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were to be freed in Ayodhya at the end of their sojourn. Their “liberation” (mukti)
would be represented by the (re)construction of the Temple of Rama’s Birthplace.
In 1989, another set of performances followed, in which bricks were consecrated in
local communities all over the subcontinent and abroad, then sent to Ayodhya for
inclusion in inaugural ceremonies for the new temple—another great ingathering
calculated to sharpen the city’s profile as sacred center. The next year the BJP’s
leader, L. K. Advani, performed a 10,000-mile “temple-chariot journey” himself,
again with Ayodhya as the destination.
Toward the end of 1990, drama yielded to confrontation as the BJP and its allies
sent the first “troops” to attack the mosque itself. Tens of thousands of activists
massed, and six of them were killed by police in the fray. Instantly, they became
martyrs. From then onward clouds gathered thickly as electoral struggles intensi-
fied—there were major BJP victories at the polls in 1991—and at the end of 1992
another major thrust against the mosque was organized. This time hundreds of
thousands of militants flooded into Ayodhya, camping in regional groups and often
in settings prepared with near-military precision. December 6 was the day an-
nounced for attack (“liberation”), and a flurry of last-minute measures involving
the provincial and central governments and the judiciary ultimately did nothing to
deflect it. To many people ’s surprise—and horror—the government failed to in-
tervene in any decisive way. In five hours’ time the mosque came down, its three
great domes crashing into a dusty sea of rubble.
Where is all that rubble? On a visit to Ayodhya only a month afterward (January
1993), I could see almost none. True, there was a vast mesa of crushed stones that
would soon become a thoroughfare connecting the main highway directly to Rama’s
birthplace and eerily avoiding the rest of the town. Ayodhya had been an amiable
warren of temples, tombs, and ashrams constructed over the years to express the
pieties of many generations of Hindus, Jains, and even Muslims—often with the help
of governments captained by Muslims. Now these truckloads of stone had been
brought in to bypass all that and lead in a no-nonsense way to the new “tourist park”
surrounding the mosque/birthplace that the BJP-controlled state government had
vowed to create. Here one saw in graphic terms what someone hoped would be a sleek
new Hinduism that could circumvent, cut through, repackage, and obscure the old.
The stones that built that road were new stones. Like most of the BJP and VHP
activists themselves, they had been imported into Ayodhya from beyond the city
limits, and they bore no physical relation to either the long-lost original temple (if
ever it stood there) or the mosque that is said to have supplanted it. These were the
stones of Hindu modernity.