The pattern is true for Kashi, for Vrindavan, for a dozen other sites which were destroyed and reconstructed repeatedly. History of religion questions that have been mulling in the back of their minds for generations are answered in that repetition; how does a civilization survive a thousand years of disruptions when others did not?

The ruins remained in Greece, but not the worship that gave them life. Egypt preserved its monuments, and not its deities. Zoroastrianism once the state religion of an empire that stretched from the Aegean Sea to the Indus, is today found in small and scattered communities. But in India, it is different; it is not a coincidence but a structural difference. Sanatan Dharma was never based on a single institution or scripture or the authority of a single person whose collapse would lead to its collapse. It developed as an organic complex of thought, local culture, and domestic customs connected through common texts, common festivals. It was possible for a king to lose his throne and the faith its footing. A temple might be destroyed and the worship would be transferred to the next village. Decentralisation – more of an obstacle than a wall and more of an army than a wall – proved best.

The other defence was memory itself carried not in vaults but in people. Vedic verses were passed down over the centuries by systems of recitation which are designed to ensure even the smallest of inaccuracies in pronunciation and order, which is acknowledged as part of humanity's intangible heritage by the UNESCO Memory of the World Register and which saw the Rigveda included on the Register. A manuscript may catch fire. A trained memory, distributed among thousands of people is much harder to destroy. Overlaid on this was the Bhakti movement that brought devotion from Sanskrit scholarship and into Tamil, Marathi, Awadhi, Bengali and many other languages, through the Bhakti saints, such as the Alvars, Tulsidas, Mirabai, and Chaitanya. Lullabies and wedding songs, and telling the Ramayana at a grandmother's knee, once a civilisation has lived in them no conqueror has the reach to put them in a museum box.

The distinction of 2026 is the attached spreadsheet, and the numbers aren't to be taken lightly in this old civilisational tale. According to the figures from the National Sample Survey Office, the total expenditure on pilgrimages by Hindu devotees over the year is estimated to be around Rs 4.74 lakh crore, while according to the estimates in various academic research published in recent years, some seven to eight crore people support their livelihoods through religious tourism in the country and from the temples, which include flower vendors at Tirupati, boatmen at Varanasi and homestay owners at Ayodhya. The Kashi Vishwanath corridor alone attracted more than seventy-two million devotees last year, and industry analysts, who monitor the much wider faith-tourism industry, estimate it will reach several times that figure within a decade. The Ram temple in Ayodhya is said to have contributed to the annual tourism income in that city reaching a crores of ten thousand rupees due to the study conducted by IIM Lucknow. Based on the numbers provided by the state tourism department, the spending of the tourists in Mathura and Vrindavan is more than fifteen thousand crore rupees in a single year. The budget of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams board alone was approved for the next year exceeding the figure of five thousand crore rupees. This isn't spending money that was just thrown away. It is a service economy, and there are even hotels, railway packages and guided-tour operators in towns, while also the international hotel chains which are steadily entering the picture a decade later where there was no branded hotel at all.

Looked at that way, the survival narrative isn't just about faith, it's about the cultural continuity that becomes economic weight. Governments in other countries have sought to "invent" heritage tourism, by restoring ruins and marketing history to tourists who have no living connection with what they are seeing. The situation in India's temple towns is far different: the pilgrim and the tourist are often one and the same, ritual and transaction often come in the same visit and the need was never driven because it never ceased. That's a very unusual situation for any economy based on the heritage, and that's why investment in infrastructure such as the pilgrimage scheme ‘PRASHAD', new trains, expanded airports at Keshod, for example has been as much an economic policy question as a cultural one.

But none of this washes away the bad times. The devastation at Somnath was very real, as was the coercion that followed in the Portuguese period of Goa and the more gradual process of colonial takeover of Indian education and historiography. However, reconstruction, not surrender, was the answer every time and was equally performed by rulers, reformers and ordinary households. The same instinct was manifested in intellectual form in Vivekananda's late-nineteenth century shift from the role of defender of Hindu thought to its confident explanation to the world. Ten centuries after the first raid on Somnath's temple, the bells at that temple, at Kashi, at Vrindavan, sound for the pilgrims who come on Vande Bharat trains and spend their nights in hotel chains that do not yet exist twenty years ago, and in the most literal economic sense, a civilisation held up at the dinner table is never far from the ledger.