Ayodhya - Modified
"The Ramayana is but a story from a long-gone time. But now, when news of the world war, atom bomb and Japan's surrender sweep the world like a firestorm, it is strangely relaxing, indeed soothing to escape into the capacious embrace of the epic and wander the imperial realms of Ayodhya..."
Ayodhya was on my travel wish-list for many years - perhaps ever since I read Pottekkat's article on a 1945 daytrip there in the company of nationalist firebrand Mathai Manjooran (who was then on the run from Brit police).
A pleasant november morning in 2023. We drove out of Allahabad and headed north past fertile cropland, dense villages and awfully congested towns. In contrast to a similar drive (to the south) from Jhunsi that happened six years ago, this one featured a recurring and very energizing sight - large troops of children, all in uniforms, going to school, with girls almost invariably outnumbering the boys. So, in the backwaters of UP, they have at last begun to padhao the betis.
Till the 1980s, Ayodhya must have been pretty much a sleepy, fly-blown pilgrim outpost, loosely attached to the larger town of Faizabad. Pottekkat never mentions the Masjid which must have been a very conspicuously big building in 1945.
Even post the fateful events of 1992, Ayodhya proper must have remained rather low-profile. I can only recall a TV interview in Malayalam of education magnate Fazal Ghafoor who visited the makeshift temple that stood for decades among the rubble of the mosque. Till I myself visited, I had known exactly one other person who had been there.
It would be interesting to quote a bit from Pottekkat about the 1945 Ayodhya:
"Buildings, many painted saffron, that densely clutter the narrow gallies bear no sign of affluence - they only display a certain fake religiosity that pays homage to an imagined past...Open Dharamsalas, humble hovels of the poor, dwellings of the Panda priests, pervasive filth...
Kanak bhavan is an elegant modern edifice, believed to have been built over an ancient palace where Rama and Sita dwelled.... inside, a beautiful carved mandap bears idols of Rama and Sita and an attendant operates a big Punkah over them. I must say the devotions done to those cheap effigies are an affront to our basic intelligence. Kanak Bhavan too, in its many-times-reworked modern avatar is an intense disappointment. Indeed, to me, even if Kanak Bhavan were a grand Taj Mahal-like structure, the dusappointment would remain. For Rama's grand citadel that flourished many millennia ago belongs purely in our imagination; the sanctity of the site would be truly enhanced if they merely dismantle everything to the last brick and plant a simple board "here stood Lord Rama's palace"!
The Ayodhya that I saw consists of (1) a row of ghats lining the Sarayu river - plus an artificially created inlet lined by very out-of-some-cheap-film-set looking religious edifices, (2) a new-looking and wide 2 km long double road (ideal for 'road shows' I guess) that connects the ghats with the core area of Ramkot and (3) the 'Janmabhumi' area which lies a further half kilometer beyond.
Ramkot still appears to retain something of the old Ayodhya; narrow gallies, clusters of temples, none - with the possible exception of the Rajdwar temple - possessing any real grandeur but very bustling and vital nevertheless and throngs of devout pilgrims. On some of the roads leading away from Ramkot stand old and dusty mansions mostly built by religious orders. I suspect the double road, so manifestly a very recent creation of Modi's, must have flattened many buildings, dwellings, bazars and shrines.
Ayodhya has no stray dogs but hordes of monkeys and most possess lotus-colored backsides that once got the goat of Ramanujacharya.
I love pastiche architecture (mostly religious, mostly of Hindu persuasion) and have written here about the 'folkified' Shah Jahani arches and brightly painted domes of Chitrakoot . (Pre-Modi) Ayodhya too adopted those Mughal innovations bigtime but it also displays an even greater fascination for heraldic beasts (mostly lions) and Corinthian columns (well, what one sees are mostly fancy pilasters rather than proper columns but what really beats me is the question "Why Corinthian?" - one hardly sees, for example, ionic columns in modern Hindu buildings!).
What follows is a little gallery - it also features some elegant and partially ruined mansions with other ideosyncratic traits like 'arches embedded in arches'. Can you spot, in one of the pics, a Corinthian object that is both horizontal (!) and double-headed(!!)??
But the greatest surprise for me was this object:
Looking like a big set-square (btw, 'set-square' is not a square, so it's a compound that is not a tatpurusha), it is a monument to Princess Hui or Heo Hwang-ok who traveled from here ('Ayuta' as per tradition) to Korea, married a prince there and is a sort of 'mitochondrial Eve' to a large fraction of the Korean population.
I missed to ask around about Kanak Bhavan. But instead of Rama-Sita being reverentially fanned, I got to see Radha-Krishna ceremonially rocked - of course, at this roadside shrine, one is expected to pay for the right to work that swing!
Approaching the site where a mosque once stood and Modi is building an immense new temple, the guards told me it would open only in the afternoon and that one has to leave even cellphones in some cloakroom. From where I stood I could see a very persistent cloud of dust and huge cranes. I chose to retreat; maybe I shouldn't have.
Ayodhya was on my travel wish-list for many years - perhaps ever since I read Pottekkat's article on a 1945 daytrip there in the company of nationalist firebrand Mathai Manjooran (who was then on the run from Brit police).
A pleasant november morning in 2023. We drove out of Allahabad and headed north past fertile cropland, dense villages and awfully congested towns. In contrast to a similar drive (to the south) from Jhunsi that happened six years ago, this one featured a recurring and very energizing sight - large troops of children, all in uniforms, going to school, with girls almost invariably outnumbering the boys. So, in the backwaters of UP, they have at last begun to padhao the betis.
Till the 1980s, Ayodhya must have been pretty much a sleepy, fly-blown pilgrim outpost, loosely attached to the larger town of Faizabad. Pottekkat never mentions the Masjid which must have been a very conspicuously big building in 1945.
Even post the fateful events of 1992, Ayodhya proper must have remained rather low-profile. I can only recall a TV interview in Malayalam of education magnate Fazal Ghafoor who visited the makeshift temple that stood for decades among the rubble of the mosque. Till I myself visited, I had known exactly one other person who had been there.
It would be interesting to quote a bit from Pottekkat about the 1945 Ayodhya:
"Buildings, many painted saffron, that densely clutter the narrow gallies bear no sign of affluence - they only display a certain fake religiosity that pays homage to an imagined past...Open Dharamsalas, humble hovels of the poor, dwellings of the Panda priests, pervasive filth...
Kanak bhavan is an elegant modern edifice, believed to have been built over an ancient palace where Rama and Sita dwelled.... inside, a beautiful carved mandap bears idols of Rama and Sita and an attendant operates a big Punkah over them. I must say the devotions done to those cheap effigies are an affront to our basic intelligence. Kanak Bhavan too, in its many-times-reworked modern avatar is an intense disappointment. Indeed, to me, even if Kanak Bhavan were a grand Taj Mahal-like structure, the dusappointment would remain. For Rama's grand citadel that flourished many millennia ago belongs purely in our imagination; the sanctity of the site would be truly enhanced if they merely dismantle everything to the last brick and plant a simple board "here stood Lord Rama's palace"!
The Ayodhya that I saw consists of (1) a row of ghats lining the Sarayu river - plus an artificially created inlet lined by very out-of-some-cheap-film-set looking religious edifices, (2) a new-looking and wide 2 km long double road (ideal for 'road shows' I guess) that connects the ghats with the core area of Ramkot and (3) the 'Janmabhumi' area which lies a further half kilometer beyond.
Ramkot still appears to retain something of the old Ayodhya; narrow gallies, clusters of temples, none - with the possible exception of the Rajdwar temple - possessing any real grandeur but very bustling and vital nevertheless and throngs of devout pilgrims. On some of the roads leading away from Ramkot stand old and dusty mansions mostly built by religious orders. I suspect the double road, so manifestly a very recent creation of Modi's, must have flattened many buildings, dwellings, bazars and shrines.
Ayodhya has no stray dogs but hordes of monkeys and most possess lotus-colored backsides that once got the goat of Ramanujacharya.
I love pastiche architecture (mostly religious, mostly of Hindu persuasion) and have written here about the 'folkified' Shah Jahani arches and brightly painted domes of Chitrakoot . (Pre-Modi) Ayodhya too adopted those Mughal innovations bigtime but it also displays an even greater fascination for heraldic beasts (mostly lions) and Corinthian columns (well, what one sees are mostly fancy pilasters rather than proper columns but what really beats me is the question "Why Corinthian?" - one hardly sees, for example, ionic columns in modern Hindu buildings!).
What follows is a little gallery - it also features some elegant and partially ruined mansions with other ideosyncratic traits like 'arches embedded in arches'. Can you spot, in one of the pics, a Corinthian object that is both horizontal (!) and double-headed(!!)??
But the greatest surprise for me was this object:
Looking like a big set-square (btw, 'set-square' is not a square, so it's a compound that is not a tatpurusha), it is a monument to Princess Hui or Heo Hwang-ok who traveled from here ('Ayuta' as per tradition) to Korea, married a prince there and is a sort of 'mitochondrial Eve' to a large fraction of the Korean population.
I missed to ask around about Kanak Bhavan. But instead of Rama-Sita being reverentially fanned, I got to see Radha-Krishna ceremonially rocked - of course, at this roadside shrine, one is expected to pay for the right to work that swing!
Approaching the site where a mosque once stood and Modi is building an immense new temple, the guards told me it would open only in the afternoon and that one has to leave even cellphones in some cloakroom. From where I stood I could see a very persistent cloud of dust and huge cranes. I chose to retreat; maybe I shouldn't have.
posted by R.Nandakumar @ 12:03 AM
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