The Demolition of Babri Masjid and The Post-modernist Challenge to History: A Lacanian Answer

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On the fateful day of December 6, 1992, a mob of Hindu nationalists demolished the Babri Masjid, leading to riots and violence against Muslims all over India. This event culminated after rigorous propaganda by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and R.S.S (both fascist organization). The movement gathered so much heat that India was entirely encompassed by the myth of Rama. The main reason behind this movement was to reclaim the site of Babri Masjid as the birthplace of Rama. In this article, without referring to the legitimacy of their claim, I have tried to read this movement against the background of the advent of postmodernism and its challenge to History. In this article, I tried to do this through Lacanian psychoanalysis. Here, I have used Lacanian real in order to understand the postmodern condition. I have taken the postmodern condition here as reaching the limit of phallogocentric language. For me, the postmodern condition is a crisis of the phallic signifier. From this perspective, I have encountered the absence of metanarratives. I wanted to show that even if the basic facts of History are obliterated through the advent of post-truth and conspiracy theories, there is still reason for History to be alive; still, there is reason for us to be optimistic about if we take the lessons of psychoanalysis seriously. I wanted to show here how present Historians are trying to battle this challenge by referring to crude positivistic empiricism as fundamentally useless, and by accepting the narrative nature of History, we can transform History into a radical discipline and open its windows to the various theoretical innovations that are taking in other disciplines.