What will Ram temple symbolise for you?

Inside Out

The temple has been on many minds since the Bhoomipujan of August 5. The-mosque-that-once-was has also been in our thoughts. The building of a grand temple to Rama on the same spot where the Babri Masjid once stood is something so many of us are finding hard to wrap our heads around. What does the temple stand for now? What does it symbolise?

As I heard the speeches made after the Bhoomipujan and took in the enormity of the moment, a part of my mind felt as though I was watching not the building of a new temple but the inauguration of a new India. An India that would run according to principles very different from the ones chosen at the birth of the Republic. Prime Minister Modi had just performed an hour-long puja on live TV to mark the start of the temple’s construction. The temple was being described as the new symbol of national integration. Where was the Constitution in all of this, I wondered.

RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat and Modi soon went on to speak of the temple as the symbol of a self-confident and self-reliant India. They also hailed it as a modern-day marker of India’s ancient ethos of peaceful co-existence with all. The prime minister quoted from Tulsidas’ Ramayan or the Ramcharitmanas to great effect, describing how the temple was linked to creating a society with a place for all strata of people, invoking the ideal of ‘Ram Rajya’ no doubt.

As the number of things the temple was supposed to symbolise mounted, I remembered something I had read in the columns of those who had covered the Babri Masjid demolition. They spoke of how it was important even then to have distinguished between the devotion of common Hindus for the birthplace of Rama and the political movement that had seized the initiative to milk this sentiment for whatever grievance there was in it. I saw this same sentiment of simple devotion reflected on my social media timelines that day. To many Hindus, then, the temple stood for belief in something bigger than themselves. It was simply the supreme object of their bhakti.

It would never be as simple for me, alas. But watching the scenes unfold on TV, I too found myself responding to something other than a sense of fear and disbelief at the proceedings unfolding in front of me. Perhaps it was a flicker of recognition — nothing more — that what responded in me to the beauty of Tulsidas’ words, and the gentleness and generosity of Rama that I could sense, was also active in those before me on the stage, no matter what their lapses as people were.

It was something vague, difficult to explain. I knew it was the intimation of something bigger than the treasure trove of my likes and dislikes. How? I was crying by now, grief mixed with something less definable. Something that felt like a release. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the despicable, the right and the wrong all mixed up. Like they are in all human beings.

This is the thing, then, that I took away from Ayodhya on August 5: The Ram temple will be a reminder of the failures of our State, our politics and our society; but it will also be a reminder of what we need to do to help us stay the course henceforth.

Let me put it another way. That day in Ayodhya, no one mentioned Ravana. But Ravana was liberated by Rama, not just killed by him, at the end of their epic battle. The teaching there is that we must liberate the tendency in us to hate and allow it to be won over by the essence of love. That is what Rama stands for and that is what his temple, too, must represent. It is this understanding that must guide us now in the long fight that awaits us against what is unjust in this land. Fight we must, but without anger or hate. This is what the temple will symbolise for me. What does it symbolise for you?