The Guardian, Saturday April 6, 2002

Holy lies

A holy site in the small Indian town of Ayodhya has become the focus
of communal strife between Hindu nationalists and Muslims - hundreds
have been killed in the past two months. At stake is the plan, backed
by rabble-rousing politicians, to build a temple in place of a ruined
mosque. Behind it, Pankaj Mishra uncovers a saga of falsified
history, opportunistic abbots and a spurious legacy of the British Raj

Ayodhya is the city of Ram, the most virtuous and austere of Hindu
gods. To travel there from Benares - across a wintry north Indian
landscape of mustard-bright fields, hectic roadside bazaars and
lonely columns of smoke - is to move between two very different Hindu
myths, or visions of life. Shiva, the god of perpetual destruction
and creation, rules Benares, where temple compounds conceal internet
cafes and children fly kites next to open funeral pyres by the river.
But the city's aggressive affluence and chaos feel far away in
Ayodhya, which is small and drab, its alleys full of the dust of the
surrounding fields. The peasants carrying unwieldy bundles bring to
mind the pilgrims of medieval Indian miniature paintings; and,
sitting by the Saryu river at dusk, as the devout tenderly set afloat
tiny lamps in the slow-moving water, one feels the endurance and
continuity of Hindu India.

After this vision of eternal Hinduism, the mosques and Moghul
buildings of Ayodhya come as a surprise. Most are in ruins -
especially the older ones built during the 16th and 17th centuries,
when Ayodhya was the administrative centre of one of the Moghul
empire's major provinces, Awadh. All but two were destroyed as
recently as December 6 1992, the day, epochal now in India's history,
when a crowd led by politicians from the Bharatiya Janata party
(BJP), or Indian People's Party, demolished a mosque they claimed the
16th-century Moghul emperor Babur had built as an act of contempt on
the site of the god Ram's birthplace.

Memories of that demolition, and the subsequent anti-Muslim pogroms,
have been reawakened in the past two months after a Muslim crowd in
Gujarat burned alive 58 Hindu activists on a train. The activists
were returning from Ayodhya, where they had participated in
preliminary rituals for building a new Ram temple, which BJP leaders,
who now run the government in Delhi, had vowed to build on the site
of Babur's mosque. Hindu militants in Gujarat retaliated by killing
more than 600 Muslims. With Hindu passions so aroused, the
construction of the new temple seems more, not less, likely. As for
the mosques destroyed in 1992, they are unlikely ever to be restored.
The Muslim presence in the town seems at an end for the first time in
eight centuries.

That was the impression I got even in January, a full month before
the anti-Muslim rage exploded, when I visited Digambar Akhara, the
straw-littered compound of the militant Sadhu sect presided over by
Ramchandra Paramhans, who in 1949 initiated the legal battle to
reclaim Babur's mosque, or Babri Masjid, for the Hindu community. The
sect, Paramhans told me, was established four centuries ago to fight
Muslim invaders who had ravaged India since the 10th century, and
erected mosques over temples in the holy cities of Ayodhya, Benares
and Mathura. It had been involved, he said, in 76 wars for possession
of the site of the Ayodhya mosque, during which more than 200,000
Hindus had been martyred.

Paramhans, who is now more than 90 years old, exuberantly directed
the demolition squad in 1992, and now heads the trust in charge of
the temple's construction. When we spoke, he expected up to a million
Hindu volunteers to reach Ayodhya by March 15, defy a Supreme Court
ban on construction at the site, and present a fait accompli to the
world in the form of a semi-constructed temple.

Two bodyguards watched nervously as he told me of his plans; other
armed men stood around the wall of the compound. The security seemed
excessive in this exclusively Hindu environment but, as Paramhans
said, caressing the tufts of white hair on the tip of his nose, the
year before he'd been attacked by home-made bombs delivered by what
he called "Muslim terrorists". "Before we take on Pakistani
terrorists," he added, "we have to take care of the offspring Babur
left behind in India - these 130 million Muslims of India have to be
shown their place."

This message was briskly conveyed to the Muslims of Gujarat by
Paramhans' associates, leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), or
World Hindu Council, a sister organisation of the BJP. According to
reports from Gujarat, Hindu militants incited, and in some cases
organised, the killing of more than 600 Muslims during four hectic
days in late February and early March. The chief minister of Gujarat,
a hardline BJP leader, quoted the English scientist Newton while
defending his government's inability or unwillingness to stop the
massacres: "Every action," he said, "has an equal and opposite
reaction."

The reaction wasn't equal, though - the final tally of Muslim dead
may exceed 1,000 - but it did display a high degree of administrative
efficiency, as was also evident during the anti-Muslim pogroms in
Bombay in 1992-93, when members of the Hindu extremist group, the
Shiv Sena, went around mixed localities with electoral lists of
Muslim homes. In Gujarat's cities last month, middle-class Hindu men
drove up in new Japanese cars - the emblems of India's globalised
economy - to cart off the loot from Muslim shops and businesses.
These rich young Hindus in Benetton T-shirts and Nike sneakers seemed
unlikely combatants in what Paramhans told me was a holy war against
the traitorous 12% of India's population - both wealth and education
separated them from the unemployed, listless young small-town Hindus
I met in Ayodhya, one of whom is a local convenor of the Bajrang Dal,
the stormtroopers of the Hindu nationalists.

What they shared, however, was a particular worldview, outlined most
clearly by students at Saraswati Shishu Mandir, a primary school in
Benares, one of 15,000 such institutions run by the Rashtriya
Swyamsevak Sangh (RSS), or Association of National Volunteers, the
parent group of Hindu nationalism from which have emerged almost all
the leaders of the BJP, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. The themes of
morning assembly were manliness and patriotism. In the gloomy hall,
portraits of militant Hindu freedom fighters mingled with such
signboarded exhortations as, "Give me blood and I'll give you
freedom", and "Say with pride that you are a Hindu". For an hour,
boys and girls marched in front of a stage, where a plaster of Paris
statue of Mother India stood astride a map of south Asia, chanting
about the perfidy of Pakistan, of Muslim invaders and of the
gloriousness of India's past.

Most of the students came from middle-class areas of Benares. Their
bare, thin limbs shook with their passion and efforts to memorise
arcane Sanskrit words. The principal watched serenely. He told me
that Joshi-ji, the education minister, was making sure that new
history textbooks carried to every school in the country the message
of Hindu pride and Muslim cruelty. It is a message that resonates at
a level of caste and class privilege, flourishing in a society where
deprivation is always close at hand. An out of work upper-caste
advertising executive I met in Benares seemed to be speaking of his
own insecurities when he said, after some talk of the latest iMac,
"Man, I am scared of these Mozzies. We are a secular, modern nation,
but we let them run these madrasas [religious schools], we let them
breed like rabbits and one day they are going to outstrip the Hindu
population, and will they then treat us as well as we treat them?"

The Muslims, of course, have a different view of how they've been
treated. In Madanpura, Benares's Muslim district, I met Najam, a
scholar of Urdu and Persian literature. He is in his 30s, and grew up
during some of the worst anti-Muslim violence of post-independence
India - in the 1992 slaughter, he saw Hindu policemen beat his doctor
to death with rifle butts. "I don't think the Muslims are angry any
more," he said. "There is no point. The people who demolished the
mosque at Ayodhya are now senior ministers. We know we will always be
suspected of disloyalty, no matter what we say or do. Our madrasas
will always be seen as producing fanatics and terrorists. There is no
one ready to listen to us, and so we keep silent. We expect nothing
from the government and political parties. We now depend on the
goodwill of the Hindus we live with, and all that we hope for is
survival with a bit of dignity."

Hindu devotees throng the Viswanath temple in Benares, but few, if
any, Muslims dare negotiate a way through the armed police and
sandbagged positions to the adjacent Gyanvapi mosque, one of two that
the Hindu nationalists have threatened to destroy. It is not easy for
an outsider to grasp the Muslim's sense of isolation here. There was
little in my own background that could have prepared me to understand
the complicated history behind it - being Brahmins with little money,
we saw the Muslims as another threat to our aspirations for security
and dignity. My sisters attended a RSS-run primary school, where
pupils were indoctrinated into disfiguring images of Muslim rulers in
their textbooks. At my English medium school, we were encouraged to
think of ourselves as secular, modern citizens of India, and regard
religion as something one outgrew. So when, in the 1970s and 1980s, I
heard about Hindu-Muslim riots, or the insurgencies in Punjab and
Kashmir, it seemed to me that religion-based identities were the
cause of most conflict and violence in India. The word used in
newspapers and academic analyses was "communalism", which was
described as the antithesis of the kind of secularism advocated by
the founding fathers of India, Gandhi and Nehru, and also of Hinduism
itself, which was held to be innately tolerant and secular.

I spent several months in Benares in the late 1980s, unaware that
this ancient pilgrimage centre of Hindus was also a holy city for
Muslims - unaware, too, of the 17th-century Sufi shrine just behind
the tea shack where I often spent my mornings. It was one of many in
the city that both Hindus and Muslims visited, a legacy of the
flowering of Sufi culture in medieval north India. Only this year I
discovered from Najam that one of the great Shia philosophers of
Persia had sought refuge at the court of a Hindu ruler of Benares in
the 18th century. And it was after returning from my trip to Ayodhya
that I read that Ram's primacy in this pilgrimage centre was
relatively recent - for much of the medieval period, Ayodhya was the
home of the much older sect of Shaivites, or Shiva-worshippers (Ram
is one of many incarnations of Vishnu, one of the gods in the Hindu
trinity, in which Shiva is the most important); that many of
Ayodhya's temples and sects devoted to Ram had actually emerged under
the patronage of the Shia Muslims who ruled Awadh in the early 18th
century.

Paramhans had been quick to offer me a history full of
temple-destroying Muslims and brave Hindu nationalists. But his own
militant sect had been originally formed to fight not Muslims but
Shiva-worshipping Hindus; and it had been favoured in that long and
bloody conflict by the Muslim Nawabs. The Nawabs, whose
administration and army were staffed by Hindus, kept a careful
distance from Hindu-Muslim conflicts. One of the first such conflicts
in Ayodhya came in 1855, when some Muslims accused Hindus of
illegally constructing a temple over a mosque and militant Hindu
sadhus (mendicants) massacred 75 Muslims. The then Nawab of Awadh,
Wajid Ali Shah, a distinguished poet and composer, refused to support
the Muslim claim, explaining, "We are devoted to love; do not know of
religion. So what if it is Kaaba or a house of idols?"

Wajid Ali Shah, who was denounced as effeminate and inept and deposed
a year later by British imperialists, was the last great exponent of
the Indo-Persian culture that emerged in Awadh towards the end of the
Moghul empire. India was then one of the great centres of the Islamic
world, along with the Ottoman and Safavid empires. In India, Islam
had lost some of its Arabian and Persian distinctiveness, and had
blended with older cultures. Its legacy is still preserved - amid the
squalor of a hundred small Indian towns, in the grace and elegance of
Najam's Urdu, in numerous songs and dances that accompany festivals,
in the subtle cuisines of north India - but one could continue to
think of it, as I did, as something without a history or tradition.
The Indo-Islamic is an embarrassment to the idea of India maintained
by the modernising Hindu elite for the past 50 years.

That idea first emerged in the early 19th century, as the British
consolidated their hold over India and found new allies among
upper-caste Hindus. As elsewhere in their empire, the British
encountered the stiffest resistance from Muslim rulers. So they
tended to demonise the Muslims as fanatics and tyrants, and presented
the British conquest as at least partly a humanitarian intervention
on behalf of a once-great Hindu nation. Most of these British views
of India were useful fictions at best - the Turks, Afghans, central
Asians and Persians, who together with upper-caste Hindu elites had
ruled a variety of Indian states for more than eight centuries, were
more than plunderers and zealots. The bewildering diversity of people
who inhabited India before the arrival of the Muslims in the 11th
century hardly formed a community, much less a nation; and the word
"Hinduism" barely hinted at the almost infinite number of folk and
elite cultures, religious sects and philosophical traditions found in
India.

But these novel British ideas were received well by upper-caste
Hindus, who had previously worked with Muslim rulers and began to see
opportunities in the new imperial order. British discoveries of
India's classical sculpture, painting and literature had given them a
fresh, invigorating sense of the pre-Islamic past; they found
flattering and useful British Orientalist notions of India that
identified Brahmanical scriptures and principles of tolerance as the
core of Hinduism. In this view, practices such as widow-burning
became proof of the degradation Hinduism had suffered under Muslim
rule, and the cruelties of caste became an unfortunate consequence of
their tyranny.

end of part 1