Ayodhya – The Political Appropriation and Abuse of History

Ayodhya – The Political Appropriation and Abuse of History

1989 12 December 18 22 Ayodhya – The Political Appropriation and Abuse of History (1754) Behind the present Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi controversy lie issues of faith, power and politics. Each individual has a right to his or her belief and faith. But, when beliefs claim the legitimacy of history, then the historian has to attempt a demarcation between the limits of belief and historical evidence. When communal forces make claims to historical evidence for the purposes of communal politics, then the historian has to intervene.

Historical evidence is presented here not as a polemic or as a solution to the Ram Janambhoomi Babri Masjid conflict, for this conflict is not a matter of historical records alone. The conflict emerges from the widespread communalisation of Indian politics. Nevertheless, it is necessary to review the historical evidence to the extent it is brought into play in the communalisation of society.

Is Ayodhya the birth place of Ram? This question raises a related one: Is the present day Ayodhya the Ayodhya of the Ramayan?

The events of the story of Ram, originally told in the Ram-Katha were rewritten in the form of a long epic poem, the Ramayana, by Valmiki. Since this is a poem and much of it could have been fictional, including characters and places, historians cannot accept the personalities, the events or the locations as historically authentic, unless there is other supporting evidence. Very often historical evidence contradicts popular beliefs.

According to Valmiki Ramayana, Ram the king of Ayodhya, was born in the treta yug that is supposed to being in 3102 B.C. There is no archaeological evidence to show that at this early time, the present day Ayodhya was inhabited. The earliest possible date for settlements at the site are of about the eighth century B.C. The archaeological remains indicate a fairly simple material life, more primitive than what is described in the Valmiki Ramayan.

There is also a controversy over the location of Ayodhya. Early Buddhist texts refer to Shravasti and Saket, not Ayodhya, as the major cities of Koshal. Jain texfs-aIso refer to Saket as the capital of Koshal.

The town of Saket was renamed Ayodhya by a Gupta king. Skanda Gupta in the late fifth century A.D. moved his residence to Saket and called it Ayodhya.

In a way, the local tradition of Ayodhya recognizes the ambiguous history of its origin. The story is that Ayodhya was lost after the treta yug and was rediscovered by Vikramaditya. While searching for the lost Ayodhya, he met a yogi who told him that he should let a cow and a calf roam. When the calf came across the Janambhoomi milk would flow from its udders. The king followed the yogi’s advice. When at a certain point the calf’s udders began to flow the king decided that this was the site of the ancient Ayodhya.

This myth of “re-discovery” of Ayodhya, this claim to an ancient sacred lineage, is an effort to impart to a city, a specific religious sanctity which it lacked. But even in the myths, the process of identification of the sites appear uncertain and arbitrary.

If present day Ayodhya was known as Saket before the fifth century, then the Ayodhya of Valmiki’s Ramayan was fictional. If so, the identification of Ram Janambhoomi in Ayodhya today becomes a matter of faith, not of historical evidence.

Ayodhya has been a sacred centre of many religions, not of the Ram cult alone. Its rise as a major centre of Ram worship is, in fact, relatively recent.

Inscriptions from the fifth to the eighth centuries A.D. and even later refer to people from Ayodhya but none of them refer to its being a place associated with the worship of Ram.

Hsuan Tsang writes of Ayodhya as a major centre of Buddhism with many monasteries and stupas and few non-Buddhists. For Buddhists Ayodhya is a sacred place where Buddha is believed to have stayed for some time.

Ayodhya has been an important centre of Jain pilgrimage. To the Jains it is the birth place of the first and fourth Jain Tirthankaras.

The cult of Ram seems to have become popular from the 13th century. It gains ground with the gradual rise of the Ramanandi sect and composition of the Ram story in Hindi.

Even in the 15th and 16th centuries Ramanandis had not settled in Ayodhya on a significant scale. Shaivism was more important than the cult of Ram. Only from the 18th century do we find the Ramanandi sadhus settling here on a large scale. It was in the subsequent centuries that they built most of their temples in Ayodhya.

So far no historical evidence has been unearthed to support the claim that the Babri mosque has been constructed on the land that had been earlier occupied by a temple.

Except for the verses in Persian inscribed on the two sides of the mosque door there is no other primary evidence to suggest that a mosque had been erected there on Babar’s behalf. Mrs. Beveridge, who was the first to translate Babar Nama, gives the text and the translation of these above verses in an appendix to the memoirs. The crucial passage reads as follows: “By the command of the Emperor Babur, whose justice is an edifice reaching up to the very height of the heaven, the good hearted Mir Baqi built the alighting place of angels. Bavad khair baqi (may this god last for ever)”.

The inscription only claims that one Mir Baqi, a noble of Babur, had erected the mosque. Nowhere does either of the inscriptions mention that the mosque had been erected on the site of a temple. Nor is there any reference in Babur’s memoirs to the destruction of any temple in Ayodhya.

The Ain-i-Akbari refers to Ayodhya as “the residence of Ramachandra who in the treta yug combined in his own person both the spiritual supremacy and kingly office”. But nowhere is there any mention of the erection of the mosque by the grandfather of the author’s patron on the site of the temple of Ram.

It is interesting that Tulsidas, the great devotee of Ram, a contemporary of Akbar and an inhabitant of the region, is upset at the rise of the mlechha but makes no mention of the demolition of a temple at the site of Ram Janambhoomi.

It is in the 19th century that the story circulates and enters official records. These records were then cited by others as valid historical evidence on the issue.

This story of the destruction of the temple is narrated, without any investigation into its historical veracity, in British records of the region.

Mrs.Beveridge in a footnote to the translated passage quoted, above affirms her faith in the story. She suggests that Babar being a Muslim, and “impressed by the dignity and sanctity of the ancient Hindu shrine” would have displaced “at least in part” the temple to erect the mosque. Her logic is simple: “....like the obedient follower of Muhammad he was in intolerance of another Faith, (thus he) would regard the substitution of a temple by a mosque as dutiful and worthy”.

This is a very questionable inference deduced from a generalised presumption about the nature and inevitable behaviour of a person professing a particular faith. Mrs. Beveridge produced no historical evidence to support her assertion that the mosque was built at the site of a temple. Indeed the general tenor of Babur’s state policy towards places of worship of other religions hardly justifies Mrs. Beveridge’s inference.

To British officials who saw India as a land of mutually hostile religious communities, such stories may appear self-validating. Historians, however, have to carefully consider the authenticity of each historical statement and the records on which they are based.

While there is no evidence about the Babri mosque having been built on the site of a temple, the mosque according to the medieval sources, was not of much religious and cultural significance for the Muslims.

The assumption that Muslim rulers were invariably and naturally opposed to the sacred places of Hindus is not always borne out by historical evidence.

The patronage of the Muslim nawabs was crucial for the expansion of Ayodhya as a Hindu pilgrimage centre. Gifts to temples and patronage of Hindu sacred centres was an integral part of the nawabi mode of exercise of power. The diwan of Nawab Safdarjung built and repaired several temples in Ayodhya. Safdarjung gave land to the Nirwana akhara to built a temple on Hanuman hill in Ayodhya. Asaf-ud-daulah’s diwan contributed to the building of the temple fortress in Hanuman hill.

In moments of conflict between Hindus and Muslims, the Muslim rulers did not invariably support Muslims. When a dispute between the Sunni Muslims and the Naga Sadhus over a Hanumangarhi temple in Ayodhya broke out in 1855. Wajid Ali shah took firm and decisive action. He appointed a tripartite investigative committee consisting of the district official Agha Ali Khan, the leading Hindu landholder, Raja Mansingh, and the British officers in charge of the company’s forces. When the negotiated settlement failed to control the build up of communal forces, Wajid ali Shah mobilised the support of Muslim leaders to bring the situation under control, confiscated the property of Maulavi Amir Ali, the leader of the Muslim communal forces, and finally called upon the army to crush the Sunni muslim group led by Amir Ali. An estimated three to four hundred Muslims were killed.

This is not to suggest that there were no conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, but in neither case were they homogeneous communities. There was hostility between factions and groups within a community, as there was amity across communities.

This review of historical evidence suggests that the claims made by Hindu and Muslim communal groups can find no sanction from history. As a sacred centre the character of Ayodhya has been changing over the centuries. It has been linked to the history of many religions. Different communities have vested it with their own sacred meaning. The city cannot be claimed by anyone community as its exclusive sacred preserve.

The appropriation of history is a continual process in any society. But in a multi-religious society like ours, appropriations which draw exclusively on communal identities engender endless communal conflict. And attempts to undo the past can only have dangerous consequences.

It is appropriate, therefore, that a political solution is urgently found – the Ram Janambhoomi Babri Masjid area be demarcated and declared a national monument.

Extracts from a document prepared by members of the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

(Courtesy: The Times of India, November 6, 1989)