Bollywood veteran Amitabh Bachchan on Sunday shared a video of a Hindu Vishnu Temple located in Bandar Abbas, Iran, on his Instagram account, pairing it with the Persian song Ae Vishnu Jaan. While the post sparked widespread interest in India-Iran cultural ties, Bachchan reportedly mislabelled the structure as 'ancient' — the temple was, in fact, built in 1892, making it approximately 135 years old.

What Bachchan Posted

In a lengthy caption accompanying the video, Bachchan wrote: 'The Ancient Hindu Vishnu Temple in Abbas Bandar, Iran .. Built in 1892 during the Qajar era, it was constructed for Hindu traders from India working in the city .. the song .. in Persian (sic).' The post drew attention both for its cultural significance and for the factual inconsistency — a structure from 1892 does not qualify as ancient by historical standards, though its heritage value remains intact.

A Temple Built for Indian Traders

The Bandar Abbas Vishnu Temple, constructed during the Qajar era, served the community of Hindu traders from India who had settled in the Iranian port city for commerce. Its existence is a tangible marker of the centuries-old mercantile relationship between the two civilisations. Before the Partition of India in 1947, India shared a border with Iran, and trade links between the two regions stretched back many centuries.

India-Iran: A Deep Civilisational Bond

The temple's story is embedded in a far longer history. India and Iran share one of Asia's oldest civilisational relationships, rooted in trade, language, religion, and culture. Persian influence profoundly shaped medieval Indian courts, literature, architecture, and administration — most visibly during the Mughal era, when Persian served as the primary language of governance and elite culture. Thousands of Persian-origin words entered everyday Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, and Kashmiri vocabularies, covering everything from governance to food and emotion.

After India's independence, the two nations formally established diplomatic ties in 1950. During the Cold War, relations were uneven — Iran aligned with the West while India maintained a non-aligned posture close to the Soviet Union. In recent decades, cooperation has deepened through energy trade, the Chabahar Port project, and shared interests in Afghanistan. Despite international sanctions and geopolitical pressures, India has sustained a carefully balanced relationship with Iran.

Why the Post Resonated

Bachchan's post, though factually imprecise on the temple's age, succeeded in surfacing a lesser-known chapter of South Asian diaspora history. The image of a functioning Hindu temple in an Iranian port city — built by Indian merchants over a century ago — offers a window into how trade once wove cultures together across the Persian Gulf. Notably, the use of a Persian devotional song as the soundtrack underscored the syncretism the post was attempting to celebrate.