262. identity
of anticolonial struggle in much of the world today. Some opiate! But as the temple
of postcolonial secularism is attacked, so also are real temples—or, in this case,
mosques and tombs. On the outskirts of Ayodhya stands the tomb of a Muslim saint
that has served as a focus of worship for centuries. On December 6, 1992, after the
Babri Mosque came down, one part of the great visiting mob set upon this tomb too,
destroying the saint ’s grave and dislodging many bricks from the walls (see figure
11). “Most of the people who worship here are Hindus,” reported an immaculate,
soft-spoken local Muslim leader whom I encountered there. “We have always lived
together in peace. Whatever happened downtown, we never thought it would come
here. Yet....”
Here is rubble of another kind—neither the rubble of the imperialist incursion
that the Babri Mosque represented to many Hindus nor the simple product of age-
old Hindu-Muslim rivalries, as secularists sometimes like to think. This is rubble
created by a newly streamlined brand of Hinduism. One can perhaps sympathize
with the desire to remove a mosque built by a religious culture aggressive enough
to raze many Hindu temples, possibly including one that stood on the site of the
Babri Mosque itself, as alleged. But here the crowds were erasing from memory a
symbol of the fact that Hindus and Muslims have so often prayed together. This un-
ruly mix is one of the glories of India, giving the lie to all those airtight textbook
chapters on Hinduism, then Islam. Such a tradition is more than tolerance: it ’s life
together, unbrokered by secularism or any other mediating ideology.
Ayodhya is being reshaped by a new kind of Hinduism: a syndicated, textbook
Hinduism that offers a new sense of political agency to many in the majority who
have so far felt left out. As this new Hinduism takes hold, the tomb of Sisle
Hazrat Islam and all it stands for is in danger. So is the intricate network of
arrangements symbolized in the ashrams and temples of the old Ayodhya, as a
great road is bulldozed from the edge of town to the as-yet unbuilt Temple of
Rama’s Birthplace.
And what about the rubble, the huge stones that once were the great building-
blocks of Babar’s Mosque and are now, in their absence, the stuff of miracles?
Where did they go? There are some good-sized rocks lying near the place where the
mosque once stood, but nothing to rival what visitors would see if they visited the
great Mughal mosques that have so altered the landscape of great Hindu cities such
as Mathura and Benares.
The answer, as it turns out, is quite simple. The mosque was not actually con-
structed of such stones. It predated the fine mosques of Mathura and Benares and