AYODHYA, India—At the end of January, devotees from far and wide congregated in this northern Indian city before a new temple to pay tribute to Ram, the warrior-deity hero of the ancient Sanskrit epic the Ramayana. The gleaming temple built in Ram’s honor—the Ram Mandir—had been inaugurated less than a week before, but the carpet leading to gender-segregated metal detectors already looked threadbare.
AYODHYA, India—At the end of January, devotees from far and wide congregated in this northern Indian city before a new temple to pay tribute to Ram, the warrior-deity hero of the ancient Sanskrit epic the Ramayana. The gleaming temple built in Ram’s honor—the Ram Mandir—had been inaugurated less than a week before, but the carpet leading to gender-segregated metal detectors already looked threadbare.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the site’s consecration on Jan. 22. The day after, half a million worshippers flooded Ayodhya. They discarded their shoes behind a metal barricade. Men in knit neon-orange caps lunged up the polished sandstone, pausing to touch each step. The temple’s pillars were wrapped in lilies, roses, carnations, and a blue floral peacock with a cascading tail. The milky white sanctum glimmered like a mirage.
“Jai Shri Ram!” chanters bellowed. (“Victory to Lord Ram!”) Inside the temple, devotees locked eyes with the black-stone Ram Lalla, the site’s main idol, for a few seconds before being ushered along by uniformed guards.
Scenes from the Ramayana, including a portrait of Sita, Ram, and Ram’s brother Lakshmana, adorn a new bus stop in Ayodhya on Jan. 29.
Giant cutouts of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Prime Minister Narendra Modi soar over a statue of 16th-century sage Tulsidas in Tulsi Udyan, a park in Ayodhya, on Jan. 30.
To many Indians, Ram Mandir’s opening embodies the revival of a Hindu golden age, a time predating Mughal invasions and Britain’s colonial chokehold. At a ceremony to lay the temple’s foundation stone in 2020, Modi said, “Ram Temple will be a modern signifier of our ancient culture; it will be an example of our patriotic fervor; it will be a symbol of the strength of will of our citizens.” The trust set up that year to manage the temple’s construction released a 3D animation on YouTube detailing each stage of the process. One commenter declared the temple a “soul-fulfilling achievement of lost glory.”
To others, Ram Mandir symbolizes the waning of a pluralist India that offered safe harbor to religious minorities for centuries. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have consolidated their base by politicizing Hindu religious and cultural identity. India’s main opposition, the secular Indian National Congress party, declined to attend the star-studded temple opening. Prakash Ambedkar, a former member of parliament and founder of the anti-caste Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi party, tweeted that the BJP was “trying to appropriate God.”
Now in Ayodhya, weeks after the temple’s consecration, illustrated posters of Ram—sky-blue skin, traditional bow in hand—still plaster the streets. He is joined by larger-than-life cutouts of Yogi Adityanath (the BJP chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, where Ayodhya is located) and an orange-clad Modi. They tower over a statue of Tulsidas, a 17th-century sage who popularized the Ramayana by translating it into the regional dialect.
As India looks ahead to general elections this spring, the shrewdly timed inauguration of Ram Mandir—which is still under construction—has fulfilled one of the BJP’s most ardent campaign promises.
Temples line the Ayodhya waterfront, with cranes visible in the distance, on Jan. 29. Much of the city is still under reconstruction, converted into a so-called “Hindu Vatican.”
Ram Mandir’s hallowed grounds were once home to a 16th-century mosque, the Babri Masjid. Built under the first Mughal emperor, Babur, in 1528-29, the mosque emerged as a flash point for Hindu-Muslim tensions in the mid-1850s, when Hindu groups alleged it lay on top of the location believed to be the birthplace of Ram.
In 1856, Britain’s East India Company annexed the region home to Ayodhya. The British built a wall to separate Hindu and Muslim worship. The next year, in a rebellion known as the Sepoy Mutiny, Hindu and Muslim soldiers rallied against a common British target—temporarily allaying tensions surrounding the Babri Masjid. “Hindu-Muslim unity during the rebellion showed the British that they [could not] rule without playing one against another,” journalist Valay Singh told Foreign Policy. Singh is the author of the book Ayodhya: City of Faith, City of Discord.
From then on, divide and conquer was the colonial modus operandi. By 1885, the Ayodhya site dispute became the subject of litigation. A petition to build a Hindu temple on the site was dismissed in court. Further communal riots followed in the 1930s. Then, just two years into India’s independence in 1949, a Hindu ascetic broke into the Babri Masjid, where he planted an idol of Ram. Onlookers heralded it a divine apparition. Authorities officially declared the site disputed and locked the mosque.
A right-wing Hindu nationalist organization launched the movement to build a temple at the Babri Masjid site in 1984. Its slogan—Mandir wahi banayenge, or “we will build a temple right there”—was embraced as a rallying cry by the BJP. In 1992, Ram Temple activists famously charged the mosque and hacked it down with axes and hammers; worshippers filed past cleared rubble to offer prayers to Ram.
Read More
How a small town in an electorally significant state captured India's imagination.
|
The massive publicity around the consecration of a temple to the Hindu warrior-king Rama further consolidates the Indian prime minister’s political dominance.
|
An Indian state approved a bill that religious minorities say amounts to interference. National implementation could be next.
|
A decade later, Hindu pilgrims, many of them women and children, were killed in the state of Gujarat on their way back from Ayodhya when a Muslim mob set fire to their train carriage. Hindu militias targeted Muslim families in retaliation; according to a 2002 Human Rights Watch report, they collaborated with police and BJP state officials. Modi was chief minister of Gujarat at the time. (Last year, Indian courts acquitted 68 of the accused, to cheers of “Jai Shri Ram!”)
Then, in 2019, India’s Supreme Court sanctioned the construction of a new Hindu temple on the site of the Babri Masjid. In its verdict, the Supreme Court denounced the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid but justified its decision based on Hindu “faith and belief” that the site was Ram’s birthplace. It awarded five acres to a Sunni trust in Uttar Pradesh to build a mosque complex in Dhannipur, a village 15 miles from Ayodhya’s Old City. Construction of the mosque is slated to begin after Ramadan ends in April, when Indians head to the polls.
“This entire city belongs to Ram,” said Tulsi Ram Shastri, priest of a small temple in Old Ayodhya. Likened to Jerusalem for decades, Ayodhya—one of India’s seven sacred Hindu cities—is Ram’s kingdom in the Ramayana. The Old City spatializes Ram’s mythological biography. There is the palace of Sita, Ram’s wife, where devotees make offerings of jaggery-sweetened rice pudding. A faded edifice is believed to be the remains of a royal court.
Nothing still standing looks millennia-old, but many locals blame the Mughals for that. “God himself could not live in his house for 500 years,” Shastri told Foreign Policy, referring to the land once occupied by the Babri Masjid. “Where else should we build a temple, if not there?” A younger priest interrupted him. “Don’t say ‘Babri Masjid,’ he chided. “Say ‘disputed site.’”
On the wall of Shastri’s small temple hangs a portrait of two young men: Ram and Sharad Kothari, brothers who were killed in 1990 when Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister ordered police to fire on Ram Mandir activists who attempted to breach the Babri Masjid and hang Ram flags. “I saw that,” Shastri said. “Instead of water flowing through the drains in the street that day, there was blood.”
Old Ayodhya’s sacred geography doubles as a memorial. The narrow lane that bore the most fighting in 1990 is still nicknamed “Shaheed Gali,” or Martyr Street. Bitterness lingers. While many people in India and abroad see the Ram Mandir as evidence of the Hindu right’s dominance over Indian politics, here in Ayodhya’s Old City, the BJP’s actions are perceived as a salve. “The sacrifice of my brothers and several others did not go in vain,” the Kothari brothers’ surviving sister recently told the Indian Express, lauding Modi’s temple inauguration.
Martyr Street is now lined with stalls selling orange Ram flags. Indian musician Jagjit Singh’s devotional melody “Hey Ram Hey Ram” blasts from loudspeakers. A man lifts his purple fleece to reveal a bullet scar on his lower abdomen. He said he was shot by the police in 1990. “Now I’m very happy,” he said, smiling. “Not only the temple is here, but everything is getting developed.”
A devotee leaves offerings at a Hanuman shrine along Ayodhya’s Sarayu River, considered sacred, on Jan. 29. Riverside ghats are set to be revamped as part of Modi’s massive Ayodhya development plan.
The transformation of Ayodhya into what many are now calling a “Hindu Vatican” has ruffled feathers among residents. Thousands of homes and small businesses were demolished to make way for the temple complex. “What is happening in the name of development is that they’re breaking apart existing constructions,” said Anay Kumar Gupta, the owner of a small South Indian eatery along Ayodhya’s main road, now renamed the Ram Path. He said that his restaurant’s square footage was halved when the road was expanded. “The government didn’t take care of us, even though we’re subjects of Lord Ram.”
More critically, the idea of a Hindu Vatican presupposes only one version of Hinduism, a vast and syncretic faith system. A singularized Hindu narrative also overshadows other regional histories: Jain, Buddhist, and Muslim. “All these sites of confluence are turning into sites of conflict,” Singh, the journalist, said.
Umar Altaf, a New Delhi-based video artist from the Kashmir region, traveled with his camera to Ayodhya disguised as a Hindu. “I had a tikka [forehead mark] on my head, because I didn’t want to get identified as a Muslim,” he said. Altaf is making a documentary about what he calls the “psychological impact on Muslims” of India’s Hindu right. “What my grandfather used to say about India, I can’t see that country now,” Altaf said. “He used to brag about the cultural harmony.”
Ram Mandir’s opening has also spawned new controversies. Weeks after the inauguration, a local court in Varanasi, another sacred city in Uttar Pradesh, ruled that Hindu worshippers could access a Mughal mosque to pray after emboldened right-wing Hindu groups claimed that it had been built over a temple to the Hindu god Shiva.
Eighty miles west of Ayodhya sits Lucknow, the state capital of Uttar Pradesh. Lucknow is nicknamed the “City of Nawabs” for its late-Mughal mosques and palaces (nawabs were local Muslim rulers during the Mughal empire). In the run-up to the elections, BJP posters line traffic-clogged roundabouts and Ram flags billow from rooftops. Lucknow is home to the headquarters of the Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation, the Muslim trust established to oversee the construction of the new mosque in Dhannipur after the 2019 verdict that allowed the Ram Mandir project to go ahead.
A man sits near a late 18th-century mosque in the Residency in Lucknow, India, on Jan. 30. Constructed as a residential compound for the British, the Residency came under siege in 1857.
In 1857, Lucknow was also where Hindu and Muslim sepoys (troops) joined forces and stormed the Residency, a British residential complex dating back to 1775. Today, the site is a ruin-filled park near the banks of the Gomti River. The Sepoy Mutiny, known patriotically in India as the First War of Independence, “was the only instance in recent history when Hindus and Muslims have stood together,” said Athar Husain, the secretary of the Indo-Islamic Cultural Foundation. In addition to the new mosque, the foundation also plans to build an archive and museum in Dhannipur dedicated to Hindu-Muslim unity in 1857 and beyond.
To Husain, the new temple and the mosque construction are not at odds. “They have identified [Ayodhya] as the Kingdom of Ram,” he said. “We have no problem with that, because we are also part of this land.”
At the Residency, a small museum already attempts to unite India’s fractious history. It displays valiant portraits of both Hindu and Muslim freedom fighters. Rani Lakshmibai, the Brahmin-born rebel queen who led counterattacks on the British by horseback, is depicted drawing a long sword. Begum Hazrat Mahal, who helped mount the rebellion against the British after her nawab husband was deposed, smiles enigmatically under a sequined veil.
Cannonball holes are still visible in the Residency’s stone walls. But the booms of artillery feel distant. All is quiet, save the cries of mynas and peacocks. Muslim women stroll around the leafy grounds in sheeny abayas, Hindu women in salwar kameez and sindoor. How many histories can overlap? “There’s a pain, as conjoined twins have pain,” Husain said of Hindus and Muslims in India. “But they know how to exist together.”
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
