Rama’s Ayodhya

In 1992, a Hindu mob destroyed an early sixteenth-century mosque, known as the Babri Masjid, in the north Indian city of Ayodhya through an act of violence that, the attackers said, honored the Hindu deity Rama. The Babri Masjid’s demolition has drawn robust scholarly attention, predominantly focused on its implications for Hindu-Muslim relations in present-day India. Historians who have analyzed this event have generally centered on disproving the myths that undergirded the violent targeting of the mosque. This paper charts a different path of analyzing myth-making by tracing the social and intellectual history of Hindu ideas and lived realities concerning Ayodhya over 2,000 years. I identify five major sequential moments in the Hindu imagination and experience of Ayodhya: 1) dubbing a north Indian site a physical incarnation of Rama’s mythical Ayodhya in the first millennium, (2) medieval Muslim patronage that benefited Muslim and Hindu communities in Ayodhya, (3) the early modern rise of north Indian Rama worship that enabled new possibilities for Rama’s Ayodhya as an earthly city, (4) colonial-era religious nationalism in which Rama and his Ayodhya became increasingly conscripted to promote anti-Muslim sentiments, and (5) contemporary mob violence that culminated in the destruction of Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid and its subsequent replacement by a Rama temple. Throughout, I argue that Hindu conceptions of Rama and his Ayodhya are not timeless—as is often proclaimed by courts, popular publications, and even scholars—but rather have a precise, contingent history that is characterized by contestation and multiplicity

Hinduism · Hindutva · Identity (music) · Incarnation · Mythology · Worship · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Indian and Buddhist Studies · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

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