By Garga Chatterjee
The Babri Masjid (mosque ) was built in Ayodhya, in present day Uttar Pradesh in India on 1527. Some have come to claim that the Central Asian invader and the first Turkic emperor of Northern India 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 mosque. 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. 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. There has been a change in the way crucial sectors of India conceptualize the past. 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.
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.
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.
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, that 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.
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 around 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.The decentering of the mind this produces in man has no insurance. One is left alone to fend for its consequences. 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, 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 the core of that peculiar species that now exists in certain Indian metros -people who are not Telugu Reddys or Bengali Mahishyas – they are simply Indians. Such 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? In an atmosphere, where the historical mindset reduces the past to a partly illuminated, linear archive of objective detail, imagination of the future is 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 (im)possible futures can take wings right here. The Ayodhya debate shows how unimaginative we have become.
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Garga Chatterjee is a research scholar in Psychology at Harvard University. A version of this article appeared in Himaal magazine.