264. identity
the morning of December 23, 1949, got there as a result of divine intervention in the
affairs of this world. After all, some of the most important images in Hindu temples
throughout India are said to besvayambhu—self-manifested. For the child Rama of
Ayodhya, that may still be so in a symbolic sense, but we now know that it is not true
in a literal one. Recently, after decades of public silence, an ascetic living in Ayod-
hya has confessed that he and several comrades were responsible for placing the
image inside the mosque during that night in 1949. The man says it was easier to let
people surmise that this was a miracle than to explain the facts, because if they had
done so, they would have been prosecuted. They saw their mission as above the
courts, whose actions would only have confused matters. In their eyes, that mosque
wasa temple, since the place on which it was built was Rama’s birthplace. It deserved
to be restored to its intrinsic glory—and to its proper owner, Rama.
The crowds who filled the streets of Ayodhya in late 1992 said similar things in
the graffiti art with which they covered the walls. “It isn’t a question of justice,” one
placard said. “It ’s a question that goes beyond the boundaries of the courts. The
issue of Lord Rama’s birthplace is not a subject for the courts!” The reason for this,
as another poster made clear, is that in the minds of at least some Hindus there is a
court above the courts, a true state that defines what statecraft really is. In this poster
the young Rama appears as an archer ready to put his arrow to its bow. The caption
reads, “The love of Rama is the strength of the state.”
Since 1993, for a variety of reasons, the rhetoric of the BJP has slowly shifted
away from the idiom of religious triumphalism. Many Indians have breathed a sigh
of relief. Yet the ability of the Congress Party to shepherd the country through a
period of fundamental redefinition is still in doubt, and the economic and ideolog-
ical power of Islamic states not far away continues to rankle an Indian (and, still
more, a Hindu) sense of dignity. Then too, the issue of what will be constructed on
the site of “Rama’s birthplace” remains unsettled.
In such circumstances it is hard to predict the future of religious nationalism in
India, but with the BJP regularly garnering about a third of the vote in elections
throughout North India, and with the Congress weakened in the south, it does not
seem that it will go away. The Temple of Rama’s Birthplace is still invisible to the
eyes of most who travel to Ayodhya, except as a canopy spread across the area where
the sacred pillar and the image of child Rama are displayed for pilgrims’ veneration.
Yet thanks partially to Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan, the long-running television se-
ries about Rama’s life that was seen at least in part by most of the Indian populace,
the image of Rama’s eternal palace in an ideal Ayodhya is shared in a way it has
never quite been before.