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Will digging resolve the problem?

By Harbans Mukhia

A month's digging barely touches the fringe of the site (at Ayodhya). It is unlikely that such a small amount of digging could yield anything worthwhile... In the end, it will call for a political solution.

LET ME at the outset state that I for one welcome the directive of the Allahabad High Court for archaeological excavation at the site of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute. The welcome is not in expectation of any definitive resolution of the highly contentious issue, but in the court's implied refusal to accept the validity of the claims of the Sangh Parivar and the Muslim leaders about the existence of a Ram temple underneath the mosque. Even as the denial appears neutral between the two sides, it seems more weighted against the Sangh Parivar if only because it has been the more vociferous of the two in making the claim.

The historical evidence available for a Ram temple having been demolished to build the mosque is extremely slender. The fact that Babar himself records his visit to Ayodhya twice in his Babarnama but does not mention either the Ram temple or the construction of a mosque in his name is the first source of doubt about it. The verses carved on the entrance to the prayer hall of the mosque and the inner wall announcing the construction of the mosque, when it was intact, made no mention of the temple either. The fact that silence on the issue reigns among numerous medieval historians who have left behind a long series of court chronicles, reinforces the doubt significantly.

Some of these historians were dogmatic Muslims, such as Mulla Abdul Qadir Badauni, Akbar's courtier, who would have revelled in recording the incident with great hyperbole. Even Aurangzeb, himself responsible for the demolition of many temples and the construction of mosques on their sites, never mentions the act of his predecessor; this adds significantly to the silence. The several Hindu historians of the period make no reference to it either. But the most deafening silence is that of Goswami Tulsi Das, epitome of devotion to Ram, a resident of Ayodhya, and writing within 50 years of the construction of the mosque, i.e. within living memory of the incident. Nor do the many European travellers, given to a great degree of dramatisation of their narrative, state it with any clarity.

The first clear, unambiguous statement that "the Jama Masjid constructed by Emperor Babar at the site of the birth of Ram, son of Raja Dasrath (is) adjacent to the building of the rasoi (kitchen) of Sita, wife of the above-mentioned Ram" occurs in a Persian language document submitted to the Faizabad law court by its superintendent, Hafizullah, in 1822. Yet, even this document does not mention a temple at the site, demolished for the construction. As the 19th century progressed, gradually an association between the Ramjanmabhoomi and the existence of a Ram temple grew and several disputes began to arise, some of them violent. However, a cardinal principle in the historian's craft is that the value of any piece of textual evidence for testifying the occurrence of an event diminishes with growing distance in time. Evidence of the 19th century will thus be a poor basis to testify an event of the 16th century. Richard M Eaton, a respected U.S. historian of medieval India, is aware of the Sangh Parivar's ever inflating figures of temples demolished in medieval India and mosques built on their sites, first pegged at 300 some 15 years ago but by now having grown to 30,000. He has meticulously documented the desecration of each and every temple between 1192 and 1760 and arrives at the figure of 80. For details, his paper `Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States' in his book, Essays on Islam and Indian History, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2000, may be consulted. His list does not include the temple at Ayodhya.

If the silences of history leave ambiguous traces on this count, archaeological evidence by its very nature is slightly less open to varying interpretation, if only relatively. Therefore, the court's directive has the potential of opening the door to a little more substantive evidence on the issue. What are the prospects of this happening?

Some archaeological excavation has already been undertaken around the site by B. B. Lal under the project "The Archaeology of the Ramayana" in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The fact that he had proposed to extend the excavations further and the non-submission of a final report of his undertaking points to the inconclusive nature of his findings. The court's injunction that further excavations should be carried out in a month's time implies its unfamiliarity with archaeological procedures which are extremely painstaking and time-consuming; a month's digging barely touches the fringe of the site. It is unlikely that such a small amount of digging could yield anything worthwhile.

But even prolonged and extensive digging could yield any of the following scenarios: conclusive evidence that a Ram temple did exist which was demolished to build the temple. It is extremely unlikely that this will happen; but if it does, the Muslim leaders have already announced that they would accept the evidence without further ado and honour it.

Evidence of layers of construction at the site demonstrating buildings of several kinds on top of one another. Very likely at any ancient site. This will seriously puncture the claim that this was the site of Ram's birth and cast doubts on the Sangh Parivar's lifeline campaign. If, on top of it, it also shows that the demolition of an earlier place of worship of a different denomination had preceded the construction of a temple before the mosque — not an unlikely happening in view of the fact that demolition of places of worship of one's political rivals was quite common in history around the world and so too in India and was not specific to the Muslims — the claim would be damaged even further. No conclusive evidence of the existence of a Ram temple, or any temple, even in the top layers; instead, digging throws up remains of a palace, or a mansion, for example. Not unlikely. This too will seriously strain the Sangh Parivar's claim.

Thus, if the digging bears out the first scenario, the solution will be clear-cut. If not, the matter will no longer be subject to judicial resolution. In the end, it will call for a political solution.

The unearthing of even a slight bit of evidence of a place of worship in the digging might mean a whirlwind campaign unleashed by the likes of Praveen Togadia and Ashok Singhal which will undermine the authority of the Judiciary and seek a forcible solution, helped by the Vajpayee Government's masterly inactivity. We can hardly overlook the fact that the momentum to this agitation was lent by L. K. Advani. The damage to the nation will be incalculable.

The other political solution, ideally to have been attempted in the 1980s, requires a grandeur of vision that the Muslim leadership seems so incapable of: the offer of the site to the Hindus and joining hands with them to build a Ram temple, even if symbolically. At one stroke, the Sangh Parivar balloon would have burst and the very Indian-ness of Indian Islam would have been established beyond the innuendoes cast on it by Narendra Modi, Mr. Togadia and the like. No one had heard of the Modis and the Togadias then; no one would have heard of them now either. And this one grand gesture would have insured all other medieval mosques against further predatory claims of the Sangh Parivar, some of them with much stronger basis of fact than Ayodhya. Is it too late?

(The writer is Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, JNU.)

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