Granite and Grade Sheets: Pradhan Ji Out, Prahlad Cha In
Who Gets to Name a Place: Boniyar, the Ministry, and a Diwas of Contested Memory There's a granite temple in Boniyar that nobody can agree on the name of. Alexander Cunningham, reading it the way a 19th-century colonial surveyor reads most things in the subcontinent, traced it to "Bhawani" and filed it under goddess-cult architecture. The people who actually live around it have mostly never used that name — they call it a Pandava site, something out of the Mahabharata, older than any colonial epigraphist's guess and answerable to nobody's inventory. The temple itself is a rarity even by Kashmir's standards — granite in a valley of limestone, a quadrangular cloistered plan, a lotus-carved dome, Greco-Buddhist echoes that likely predate the Karkota period it's usually dated to. It sat for over a thousand years on the old corridor connecting the Valley to Gandhara and Taxila, a waypoint for traders and pilgrims long before it became a name in anyone's se...
