The business and accoutrements of religion have always dominated Ayodhya’s public space, and pilgrims and tourists been a key source of income. However, a town that historically served as a confluence of several religions — Buddhism, Sufism, Jainism, Hinduism and Islam, is no longer a space of meeting, but an arena of contention. Scharada Dubey’s Portraits from Ayodhya: Living India’s Contradictions, chronicles with understanding, sorrow, and some anger, how this formerly tolerant space of multi-spirituality has been changed by the events surrounding the Babri Masjid/ Ram Janmabhoomi controversy.
Almost two decades after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Dubey, an Ayodhya resident, has researched and written an oral history of the town. She interviews 25 people significant to Ayodhya, all inhabitants of the town chosen because they have, to varying degrees, participated in the ongoing controversy. The volume is divided into three parts: Mavericks and madmen, Establishment entities, and People like us, each examining a cluster of people who are significant, as marginal and central players, and onlookers, respectively, in the ongoing argument.
Among those interviewed in the first section is Vineet Maurya, whose family owns property adjoining the disputed site, and who now lives surrounded on three sides by barbed wire and barricades; and Ram Sharan Das, who worships his god by keeping the gutters of Ayodhya clean. The second section profiles amongst others, Baba Dharamdas, who claims to have removed the idols of the infant Rama and its companions during the destruction of the Masjid on December 6, 1992, and replaced them on December 7. Nritya Gopal Das, the current head of the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas, and reputedly a member of the semi-criminal bhoo-mafia (land grabbing mafia), is also featured in this section. A clear motif running through this section is how politics, in the shape of the VHP, helped turn religion into criminalisation, and land into lucre, in the town
of Ayodhya.
The third section, People like us, profiles those who are not part of the establishment’s power structure who have been implicated in the dispute that has taken over Ayodhya’s public life. Among others, this section profiles Hashim Ansari, variously described as farishta (angel), chacha (uncle), and an ordinary man with extraordinary goodwill, who is Plaintiff No. 7 in the title suit case filed by the Wakf Board in 1961.
That this book has been written by an insider to the town is very clear. What is less clear is the reason why mainstream Hindu voices so outnumber representatives of secularism, or mentions of non-Hindu religions. If this is meant to be a series of narratives about the town of Ayodhya, surely other points of view could have found space in it? The choice to let Hindutva perspectives and linkages dominate the narrative makes sense, if the author is trying to claim that Ayodhya has actually wiped out all but its mainstream sensibilities, but this argument is not mentioned directly. The reader comes to this conclusion over the course of the book, and some important questions about choice of profiles unfortunately remain unaddressed in the volume.
Any possible criticism of authorial choice, however, must yield to the common theme that Ayodhyans have echoed through the book. Things were different before the events of December 1992, they say. Harmony among disparate people and ideas was the norm, in spite of ongoing differences. Political contingency, and an injection of outsiders looking for opportunity, changed all that. Now there is no development, and little funding for anything other than security for the disputed area. The Rs 25 lakh that the government of India spends to keep the disputed area safe, is perceived to be at the cost of Ayodhya herself, and bitterly resented by its denizens.
Anyone interested in the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi conflict ought to read this book, in spite of its uneven editing, in order to get an alternate perspective to those offered by mainstream media on the issue.
