The symbolic representation of the Ram temple in Ayodhya as a significant cultural object in overtly Hindu terms seems to redefine the established contours of postcolonial official memory — the state recognised authoritative ways to observe events of national significance. Two specific reasons lie behind it.
First, the temple is not commemorated only as a religious place of worship. The active participation of political leaders and the media campaign to celebrate the inauguration ceremony as an important national event created the impression that the Ram temple has an official status. The temple is being displayed as a new official site of national memory.
Secondly, the Ram temple is not portrayed as a historical object. The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra (SRJTK) Trust, an autonomous body constituted by the government in 2020 for the construction and management of the temple, relies heavily on the contemporary history of the Ayodhya dispute. According to this narrative, the struggle for the Ram Temple is 492 years old. It means that the Babri Masjid, built on this site in 1528, is still remembered as a historical point of reference. The SRJTK is not interested in exploring any ancient history of Lord Ram’s birth place, or for that matter, the archaeological historicity of the temple that was supposedly demolished to construct the Babri Masjid.
The Trust, it seems, is obsessed with a few controversial moments of our political life — 1984 (an indirect reference to the first VHP led-Yatra), 1989 (when the Shilanyas took place), and 2019 (Supreme Court judgement in the Ayodhya case). The SRJTK website does mention research institutions that are to be established inside the Ram temple complex — Guru Vashishtha Peethika (Centre for study of research on Veda, Purana, Ramayana, and Sanskrit), Ram Darbar (Lecture and Communication Centre), and Ramayana (Library and Reading Room). However, one does not find any information about these academic endeavours.
The relationship between official history and official memory is very relevant to understand the specific status of the Ram temple as a commemorative entity. The official memory refers to those possible ways in which certain historical images, people, and events of national importance are remembered, evoked, and commemorated by performing a set of official rituals. The official history, on the other hand, is generated through government publications, web-portals, school text books and the “introductory histories” of the monuments and memorials.
The official history, in this sense, provides resources to the ruling elite to construct a politically relevant narrative; while the official memory empowers them to institute certain official rituals— Independence Day celebrations, Republic Day Parade, Gandhi Jayanti festivities and so on. One can find three sites of official memory in postcolonial India: Protected monuments, memorials and samadhis.
A monument, technically speaking, is a building/site that is more than a century old and which has certain historical, artistic, and archaeological significance. The Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Qutub Minar, Ajanta and Ellora caves, thus, are officially called the monuments of national importance. An in-situ principle of conservation is applied to protect the originality and authenticity of these sites so as to make them trustworthy official symbols — something that Nehru evoked very creatively to justify his nation-building project.
Memorials are the sites built to commemorate important events and individuals. These sites are used as representative symbols by the political establishment to legitimise its historical existence. Unlike monuments, memorials are open to changes and makeovers. The Indira Gandhi government reconverted the India Gate — a memorial built in memory of Indian soldiers killed during the first World War — into a purely postcolonial entity in 1972 when a relatively smaller Amar Jawan Jyoti was installed inside it. The same India Gate has found a completely different commemorative status after the construction of the National War Memorial in 2018.
A samadhi is a truly postcolonial site of memory. For instance, the development of the Raj Ghat — an old ghat of the Yamuna where Gandhi’s body cremated. This land was officially declared the Gandhi Samadhi, when a law was passed by Parliament in 1952. After the death of Nehru and Shastri, the idea of the samadhi found a new political overtone. As a result, several new commemorative structures — Kisan Ghat, Shanti Van, Shakti Sthal, Veer Bhumi and so on came into existence.
The Ram temple does not fit in this established schema. Hindutva politics does not want to treat it as a pure historical monument; at the same time, it cannot be called either a memorial or samadhi. There are two intrinsic elements, which make it a uniquely new site of official memory.
First, the Ram temple is a symbol of Hindutva’s success as a political force as well as the dominant narrative of Indian politics. This Hindutva triumph has given new enthusiasm to the Sangh Parivar to actively pursue the Shahi Eidgah case in Mathura and the Gyanvapi mosque case in Banaras. From this standpoint, the Ram temple emerges as a reliable political reference point.
However, the BJP establishment is reluctant to portray it as any kind of political object. Instead, there is a careful effort to recognise the Ram Temple as a culturally symbolic site of national significance. The BJP is keen to make use of the intermingling of religion, culture, and politics by evoking a particular set of political events. This kind of selective remembrance might help the party to constitute a new official memory from the Hindutva perspective.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the Ram temple has a religious significance of its own, which has nothing to do with the Babri Masjid. For a significant majority of committed Hindu devotees, the Ram temple is a sacred site, which is inextricably linked to their religious faith. This Hindu population is likely to observe it as a non-controversial holy place of worship in the future. This religious attitude might encourage them to forget the contentious history associated with it.
This tussle between political remembrance and religious forgetting is going to redefine the future trajectories of official memory, and for that matter, Indian politics.
The writer is associate professor, CSDS, New Delhi
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