Found and Lost: the Ayodhya Evidence

Dr. Koenraad Elst

(21 July 2003)

The North-Indian town of Ayodhya is scene to a controversy over a Hindu sacred site, the Rama Janmabhoomi or "birthplace of Rama".  That is where a mosque, the Babri Masjid, was built in forcible replacement of an earlier Hindu temple, in 1528 under Moghul emperor Babar at the latest, and demolished by a Hindu crowd in 1992.  The controversy pits Hindu activists against a combine of Muslim activists and the so-called "secularists", an array of Hindu-born Marxists and US-oriented 'globalists' who share a hatred of Hindu assertiveness.  The matter has been sub-judice at the High Court of nearby Allahabad since 1950, when Hindus had taken control of the mosque by installing statues of the deified hero Rama, his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana.  Now, Hindu organisations are preparing to build a proper temple at the site.  Muslims organisations are reclaiming the site, and the judges have endlessly been postponing their intervention. 

At least until the winter of 2002-2003, for then the court secretly asked a specialized firm to scan the underground by radar for traces of the foundation of a temple predating the mosque.  One of the questions on which a verdict could arguably be based, was whether there had indeed been a temple at the site before the mosque was built.

A Splendid Consensus

Actually, until 1989 there had been no question about the site's history.  All the written sources, whether Hindu, Muslim or European, were in agreement about the pre-existence of a Rama temple at the site.  "Rama's birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor Babar in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple", according to the 1989 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry "Ayodhya".  Neither was there any document contradicting this scenario: no account of a forest chopped down to make way for the mosque (already unlikely in the centre of an ancient town), no sales contract of real estate to the mosque's builder, nothing of the kind.  By contrast, there was testimony after testimony of Hindus bewailing and Muslims boasting of the replacement of the temple with a mosque; and of Hindus under Muslim rule coming as close as possible to the site in order to celebrate Rama's birthday every year in April, in continuation of the practice at the time when the temple stood. 

And if authors of testimonies may be unreliable, there was also the archaeological evidence: in the 1970s, a team of the Archaeological Survey of India led by Prof. B.B. Lal dug out some trenches just outside the mosque and found rows of pillar-bases which must have supported a larger building predating the mosque.  Moreover, in the mosque itself, small black pillars with Hindu sculptures had been incorporated, a traditional practice in mosques built in forcible replacement of infidel temples to flaunt the victory of Islam over Paganism. 

The only remaining question about the site was its status in the period 1192-1528.  In 1192 and the subsequent years, practically all the Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries in North India were demolished by Mohammed Ghori and his Turkish invaders.  It is impossible that the medieval temple at the site could have survived until 1528.  The most likely scenario is the one well-attested at another famous temple site: the Somnath temple in Gujarat.  No less than nine times did Hindus reclaim it as a temple, until Muslims retook it and turned it into a mosque again.  Since Ayodhya was a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, opportunities for wresting the site from Muslim control were certainly more limited than in the case of the outlying Somnath temple.  Then again, the frequent infighting among the Muslim elite may have given rebellious Hindus some opportunities too.  From peculiarities in the architecture of the Babri Masjid, art historians on both sides of the debate (Sushil Srivastava, R. Nath) have deduced that the main part of the structure had been built well before the Moghul invasion, probably in the 14^th century.  In that case, the tradition that it was built by Mir Baqi may be based on the following scenario: towards the end of the Sultanate period, Hindus may have managed to recapture the site and to turn it into a functioning temple, until Babar and his lieutenant Mir Baqi firmly imposed Muslim control again and gave some finishing touches to the mosque architecture in replacement of any Hindu elements that had come to adorn it.  But this must for now be kept inside speculative brackets.  What is certain is that a major Hindu temple at the site was demolished by Islamic iconoclasm and replaced with a mosque symbolizing the victory of Islam over Infidelism.  Of that, evidence is plentiful and of many types.