Issue 8.5 - Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Australia

India:
No Longer
Handcuffed to
History
New Delhi: A recent court ruling has revealed
India’s strengths and limitations as it grapples with
its transformation from a land handcuffed to
history—ever since the Partition of 1947, which
carved Pakistan out of its stooped shoulders—into
a modern global giant.
The High Court of India’s most populous state,
Uttar Pradesh, finally decided a 61-year-old suit
over possession of a disputed site in the temple
city of Ayodhya, where, in 1992, a howling mob of
Hindu extremists tore down the Babri Masjid
mosque. The mosque was built in the 1520’s by
India’s first Mogul emperor, Babur, on a site
traditionally believed to have been the birthplace
of the Hindu god-king Ram, the hero of the 3,000year-old
epic, the Ramayana. The Hindu zealots
who destroyed the mosque vowed to replace it
with a temple to Ram, thereby avenging 500 years
of history.
India is a land where history, myth, and legend
often overlap; sometimes Indians cannot tell the
difference. Many Hindus claim that the Babri
26 | Bhavan Australia | Nov 2010
Masjid stood on the precise spot of Ram’s birth and
had been placed there by Babur to remind a
conquered people of their subjugation. But many
historians—most of them Hindu—argue that there
is no proof that Ram ever existed in human form,
let alone that he was born where believers claim.
More to the point, they argue, there is no proof that
Babur demolished a Ram temple to build his
mosque. Thus, to destroy the mosque and replace
it with a temple was not righting an old wrong but
perpetrating a new one. The Archaeological Survey
of India, however, reported the existence of ruins
beneath the demolished mosque that might have
belonged to an ancient temple. The dispute
remained intractable, and dragged interminably
through the courts.
To most Indian Muslims, the dispute is not about a
specific mosque. The Babri Masjid had lain unused
for a half-century before its destruction, as most of
Ayodhya’s Muslims had emigrated to Pakistan after
Partition. Rather, the issue was their place in Indian
society.