India: The lingering Ayodhya dispute is a conflict between history and faith | Garga Chatterjee

The Friday Times, Issue: 06 Dec 2013

Faithless debates
by Garga Chatterjee

The lingering Ayodhya dispute is a conflict between history and faith

Some debates do not die. They remain unresolved, as they are not debates unto themselves but venting spouts for other concerns and tendencies. The strengthening and weakening of the concerns affect the vigour with which the debate is carried out. The Ayodhya ‘debate’ is one such. With ‘national’ parties in the Indian Union baying for a communalized election with a ‘development’ veneer, the apparently sleeping debate might just be rekindled.

The Babri Masjid was built in Ayodhya, in present day Uttar Pradesh in India on 1527. Some have come to claim that Babur, the Central Asian invader and the first Turkic/Mongol emperor of North-Western part of the Subcontinent had this mosque built by demolishing a pre-existing temple, one that stood on the birth-site of Lord Ram (Ram Janmabhoomi). On 6th December 1992, a large group of communal Hindu activists, egged on by leaders of India’s second largest political formation of the time, demolished this structure. Between 1949 and 1992, various attempts had been made, by action and inaction sponsored by the state, to change the nature of access to the site from the conditions existing before 1949. On 30th September 2010, a three-judge bench of the Allahabad High Court passed the now famous judgment – the disputed area is to be parsed between the 3 litigants. The Muslim litigant group will receive one third of the land but not the area under the central dome of the erstwhile Babri structure. The two Hindu groups were to get the remaining two-thirds, including the area under the central dome. None of the sides were happy with the judgment and have filed appeals. The case in still on.

The nature of the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid debate shows how much certain parts of Indic society are now prisoners of a historical mode of thinking. This is evident not only in the kind of arguments and evidences that the court case dealt with but also the talking points that populated the media. People spoke about the past with clinical precision, of scientific evidence, without a shred of doubt that divine location of the Avatar’s birthplace would not transcend the evidence based historical research method. It would rather be the opposite – the evidence-based method would legitimize the ancient, indeed the timeless. There has been a steady change in the way crucial sectors of India conceptualize the past. And it is an ongoing process. A clandestine transformation of the nature of consciousness about the past has important implications about our imaginations of the future. It involves, in this case, the possibility that the very soul of our peoples – a plural soul – will undergo degeneration.

There are at least six other sites that are believed by numerous Hindus to be the birth site of Ram

Communities living in close proximity, trigger anxieties of self-demarcation like the “Islamic” in India against the “Hindu” backdrop. They also figure out ways of mutual tolerance. Such tolerance is often not one of brotherly love but these nonetheless co-exist without being at each other throats untiringly. A crucial enabler is time – time that heals, muddles, blurs and creates memories. This is the stuff of past consciousness that permeates the present in all its imaginative creativity – creating cross-faith interactions and encounters that put scripture peddlers of “pure” religion to shame. Unchangeable scriptural Words in India change, take myriad forms, meanings and still remain as ancient, as believable, as certain, eternal and final.

The disputed piece of land in Ayodhya, has two major contenders, ostensibly representing Hindu and Muslim interests and sentiments (though there are minor contenders too like the Buddhists and Jains). However, there are other, uncomfortable contenders of a different sort, too. There are at least six other sites with structures, in and around Ayodhya, unencumbered by mosques on top of them, which are believed by numerous Hindus to be the birthsite of Ram. Hence, the claim that the real Ram Janmabhoomi is exactly where the Babri Masjid stood necessarily involves dismissing the claims of these other contenders to Ram Janmabhoomi-hood and to inherent sacredness. This faithless claim of exclusivity runs antithetical to the vital force of hitherto dominant Indic style – where the quality of being sacred has a very distributed geography. All these are the birth-sites of Lord Ram. In Thailand, exists the old imperial capital city of Ayudhya or Ayuthhaya. It is as potently the city of Ram as any other. No order of precedence here. Indeed, it is a matter of faith, not chronology. The presence of so many sites of Ram hence points to a largely non-exclusive belief.

The Ayodhya legal case centres on the question what was “really” there

It is with this background in mind that one has to view the large currency this exclusive claim has gained with time. The pantheon of values that is the legacy of the European Enlightenment has long dominated the minds of certain sections of our society. Scientific rationality is the holiest of these values. This domination inevitably has victims. One such victim is the communitarian consciousness of the past, which is passed on and amended from generation to generation. Recollections of the past, fables and grand-mother’s tales, jati-puranas, gathas and legands, carry within them the imprint of long time-range mechanisms of survival, of healing from trauma, of long-held aspirations and fears, of close encounters. This is being replaced by an immutable archival view of the past. We have come to know this as history – objective, sharp and if one may add, unethical, pitiless and enslaving. It is frozen, out there – it simply needs to be unearthed, excavated, deciphered, dusted off and archived. Irrespective of whether it is a story of progress or not, it closes the possibilities of the past, nonetheless. The needs of present people cannot open it up as they wish, but only as History allows.

The raucous debates that were heard before and after the judgment and the echo-box streams that take their cue from them, have a few predictable characteristics. They seek to either protect God(s), or the constitution of the republic. The cynical use of the avatar of Lord Vishnu by the Hindutva brigade is matched well by “secular” brigades, whose parodying of the idea of locational divinity belies their ultimately belittling attitude towards the faith of small people – the unscientific, under-educated, in the penumbra of the Baconian world of the “seculars”. This utter disconnect is evident when Marxians of various hues bring in the “sociological” Ram to counter the “Ironman” Ram of the Hindutva Sangh Parivar. The charlatan usage of Ram’s powerful symbolism by the seculars who could care less of Ram’s divinity appears to the faithful like a village nautanki – a sordidly affected and unrehearsed one at that. The characters forgot change their dress and make up from the last scene but have only changed dialogues. Not many are impressed.

Such is the grip of historicity and scientific rationality among certain sections so that matters of faith, the ballast of certitude in uncertain times – are now being cynically evaluated. The Ayodhya legal case centres on the question what was “really” there – the real of course being pillars, columns, dirt, dust, radio-carbon dating and excavations. From the “real” will flow the “objective” truth establishing the “authentic” claim. This insistence on authentic exclusivity has affected religion also. History, the new God with all its heartlessness stands, scalpel in hand, in front of faith. In this battle that of thrust open faith, it is stabbed often by the scalpel. Not that faith is weak in front of History – just that its rules of engagement are different. But the new God has the support of the contemporary nation state behind it. The decentering of the mind this produces in man has no insurance. One is left alone to fend for its consequences – of unmet uncertainties and poisoned, sacred groves. Man has fantastic creative potentialities to tide over alienation. My fear is that such potential is not endless.

The present debate can be seen as another step in a long process of desacralization where scientific rationality as an ideology has cast its long shadow on religion. The ideology has been transforming it, attempting to cure it of all its promise and mystery. To survive this modernist siege, the religions themselves lay transformed – more masculine, cynical and frenzied; less faith, less creativity. The politico-religious bloc that often claims to speak for Hindus in general, has all the markers of this thrust.

This bloc does not only consist of those who are officially with the BJP or its comradely associates. It also includes parts of the migrating, ‘aspirational’, middle class. Significant sections of this group, without access to the intimate rootedness of local faith and continuities of ancestral rituals, are spirited cheerleaders of that dream of 19th century vintage – a homogenized Hinduism. They form a section of that peculiar species that now exists in certain Indian metros – people who are not Telugu Reddys or Bengali Mahishyas – they are simply Indians and nothing else but Indians. Rootless liberals make up the rest of such “Indians”. And such “Indians” have the means to exert influence beyond their numbers. This is evident in how Narendra Modi has been built up in recent months as well as the massive counter of Modi that has been built up. Connecting Modi and the anti-Modi is the thread of non-rootedness and an indignant aspiration to set agendas for the many. Thankfully, the subcontinent still has multiple poles, multiple centres, multiple loyalties and multiple contradictions.

Pan-Indic formulations of Hinduism are a grave challenge to the Indic faith systems. It is a mortal danger to the religious osmosis that has enriched our softly bounded identities. With its plural possibilities, the million Gods and Goddesses, protect the billion small people. These people refuse to stand united, to dump powerful local deities like Dharma Thakur and Ola Bibi, to let their own divine forces die a slow, impoverished death. For some this refusal is the rub, for some it is the only possibility.

Possibility of what, one may ask? In an atmosphere where the historical mindset reduces the past to a partly illuminated, linear archive of objective detail, the possibilities inherent in plural imaginations of the future are also severely impoverished. A linear, closed past restricts possibilities of the future. By refusing to buy History as the only way of looking at the past, by countering the homogenizing tendencies that History unleashes, by refusing to be sapped out of the uniqueness of its encounters, communities amongst themselves hold out the possibility of keeping the past open, alive, responsive. In the Indic context, people often conceive their aspired future ideal as an image of the past, (for example, Ramrajya or when 2 annas could get a maund of rice ).This also holds within itself the promise that the myriad open and plural pasts that populate the mindscapes of India are producing open and plural futures, right now. In a world of increasing dominance through homogenization, unfettered by historicity, imaginations of impossible futures can take wings right here. The Ayodhya debate and its lingering non-resolution shows how unimaginative we have become. It shows how fast we are losing the creativity to deal with antagonisms, how we can no longer dare let our God(s) seek their identity among the rustic and the fantastic.
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