SHRI RAMA TEMPLE SITE - AKA DEMOLISHED BABRI MASJID SHIT !!!! PART 1

[ravi]

http://www.voiceofdharma.org/books/ayodhya/ch1.htm

Before the Masjid, the Mandir

The historical starting point of the Ram Janmabhoomi issue is the
contention that the Babri Masjid structure in Ayodhya was built after
the forcible demolition of a Hindu temple on the same spot by Muslim
soldiers. In the first part of my book Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri
Masjid, a Case Study in Hindu-Muslim conflict,1 I have dealt
extensively with the arguments given pro and contra this contention.
The case can be summarized as follows.

There is archaeological evidence that a temple, or at the very least a
building with pillars, has stood on the Babri Masjid spot since the
eleventh century. Of course, because of the structure standing there,
the archaeological search has been far from exhaustive, but at least
of the existence of this 11th century building we can be certain.2

When the building was destroyed, we do not know precisely, there are
no descriptions of the event extent anywhere. Mohammed Ghori's armies
arrived there in 1194, and they may have destroyed it. It may have
been rebuilt afterwards, or it may only have been destroyed by later
Muslim rulers of the area. so it is possible that when Mir Baqi,
Babar's lieutenant, arrived there in 1528, he found a heap of rubble,
or an already aging mosque, rather than a magnificent Hindu temple.

However, it is very unlikely that the place was not functioning as a
Hindu place of worship just before the Babri Masjid was built. As is
well known, fourteen pillar-stones with Hindu temple ornamentation
have been used in the construction of the Babri Masjid. Considering
the quantity of bricks employed in the building, one cannot say that
these fourteen pillar- stones were used merely to economize on bricks:
quantitatively, they simply didn't make a difference. These remnants
of Hindu architecture were more probably use in order to display the
victory of the mosque over the temple, of Islam over Paganism. That
was in keeping with a very common practice of Muslim conquerors, who
often left pieces of the outer wall of the destroyed temple standing
(as was done in the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, replacing the Kashi
Vishvanath temple), or worked pieces of idols into the threshold of
the newly- built mosque, so that the faithful could tread them
underfoot.

Since the actual practice in the case of the Babri Masjid conforms to
this general pattern, we may infer that in all probability the Masjid
was built in the same material circumstances in which the pattern
normally applied, viz. just after the demolition of a Pagan place of
worship. This is all the more probable considering that no alternative
explanations for the presence of these Hindu pillar-stones have been
offered, not even by those historians who would have an ideological
and argumentative interest in doing so.

In methodological terms, our conclusion that the use of Hindu remnants
in the mosque building indicates an immediately preceding temple
demolition because such a sequence fulfills a common pattern, is based
on the principle of coherence. This principle as a ground for
historical inference does not given absolute certainty, but at least a
good measure of probability. But conversely, a contention that
violates the principle of coherence without being supported by hard
evidence, thereby becomes very improbable. As we shall see, the
advocates of the Babri Masjid cause, including a team of 25 JNU
historians, have disregarded the coherence principle in central points
of their argumentation.

In their well-known and oft-quoted statement on the Ayodhya
controversy, the JNU historians have rejected the contention that
there was a temple on the disputed spot before the Babri Masjid was
built there.3 This is a wildly improbable contention. There is a
general cultural pattern that would have made people build a temple
there, a very important one.

If you go to Ayodhya and walk to the Masjid/Janmabhoomi, you will find
yourself walking uphill, even after passing the Hanuman Garhi which
itself is on a little hill. Relative to the flatness of the entire
Ganga basin, the disputed split is quite an elevated place, and it
overlooks Ayodhya. Now, either prince Rama was a historical character,
born in the castle of the local ruler, which would logically (i.e.
strategically) have been built on this elevation, and then his
birthplace temple would also have to be there. Or we do not assume
Ram's historicity (without necessarily excluding it) and we also do
not assume that he was born there, which is the JNU historians'
position, and then the question is reduced to whether people would
have refrained from building a temple on this hilltop.

Ayodhya is a place of pilgrimage and temple city of long standing. The
JNU historians themselves cite evidence that it housed important
temples of the Buddhists, Shaivas and Jains. In such a temple city par
excellence, it is virtually impossible that the geographical place of
honour would have been left unused. The contention that there was no
temple on the Babri Masjid site goes against all we know of ritual
patterns in the lay-out of sacred places the world over: it violates
the principle of coherence.

That the Babri Masjid replaced a pre-existent centre of worship, is
also indicated by the fact that Hindus kept returning to the place,
where more indulgent Muslim rulers allowed them to worship on a
platform just outside the mosque. This is attested by a number of
different pieces of testimony by Western travelers and by local
Muslims, all of the pre-British period, as well as from shortly after
the 1856 British take-over but explicitly referring to older local
Muslim sources. A number of these documents have been presented by
Harsh Narain4 and A.K. Chatterjee5. That they are authentic and have a
real proof value, is indirectly corroborated by the attempts made to
make two of them disappear, which Harsh Narain and Arun Shourie
independently discovered6.

Most of these sources explicitly declare that the Babri Masjid had
replaced an earlier Hindu temple, and even specify that it has been
Ram's birthplace temple. But whatever their historical explanation for
this unusual phenomenon of Hindus insisting on worshipping in a
mosque's courtyard, they testify to the existing practice. And these
Hindus were going into a mosque courtyard for specifically Hindu
worship -- not for common Hindu-Muslim worship of some local Sufi, as
you find in some places, but for separate Hindu worship of Lord Ram.
The JNU historians completely fail to explain this well attested fact.

The attachment of the Hindus to the Babri Masjid spot cannot
reasonably have originated in the period when the mosque was standing
there. For the sake of argument, we might opine that perhaps a great
miracle happened on the spot, sometime later than 1528: but in that
case, there would be a tradition saying so. No, the Hindus' attachment
to the spot clearly dates back to pre-Masjid days, and stems from a
pre-existent tradition of worship on that very spot. Since this near
inevitable assumption is corroborated by all relevant documents and by
the local Hindu tradition, and is not contradicted by any authentic
source giving a different explanation, we might as well accept it.

However, while the inference that there was a pre- existent tradition
of worship on the spot is necessary for explaining the Hindus'
centuries-long attachment to the place, it may not be sufficient.
There are many destroyed temples to which Hindus have not kept
returning. They simply built a new temple somewhere else, and even
when Muslim power ended, they stayed with the new arrangement and
forgot about the destroyed and abandoned temple. If they were so
attached to the place, it is probably not because the erstwhile temple
had made it important, but because the place had an importance of its
own, and retained its special character even regardless of there being
a temple in place or not. This assumption is coherent with the
unanimous and uncontradicted testimony of Hindu and pre-colonial
Muslim and Western sources, that the place was believed to be Ram's
birthplace.

When in December 1990 the Chandra Shekhar government asked both
parties to collect evidence for their case, a small group of scholars,
on being invited by the VHP, traced some more strong pieces of
documentary evidence. At the same time, dr. S.P. Gupta and Prof. B.B.
Lal came out with unambiguous archaeological and iconographical proof
that a Vaishnava temple has stood at the site until it was replaced
with the Babri Masjid. By contrast, the Babri Masjid Action Committee
could only muster a pile of newspaper clippings, articles and book
extracts by partisan writers who gave their anti-Mandir opinion, but
no evidence whatsoever. The Hindu team of scholars had no difficulty
in demonstrating, in a rejoinder, the utter lack of proof value of the
AIBMAC evidence. The VHP documents Evidence for the Ram Janmabhoomi
Mandir and Rejoinder to the AIBMAC Documents are the definitive
scholarly statement on the Ayodhya dispute.

There is one architectural argument which has not been used in the VHP
evidence bundle, though it seems quite pertinent to me. The central
dome of the Masjid is slightly deformed, and it is supported by a
front wall that forms a sort of screen before part of the dome. The
reason seems to be that the builders had to adjust the upper part of
the Masjid to the walls and pillars of the pre-existing Mandir, which
they were incorporating rather than razing them flat and starting
totally anew.

1.2 Methodological Errors
In order to save their contention that the Babri Masjid was not built
on a Hindu place of worship (let alone a specially sacred place),
several Babarwadis have resorted to questioning the validity of the
documents attesting the Hindu worship in the Masjid courtyard during
the period of Muslim rule. Their claim is that all those authors, as
well as the Hindu worshippers who they described, were mistaken : they
had unknowingly swallowed a false rumor which from about 1800 onwards
the British had consciously floated in order to create Hindu-Muslim
riots, which they hoped would help them in eventually annexing Awadh,
the state of which Ayodhya was a part. This hypothesis is quite an
amazing construction.

First of all, four of the sources are pre-1800. The Western travelers
William Finch and father Tieffenthaler visited Ayodhya in 1608 and
1767 respectively. A document by a Faizabad Qazi proving that Hindus
used the mosque courtyard for worship and wanted to take over the
Masjid itself, and a letter by Aurangzeb's granddaughter encouraging
the Muslims to assert their hold over ex- Hindu shrines at Varanasi,
Mathura and Ayodhya, were written in the first half of the eighteenth
century.

Secondly, the Babarwadis want us to believe that the local Hindus
decided to set up a puja tradition in a mosque courtyard and thereby
constantly risk a lot of trouble with the Muslim population and
rulers, just because some foreign paleface came to tell them that in
their elaborate Ram tradition one little piece of information was
missing, which he then promptly furnished : Ram had been born right
there on that mosque spot. This is not at all coherent with all that
we know about religious traditions in general and brahminical
pilgrimage traditions in particular : it arbitrarily assumed an
extreme gullibility, an astonishing lack of serieux concerning the
native sacred tradition among the very guardians of that tradition,
and an uncharacteristic openness to utterly non-expert foreign opinion
(even today they will have nothing of the chronology imposed on Indian
history by scholars).

Thirdly, that the British concocted a story of temple demolition and
replacement by a mosque, because that would create riots, presupposes
that they had to break a state of communal harmony, which existed in
spite of the fact that the country was full of demolished temple
demolitions failed to create trouble, why concoct one? Or why not
start with exploiting to the full the trouble- making potential of the
non-concocted temple demolitions? The postulated rumour is not known
to be part of a British tactic attested anywhere.

But all right, sometimes very improbable and uncharacteristic
scenarios turn out to be true,. So even while the hypothesis of the
British concoction of a Ram temple destroyed by Babar is grossly
incoherent with our general knowledge relevant to the issue, I would
be willing to consider it if they manage to come up with a single
positive indication : a letter by a British officer mentioning the
creation of this rumour, for instance. But the 25 eminent JNU
historians, quoted by every secularist in India, and other academics
like Gyanendra Pandey or R.S. Sharma, have not come up with a single
piece of evidence. In the numerous and voluminous archives of the
British Raj that are still extant, they have not found anything. They
have not even come up with any similar British ruse in any other part
of India. Therefore, the hypothesis that the destruction of a Hindu
temple and its replacement by the Babri Masjid is merely a rumour
created by the British as part of their "divide and rule" policy, has
to be rejected as both extremely improbable and totally unsupported by
evidence.

The British concoction hypothesis is not only untenable. It is so far
off the mark, so totally out of tune with the known historical and
cultural context, so totally unsuggested by any relevant document,
that no unbiased historian would ever have come up with it. It
warrants a suspicion against the pretended objectivity and scientific
temper of the secularist participants in this debate.

In methodological terms, we could say that the pro-Babri case,
including the JNU professors' statement, violates the principle that
"entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity", also know as
"Occam's razor". Against every element in the very coherent hypothesis
of the pre- existent Ram Mandir, they have to invent a counter-
hypothesis, altogether a long string of separate ad hoc hypotheses, of
which it remains to be proven that they add up to a coherent scenario.
What is more, while the Ram Mandir hypothesis is coherent with well-
established behavior patterns (of general city building, of Hindu
devotion, of Muslim conquest, of British colonial policy), and
postulates little more than that the general pattern applied in
Ayodhya as well, the JNU historians continually have to postulate
uncharacteristic courses of events.

Thus, in postulating that the Babri Masjid was built on empty land,
they implicitly postulate that the Ayodhya people for some reason made
an exception to the custom of building something important on the
place which by its elevation was the place of honour in their city.
This special entity which the JNU historians implicitly create within
their theory, and of which they should accept the burden of tracing
the existence in reality.

For another example, in postulating that the Hindus did not have a
pre-1528 tradition of worship on the Janmabhoomi spot, they are forced
to create within their scenario a reason why the Hindus suddenly
engaged in the strange behavior of defying the Muslim rulers by
starting a strictly Hindu worship right in a mosque's courtyard. They
implicitly postulate a highly unusual event that made the Hindus
behave so uncharacteristically. This event is another entity they
create, and of which they should show the historicity.

When you analyze and explicate all the implications of the secularist
historians' version of the Babri Masjid story, you find that they in
fact postulate a great many unusual entities. And they create them
purely in the air : not a trace of evidence of a reason for leaving
the place of honour in Ayodhya unused, no evidence for an event that
made the Hindus start worship in the till then unimportant mosque
courtyard, no evidence for a British rumour campaign. If the
(explicitly or implicitly) postulated scenario elements were found to
correspond to a real historical entity or event, then they would not
be a multiplication of entities beyond necessity. But so far, the anti-
Mandir scenario is dependent on a multiplicity of entities postulated
ad hoc, beyond necessity. Beyond necessity, because there is a
coherent alternative scenario that integrates all the available
information : the Ram Mandir hypothesis.

The argumentation developed by anti-Mandir polemists like Syed
Shahabuddin, Mrs. Surinder Kaur 7, and the JNU historians, is simply
unbecoming of educated people. This postulating of very improbable
theoretical possibilities without any coherence is not really the
scholarly defense of an alternative Ayodhya scenario, it is just a
diversionary tactic made up to put the pro- Mandir people on the
defensive. As the historian Sita Ram Goel has said, it is a typical
strategy of unscrupled lawyers. For instance, in the Indira Gandhi
murder trial, the facts were amply clear, and all that an honest
defense lawyer could do, was to pleas circumstances in order to avert
the death penalty. But no, they constructed a fantastic scenario,
bringing in a conspiracy involving Indira's son Rajiv, totally
unfounded, but enough to jeopardize the prosecution case for a little
while, by forcing it to prove what it had considered evident and
already sufficiently proven. Of course, lawyers are paid by clients to
try such un- truthful tactics, so we may perhaps forgive them. In the
case of historians, or even for politicians claiming high ideals, this
is unacceptable.

Incidentally, the same methodological mistake is made, though less
blatantly, in the discussion of Ayodhya's ancient history. The
contention that the Ramayana is just fictional, postulates a non-
typical cultural phenomenon which needs an explanation, a reason (i.e.
a theoretical entity). After all, what great epic in any ancient
culture is known to have been purely fiction? Western scholars long
thought that Homer's epic on the Trojan war was pure fiction, until
Heinrich Schliemann started digging and found Troy. So long as no
independent indications for the Ramayana's purely fictional character
are given, it is more logical to assume that, like most ancient epics,
it has a historical core with a lot of fabulation around it.

But the ancient history is not what concerns us here. It is far more
difficult to get at conclusive evidence regarding Ram's existence,
era, abode etc., but fortunately it is not important for the political
issue which historians are called upon to help solve. Once it is
established that there was a Ram temple on the spot, and that there is
a genuine tradition that considers it Ram's birthplace, then the am
Janmabhoomi should get equal respect with other sacred places, like
the Kaaba, of whom nobody asks whether Mohammed's claim that it was
built by Abraham, is at all historical. The question is only whether
it is indeed a Hindu sacred place, not why it is one.

1.3 Who built Babar's mosque?
An entirely different aspect of the Babri Masjid's history is whether
it really was built by Babar (or his lieutenant Mir Baqi) at all. The
JNU historians have chosen to cast some doubt on this assumption,
which so far had seemed evident because it is confirmed by the Persian
inscriptions on the building, itself. Another secularist, Sushil
Shrivastava, has made much of the matter, and opines that the
inscriptions are a later forgery (on the ground that the calligraphic
style is anachronistic), and that the structure was built under Khwaja-
i-Jahan in the fourteenth century8. His justification for this dating
is the architecture of the building, especially its imperfect domes,
which in his opinion must have been built before the dome architecture
was perfected under the Delhi-based Turkish sultans in the fifteenth
century.

Of course, this architectural anachronism, it at all substantiated,
can easily be explained in other ways, starting with the general fact
that architectural innovations spread only gradually. Moreover, Mr.
Srivastava's somewhat unexpected theory leaves its proponent with the
task of explaining how and why the mosque came to be associated with
Babar. On the other hand, it would take the last bit of force out of
the (already discredited) argument that Babar cannot have demolished a
temple on that spot as sources of the Moghul period do not mention the
temple demolition : the "Babri Masjid would have been a long-
accomplished fact by the Moghul period, but it could just as much have
replaced a Hindu temple under an earlier ruler".

In fact, the two contentions that the Mosque was built before Babar,
and that it was built on a forcibly demolished temple, have been
combined by R. Nath. when he read in the Indian Express that pages of
his own book History of Mughal Architecture had been included in the
pro-Babri and anti-Mandir evidence of the BMAC, presented to the
government of India on December 23, 1990, he sent in a reply, in which
he stated that he was completely sure that the Masjid had been built
on a temple, and that inspection on the spot had confirmed him in this
conviction. On the other hand, he argued that the mosque cannot have
been built by Babar or Mir Baqi, because in their brief stay in this
area they had to wage a difficult struggle against the Pathans, and
had no time for building mosques. Rather, the earlier Muslim rulers of
the area could have demolished the temple and replaced it with the
mosque. Mir Baqi at most renovated it, and does not claim more than
that this happened under Babar's reign (rather than at Babar's
command, though this translation is disputed).

But theories about the exact date of the Babri Masjid construction are
not really to the point, except in so far as they can or cannot be
coordinated with other data. At any rate, the Muslim habit of
destroying Hindu temples and replacing them with mosques, often using
some of the temple materials as a display of victory over Paganism,
has remained unchanged during the entire Turko- Afghan and Moghul
period. Whether the temple was destroyed by Mohammed Ghori in 1194, or
by Babar, or by a ruler in between these two, or even by more than one
of them (since Hindus were tireless rebuilders if given a chance),
this all makes no difference to the facts pertinent for the Hindu
case: one, there was a temple there since at least the eleventh
century, attested by archaeology : two, the use of temple materials in
the Babri Masjid entirely fulfills a set pattern of temple destruction
followed by replacement with a mosque; three, Hindus continued to
worship on the spot to the extent possible, as witnessed by travelers
and locals, something they would never have done except on a specially
sacred spot and in continuation of a pre-Masjid tradition.

In keeping with the internationally accepted standards of methodology
and inference in scientific history-writing, we may conclude that all
the indications available confirm the traditional belief, consensually
held by the local Muslims as well as Hindus, that the Babri Masjid was
built in replacement of a Hindu temple where Ram worship used to take
place.

In fact, this conclusion is merely a restatement of what was a matter
of consensus until a few years ago. This time it is supported by a
bundle of evidence, but it had been known all along. It is only
recently that politically motivated academics have manufactured doubts
concerning this coherent and well-attested tradition. And it is not on
the strength of arguments, but exclusively through their grip on the
media, that they temporarily managed to create the impression that the
Hindu case was built on myth and concoction.

As Lenin, Goebbels and other masters of lies knew, it is sufficient to
repeat a big lie often enough, to make it pass as truth. So, the truly
outstanding feature of the Leftists' and Muslim fanatics' campaign of
distortion has been its shameless persistence. No matter what hard
evidence they got confronted with, the Romila Thapars and R.S. Sharmas
just kept on lambasting the Hindu side for distorting history and
concocting evidence and for merely bluffing in the face of
"incontrovertible evidence that no Ram temple ever stood on the
site".

While they had not given any such evidence nor replied to the pro-
Mandir evidence (they have kept on willfully ignoring B.B. Lal's
affirmation of strong archaeological evidence, and have not addressed
the massive documentary evidence at all)9, they kept up the offensive
and absurdly accused the other side of not facing the evidence. The
way the anti-Mandir falsehoods have been given wide currency in
1989-91 will make an interesting case study for future scholars. A
classic in propaganda.