For many years, some Hindus have argued that Babur’s Mosque (also called the Babri Masjid) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama in Ayodhya, the city where, according to the Ramayana, Rama was born.31 During the 1980s, as the Hindu right rose slowly to power, Hindu organizations began holding rallies at the site of Babur’s Mosque, campaigning for the “rebuilding” of the temple, despite the absence of any evidence to confirm either the existence of the temple or even the identification of the modern town of Ayodhya with its legendary predecessor. Then the Ramayana was broadcast on Indian television in 1987-1988, adding fuel to the mythological furor over the Ayodhya mosque. In 1989, during a judicial procedure that resulted in allowing Muslims continuing access to the mosque, against the plea of Hindus who wanted to lock them out, it was said that “a monkey sat atop the court building and when the order was passed it violently shook the flagstaff from which the national tricolour was fluttering.”32 The monkey was presumed to be Hanuman, who has become the mascot of the RSS, the militant wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and whom Forster, in 1921, already referred to as “the Monkey God (Hanuman-who-knocks-down-Europeans).”33 In 1989, as a response to the growing agitation over Ayodhya, a group of historians at the Center for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) released a pamphlet entitled The Political Abuse of History: Babri-Masjid-Rama-Janma- Bhumi Dispute. The pamphlet marked the direct intervention of historians in the debate over Ayodhya and was eventually published as an edited volume.34 The essays all argue that the case for a Rama temple under the mosque is based on myth rather than history. In 1990 L. K. Advani, the BJP president, put on the saffron robes of a renouncer (or, nowadays, a right-wing Hindu) and posed with a bow and arrow on top of a truck decorated to look like Rama’s chariot. He was arrested as he was heading for Ayodhya.35 Two years later, on December 6, 1992, as the police stood by and watched, leaders of the BJP whipped a crowd of two hundred thousand into a frenzy. Shouting, “Death to the Muslims!” the mob attacked Babur’s Mosque with sledgehammers. As the historian William Dalrymple put it, “One after another, as if they were symbols of India’s traditions of tolerance, democracy, and secularism, the three domes were smashed to rubble.”36 In the riots that followed, more than a thousand people lost their lives, and many more died in reactive riots that broke out elsewhere in India, first in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the mosque, then intermittently, and then very seriously again in 2002. Litigation over the site continues. On the site today (as of 2008) nothing but vandalized ruins remains, yet there is intense security (and there have been several attacks to justify such security). Visitors to the site find, in a dark corner of the large, empty space, a small shrine, like a family puja closet, with a couple of oleograph pictures of Rama, where a Hindu priest performs a perfunctory puja. Nearby, in a BJP tent, is a model of the new temple they intend to build. Whether or not there ever was a Hindu temple there before, there is a temple, however makeshift, there now.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 08:52:45 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015