Babri Research Articles

Allah’s House to Domes of Secularism: Minoritization of Muslims in India

Disputes around the Babri masjid have been crucial for understanding the Muslim subject position in India, also because mosques are public expressions of Muslimness. I read the legal proceedings of the Babri masjid dispute leading to the Supreme Court’s controversial judgment in 2019, tracing the life of Babri masjid unfolding as a mosque, a disputed site and, finally, a Hindu temple. Focusing on the theological and secular claims of Hindu and Muslim litigants, I look at the differential approach to belief and historical claims within the legal adjudication. I especially analyse two strategies, disruption and description, that significantly led to the changes in the attributes of the mosque. Comparing the Babri dispute with the case of the Malappuram mosque dispute in the eighteenth century, this article analyses theological claims on a mosque, asking the question why the Muslim narrative shifted from one rooted in religious reverence, Allah’s house, to one anchored in secular symbolism, the domes of secularism? It would discreetly give an idea of the practice of secularism in India which, as different scholars contend, systematically erases Muslim religiosity from the public space. I suggest reading the anchoring of Muslim claims in secularism as pointing to the crucial changes in the Muslim subject position that is decisively framed through excessive powers of the modern nation-state.

Babari Masjid Chronicles: Modi’s Ideology not Embracing Ayodhya Spirit and India’s Future

Introduction: After the Babri Masjid demolition, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's treatment of Ayodhya’s was criticized for violating its unity tradition. Modi's politics emphasize inclusion over exclusion. Reconciliation initiatives are examined in Ram temple construction. The essay promotes discourse, harmony, and India's diversity, emphasizing the need for integration. Methodology: The study uses inductive qualitative research to examine Modi's ideology and its relationship to Ayodhya's symbolism of unity and diversity in India. Literary secondary sources including books, journals, and novel research help collect data. The study uses interpretive content analysis and is qualitative. The protagonist's psychological journey is explored using inductive inquiry. Results/ Findings: The analysis reveals The analysis indicates a notable discrepancy between Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ideological stance and the historical essence of Ayodhya as a symbol of unity and pluralism. The necessity of reevaluating Modi's ideology vis-à-vis Ayodhya and its broader implications for India's future trajectory. The research emphasizes the importance of embracing inclusivity and dialogue to safeguard the nation's unity and diversity in the face of socio-political challenges. Modi's policies and decisions concerning Ayodhya, including his role in the Ram temple construction, come under scrutiny for their implications on India's socio-political landscape. Future Direction/ Implication: This study improves understanding of "Babri Masjid Chronicles: Modi’s Ideology Not Embracing Ayodhya Spirit and India’s Future" and opens the door to further research on socio-political narratives and their psychological roots in literature. This includes studying national identity, ideological disagreement, and cultural and religious pluralism in fictional and historical situations. This research inspires further study of literary discourse, socio-political ideologies, and Indian national identity and unity

THE JUDICIAL RULINGS PERTAINING TO THE HAGIA SOPHIA IN TURKEY AND THE BABRI MOSQUE IN INDIA: An Analysis

<p><strong>Abstract: </strong>On November 9, 2019, the Supreme Court of India issued a ruling allowing for the construction of a temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Ram on the site of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttara Pradesh. Similarly, on July 10, 2020, the State of Council, the highest administrative court in Turkey, issued an order to convert the status of Istanbul's Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque. The court's decision in both nations has been regarded as a transformative political development within their respective contexts. This decision has garnered praise from certain individuals, while also attracting criticism from others, both domestically and internationally. This article is thematically based, library-focused, and qualitative. The article examines and evaluates both cases based on the existing evidence pertaining to the historical structures, and endeavours to propose the most persuasive perspective to adopt in such situations. The study's findings suggest that the judicial decision under scrutiny exhibits a greater inclination towards political considerations rather than rational ones.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> Hagia Sophia, Babri Mosque, Judicial Rulings, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Narendra Modi</p>

The view from Mathura: nationalist projections in local perspective

ABSTRACT Following the Indian Supreme Court's verdict allowing the construction of a Rām Mandir at the site of the former Babri Masjid in 2019, Hindu nationalists have put renewed pressure on the North Indian city of Mathura. There, the seventeenth-century Shahi Idgah shares a boundary wall with a temple complex associated with the birth site of the deity Kṛṣṇa. Between 2019 and 2023, at least nine court cases were filed to remove the idgah from the vicinity of the Kṛṣṇa Janmabhūmi. With the future of a contentious religious site unfolding in the courts, I adopt an ethnographic perspective to assess the consequences of political stake claiming in the name of religion within the city of Mathura. I argue that the very threat of transforming a religiously plural landscape into a distinctively Hindu territory has had material consequences for those who live in Mathura. This situation demonstrates how rhetorical and spatial erasure mutually reinforce one another within contemporary Hindutva projects, whereby Muslim sacred territory in India becomes progressively more difficult to access, both conceptually and on the ground.

Babri retold: rewriting popular memory through Islamophobic humor

ABSTRACT The strategic mobilization of humor by Hindutva groups online contributes to the mainstreaming of supremacist ideologies that inform extremist behavior. Analyzing the social media recontextualizations of the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition as case studies, this paper examines how online instantiations of Islamophobic humor contribute to the Hindutva revisioning of popular memory. This paper expands the understanding of how Islamophobia is normalized through the shifting affective framing of the Babri Masjid demolition, from shame to schadenfreude, from tragedy to comedy, and from a threat to Indian secularism to a necessary act of paternalistic disciplining. Studying these shifts through specific examples of Islamophobic humor builds upon previous insights into: (1) the affective regimes by which Islamophobic ideas are made palatable to a wider audience, (2) discriminatory speech as an act of pleasure, and (3) how both of these work toward the reworking of popular memory in service of the Hindutva political project.

Lajja: A Critical Examination of Religious Fanaticism in Taslima Nasrin's Novel

Taslima Nasrin's novel, Lajja, explores the theme of religious fanaticism and its devastating impact on individuals and society. Published in 1993, the novel offers a poignant portrayal of a Hindu family living in Bangladesh and their struggles in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition in India. This article aims to analyze Nasrin's Lajja in the context of religious fanaticism, examining the narrative's socio-political implications and its significance in promoting religious tolerance and understanding. The research paper follows both descriptive and analytical method, and is based on both primary and secondary sources. Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja served as the primary source while many articles and essays constituted the secondary sources.

The Ayodhya decision and Marwari mercantile patronage: materializing a devotional geography for Rāma through Hanumān

ABSTRACT This article argues that even as the legal dispute over the Ram Janmabhumi site remained unresolved for decades, an unimpeded surge in Marwari mercantile financing of new temples for Hanumān, Rāma’s most celebrated devotee, provided the material foundation for a nationwide space exalting Rāma through the worship of Hanumān. Living in the pan-Indian urban diaspora and tracing descent to Rajasthan, Marwari merchants coalesced into devotional organizations dedicated to Hanumān and allied Vaiṣṇava deities (such as Rāma and Kṛṣṇa), initially centered on shrines in Rajasthan itself, from the 1980s on – coeval with the Ram Janmabhumi movement’s escalation. Marwaris had long been known as philanthropists for various social causes, but this article suggests that their philanthropy had evolved by the 1990s. Since the destruction of the Babri mosque at that time, Marwaris funded numerous new temples for Hanumān, in which Rāma was of course also revered. Some Marwaris assumed advisory roles in Hindu activist groups, seemingly embracing a commitment to restore canonical Hindu values eroded by centuries of foreign rule and modern caste politics. This article thus looks at Marwari patronage of deities’ temples as anticipating a post-2019 Ayodhya verdict Hindu devotional geography.

Archaeology for the courtroom: the Ayodhya Case and the fashioning of a hybrid episteme

On 1 August 2002, the Allahabad High Court in India, adjudicating the Ayodhya Case, ordered archaeological excavations by the central government agency Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) at the site of the demolished mosque Babri Masjid in Uttar Pradesh. The order marked a new moment for the convergence of law and archaeology in India, with archaeological knowledge being produced on judicial demand as evidence in a civil dispute. This paper argues that this marked the emergence of a hybrid episteme of archaeology-as-legal-evidence which redefines archaeology within the framework of law. It traces these tendencies by a close reading of three documents: the judgements of the Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court in the Ayodhya Case and an order issued by a lower court in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh on 8 April 2021 in the GyanVapi Case. I argue that the new role that archaeology is assuming in courtrooms in India is destabilising the standing of the ASI as the authority of archaeological knowledge and the protector of the nation’s material past. It has also produced a category of assertive public that successfully demands production of archaeological knowledge towards ideological ends.

Between the Temple and the Mosque in Varanasi

The conflict in the Indian city of Varanasi caused by the request of the Hindus to be allowed to enter the territory of Gyanvapi mosque to perform their rituals is in the center of the author’s attention. The mosque was constructed in 1669 on the site of the demolished Hindu temple. In 2021 a stone cylinder, which is supposed to be the symbol of Shiva, was found in the water tank used by the Muslims to wash themselves before the Namaz. Nevertheless, the representatives of the mosque think the object is the basement of the fountain. The case of Gyanvapi mosque received a wide public response and caused a surge of legal proceedings in the courts of the country. Radically concerned Hindu nationalists threaten to demolish the Gyanvapi mosque, as it happened in 1992 with Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly received delegations of Muslim communal leaders. He promised support for the protection of mosques and madrasas’ property and government assistance in educational programs for the Muslim youth. Nonetheless, Modi cannot stop people from applying to courts.

Almighty as Litigant : Ram Janmabhoomi Case and the Concept of juristic personhood of temple deities in India

Faith and political machination surrounding Ram Janmabhoomi / Babri Masjid issue triggered probably the biggest mass movement in Post-Colonial India, leading to a massive upheaval in the contemporary society and politics, that had been analysed in detail. But the jurisprudence involved in the case, which was finally settled by the Apex Court attracted little scholarly attention so far. In this essay I would analyse how the doctrine of ‘juristic personhood’ came to be imposed on temple deities, as well as philosophical foundation and contestations about this interesting, but little understood, seldom analysed phenomena.

Partition’s First Generation: Space, Place, and Identity in Muslim South Asia By Amber H. Abbas

Partition’s First Generation starts with the author’s family connections to the city of Aligarh in the western part of the largest and most populous Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Her ancestral family home was located on Amjad Ali Road, named in honour of her great-great grandfather, a leading lawyer in Aligarh. The narrative starts in 2009 with her trying to locate the road and the ancestral home, where her grandmother and father were born, only to discover that Amjad Ali Road no longer existed. Following the destruction of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, eastern UP, on 6 December 1992, many Muslims neighbourhoods across the state were targeted by emboldened Hindu nationalists, including this area. Despite this erasure, Abbas managed to locate the property, which now belonged to a Hindu family who had fled Lahore in 1947 and received this as refugee property. This personal opening to the book frames its broader institutional focus, which is to examine the history of the iconic Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), est. 1875, and situate this history in the ‘before, during and after’, of Partition (p. xiii). It highlights the continuum of violence straddling 1947, the ways in which it affected the people moved between places, and whether their movements had been voluntary or forced.

The Muslim Problem: A Majoritarian Concern in India

Muslim communities in modern Indian society are often seen through the lens of race and politics. The separate mechanisms of faith and secularism, which, as Judith Butler observes, may well be “a fugitive way” for certain kinds of “religion to survive”, are meshed together with the politics of representation and counter-representation of Islam and Muslims in the framing of identities. From the Babri masjid demolition to the wake of Ram mandir bhoomi pujan, and the hijab controversy, religion and culture run the risk of being employed in disloyalty, as a threat, in an artistically compromised manner. This article will examine how the tensions between individual subjectivity and a communitarian adherence to culture and faith manifest themselves in the present-day situation in India, as they negotiate between the pull of a liberal individualist lifestyle and that of family and community—between speaking as an “I” and on behalf of a collective.

Exploitation of Minority Community in Nasrin’s Lajja: Marxist Perspective

This paper seeks to examine the terrific effects of the economic exploitation and domination of the plebeian Hindu communities by the majority of aristocratic Muslim communities in Bangladesh in Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja. The genesis of the novel lies in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India by Hindu extremists on December 1, 1992, and its effects in Bangladesh thereafter. The destruction of the temples, burning down of shops and houses, and rape of the proletariat Hindu women clearly signify the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. The research tool used to survey the issue is the Marxist theoretical perspectives elaborated by Lois Tyson and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This conflict is similar to the scenario of Marxism, which deals with the conflict between the oppressed class and the oppressor. The Hindu minority community can be compared to the exploited class and the Muslim fundamentalists as the exploiters. The chief finding of the research is that the lower class Hindu women were raped, and the proletariat Hindu males were beaten; their property was destroyed or looted by the so-called Muslim capitalists, taking advantage of the weakness of the plebeians. Nasrin has portrayed the harassment, discrimination, and persecution of lower-class Hindu people by the bourgeois Muslims in Bangladesh. It is expected that readers opting to approach Nasrin from the Marxist perspective can take the paper as a reference.

Melancholia of the Past: Remembering Communal Violence in a Mumbai Slum

This article analyses how the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindu nationalists and the communal violence in its aftermath (1992–93) is remembered in a predominantly Muslim slum neighbourhood in Mumbai. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it considers how a traumatic event is given meaning through fragmented memories inscribed in the urban space. A nuanced analysis of the recollections of the city’s Muslim poor, who faced the main brunt of the violence, suggests that the spatial context of the Muslim neighbourhoods provide a safe social backdrop for the expression of an otherwise suppressed memory that has been pushed by the official narratives of the past into marginality, leading to the creation of an alternative sociality that addresses community concerns to break the hold of the past and imagine a future of peaceful cohabitation.

Modi is Hiding Behind the Cloak of Secularism to Promote Hindutva Ideology

Prior to Election, the mingling of politics with religion was practiced frequently throughout South Asia, including India. Modi, a fascist who employs the religion card to win the elections as Hindus are in the majority. The initiatives implemented in his first term helped him to win the 2019 elections. In addition, the popularity of Modi grew due to the Pulwama incident as he openly challenged and conducted an air strike against Pakistan. Modi won the second term with a promise to rebuild the Ram temple on the site of Babri Masjid, abrogate the special status of Occupied Jammu and Kashmir, and implement the Anti-Citizenship Act.More hate towards religious minorities, especially Muslims, exacerbates the Hindu Vote Bank. The Hardcore majority of Hindus and BJP applauded such Anti-Muslim promises and assisted him in procuring massive seats in Lok Shaba.

Settling the Unending Legal Battle for the Holy Site in Ayodhya: Revisiting the Ram Janmabhoomi – Babri Masjid Case

Settling the Unending Legal Battle for the Holy Site in Ayodhya: Revisiting the Ram Janmabhoomi – Babri Masjid Case

Myth, Memory, and Placemaking

The contested site of Ramjanmabhoomi in Ayodhya, India, has been reclaimed for building a Hindu temple following years of litigation and occupation of the site by Babri Mosque for more than three centuries. This temple is projected to be a monumental complex, a grand statement of Hindu faith in the divine king Rama. The site, while of immense significance as his birthplace, is projected to be a theme park designed as a visual spectacle. The article outlines an alternative conceptual framework for site design predicated on the idea of placemaking as a process for memory retrieval in the present and encoding memories for the future. Place images in literary and pictorial narratives depicting Rama’s life are building blocks of collective memory and have shaped actual landscapes in their likeness in the past. They are integral to memory formation and recall, and as such they have a significant role in reclaiming Ramjanmabhoomi as the legendary place of his birth and domicile. The temple is proposed to be situated in a narrative landscape that can speak of Rama’s person and deeds, its design language inspired by place images and ritual practices. Collective memory of Rama’s story can be recalled and reconstituted with the amplification of memory traces in site design, anchoring the emergent landscape narrative. The mnemonic landscape of Ramjanmabhoomi can be sustainably managed and become a model for reclaiming other sites across India that are associated with Rama’s story and help communicate the lost environmental ethos of living in harmony with nature.

Shock and shove: the embodied politics of force in India

ABSTRACT This essay examines the phenomenological and political dimensions of force in north India. Manifest as embodied experience, and as power and domination, force encompasses felt emotion and collective clout. Yet unlike other categories traversing the political and experiential, force has been comparatively understudied. This paper surveys ethnographic and historical examples where force is prevalent. We see it in urban life, as an idiom of moral states, as embedded in community narratives and social hierarchies, and as enacting political demarcations. A focus is on the 1992 nationalist destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, when force was invoked and expressed. Through this study, certain tensions and paradoxes are raised. Force is seen as indispensable to state authority and legal sanction. Simultaneously, it is a field of potentials irreducible to human intentions. While force is a recurring locus of impetus and influence, it is also volatile and delinquent. It gives us insight into moments of concatenation without presuming contained interest or enduring stability. Force, affective and effective, is also slippery and insurrectionary, illuminating processes of mutability and contingency, in India as elsewhere.

At the Crossroads of Law, Faith, Religion and History: A Study of the Supreme Court of India’s Judgment in the Ram Janmabhoomi – Babri Masjid Case

The Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment in the appeals pertaining to the Ram Janmabhoomi – Babri Masjid case on 9 November 2019, after a marathon hearing of 40 days and exhaustive discussions and deliberations on issues encompassing history, archaeology and of course law. The judgment has been praised for bringing a closure to a long-standing dispute in the most amicable and logical manner but has been equally criticised for incorrect application of law and for imposing unequal burden of proof on different parties. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has, itself, been criticised on moral grounds. Therefore, the author has inquisitively studied the encyclopaedic judgment, in quest of the truth, by tracing the complex factual and legal matrices of the case and by analyzing the manner in which the Supreme Court has decided the principal issues involved in the adjudication of this dispute. After having read the 1045 pages judgment and studying it with utmost sincerity, the author has come to the conclusion that the Supreme Court has decided this “title dispute” on the basis of settled principles of law and within the parameters prescribed by it, while maintaining its commitment to secularism at all times. This brilliantly crafted judgment, written with excellent clarity of thought, must be celebrated for gracefully bringing an end to a fractious dispute which had remained mired in the labyrinth of history, law, religion and politics since the inception of India.

Religious Literacy in Law: Anti-Muslim Initiatives in Quebec, the United States, and India

This inquiry examines how religious illiteracy amongst politicians, legislators, lawyers, and judges could lead to discriminatory legislations and increased persecution against religious minorities. We look at laws and legislations in three contexts, Quebec, the USA, and India, where anti-religious sentiments and violence are predominantly directed against Muslims. More specifically, we examine Quebec’s legal attempts, in the form of exclusive laïcité, to regulate religion and religious signs within the province; the recent ruling about converting the Babri mosque in India into a Hindu Temple; and anti-Shariah laws in the United States. Taken together, these justifications for anti-Muslim bills perpetuated illiteracy about both religion and the legal systems, leading the conditions for discrimination against religious minorities. We conclude that religious illiteracy, more specifically on the level of judiciaries and legislative bodies, presents a pressing threat to the safety and wellbeing of religious minorities, Muslims in particular, around the world.