For the truly devout, it was a day of deep wish fulfilment. They have got their temple at Ayodhya, bringing glimpses of a classical past long vanished from their midst and grown more ornate in the imagination as a kind of static fantasia that it never was. To that extent, it speaks to a void in their heart and mind and will hopefully have a healing effect. The temple is still architecturally incomplete, and shastric doubts were raised in the run-up to a seamlessly choreographed consecration event. But it’s at least not a makeshift one—not one that had an uneasy relationship with habitat, the look and feel of an encroachment. The deity is installed with complete legal sanctification. That does not exhaust its meaning, though.
The pran pratishtha event has symbolically brought the curtains down on one phase of modern Indian history. Pure European secularism never sat too well with India; it had invented one of its own. But for those who still felt the traces of the former too strongly, this is a moment that puts culture back at the core of the state. So we also inaugurate a new history, one whose exact contours cannot be delineated in advance. That task has to be left to future historians. But the wish that it be one of peace, compassion and harmony—an ethos in line with the ideals of the very deity this event foregrounds—is universal.
Even the speakers on the stage voiced that to varying degrees, harking back to a more violent past with which they contrasted the future about to unfold. “Ayodhya will no longer reverberate to the sounds of gunfire, its streets will no longer see curfew,” said Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. “Ram is not fire, but energy,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And Mohan Bhagwat, sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, in a very interesting speech that quoted Mahatma Gandhi and Sister Nivedita, mined the metaphors of Tulsidas to underline again and again that universal welfare, empathy and a polyphonic democracy where everyone’s voice is heard and respected was the core of the Ayodhya ruled by Ram.
That is not a vision that would imperil the Indian Constitution, let alone displace it. It only seeks to deepen it, and link it with a cultural subsoil. History will be an honest witness to its progress.