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Destroyed or Occupied Mandirs or Stupas in India

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This is not my regular type of post.

We know from evidence that Mandirs and Stupas (and other monuments like universities) were demolished/occupied and often even replaced by invaders. Several historical accounts both contemporary and today acknowledge this. The legendary Sita Ram Goel made one of the first comprehensive study of the destroyed temples that dot the landscape of the Indian subcontinent. However, the list of these temples or other buildings are difficult to find (other than his original book). There is another book by Prafulla Goradia, namely 'Hindu Masjids' that speaks specifically about Hindu temples that are currently under occupation.

The main problem is that this information is difficult to find. Unless one is a scholar, or has a special inclination towards reading history - one cannot be expected to stumble upon this on their own.

Hence, it is important that a easy to find repository of all monuments with a wound is recorded for posterity. My own humble attempt to fill this gap is in the way of this website - https://sarthakganguly.github.io/mutewitnesses/

This is our frontend
Before you dismiss this as an amateur site, let me explain how this can make a lot of difference.

Since I wish this material to be understood by the greatest possible audience, I will keep the technical jargon limited.

What you see in the web page is a list of mandirs that are in various states of ruin. Their status, the date when they were built or destroyed, a picture, some details etc are present.

The advantage is that the data that you see here is entered only via a Google sheet.

You can easily contribute to the data set. Once you get access to this Google Sheet (when I give you access), you have to enter the details as shown below.

Destroyed Mandir List - in Google Sheets
This makes the data entry and management part extremely simple. When you add a new entry, the page will automatically change when you reload it.

Several other advantages are mentioned below:

  1. It is totally free, all you need is a Google account. Send me a DM via @thecodepost and I will grant you the same.
  2. Worried that your data may be deleted and the site broken? Not a problem. Google Sheets has sheet history built in. If I see an issue with the website, I will simply restore the Google Sheets to a previous date.
  3. Access control is built in - if you get write access, you will not be able to share it with others.
  4. Data validations will be put in, soon.
  5. I will add search functionality in some time as well.
If you people like this site and this gets some traction, I will buy a domain name and redirect my GitHub page to the domain. This will increase our visibility and anyone with a doubt about the authenticity of our claims will only have to go to this site to know which mandir was destroyed and when.

For those of you who are technically inclined, I have covered this in a post here at The Code Post.
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