Ayodhya’s Rama

Image of the Ayodhya Temple from NDTV

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be inaugurating the Rs 18,000 crore temple of Rama on 22 Jan 2024. Any patriotic Indian should be filled with nationalist pride. Or, is it religious pride? Cultural pride? Well, you choose.

As an Indian whose patriotism is highly questionable, I chose to contemplate on the very existence of Lord Rama. Google instructs me that Rama was born in Treta Yuga, the second period in the Hindu classification of history. Treta Yuga stretched from 2,163,102 BCE to 867,102 BCE, according to Google. The same Google tells us that homo sapiens arrived on earth some 300,000 years ago. Lord Rama lived long, long before homo sapiens evolved. “Hanuman was Lord Rama’s real subject,” a friend suggested. All the others are creatures of Valmiki’s imagination. “Mythology, man,” the friend reminded helpfully.

Then what about Lord Rama? Did he evolve before time? A premature homo sapiens? I’m inquisitive.

“Don’t you remember Plato?” My friend asks. Rama is God. God has to be perfect. Existence is imperfect, as Plato would say. The idea of Rama is as perfect as can be the ideal idea of anything. So it was the idea of Rama that preceded all evolution, that transcended time and place, that originated even before the cosmic Big Bang…

I joined my hands in gratitude to my friend. This is superb. Even Plato would have prostrated before this friend of mine.

But then arose another problem. Lord Rama has a birthplace. Rama Janmabhoomi, Ayodhya. He was born there following the normal human processes of conception and delivery. He wasn’t all that perfect too. If you trust the suspicions of a barber more than the chastity of your wife whom you choose to consign to flames because of the barber’s suspicions…

We are all imperfect and we love our gods to have imperfections, my friend argues. Plato’s ideal be damned. He is too Greek to be Aryan. Who can worship philosophy except those barbaric Greeks? We the noble Aryans need a god who is like us and yet not totally like us.

So somewhere down the line, Rama became the god in the temple on Ramkot hill in Ayodhya. Perhaps. Perhaps, my friend repeats emphatically as if I don’t know the meaning of that word. No one is really sure that there was a Ram temple there. No one is sure either that the Mughal emperor Babur demolished that temple in order to construct a masjid. That’s all possible, however.

One of the best ways of ascertaining one’s power over a people is to destroy their gods and temples. You prove to those vanquished people that you are more powerful than their gods by demolishing their temples. Didn’t Modi do this? My friend asks. When Modi became the Prime Minister, how many churches in North India were attacked?

I can’t remember the number, I say. The number doesn’t matter a bit, my friend responds. Numbers don’t carry any substantial truths. Look at the millions of people in India. Contrast their living conditions with those of the few elites who actually run the country. Where lie the substantial truths? India will be a superpower soon and yet the majority of her people will be struggling to make both ends meet. Numbers don’t count, man.

Babur destroyed a Hindu temple and replaced it with a Muslim masjid. We destroyed that masjid and are now replacing it with a temple. Where’s the difference between Babur and us?

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 463: One emperor is believed to have demolished a temple to build a mosque there. Another emperor constructs a temple where the mosque stood for a few centuries. What makes this emperor different from that emperor? #WorshipConstruction