Ayodhya is the city of Rama, the most virtuous and austere of Hindu gods. Travelling to it in January 2002 from Benares, across a wintry North Indian landscape of mustard-bright fields, hectic roadside bazaars, and lonely columns of smoke, I felt myself moving between two very different Hindu myths, or visions of life. Shiva, the god of perpetual destruction and creation, rules Benares, where temple compounds secrete internet cafes and children fly kites next to open funeral pyres by the river. But the city’s aggressive affluence and chaos seem far away in Ayodhya, which is small and drab, its alleys full of the dust of the surrounding flat fields. The peasants with unwieldy bundles under their arms brought to mind the pilgrims of medieval Indian miniature painting; and sitting by the Saryu river at dusk, watching the devout tenderly set afloat tiny earthen lamps in the slow-moving water, I felt the endurance and continuity of Hindu India.
After that vision of eternal Hinduism, the numerous mosques and Mogul buildings in Ayodhya came as a surprise. Most of them are in ruins, especially the older ones built during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Ayodhya was the administrative centre of a major province of the Mogul Empire, Awadh. All but two were destroyed as recently as 6 December 1992: the day, epochal now in India’s history, on which a crowd led by politicians from the Hindu nationalist BJP demolished the mosque they claimed the sixteenth-century Mogul emperor Babur had built, as an act of contempt, on the site of the god Rama’s birthplace.
None of the mosques are likely to be repaired any time soon; the Muslim presence in the town seems at an end for the first time in eight centuries. This was the impression I got even in January 2002, a month before anti-Muslim rage exploded in the western Indian state of Gujarat, at Digambar Akhara, the large, straw-littered compound of the militant Sadhu sect presided over by Ramchandra Paramhans. In 1949, Paramhans initiated the legal battle to reclaim Babur’s mosque, or the Babri Masjid, for the Hindu community; in December 1992, he exuberantly directed the demolition squad.
The sect, Paramhans told me, was established four centuries ago in order to fight the Muslim invaders who had ravaged India since the tenth century AD, and who erected mosques over temples in the holy cities of Ayodhya, Benares and Mathura. The Sadhus had been involved, he added, in the seventy-six wars for possession of the site of the mosque in Ayodhya, in which more than 200,000 Hindus had been martyred.
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In Ayodhya in January, Paramhans had told me, ‘Before we take on Pakistani terrorists, we have to take care of the offspring Babur left behind in India; these 130 million Muslims of India have to be shown their place.’ This message seems to have been taken to heart in Gujarat, where the Hindu nationalists displayed a high degree of administrative efficiency in the killing of Muslims. In Gujarat’s cities, middle-class Hindu men drove up in new Japanese cars – the emblems of India’s globalized economy – to cart off the loot from Muslim shops and businesses.
The rich young Hindus in Benetton T-shirts and Nike trainers appeared unlikely combatants in what Paramhans told me was a dharma yudh, a holy war, against the traitorous 12 per cent of India’s population. Both wealth and education separated them from the unemployed, listless small-town Hindus I met in Ayodhya, one of whom was a local convener of the Bajrang Dal (Hanuman’s Army), the stormtroopers of the Hindu nationalists, which has been implicated in several incidents of violence against Christians and Muslims across India, including the 1998 murder of a Australian missionary in the eastern state of Orissa. In response to a question about Muslims, he dramatically unsheathed his knife, and invited me to feel the sharpness of the triple-edged blade, in the form of the trident of the Hindu god Shiva.
But, despite their differences, the rich and unemployed Hindu Indians shared a particular world view. This was outlined most clearly for me, during my travels across North India in early 2002, by students at Saraswati Shishu Mandir, a primary school in Benares, one of the 15,000 such institutions run by the RSS. The themes of the morning assembly I attended were manliness and patriotism. In the gloomy hall, portraits of the more militant Hindu freedom fighters mingled with signboarded exhortations including, ‘Give me blood and I’ll give you freedom’, ‘India is a Hindu nation’, and ‘Say with pride that you are a Hindu’. For over an hour, boys and girls in matched uniforms of white and blue marched up and down in front of a stage where a plaster-of-Paris statue of Mother India stood on a map of South Asia, chanting speeches and songs about the perfidy of Pakistan, of Muslim invaders, and the gloriousness of India’s past. The principal watched serenely. He later explained to me how Joshi-ji – the education minister – was making sure that the new history textbooks carried the important message of Hindu pride and Muslim cruelty to every school and child in the country.
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In the 1970s and 1980s when I heard about Hindu—Muslim riots, or the insurgencies in Punjab and Kashmir, it seemed to me that religion was the cause of most conflict and violence in India. The word used in the newspapers and in academic analyses was communalism – the antithesis of the secularism advocated by the founding fathers of India, Gandhi and Nehru, and also the antithesis of Hinduism itself, which was held to be innately tolerant and secular.
Living in Benares in the late 1980s, I was unaware that this ancient Hindu city was also holy for Muslims – unaware, too, of the seventeenth-century Sufi shrine just behind the tea-shack where I often spent my mornings. It was one of many in the city which both Hindus and Muslims visited, part of the flowering of Sufi culture in medieval North India. It was only in 2003, after talking to Najam, the young Persian scholar I met in Benares, that I discovered that one of the great Shia philosophers of Persia had sought refuge at the court of a Hindu ruler of Benares in the eighteenth century. And it was only after returning from my most recent trip to Ayodhya that I read that Rama’s primacy in this pilgrimage centre was a recent development; that Ayodhya was for much of the medieval period the home of the much older and prestigious sects of Shaivites, or Shiva-worshippers (Rama is only one of the many incarnations of Vishnu, one of the gods in the Hindu trinity, in which Shiva is the most important); many of the temples and sects currently devoted to Rama actually emerged under the patronage of the Shia Muslims who had begun to rule Awadh in the early eighteenth century.
Ramchandra Paramhans in Ayodhya had been quick to offer me a history full of temple-destroying Muslims and brave Hindu nationalists. Yet Paramhans’s own militant sect had originally been formed to fight not Muslims but Shiva-worshipping Hindus; and it had been favoured in this long and bloody conflict by the Muslim Nawabs who later gave generous grants of land to the victorious devotees of Rama. The Nawabs, whose administration and army were staffed by Hindus, kept a careful distance from Hindu—Muslim conflicts. One of the first such conflicts in Ayodhya occurred in 1855, when some Muslims accused Hindus of illegally constructing a temple over a mosque, and militant Hindu sadhus (mendicants) massacred seventy-five Muslims. The then Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, a distinguished poet and composer, refused to support the Muslim claim on the building, explaining:
We are devoted to love; do not know of religion.
So what if it is Kaaba or a house of idols?
Wajid Ali Shah, denounced as effeminate and inept – and deposed a year later – by British imperialists, was the last great exponent of the Indo—Persian culture that emerged in Awadh towards the end of the Mogul empire, when India was one of the greatest centres of the Islamic world, along with the Ottoman and the Safavid empires. Islam in India lost some of its Arabian and Persian distinctiveness, blended with older cultures, but its legacy is still preserved – amid the squalor of a hundred small Indian towns, in the grace and elegance of Najam’s Urdu, in the numerous songs and dances that accompany festivals and marriages, in the subtle cuisines of North India, and the fineness of the silk saris of Benares – but one could think of it, as I did, as something just there, without a history or tradition. The Indo—Islamic inheritance has formed very little part of – and is increasingly an embarrassment to – the idea of India that has been maintained by the modernizing Hindu elite over the last fifty years.
~~Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond -by- Pankaj Mishra
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