After watching the telecast of the groundbreaking for a Ram temple in Ayodhya this morning, I can choose to write a great deal about it from the political standpoint since I reported on the whole Ram Janmbhoomi movement quite extensively. That reporting culminated into an extraordinary interview with Atal Behari Vajpayee on December 9, 1992, three days after the demolition of the Babri Masjid that he gave Tarun Basu and I. It was an interview that practically split the party down the middle.
Instead of writing about all that, I am more interested in how seemingly unconnected historical events spread over centuries come to shape and reshape our civilization. For instance, when Babur ordered the construction of the particular mosque in Ayodhya in 1528-1529 under the supervision of Mir Baqi, who would have thought then nearly five centuries later an aggressive political movement against it fundamentally reorder India’s politics and polity amid a great deal of bloodletting. What if there were no Babur and therefore no Babri Masjid, would we still have figures such as Lal Krishna Advani or Narendra Modi? I know these are what if questions which have no real answers.
Incidentally, the Ayodhya mosque was one of the three that Babur ordered to be built, the other two being in Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh and Panipat in Haryana.
Just to digress a bit, when the Babri Masjid was completed Tulsidas was barely 17 and had not yet written Ramcharitmanas, the seminal book about the journey of Ram’s life. Verses from Ramcharitmanas were recited by the speakers at the groundbreaking, including Prime Minister Modi.
I am fascinated by such convergences over centuries and often even millennia.
In another speculative detour, would Mir Baqi ever have thought that the building he was creating, in an architectural style that defined the Lodi dynasty before the Mughals, would be at the heart of so radically altering the country’s cultural and political life all these centuries later? Of course not because that is not how life works.
From that standpoint I do wonder how what happened in Ayodhya today amid promises of building a grand temple and thereby restoring the country’s civilizational pride and self-assurance (not my take but a sum-up of what was spoken there) might play out five centuries later, say in 2520. It is more than likely that some version of the human civilization will still be there.
More often than not, I have felt that the universe has already unfolded a long time ago and vanished and we are merely catching up with it now. We too are our own past. There appears to be an ever so subtle time lag between what I sense I am now and what I already have been.
On a separate and trivial note, it was instructive that purely going by a quick visual assessment there were so many more men among the special 175 invitees at the groundbreaking than women. It would be fair to assume that many of them were either lifelong bachelors or those who may have married but quickly chosen the life of one.
I can easily write a very well-informed political analysis of what happened but it has always been my habit to look at everything in cosmic terms. From that angle, what happened today alters nothing in the inexorable workings of the universe.