IN THE NAME OF FAITH…A historical overview of the misconstrued TRUTH

The ‘’compromise’’ judgement of the Allahabad High Court, for all its merits and attempts to achieve communal amity, is perceived as a setback for the basic tenets of historical inquiry and precision. Social scientists of all hues have reacted with dismay to the dominance of faith and belief over scientific fact and historicity.
There is nothing wrong in looking for a kernel of truth in the literary tradition of the Ramayana. But what is necessary for a scientific methodology is to build a reasonable hypothesis about the structured entity which must have been objectively in existence in the past. The courts have asserted that the site where the idols were placed was indeed the birthplace of Ram. The judgement is therefore based on faith and theology and certainly not on history. Historical evidence does not support the assertion that Ram was born where the idols were kept.
The first conflict that took place between the Hindus and Muslims dates back to 1855 and Wajid Ali Shah set up a three member committee to defuse the situation. After the 1857 uprising [ war of independence], in 1889, a Hindu priest went to the local court, staking his claim to the place and his plea was dismissed. After that, from 1889 to 1949, both Hindus and Muslims continued to worship at the Ram Chabutra peacefully except in 1934 when there was a conflict between them. The saga of the conflict over Ayodhya began in 1949, when the idols of Ram were surreptitiously placed in the central dome of the Babri mosque with the connivance of the Deputy Commissioner of Faizabad, K.K.K.Nayar, who is said to have been a member of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh).
As far as the verdict of history is concerned, if you go back in time, before 1528, there is evidence of several religious groups who had a claim on Ayodhya. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang wrote that there were 3,000 Buddhist monks and hundred monastries and only 10 devas or temples belonging to the brahmanical religion. Buddhism was dominant in Ayodhya in the 7th century. The first and the fourth Jain Tirthankaras were born in Ayodhya. Even today, Ayodhya remains a holy place for Jainas. There is strong evidence of Muslim presence since the 12th century onwards. Sufi saints visited Ayodhya since the 12th century – one of them was Qazi Qidwatuddin Awadhi, who came from Central Asia and is said to have been a disciple of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti of Ajmer. There are many Sufi shrines in Ayodhya. Thus, there is evidence of Buddhist, Jain and Muslim presence. Ayodhya was not even a Hindu pilgrimage centre before the 17th and the 18th centuries.
There is reference to Ayodhya in ‘’Skanda Puranas’’ called ‘’Ayodhya Mahatmya’’. The composition of this text stretches over 300-400 years with lots of interpolations and contradictions. There are atleast a 100 verses devoted to the place where Ram ascended to heaven, the ‘’Swargadwaar’’, located on the banks of the Sarayu river and only 10 verses referring to his birthplace, but not the site of his birth. The three historically attested Ram temples are in Madhya Pradesh, belonging to the 12th century. Tulsidas’s ‘’Ramacharitamanas’’ does not specify the locale of Ram’s birth, neither does he refer to the destruction of a temple to build a mosque. Within 50 years or so of the construction of the Babri Masjid, Tulsidas composed in 1575-76, his celebrated ‘’Ramacharitamanas’’, the most fervent exposition of the Ramayana story in Avadhi. Is it possible to believe that Tulsidas would not have given vent to heart-rending grief had the very birth site of his Lord Ram been ravaged, its temple razed to the ground and a mosque erected in its place? His silence can only mean that he knew of no such scandal; and given his attachment to Rama and Ayodhya, this must mean that no such event had infact taken place. Tulsidas on the contrary suggests that it was not Ayodhya but Prayag that was to him the principal place of pilgrimage (Tirath raj); and so no tradition of the veneration of any spot as that of Rama’s birth at Ayodhya had yet taken shape.
The historians added that even Abul Fazl, in his ‘’A’in-i-Akbari’’, completed in 1598, wrote about Ayodhya being the ‘’residence of Ramachandra, who in the Treta age combined in his own person both the spiritual supremacy and the kingly office’’ but did not confine Ram’s place of birth to the existing town of Ayodhya, let alone the site occupied by the Babri Masjid. Had such tradition existed, Abul Fazl would surely have mentionned it, because he does mention the tradition that two Jewish prophets lie buried at Ayodhya. The historians also relied on the most primary source of recorded historical evidence, the Persian inscriptions on the mosque. Presenting a full translation of the inscriptions, the historians observed that the contemporaneity of the inscriptions was shown by their text and date, and their accuracy was established by the fact that Mir Baqi finds mention in Babur’s memoirs as the governor of Awadh or Ayodhya at exactly the same time. These fairly long inscriptions show that the construction of the Babri Masjid was completed in 1528-29. But nowhere is any hint given in them that the edifice was built after destroying a temple or upon the site of a temple. If one accepts for the purpose of argument that there was a temple at the site, and the builder of the mosque (Mir Baqi) destroyed it to build a mosque, one has to answer why at all should all reference to this fact be omitted in the foundation of the inscriptions. Surely, had Mir Baqi destroyed a temple, he would have deemed it a meritorious deed, and what would have been more natural than that he should get this act recorded along with that of the building of the mosque to add to his religious reputation. That he did not get any such act recorded surely means that he had infact not destroyed any temple, and so found no reason to record something that had not happened.
As for the black pillar bases that were used to vouch for the existence of a temple, the historians noted, after examining many records, including those of art historians, that there was nothing to show that ‘’the pillar bases were remains of a local temple of which they formed an integral part in the beginning and the mosque was erected over them.’’ This is a wild hypothesis not backed by any material evidence and is actually negated by the factual position easily verifiable from the existing structure of the Babri Masjid. The stone pillars, are infact, embedded at the arched entrances in the massive walls of the mosque and stand at the floor level on the foundation walls constructed for the big building. Only those who have failed to understand the architectural plan of the building and wilfully ignore the indisputable factual position will insist on seeing these stone pillars as in situ. Since black stone pillars are relatively short and slender, they cannot be load bearing. Infact, their placement at the arched entrances and the colour contrasts they offer as also the carvings on them suggest that they have been used only as decorative pieces and are not architecturally functional beyond this decorative purpose. Furthermore, the placement of these pillars fits in the plan of the mosque and not that of a Hindu temple. The presence of animal bones throughout and the use of ‘’Surkhi’’ (made from powdered burnt bricks) and lime mortar (all characteristics of Muslim architectural presence) rule out the possibility of a Hindu temple having been there beneath the mosque. If we travel further back in time, in the 11th century, there was a minister of the Garhwal King [who ruled over the Awadh region] called Bhatt Lakshmidhara. He wrote a book called ‘’Krityakalpataru’’, which has one section on the Tirthas, called ‘’Tirthavivechankanda’’. This does not mention Ayodhya as a centre of pilgrimage.
The VHP(Vishwa Hindu Parishad) maintains that Muslims destroyed 30,000 temples to build mosques. Richard Eaton, an American historian who has written on the desecration of temples, says that the total number does not exceed 80. History is full of examples to show that the religious structures were constantly destroyed by the ruling classes of various hues and religions.
The judgement is so seriously flawed that history will be ill-served if these errors are not set right. People outside India compare the destruction of the Babri-Masjid with the destruction of the Bamian statues by the Taliban. Secular governance is incapable of remedying the travesty of destroying the mosque and denying even a shred to the people who owned the masjid and the site. India’s democracy requires that minorities must be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve or should we continue to hear the Sangh Parivar Fundamentalist’s proclamation ‘’Ayodhya today, Mathura tomorrow, and Varanasi the day after..!!!’’.??

References: 1] 1991, May ICHR(Indian Council of Historical research), an interim report, ‘’Ramjanambhoomi-Babri Masjid issue: A preliminary study of the archeological evidence’’, by Suraj Bhan (Professor of Archeology in the Dept. of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archeology at Kurukshetra University, Haryana.
2] ‘’Ramjanambhumi Baburi Masjid – A Historian’s Report to the Nation’’ authored by Historians R.S.Sharma(Professor of History, University of Delhi), M.Athar Ali (professor of History at Aligarh Muslim University), D.N.Jha (professor of History, University of Delhi) and Suraj Bhan.
3] ‘’Unfurnished Innings’’- (pages 406-407)