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Case Study B: The Ayodhya Mosque/temple Controversy

Overview

Ayodhya is today a city of some 50,000 people in the north-central Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The population of India today is roughly 80% Hindu and 14% Muslim. Many Hindus identify Ayodhya with a legendary city of the same name mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit Hindu epics the Ramayana and Mahabharata, in which Ayodhya is said to be the birthplace of the major Hindu deity Ram (or Rama/Ramachandra), who oversaw a fabled kingdom in the region.

In the 1520s, under the first Muslim Mogul emperor of northern India, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babar, a mosque was erected in Ayodhya, and it functioned as a rather ordinary mosque for some 450 years, outlasting the Moguls themselves (r. 1526–1857). From time to time some Hindus objected to the presence of the so-called Babri Masjid, claiming that it had displaced a Hindu temple on the exact site of the birth of Ram, though the historical record is unclear on this point. As British colonizers took formal control of India in 1857, they sought to manage the disputed site by allowing Hindus to conduct worship rituals outside while granting access into the building to Muslim worshippers.

Upon Indian independence in 1947, the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan (the latter eventually hiving off Bangladesh) involved ghastly violence as millions of refugees crossed the newly-formed borders and repeatedly clashed along religious lines (see book pp. 75–7). In the aftermath, Ayodhya became something of a focal point for Hindus seeking a Hindu-dominated nation, and in 1949 Hindu activists placed a pair of idols inside the mosque, of Ram and his consort Sita. Provocative rhetoric from both sides joined a string of legal cases seeking to settle the status of the site, and for several decades the mosque was locked (with the idols inside), no one being allowed access to the deteriorating structure.

In the 1980s, the emergent right-wing Hindu political movement known as Hindutva, bent on Hinduizing the secular government of India, again focused attention on Ayodhya, including a campaign to collect bricks from every village in the country to be used to build a new Ram temple on the site. These agitations stirred up anti-Muslim sentiments that had continually simmered in post-Partition India. In December 1992 a Hindu mob armed with hand tools broke into the compound and demolished the mosque. (Dramatic archival footage of the demolition is available in the article linked below from TheConversation.com.) This incursion sparked nation-wide communal riots that left more than 2,000 people dead.

In the ensuing years, an endless string of court battles has dragged on, with the badly damaged mosque again cordoned off. Hindu activists have assembled piles of building materials nearby, intended for a Hindu temple should they ever take control of the site. Hindu commitments to construct a Ram Janmabhoomi, or temple for Ram’s birthplace, countered by Muslim commitments to rebuild the Babri Masjid, generate great emotion and tension to this day. In 2019, under the conservative pro-Hindutva government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the 2.77 disputed acres should be turned over to Hindus for final removal of the mosque ruins and the construction of a Ram temple; they recommended that an indeterminate alternate site be granted to Muslims for construction of a new mosque. As of June 2020, reports indicate that the laying of a foundation for a Hindu temple at the site is imminent. In the dozens of large-scale communal riots that have marred India since independence, leaving thousands dead, wounded, displaced, and sexually assaulted, and generating untold property damage, the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi controversy has often been evoked as an enduring provocation by both Hindus and Muslims.

Below are a number of resources for gaining a better understanding of this case of the intersection of religion and violence, followed by suggestions for employing ideas from the book in making sense of this case.

Resources

A good start

  1. A good general historical summary:

    2. https://theconversation.com/ayodhya-the-history-of-a-500-year-old-land-dispute-between-hindus-and-muslims-in-india-114471

  2. A good brief overview video from Business Today news (India) from November 2019 (9:20):

    3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KFpc8Pz84M

Digging Deeper

  1. From the Business Standard (India) newspaper (includes a long documentary video):

    2. https://www.business-standard.com/about/what-is-ayodhya-case

  2. A scholarly study of the case, including a good historical summary. Published in 2000, so not up to date on recent developments:

    3. Bachetta, Paola. “Sacred Space in Conflict in India: The Babri Masjid Affair.” Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy 31, no. 2 (2000): 255–84.

  3. Efficient BBC article from 2019, focused on recent legal developments:

    4. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50065277

  4. Good overview of legal aspects of the case from the Economic Times (of India), with a timeline:

    5. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/ayodhya-case-a-brief-history-of-indias-longest-running-property-dispute/articleshow/71988076.cms

  5. An interesting comparison of the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City:

    6. Davis, Richard H. “Iconoclasm in the Era of Strong Religion.” Material Religion 1, no. 2 (July 2005): 261–7.

  6. Another scholarly study, exploring the cultural implications of the legal battle:

    7. Mehta, Deepak. “The Ayodhya Dispute: The Absent Mosque, State of Emergency and the Jural Deity.” Journal of Material Culture 20, no. 4 (2015).

  7. A thoughtful, if slightly dated, study of interreligious relations in modern South Asia:

    8. Krishna, Sankaran. “Methodical Worlds: Partition, Secularism, and Communalism in India.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27, no. 2 (April–June 2002): 193–217.

Applying the book to this case

  • In ch. 5, Hindu-Muslim “communal” tensions in South Asia were mentioned as a case that exemplifies the ways Durkheim’s ideas about religion, identity-formation, and social cohesion and differentiation can shed light on religious violence (see pp. 75–7). Review this section of the book and consider how the Ayodhya controversy displays Durkheimian elements of “religious grouping and grappling.”
  • The Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi is a pointed example of the construction of “sacred space” (as well as sacred times and objects) and the ways such spaces can generate tensions and possibly religious violence (see pp. 185–9). The contested Ayodhya site displays elements of “generic” sacred space, as the mosque historically was treated largely as an ordinary mosque for Muslim worship, study, and congregating. For Hindus, the site has taken on qualities of not only a “singular” sacred space as the claimed birthplace of Ram, but even a “hierophany,” a terrestrial point of contact with the divine realm. For both Muslims and Hindus, the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi site at times operates as a metonym for their respective communities in India, and even for their faith commitments as a whole. How might an attack on the site be taken as an attack on a whole community and all its values?
  • Discussions of religion and violence, especially the assertions of many “RV maximalists,” focus on monotheism as especially conducive to violence (see ch. 2, esp. pp. 25–6, and see also pp. 70–1). As also discussed in ch. 9, some scholars claim that monotheism tends to involve exclusivity of doctrine and community membership, and absolutism in commitments to revealed scriptures, all of which can readily generate violence (see pp. 175–8). However, the involvement of Hindu polytheists in the Ayodhya controversy shows that monotheists have no monopoly on religious violence (a commonplace, if not precise, assertion holds that Hinduism recognizes 33 million gods and goddesses). Likewise, ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were decidedly polytheist as well, and were no strangers to religious violence.
    • What are some specific ways monotheism might generate particular forms of violence, and how might Muslim beliefs and practices contribute to conflict in Ayodhya (see also ch. 10)? How do polytheistic Hindu beliefs and practices seem to shape the Hindu contribution to the Ayodhya controversy and its attendant violence?
  • Ch. 9 presents a set of “building blocks” of religious traditions that can readily contribute to religious violence. Sacred space, discussed above, is obviously relevant in this case. What other categories discussed in the chapter (listed on p. 175) might be elements of the Ayodhya controversy?
  • Review the typology of violence discussed in ch. 1 and the appendix, and consider whish specific forms of violence have occurred as part of the Ayodhya controversy. For example, how do notions of self-defense and vengeance play out in this case? What is distinctive about “mob violence” and how has it been an element of this dispute?