Imagining Ayodhyfi: Utopia and its shadows in a Hindu landscape

Philip Lutgendorf

RS.ma is king, Ayodhya his capital, and gods and sages hymn their glory.

--Tulsid~s

Oh beautiful for patriot dream, that sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears!

--Katherine l ee Bates

IMAGINING CITIES

I still recall my surprise when, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I learned that the motto of the city in which I resided was the Latin Urbs in horto - - ' c i ty in a garden'--a phrase that evoked an image of a sylvan paradise that, from my perspective on the congested South Side, seemed utterly incongruous. This incongruity (and the incongruity of my beginning an essay on Ayodhy~ in this manner) is introduced merely to emphasize that cities exist as much in the imagination as on the earth's surface. Idealizations of urban space in various cultures are diverse, but not unlimited; most often they invoke a fairly identi- fiable repertoire of archetypes of centrality and power: the crossroads, the sacred center, the city as man..dala or imago mundi. Such notions may become reified in the most concrete terms, to affect the shape and substance of people's daily lives. Urban archetypes may be imaginatively located beyond this world (for example, the heavenly Jerusalem, the eternal K~I-), but they are equally likely to be situated in an imagined past, and actual projects of urban construction often

International Journal of Hindu Studies 1, 1 (April 1997): 19-54. © 1997 by the World Heritage Press Inc.

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reflect nostalgia. To offer another (and last) example from Chicago: when a group of industrialists and educators at the close of the nineteenth century decided to construct an institution of higher learning in that city, they could not imagine it otherwise than as a medieval European university. And so (in the very center of innovative American architecture, renowned for the buildings of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan) the patrons' city-within-a-city--the University of Chicago ~ t o o k shape as a series of gray Gothic quadrangles with narrow casement windows, gargoyles, and key buildings reproduced in careful detail from Oxford, England; a visual project as anachronistic as would be, a few decades later, Madanmohan Malaviya's Banaras Hindu University, with its neo-R.~jpfit towers and gateways.

Recent events in India remind us that the consequences of urban imaginings are not simply architectonic; they may be social and political, even fatal to large numbers of people. The city of Ayodhy.~ in district Faizabad of Uttar Pradesh, a once-quiet pilgrimage town of monasteries and temples that occasionally swelled with visitors for a few annual fairs (me/ds), recently became an international cause c616bre and the focus of a domestic controversy that periodically exploded in horrific violence, precipitated the downfall of a central government and the rise of a new opposition party, and was seen by many as a rock on which the ship of state secularism, confidently launched by the founders of the nation, would finally run aground. The polarized debate over the alleged janmabhami Coirth- place) of the epic hero R~u-na has also produced a flood of publications that examine existing historical and archeological evidence regarding claims and counter-claims to the site from virtually every conceivable angle (e.g., Aggarwal and Chowdhry 1991; Chandran n.d.; Elst 1990, 1991; Engineer 1990; Gopal 1991; Shourie, Narain, Dubashi, Swarup, and Goel 1990; Srivastava 1991a). I The destruction of the sixteenth-century Babrg masjid (Babur's mosque) by a Hindu mob on December 6, 1992 unleashed another terrible wave of violence, the wounds of which, for some, will never heal. Yet the future fate of the site-- as historical monument, rebuilt mosque, or grandiose temple--remains a focus of obsessive imaginings, which reveal contesting visions of what Ayodhyi, and indeed India, ought to be.

My intention in this essay is to supplement several recent contributions to the understanding of religious nationalism and of the complexity of Hindu-Muslim relations in South Asia (e.g., King 1994; Ludden 1996; van der Veer 1994), by situating them against an urban and utopian paradigm that has persisted through some two and a half millennia. This paradigm---of an ideal city that epitomizes culture-specific notions of the good life has its locus classicus in the poet V~lmiki's description of the Ayodhy~ of the II~.viku dynasty, and its features remain discernible in the works of numerous later poets. By interpreting its

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presence (and at times, absence) particularly in literature produced during the past millennium, I hope to contribute to answering the question, posed by many Indian intellectuals in the wake of the Ayodhyi controversy, of how an obscure, abandoned mosque in a provincial backwater, the object of a local lawsuit that had been stalemated for decades, could so rapidly become the focus of nationwide emotion, controversy, and turmoil.

AYODHY,~: FOUND AND LOST

The city which will eventually become Rama's capital is the subject of two well-known chapters near the beginning of the Sanskrit epic R~m@an.a (sargas five and six in the Baroda critical edition; see Goldman 1984: 134-37). Their description of a vast and uncommonly prosperous city establishes an important literary archetype; later writers on poetics would prescribe that every great poem (/aivya) contain a description of a city through which its hero journeys, and most of these cities would resemble Vilmiki's Ayodhy~ (Ramanujan 1970: 229). A few points regarding the Sanskrit poet's description are relevant to my present topic. First, although the epic's account is hyperbolic and generalized, it is not altogether unrealistic. If one assumes (as many scholars now do) that the core of the poem was composed as early as ca. the fifth century BCE, a period charac- terized by increasing urbanization of the eastern Gangetic plain, one may discern, beneath the hyperbole, an appreciative enumeration of precisely those amenities which separate urban from rural life. 2 A second observation concerns the structure of the account, which moves from a predominantly physical description of the metropolis in sarga five--its 'chessboard' layout of thoroughfares, parks, and palatial dwellings--to an account of the condition of its citizens in sarga six. This stresses their economic prosperity, physical beauty, and health, as well as their extraordinary and uniform virtue, their adherence to the moral order of va.r~tgrama dharma, with its precise delineation of social classes and activities appropriate to the different stages of life (Ram@an.a 1.6.6-17). The two quali- ties of prosperity and virtue appear to be, in the poet's mind, intimately linked: dual aspects of a single goodness. As one verse puts it, 'No one was lacking in either rings or self-control' (Ramayan. a 1.6.11). The result is not simply a civi- lization but a utopia that reproduces on earth a celestial archetype, hence the metropolis is twice compared to the divine city of Amarivati and its king to Indra (R~mayana 1.5.15, 1.6.5). This city will be the focus of much of the epic: the backdrop for the events in Books One and Two that introduce the hero and impel him on his wanderings; the absent presence that haunts his exile and later

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struggle to recover his abducted wife; and the scene of his triumphant return and reign in Book Seven, which will lift the city to a still-higher perfection. As A. K. Ramanujan observed, the capital of Kosala 'is in f/act identified with the perfect hero .... [T]he Scene (Ayodhyi) and the Agent (RSxaa) are one' (1970: 232). Later devotional poets like Tulsidas will stress this identity: 'AyodhyA is wherever RS.rna resides' (Ramcaritmanas 2.74.3). Such epic treatments establish a paradigm that might also be expressed as a formula: 'righteous god-king = ideal city-state = cosmic order.'

Recent historical research, however, suggests that the process by which this epic hero and setting became associated with a mundane locale was a gradual one. Despite the recent flurry of publications inspired by the janmabhami con- troversy, the most comprehensive study of Rama's city remains Hans Bakker's monumental Ayodhya (1986); the historical development it meticulously traces warrants summarizing here. s According to Bakker, the site now identified as 'Ayodhy.~' developed as an urban settlement in roughly the sixth century BCE, contemporary both with the rise of other cities in the region and with the development of the institution of hereditary monarchy. However, there is no archeological, epigraphic, or textual evidence to associate this place with the capital of the Iks. vS.ku dynasty as described in the Sanskrit epic, or even with the name Ayodhy~, Until some eight centuries later. Rather, this 'second city' of the kingdom of Kosala (of which the capital, ~r~vasti, enjoyed greater prominence) was referred to by virtually all early writers as Saketa. The majority of early sources are Buddhist and Jain, for Saketa appears to have been an important center for both traditions, visited by their historical founders, but Sanskrit and Greek sources likewise confirm its existence. During Maurya times, the city was a center of Buddhist learning and pilgrimage and came to be adorned with several monumental stapas, the ruins of which (now surmounted by Hindu constructions and cloaked in Hindu lore) remain to this day. Bakker's conclu- sions (1986, 1:4-11) regarding the Ayodhy~ of epic literature---that it was an imaginary construct based on an idealization of cities of a later period--may trouble many in India, where the historicity of the Rdmayan. a (irrevocably intertwined, since the colonial period, with the experienced reality and power of its cultural archetypes) remains an intellectual obsession, but I believe that his argument is too compelling to discount.

The process by which this literary archetype was reified as an earthly locale, to eventually usurp the identity of SS_keta, is intimately connected, in Bakker's view, with the unfolding religious career of Rarna as one of the most adored avataras of Vi.sn.u. A key stage in this process occurred in the fifth century CE, at the height of Gupta imperial power, when one of the emperors (either Kumara- gupta I or Skandagupta), calling himself a paramabhagavata or exemplary

Imagining Ayodhyd / 23

devotee of Vi.sn.u (although continuing to patronize both Buddhist and Brahmani.'cal institutions), removed the capital from Pa.taliputra to the former Saketa, identifying it with the city of Rama. Bakker assembles a wealth of circumstantial evidence to support this claim--ranging from the fn'st epigraphic occurrence of the name Ayodhya in Gupta-period inscriptions, to a probable connection of the move with the composition of Kahdasa's Raghuva.mga, and the Guptas' marital alliance with the Vaka.takas of the Deccan, who evinced a similar patronage of a Rama-related site during this period. 4 Skandagupta, who assumed the title (significant to later Ayodhya-lore) of Vikramiditya ('Sun of victory'), reigned from 455-67 and defeated the 'barbarian' Hfi.nas who threat- ened his empire from the northwest--a victory celebrated in an inscription in which he compared himself to Rama. He also consecrated a temple to the 'god with the bow' (garizgin), which may have been one of ten 'deva temples' in Ayodhya mentioned by the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hs0an Tsang. That the first tentative efflorescence of Rarna devotion in north India was associated with a divinized royal patron of Brahma0i. "cal Vai.sn.avism, the threat of an alien enemy, and the reification of epic geography in a symbolic shift of a capital city was, in my view, portentous. 5

Following the decline of the Guptas, the center of urban power shifted west- ward to Kanauj, and Ayodhy~ (as it was now known) reverted to the status of a provincial town, to virtually disappear from the historical record during the period between the death of King Har.sa in 647 and the rise of the Gaha.davala kings (late eleventh century), who once again made it 'part of a powerful Hindu kingdom that unified a considerable area of the Ganges basin and that reopened the region to merchants and visitors' (Bakker 1986, 1: 35). The Gaha.davalas seized power from their Ras.trakqa.ta rivals in the aftermath of a devastating raid on Kanauj by the Ghaznavid governor of the Punjab, M .al)mfid Shah, in ca. 1090. Although the Gaha.davalas were themselves perhaps in alliance with the Ghazna- vids and recognized their overlordship, their inscriptions reflect an ideology of protecting a threatened dharma against the onslaught of an alien culture. Thus the first Gahad.avfla king, Candradeva, claimed in an inscription dated 1090 'to have protected the holy places of Ku~ika (Kanauj), K~i (Banaras), Uttarakosala (Ayodhya), and Indrasthana' (Bakker 1986, 1: 49) and made a pilgrimage to Ayodhya in 1093, performing rituals detailed in another long inscription. A successor named Govindacandra identified himself as 'an incarnation of Hari... for guarding Vary. asi against the wicked Turu.ska [Turkic] warrior' (Bakker 1986, 1: 50). Under the Gaha.davalas, Ayodhya acquired a number of royally- patronized Vai.sn.ava temples that endured until the reign of Aurangzeb; these probably included (in Bakker's assessment [1986, 1: 44--45]) a Vi.s.nu temple at the reputed birthplace of R~ma. 6 The city was now firmly associated with

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Ramayan. a geography, but the few icons that survive from this period reflect continuing worship of Vi.s.nu in his four-armed (caturbhuja) form, and many of the attested sacred sites are bathing places or shrines to various local or Saiva deities (Bakker 1986, 1: 57-58). The cult of emotional Rima bhakti in north India appears to have been a development of later centuries, and Bakker's evi- dence largely supports Sheldon Pollock's recent argument (1993) that the early worship of R~ma, at least among elite groups, reflected an effort at self- definition in the face of an alien cultural challenge and to a recognition, in the Ramayan. a story, of a paradigm for the triumph of divinized kingship against a demonized enemy5 Such elite interest in R~na was facilitated by the composi- tion, probably beginning in the twelfth century, of authoritative Sanskrit manuals such as the Agastya Sa.mhitd, which articulate an elaborate R~na-centered theology based on older models from the PS.ficarfitra tradition and prescribe a complex liturgical and ritual cycle for public and private worship (Bakker 1986, 1: 67-118).

Following the founding of the Sultanate of Delhi, Ayodhy~ became the capital of the province of Avadh in 1226 and served as a base for the eastward expansion of Muslim power. The fate of religious sites in the city (apart from the Jain temple of ,~din~tha, destroyed by an officer of Muh. ammad Ghfiri in ca. 1193) is not documented. Contemporary Muslim chroniclers boast of the destruc- tion of 'one thousand' temples in nearby Banaras, but at least some GS.had. avS.la shrines evidently survived in Ayodhyi until late Mughal times, when two temples at Svargadvara Gh~t were reported demolished at Aurangzeb's order. But it is reasonably certain that no substantial new Hindu religious structures were erected until the eighteenth century, and the epigraphic and iconographic record reveals a similar gap. Textual sources confirm that Ayodhyi remained a center of pilgrimage and indeed grew in importance throughout this period, attracting large crowds to annual bathing fairs, particularly that held on RSzna- navami--the anniversary of RS_ma's birth. Such events were evidently permitted by local officials for the purpose of collecting pilgrim taxes and for the promotion of commerce. During these centuries, the city was an administrative center and garrison town of a prosperous region renowned for its agriculture and hunting, and it acquired a fortified citadel and numerous mosques. It was also frequently a bone of contention between rulers in Delhi and rebellious provincial nobles, such as Tughril Beg, viceroy of Bengal, who revolted in ca. 1279, and the Sharqis of Jaunpur, who established a breakaway kingdom that included Ayodhy~ in ca. 1394. During the early Mughal period, AyodhyA was the scene of a pitched battle between imperial troops and Uzbek rebels under Iskandar Kh~m in 1567 and the site of another revolt in 1580. It became the capital of the NawAbs of Oudh (Avadh) soon after the disintegration of the Mughal Empire in

Imagining Ayodhya / 25

the early eighteenth century. The trajectory of Ayodhya's growing importance to Hindu pilgrims through-

out this period is traced by Bakker through painstaking study of three recensions of a long Sanskrit eulogy (rn~h~tmya) of the city, which is generally included in the Vai.sn. ava Kha.n.da of the Skanda Purd.na and the composition of which he believes to span the period of the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries. These recensions reveal a steady proliferation of religious sites, particularly Vais.n. ava ones, and a gradual elaboration of a sacred geography based on the Ramaya.na. Significantly, in one of the later recensions (ca. 1400) Ayodhy~ is no longer compared to the divine Amar~vati; instead, the text speaks of 'a celestial Ayodhya which is replicated on earth by [the divine architect] Vi~vakarman'-- reflecting the concept of Visn.u's eternal abodes (dhamas) and their earthly manifestations (Bakker 1986, 1: 129). ~ Yet the mahatmya also shows that the majority of rites performed by pilgrims during this period still centered around riverfront bathing places (ffrthas), associated with rites de passage, such as the ancient Gopratira (the alleged drowning place of R~na and his followers, and the only Ayodhya site mentioned in the ancient catalog of pilgrimage sites found in the T~rthayatra Parvan of the Mahabharata) and Svargadv~a ('heaven's gate'). The reification of urban architectural forms inspired by the epic model could not occur until there was a loosening of Muslim control over the city, a process which began tentatively during the tolerant regimes of Akbar (1556-1605) and Jah~rlgir (1605-27), when such sites as Mao.iparvat ('jewel hill,' a temple built atop a hillock that is almost certainly a ruined Buddhist stapa), R~mko.t ( 'R~na's fort,' probably the ruins of G~tha.dav~da and early Sultanate-period fortifications), and Pramodvan ('forest of delight,' an area on the outskirts of the city that developed under the influence of the rasika, 'erotic,' school of Rama bhakti) were added to the pilgrim's itinerary. These undoubtedly attracted Br~thman. a priests and guides--pujar~s and pa.n.das--to conduct rituals and collect donations. Pilgrimage must have been encouraged by Akbar's abolition of the pilgrim tax in 1563, and Ab0'l F~I noted Ayodhyi 's great sanctity as 'one of the holiest places of antiquity .... [T]he residence of R~rnacandra who in the Treta age combined in his own person both the spiritual supremacy and the kingly office' (1927-48, 2: 171, cited in Bakker 1986, 1: 137). 9 Another development during the late sixteenth century was the arrival of Srivai.sn. ava settlers from south India, who established an outpost of their great sectarian complex at Srirafigam.

The proliferation of sites greatly accelerated after one of the rulers of Oudh, .Safdar Jang (1739-54) withdrew his capital to Faizabad, six miles away. The Naw~bs were Shi'ite Muslims who depended on the active collaboration of Hindu K[iyasthas in their administration; subsequent rulers gave free reign to

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their ministers to endow religious establishments in Ayodhya (as Akbar had

earlier permitted his Rajpfit allies to patronize KLs.n. aite sites in the Vraja region, near Agra) and, in a few instances, made endowments and even pilgrimages themselves (Bakker 1986, 1: 152-53; van der Veer 1988: 37--40). In addition, the developing holy city was shaped by the influence of ascetics of the burgeon- ing Rgmgmandi order, whose militant Vais.nava identity had been strengthened through active competition with Saiva mendicants during the late Mughal period. In the eighteenth century, RS_rnLnandis began to settle in Ayodhyi in large numbers, receiving land grants to establish chavn~s (permanent 'camps'), mat.has (monasteries), and sectarian temples. Their militant (naga) branch, based after 1780 in the fortress-temple of Hanum~mg~hi, which they claimed to have taken in a pitched battle with ~aiva yoggs, revisioned the central part of Ayodhyi as Rrtmadurga ('Rama's fortress'): a four-gated citadel oriented to the cardinal directions. In the aftermath of the British annexation of Avadh in 1856, the R~-n~-nandis were patronized first by the rulers of small Hindu kingdoms in eastern and central India, and later by a nouveau riche class of urban merchants and industrialists, both of whom invested heavily in the 'reconstruction' of Rama's capital, initiating a process which has continued to the present. But before I consider the sometimes-competing designs that have shaped this restoration, I must further examine the ideal archetypes and tangible models to which they responded.

THE URBAN OTHER

The transition from the Vedic period to the age of the epics and Pur~. as--from Br~man.ism to Hinduism--is associated with a number of phenomena: the clearing of forests and spread of agriculture, the expansion of trade and commerce, and the rise of cities on the Indo-Gangetic plain. In India, as elsewhere, there were at least two kinds of early cities: trade and pilgrimage centers that developed along travel routes, often at ffrthas ('fording places') of major rivers, and powerful administrative centers that represented religio- political authority. Beginning from about the sixth century BCE, the latter were most often under the rule of hereditary monarchs, whose very identities were so closely linked with the realms they governed that the same term (for example, Videha) served to identify an individual king, his kingdom, and his capital. Whereas tgrthas sometimes acquired an urban identity that remained stable through the political vicissitudes of centuries (for example, Banaras, Hardwar), royal centers were often more ephemeral, expressions of the personality and

Imagining Ayodhya / 27

power of an individual king or dynasty, to be established by ascendant kings and looted or abandoned by rivals or successors. I° Today we style such early kingdoms 'city-states,' and note that their outer boundaries were often vague, delimiting the penumbra of authority which surrounded the royal court. Their village hinterlands were but extensions of the urban state, yielding taxes to it in return for defense and supplying its markets with produce. Classical literature is permeated by a haughty disdain for the villager, who is virtually equated with stupidity, baseness, and poverty. I n India, as in a number of other ancient cultures, the urban experience came to be understood as the epitome of culture, and (as language itself reflects) to be a civilized person (nagara) meant, first of all, to reside in a city (nagara). As the distance from the city increased, the rustic boroughs shaded off into wild country--aran, ya, vana--and it is this realm, rather than the cultivated hinterland, that forms the counterpoint to the city in classical literature: a hazardous and liminal domain of wild tribes, wilder demons, and equally untamed ascetic-wizards. The earthly city had a celestial counterpart, for the gods too were urbanized and assembled in Amar.~vati under their king, Indra; this metropolis eventually gave a name to the script (devandgart-) in which was recorded the 'divine language,' which separated the urbane elite from rustic folk, It also served as a model for later heavenly cities-- of the Pura.nic great gods Siva, Vis.n.u, and Devi--which in turn would reshape earthly ones.

The contrast between the forest and the city-state found expression in evolving religious practices. Much Vedic thought reflects a pre-urban ideal, and its great ceremonies unfolded in temporary structures that encoded a pastoral and decen- tralized world of multiple powers; its most revered exponents preferred to dwell in independent rural settlements, well supplied with kine. The literary culmi- nation of their labors was the Ved~mta of the forest sages, which stands at the head of a tradition of world-renunciation founded on a nondualism that (in theory at least) ultimately transcends worldly hierarchies of power. In contrast, the Veda-rejecting ascetics of Buddhism and Jainism rapidly quit the forests to preach in such thriving city-states as Magadha and Srivasti, winning converts especially among merchants and artisans, who were relegated to comparatively low status in the Brahma0.ical worldview. The adherents of these traditions (who included kings) would eventually produce the first post-Harappan monumental architecture, including pilgrimage centers like Amarivati that recapitulated in their design a cosmic man. d. ala of centrality and power. In time, Br~thman.ism adapted to this challenge by urbanizing as well, endorsing an ideology that glorified the king to a degree unmatched in heterodox traditions--as 'a great god in human form' (Manu 7.8)---and transforming its mediation to fit the needs of temple culture, which evolved in royal cities and found primary ritual expres-

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sion in p~j~, a ceremony which mirrored the elaborate etiquette of the royal court.

Descriptions of royal cities in Sanskrit poetry are notoriously clich&l and, as already noted, virtually recapitulate the Ramayan.a's account of Ayodhy~ Sanskrit didactic literature includes gastras on architecture and administration that delin- eate cities as geometric grids, aligned to the cardinal directions, centered on an administrative-religious complex: the fortified palace of the divinized king, who, guided by his Br~dama0. a ministers and purohitas, maintains the orderly func- tioning of society through ritual, statecraft, and warfare. These schemes are characterized by a preoccupation with hierarchy and order, and the various social classes are assigned to segregated quarters (e.g., Arthagastra 2.4). Real cities may not have been so tidy, but the remains of such sites as Sigup~dg~h in Orissa and Ahicchatr~ in Uttar Pradesh indeed suggest the gridiron man.d, ala of urban planners (Basham 1959: 200). H With the gradual rise of Pur~.ic Hinduism (patronized by rulers like Samudragupta, whose inscriptions call him 'a god dwelling on earth, being a mortal only in celebrating the rites of the observances of mankind'; Bakker 1986, 1: 26) the king sought to identify himself with his patron deitywthe king-god Vi.sn.u or Siva--who resided in a palatial temple- complex that was itself a man. d. ala of the human body, the city, and the cosmos. Given the constant warfare between small kingdoms which characterized much of Indian history, such royal temples were sometimes as short-lived as the kings who built them, for the conquest of an enemy's city might include reducing his patron deity (i.st.adeva) to vassalage as well, and the architectural treatises advised ascendant monarchs not to linger in the cities of their predecessors but to establish their own new capitals (Barnow and Shodhan 1977: 31). Powerful dynasties, however, sometimes succeeded in creating royal temples of sufficient magnetism to outlast their builders, a phenomenon exemplified by such sacerdotal cities- within-cities as the Rat~gan~tha complex at Srirangam and the Jagannitha shrine at Purl The latter is the sole example of this archetype in north India, for although the urban ~ l a pattern continued to flourish in the southern Deccan, where the later Vijayanagara kings utilized their site's mythical associations with the Ramayan. a to create a ritual center that closely identified the king with R~na (Fritz and Michell 1984), it did not reappear on a large scale on the Indo- Gangetic plain for half a millennium, until Jai Si .mha's eighteenth-century capital of Jaipur--with guardian deities installed at its cardinally-oriented gate- ways and IQ..s.na as Govinda Deva residing in the king's own central palace.

The reasons for this hiatus are obvious. Hindu royal cities presuppose power- ful Hindu kings to construct them, and the advent of Islamic conquerors at the close of the twelfth century foreclosed on this option. What is less often recog- nized is that these conquerors also brought with them a distinctive pattern of

Imagining Ayodhya / 29

urban design. Contrary to modern Hindu nationalist rhetoric, the Turko-Afghan invaders were neither barbaric nor nomadic; rather they were representatives of a cosmopolitan and quintessentially urban civilization. Even the earliest Afghan

marauders, who came to the Indian plains in search of loot, were not nomads; M .algnQd used his booty to embellish his own sumptuous city of GhazrtL Later conquerors quickly put down roots, like the early Sul.t,~tns of Delhi, who built a

succession of royal capitals that formed a protective bulwark against the depreda- tions of the Mongols--arguably real barbarians who decimated urban civilization to the west. But to call such new cities 'Muslim' is not merely to state their

ruler's religious affiliation, for Islam gave rise to characteristic urban forms and institutions. Although any generalized notion of an 'Islamic city' requires much qualification (of. Serjeant 1980), there is still merit in Hamilton Gibb and Harold

Bowen's broad observation on the cosmopolitan culture of the medieval Muslim

world:

The medieval Moslem culture was above all an urban culture. While Islam but lightly touched the secular life of the countryside, it rebuilt and refashioned the cities from their foundations, and stamped them with an individual impress which has persisted even to the present day .... [T]he cities of widely distant countries shared a common culture, a common order of life, a common disposition of mind...even when physical intercourse between them was

relatively limited (1950, 1: 276).

This 'common order of life' revolved around such institutions as the congrega- tional mosque with its open plaza for worship, the madrasa (religious school), the caravanserai, and the waqf (charitable endowment)---often centered on a tomb, but incorporating a range of functions for the living. Encompassing and linking all of these was the b~z~r, which was not simply a mercantile quarter but the very sinews of an urban organism that was simultaneously religious and economic. Though characterized by some Western critics as 'confused, amorphous mazes of streets and buildings, without public centers or spaces' (Barnow and Shodhan 1977: 51, citing Anderson 1974: 502), the Islamic bdzar reflected a distinctive order, with trades grouped in a characteristic pattern radiating from the central mosque; it was this pattern that permitted the thirteenth-century traveler Ibn Bat.t.fi.ta to observe approvingly that the market in the Muslim quarter of a Chinese town was 'arranged exactly as in the towns of the ddr al- Islam' (yon Grunebaum 1955: 146). t2

That the advent of Islamic culture in northern India produced a radical departure in urban design has indeed been asserted by some scholars. The

historian K. A. Nizami puts the case strongly:

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The immediate and the most significant effect of the Turkish occupation of northern India was the liquidation of the old system of city-planning. The place of the caste cities of the Rajput period was taken by the cosmopolitan

cities of the Mussalmans. The gates of the new cities were thrown open for workers, artisans, and Chandalas. The city walls were constantly extended and within its fold all types of people--high and low--built their houses and lived side by side without any social stigma attaching to any one .... So great was the aversion of the Muslim people to the idea of segregation that, when Aibek thought of shifting the tanners of hide to some distant quarter of the city---on purely hygenic grounds, not due to any caste consideration--the people considered it so cruel and unjust that they interpreted his sudden death as a divine punishment for this act (1961: 85; emphasis in original).

Although Nizami overstates the egalitarianism of Indo-Muslim culture, he points to an Islamic ideal that must have had perceptible effects on both the layout and lifestyles of cities. In India, as elsewhere, the ranks of the Muslim 'ulama'

(religiously learned) were permeable to a degree that contrasted sharply with the ritual specialization of the Hindu varn. agrama model. Islamic urban jurists, teachers, and prayer leaders commonly included not only merchants but also craftsmen; indeed, 'masons, stoneworkers, carpenters, coppersmiths, soap makers ...saddlers, bow makers, weavers, blacksmiths, ropemakers, bakers, tailors, butchers, wool dealers, and small traders and producers of all sorts' (Lapidus 1967: 109). Given the accessibility of religious vocations and their attendant prestige, it is hardly surprising that many Indian craftsmen and practitioners of 'base' trades were attracted to Islam, as their forbears had been to Buddhism. To high-caste 'twice-born' observers, such spiritual and occupational miscegenation invariably spelled chaos and is sometimes cited among the woeful attributes of the kaliyuga (Dark Age) in late medieval texts. ~3

Our understanding of the cultural encounter that occurred in north India from the eleventh century onward--that confronted Hindu elites with their most significant and unassimilable 'other'--has been enhanced by the recent research of Pollock, who has cited the growing veneration for the Ramayan. a's dharmic and martial paradigm as paralleling, both chronologically and geographically, the advance of Turko-Afghan rule--a process also reflected in the composition of the dharma-nibandha literature that conf'trms Hindu identity by codifying Hindu practice. 'Totalizing conceptualizations of the society,' Pollock proposes, 'became possible only by juxtaposition with alternative life-worlds; they became necessary only at the moment when the total form of society was for the first time believed, by the professional theorists of society, to be threatened' (1993: 286). ~4 Abfi Ray.han al-Binani's blanket observation that Hindus 'differ from us

Imagining Ayodhyd / 31

in everything which other nations have in common' (1910, 1: 17), may have reflected a perception common to many in both cultures, the majority of whom were less likely to share some of his more generous insights than to take shelter behind such generic brandings as k~fir (infidel) and mleccha (barbarian). Yet Hindu India produced no chroniclers comparable to al-Birfini or Ibn Ba..ttfi.ta, and so we may only speculate, based on known attitudes, over the discomfort of high-caste elites with the new urban prototype; for example, the affront to dietary and pollution taboos represented by the mazelike groundplan of the bazar, wherein butcher shops and leatherworkers abounded and bookbinders and candle- makers typically worked in close proximity to the central mosque.

The distinctions in urban paradigms that I have broadly sketched here certainly admit qualification. One may point out that Indo-Islamic elites commonly observed their own class divisions and held themselves aloof from the lower orders, including fellow Muslims. One may also readily observe that Persianized Sul~ns in India often sought to blur the (theologically rigid) division between king and deity and built cosmologically-inspired capitals that emphasized their own godlike sovereignty, generally by situating the palace-complex adjacent to the central mosque. Moreover, even 'high-caste' Hindu elites were not monolithic in their values; Bffdaman. as and Ks atriyas may have shared common ideological suppositions, but they often differed in their standards regarding dietary and pollution rules. And to many Indians, especially those of the lower classes, the new Islamic regimes and their urban strongholds must have represented no more than a change of actors playing familiar roles on a stage placed high above the level of ordinary life. The striking absence, from centuries of Hindu texts, of almost arty direct reference to Islamic culture is an argument ex silentio that may be interpreted in various ways: to connote blanket indifference as much as exlreme alienation. Yet two unusual texts, both recently made available to scholars, do preserve detailed accounts of how at least some Hindu authors reacted to Islamic urban culture. These atypical accounts--found in documents separated by some two centuries and more than a thousand miles--bear enough mutual similarities to permit some tentative conclusions.

The K~rtilata ('Vine of glory') is a long narrative attributed to the poet Vidyapati, a Br~daman. a who lived in the Mithila region during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. First published in the 1920s, it excited interest among Indian scholars more for its archaic language--a form of Sauraseni Apabhram~a known as Avaha..tt.ha~than for its subject matter, and to my knowl- edge it has been treated in only a single brief article in English (Gaeffke 1977). 15 The poem is a historical romance based on the career of R.~ji Kirtisi .mha of Tirhut, who is identified as the poet's patron, and it was probably composed in ca. 1402. Like many princely heroes of earlier literature, Kirtis" .maha is forced

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into exile, accompanied by his brother, after his father, Raja Gan.e~var, is killed by a usurper--in this case a Muslim by the name of Asl~ (from Persian arslan or 'lion'). In the second section of the poem, the princes' wanderings take them to a city known as Jonapura--apparently historical Jannpur--under the rule of IbrSlffm ShS_h (reigned ca. 1402-6). 16 In a passage that runs to 140 lines of mixed verse and prose (l~rtilata 2.75-215), the princes pass through the city enroute to the palace, first through a 'Hindu' and then a 'Turk' locale (these labels will be discussed below), and the difference in the description of the two is striking. The passage contains intriguingly vivid details that leave one with the impression that the poet may have written from personal experience of a specific locale (S" .m~a 1964: 197), yet the general movement is from the more conventional and stylized, in the Hindu quarter, to something quite different in that of the Turks.

As Peter Gaeffke notes, the Hindu town is described 'according to the pattern available in classical Sanskrit literature .... with gardens, bridges...stairs, arches, fountains...palaces with flags...and citizens busy with all sorts of honest and pleasant activities' (1977: 120). Much attention is given to architectural features (K[rtilata 2.79-96) and to the bustle of numerous specialized bazars wherein people of various castes mingle amidst a merry tumult (2.97-125). An interesting three-line passage (2.121-23) informs us that,

Numerous Br~maao. as and Kiyasthas, Rajpfits of many lineages and many castes meet and sit together. All are genteel and wealthy, and the king presides over all the town.

There follows a lengthy account of the b~zdr inhabited by the glamorous but deceitful courtesans of the city. The poet fingers over their beauty and adornment and the wiles by which they relieve the gullible of their wealth (2.126-51). The whole panorama of the cityscape concludes with the approving couplet, 'All the women are accomplished, all the people well-to-do. / By the virtues of ~ri IbrS_h3m Sh~, there's no worry or sorrow' (2.152-53).

Viewed overall, this happy city appears highly conventionalized and indeed is described, like VSlnfi~i's Ayodhya, as 'an avatdra of Amarivaff' (2.99). But after a few more verses, the poet changes his approach as the princes pass into another section of town. 'But listen attentively for a moment, O discerning one, / I'll tell something of the qualities of the Turks (turukan.)' (2.156-57). The description of the Muslim quarter which follows utilizes no literary formulas. Dense with Perso-Arabic terminology (sometimes daunting to recognize in its Avaha.t.tha transformation), the language remains vividly descriptive, yet is characterized by a mood of mounting alarm and increasing violence, which is

Imagining Ayodhya / 33

sometimes enhanced by abrupt, staccato meters (e.g., 2.158-73, 192-211). At first glance, the Muslim town is a chaos of thousands of horses and elephants, spies and slaves, who call Hindus 'dirty' and forcibly expel them (2.158--61). It is also a market, to be sure, but people are either buying weapons, leather gloves and shoes, or raw meat, onions, and garlic (2.163, 165, 168). Military and religious officials of various ranks--mrrs, valTs, and saldrs--roam about, greeting one another with 'Salem.' They shout 'A be be' and quaff down liquor, recite their profession of faith, and read from books (2.170-73). They fervently invoke their god (khud~) and swallow balls of hashish (bhang). Then they become furious for no reason, their faces turn red as copper, and saliva drips from their beards (2.174-77). More descriptions of eating and drinking follow: they get drunk on liquor and waste their money on hot kabobs, then they roam about followed by troops of footsoldiers (2.178-79); intoxicated with bhang, they become enraged and shout for more wine and meat (2.180-81), and even when taking the finest white rice they consume great quantities of onions (2.185). Turkish women dance in a circle, while sayyids distribute sweets and 'everyone eats the leftovers of others' (2.187-88). Dervishes give blessings, but if they don't receive a handout they go away cursing; prayer-leaders wave their hands about like untouchable d. oms (2.189-90). As if to confirm the dystopia of this urban milieu, Vidy~pati adds a damning note on the civic administration: 'As for the magistrate's authority--what to say7 His own wife sleeps with another!' (2.191).

The description uptil now has stressed the disgusting and ludicrously incom- prehensible behavior of the Turks, their aviveka or inability to distinguish between what is proper and improper (2.179). But in the next group of verses (2.192-99) their implicit lawlessness spills over into religious confrontation, in a series of lines that seem to anticipate the jeremiads of the poet-saint Kabir a century later:

Hindus and Turks dwell side by side and mock one another's dharma-- here the call to prayer, there Vedic chants, here .hah~l butchering, there blood sacrifice, here ojh~ healers, there .Stiff adepts, here planetary vratas, there roz~ fasting, here leaf-plates, there clay vessels, here namaz prayers, there paj&

This exercise in interreligious misunderstanding sounds balanced enough, but it quickly yields to a more one-sided violence. The poet describes how Turks seize

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passersby and press them into labor; they abduct Br~maoa students, put cow's flesh over their heads, erase their holy forehead-marks, and tear off their sacred threads (2.200-204). They demolish temples to erect mosques and fill the earth with tombs 'till there's no place to set one's foot' (2.207-9). Even their children threaten Hindus, and the Turks appear ready to devour the whole Hindu race (2.211-12). The passage ends abruptly (and ironically?) with a blessing for the Sul.t~'s long life, and the two brothers, 'having seen the spectacle,' enter his palace (2.213-15). They will in time be well received and will fred in Ibrrflffm a staunch ally who will help them to slay the usurper AslEn and win back their kingdom.

As Gaeffke (1977: 120-21) rightly observes, Vidyipati's Turkic city is not the anti-world of the civilized 'demons' (r~ks.asas) of Vilmiki, who commit their misdeeds within the same aesthetic and conceptual universe that the hero inhabits, and whose 'golden Lat~ki' remains in everyday speech synonymous with urban splendor and beauty; rather it is an incomprehensible chaos that causes the poet to depart tellingly from the conventions of the rest of his poem. Whereas the Hindu city is filled with beautiful buildings, enchanting gardens, and lovely women, the Muslim quarter is an armed camp surging with orgiastic eating and drinking and sudden erratic rage. There are no references to architecture apart from mosques and graves, and the only women mentioned are street dancers (not courtesans) and the qaz.r s errant wife. It is true that the Turks' ritual practices invite comparison with those of Hindus (and thus help to delineate the boundaries of 'Hindu' behavior, as Pollock's observation, quoted earlier, proposes), yet these apparently do not, in the poet's view, temper their proclivity for violent desecration of persons and landscape. The passage builds to a climax of aggressive behavior suggestive of an army of occupation.

One related point is the absence of the term 'Hindu' from the description of the (evidently) Hindu quarter. Its citizens are identified by caste labels-- BrS.hman. as, R~jpfits, Kayasthas, C~.dalas--and the reader has no awareness of being in any particular cultural zone until the princes cross the boundary represented by lines 156-57. Suddenly one is in the presence of a distinctive group of people, collectively referred to as turuq, who are distinct and different enough to make all the other diverse castes of the city appear as a single 'race' (kula), to which the Turks themselves apply a label that the poet adopts. It is only in the Turkic city that we repeatedly find 'Hindus'--being expelled, argued with, and assaulted. The poet thus expresses in his own way the truism that cultural self-definition is precipitated by the presence of a perceivedly alien other.

How unique was Vidyapati in his perceptions? The Sanskrit literature of the preceding three centuries includes a small number of inscriptions and compe-

Imagining Ayodhya / 35

sitions, often with R~m~tyana allusions, that demonize Islamic conquerors and critique their behavior (Pollock 1993: 270-73). Subsequent vernacular literature is so characteristically silent on the subject that the K~rtilat~ passage, in Gaeffke's words, 'stands out like an erratic block in a literary landscape which deliberately ignored the presence of Muslims in India for centuries' (1977: 122). However, one other unusual text bears mention here: the Telugu R~o, av~cakamu, recently translated and analyzed by PhiUip Wagoner under the title Tidings of the king. Though presented as a contemporary chronicle of a military campaign by the emperor K~..n.adevaraya of Vijayanagara (1509-29), the R@av~cakamu, according to Wagoner (1993: 17-23), was in all likelihood composed in the successor kingdom of Madurai during the period 1595-1602--more than three decades after the fall of the 'City of victory' to an alliance of Deccani Muslim kingdoms in 1565. If this is so, then it is a nostalgic text that seeks to formulate a legitimating model of kingship, and it accomplishes this (in part) through contrasting the reports of Kr.sn. adevaraya's spies concerning the kingdoms of the Turkic Sul.tEns of Ahmadnagar and Golconda with those of the Raja of Orissa and of KEs...nadevar~ya himself.

In the Rayav~cakarau, as in Vidyapati's account, we hear less concerning the physical layout of the Muslim cities than about the personal habits of their inhabitants, and their rash behavior. The Turks are characterized as 'drunkards who have no faith in gods and BrShm~as...barbarians, cow killers,' and again as 'drunkards and opium eaters' whose behavior stems 'from a state of mental confusion .... Indeed, they act like the demons of the Kali age' (110, 112-13). The latter pejorative, most often applied to Muslims, had itself become common- place by the late sixteenth century, and the detailed description of fiendish tortures which follows (demonstrating the rash and cruel behavior of the Turks) resembles stylized Pur~.ic narratives of the post-mortem suffering of sinners in subterranean hells. Indeed, it prompts Kr..s.nadevar,~ya's ministers to observe, 'Those Turkish domains sound like the kingdom of Yama himself, the god of death!' (115-16, 119). In contrast, the capital of the Gajapafi ruler of Orissa is depicted through conventional literary tropes of gardens and beautiful women (in fact, the emissaries break into verse to describe them), culminating in a glowing account of the king's meticulous personal regimen and exemplary service to BrS.hma0.as and to his patron deity, Jagann~tha, in the latter's palace-temple (125-28). Such a ruler, albeit an enemy who must be subdued, inhabits the same ideological universe as Kr.s.n. adevariya, and so the ministers can approv- ingly note, 'Yes...the Gajapati king is a great man. He's not like the Turks--he has faith in gods and Br~luna0. as' (134).

Both the KTrtilata and R~yavacakarau must be carefully situated in their distinctive regional and historical contexts; neither can be said to 'demonize'

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Muslims in general nor to constitute 'anti-Muslim' polemic in the twentieth- century sense. Ibr~him Sh~fla of Jaunpur is praised as a judicious ruler and ally of Kirtisi .mha, and his Hindu subjects appear to be (at least in their own quarter) happy, prosperous, and safe. And as Wagoner (1993: 60--63) points out, the Rayavacakamu assigns the Turks of the Deccani kingdoms to the barbarous 'borderlands,' yet readily accepts the contemporary Mughal ruler of Agra as one of the 'Lion thrones' of a tripartite world-order based on dharma and indeed as a representative of one of the Hindu high gods. The visual record affirms the need for a nuanced reading of cultural encounter, for Islamicate styles of dress, architecture, and music were readily adopted by south Indian Hindu elites (as they were by Rijp~ts to the north) with little apparent perception of an 'alien' origin. Yet the K~rtilata and Rayav(tcakamu suggest the limits of cultural assimilation as well, especially in the all important realms of diet, deportment, and ritual practice, and in the former text especially the perceived aviveka of Muslims produces an urban environment that elicits undisguised horror and disgust.

The shadow of R~ana's Ayodhyi--the original earthly avat~ra of the celestial Amarivati--falls over both texts and is especially evident in the Tehigu chroni- cle's long account of the founding of Vijayanagara by the sage Vidyaran. ya, who is divinely instructed to build a royal capital at the site of the Sanskrit epic's monkey stronghold of Ki.skindha. This cosmic city reaff'trms the epic's paradig- matic formula of 'god-king = cosmic city = world order' and becomes, in Wagoner's words, a 'talisman of authority' which is prophesied to endure for 360 years; its fmal loss precipitates an 'ideological crisis' for the Hindu elite of south India (1993: 33, 69). If such a crisis likewise followed the fall, centuries before, of comparable 'talismans' to the north, why does literature preserve so few traces of it?

Vidyapati's own traditional biography may be instructive in this regard. The royally-commissioned KTrtilata was apparently his sole effort at sustained narrative; the bulk of his output (after the death of his patron in 1406 at the hands of another Muslim king) would consist of legalistic Sanskrit compendia ----codifications of dharma--and some five hundred vernacular songs that cele- brate the amours of Ridha and IQ..sn.a in the pastoral setting of V.rndavana (Archer 1963: 18, 29-38). These lyric poems are the works for which he is best known today, and their composition may be seen as prophetic since, for the next three centuries, poets in the Gangetic heartland would sing of little else. I propose that the author of K~rtilata was not unique in his perceptions of a new and disturbingly alien urban environment, only in recording them. A more characteristic response was withdrawal into other themes, leaving the royal city behind.

Imagining Ayodhya / 37

CITY IN A GARDEN

In sixteenth-century north India, a potent new religious paradigm arose that had as its geographical locus neither city nor forest, but an Arcadian paradise presided over by a cowherd boy. So great was its impact that it generated a new theology and powerfully influenced the literary, visual, and performing arts of the region for the next three centuries. Crucial to this development was the career of the Bengali mystic IQ..s.na Caitanya (1486-1533), one of the most remarkable figures in Indian religious history. Charlotte Vaudeville has argued that the rediscovery of 'lost' holy sites in the Vraja region that he initiated at the beginning of the sixteenth century in fact represented the imposition of a Br~tma0. ized Vai.sn. avism on the folk religion of the area, which was oriented toward naga (snake) and devT (goddess) cults. It was a new kind of Vai.s.navism, however, initially emphasizing the worship of IQ..s.na not as a temple image, but in the embodied form of a land- scape of sacred hills and ponds; a cult in which 'prakrti-paja [nature worship] takes precedence over marti-paja [image worship]' (Vaudeville 1976: 199)) 7 Caitanya made one celebrated pilgrimage to Vraja in 1514, but his closest connec- tion was with the city of Puri, to which he made annual journeys at the time of the great ratha yatra (chariot festival), and in which he eventually settled. It was from here that he dispatched six disciples (gosvdm?s) on missions of reconnais- sance and reclamation. In contrast to neighboring Bengal, Orissa had remained largely free of Muslim overlordship, and its ruling dynasties patronized various permutations of Buddhism, Saivism, and Vai.s.navism, mingled with indigenous tribal traditions, such as the worship of the 'sacred log' of Lord Jagaimitha. Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Gajapati kings of the Gaflg~ dynasty, engaged in frequent conflict with the Muslim rulers of Bengal, inten- sifted their patronage of Jagannitha, installing him in a colossal palace-temple that became one of the wonders of north India, its groundplan and ceremonial protocol emphasizing the link between its king-god and god-king (Mishra 1971: 44-46). Although the three images in the temple had at various times been identified with Buddhist and Saiva deities, as well as with RSma, SItA, and Lak.smat.~. a, Lord JagannAtha's association with IQ..sn. a GopS.1 had been celebrated in the poet Jayadeva's twelfth-century Sanskrit song-cycle, GTtagovinda, an influential text in the development of the Tantricized 'emotional and sensual' (g.ri~gart-) bhakti which Caitanya's disciples were to promulgate. The setting of this poem was the idyllic V.rndivana, along the banks of the Yamun~, a place Caitanya yearned to see. Yet the traffic of pilgrims to this holy land was restricted by political factors---Mathuri was in the heartland of the Delhi Sultanate---as well as by the absence of identifiable shrines to visit. Caitanya changed that,

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both through his own brief visit and, more decisively, through the men he sent to Vraja. These missionaries could not hope to reproduce in Vraja the royal man. d. ala of Puri, but their evolving theology rendered this unnecessary. Their chosen deity was the child and adolescent Kr..s.na, a king in concealment among cowherders, fleeing from an adh~rmika urban tyrant who would destroy him-- an ideal expression both of the core Vaisnava paradigm of divine self-limitation in embodied form and of the religio-political exigencies of the time, when the most public and reified manifestations of the cult had themselves to be concealed or at least downscaled to avoid official displeasure.

Several recent studies have stressed that the Gau.~ya (Caitanyite) Vai.sn. avas' endeavor expressed a yearning 'for an expression of Hindu dharma that placed the world of significant meaning far beyond that sphere controlled by the Muslims' (Haberman 1988: 43; cf. O'Connell 1970: 206, 351-62; Wulff 1984: 18). I would add that this necessarily meant placing it outside the city. KLs..n. a mythol- ogy did not lack urban role models--the victorious hero of Mathura and the senior statesman of DvSxak~ were readily available--but the Gau.~yas found little relish in contemplating these. They associated nearby Mathura, Kr.s.n.a's birthplace (where an historic concentration of temples is said to have resulted in three destructive raids between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries) with the demon-king Kar0sa, even calling it Kar0. sa-puri (Haberman 1994: 76). Before renouncing the world, the future RQpa Gosv~nT (one of the greatest of the Gau.~ya theologians), then a BrS.hrna0. a occupying a high office in the court of H. usain Sh~tla of Bengal, is said to have addressed the following verse to his brother Sanitaria (who would soon follow him to V.rnd~vana): 'Where, alas, is Ayodhya, the kingdom of R~ma now? Its glories have disappeared. And where is the famous Mathura of KLs.n. a? It also is devoid of its former splendor. Think of the fleeting nature of things and settle your course' (Haberman 1988: 44). This revealing expression of world-weariness suggests how intimately the world was associated with the royal city, an archetype now conceived to be lost. Hence, to abandon worldly entanglements meant to abandon the city in favor of a new and unsullied paradigm: the pastoral landscape of the Tenth Book of the Bhagavata Puran. a--the scripture most revered by the Gau.diyas--which tells of I~..n.a's youth. God was now held to prefer being a cowherder to being a king.

As a result, rusticity--scorned for upwards of two millennia--became fashion- able in sixteenth-century north India and was celebrated in endless poetic tributes to the saucy dialect (bolt-) of the villagers of Vraja, to the bliss of herding live- stock and returning home covered with dust, to the joys of splashing in muddy ponds, all seen through the eyes of mostly upper-caste ex-urbanites. Alan Entwistle has noted the many parallels between Vraja devotional literature and the European genre of pastoral, which (in the words of Edmund Chambers [1906:

Imagining Ayodhya / 39

xxxix]), 'is not the poetry of country life, but the poetry of the townsman's dream of country life' (1991: 75). Tracing the genre back to the Latin eclogues, Entwistle notes its preference for a 'metaphorical landscape, imaginary and undefined,' which 'provides a refuge for the jaded city-dweller who yearns to escape from the complexities of polite and formal society' (1991: 74)---or, as I have argued, from a society no longer perceived as 'polite' and 'formal' enough.

That urbanity per se was not the problem is suggested by the details of the devotees' imagined paradise of Goloka (the 'world of cows'), which gradually reveal the transposition to a rural landscape of an essentially urban ideal. The watersports of Radhakun..da ('Radha's pond') are not the games of buffalo- herders, but the jalakrL~ (erotic 'waterplay') of the royal pleasure groves; the forest 'bowers' (nikuhja) quickly evolve into gem-encrusted pavilions outfitted with every luxury of the 'man about town.' Despite an occasional lurking monster sent by Kams. a and speedily dispatched by Krs..n. a, the 'twelve forests' of Vraja are neither the dangerous wilderness of epic lore nor the real, much- reduced groves that supplied contemporary villagers with firewood and bamboo; instead they resemble the manicured parks of courtly poetry. The villagers of Vraja come in for special treatment as well, escaping the association of boorish- ness that characterizes the depiction of rural people in most Sanskrit and even vernacular literature. Ig The model, again, is urban, for these are the playgrounds and playmates of the quintessential ndgara and must be appropriately urbane and sophisticated. In this sense---concealed, like g4..s.na himself--the royal city reappears even in Vraja.

In time, and with the sanction of tolerant emperors, more tangible forms-- fragments of pre-Islamic temple culture---began to reemerge from the rural land- scape in the form of both 'rediscovered' images and newly built shrines; the apogee of this process was the great temple of Govindadeva, built by Akbar's prot6g6 Mfm Si .mha in ca. 1590. Its eventual desecration and abandonment confirmed the continuing riskiness of such enterprises, which remained at the mercy of imperial caprice, and most of the revealed images of Vraja likewise ended up in safe exile in Rijp0t royal cities. Concealment of 'tangible' or sagun.a bhakt/remained the norm of the period and was expressed on the level of spiritual praxis (sadhana) as well. The elaborate temple worship of earlier Val.sn. avism was transformed into an internalized 'service' (seva) in which the practitioner too assumed a 'concealed' (aprakat.a) identity and engaged in visualized role-playing with K4..s.na and his rustic companions. Its external counterpart was the rasa-lrl~ performance tradition, wherein living child actors (svarapas) took the place of temple icons. The appeal of such practices was greatly enhanced by the intel- lectual and devotional writings of the leading Gosvamis--such as Rfipa's ency- clopedic Bhaktirasam.rtasindhu, which synthesized Kr..s.na bhakti, Pftficaratra

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theology, and classical aesthetic theory. Among the Vai.sn.ava devotees who flocked to Vraja in the sixteenth century

were some whose i.st.adeva was Rama. The emerging system of rasika sadhana (the mystical practice of 'sensory connoisseurs') appealed to them as well and gradually found expression in Ramaite texts. The first preceptor of this inter- nalized worship is held to have been Agrad~, who resided at Raivisi (near modern Jaipur) during the second half of the sixteenth century and composed an influential meditation manual called the Dhyanmahjarg ('handmaid of contem- plation') in which the loveplay of the Lord and his consort is transposed to the Ayodhy~ of Rama (Si .mha 1957: 88-95). ~9 Here a curious fact may be noted: just as IQ..sn.a devotees favored a special name---Goloka--to distinguish the eternal, transcendent Vraja from the dusty village reality that surrounded them, so Agrad~s and his followers assigned an esoteric name to their visualization of Rama's divine city, apparently to distinguish it from the profaned Avadh/Oudh of their day; to this end they reached into the past to resurrect the nearly-forgotten name of the Buddhist-period town of Saketa. We may relish the irony of this, bearing in mind Bakker's reconstruction of the city's history: for the real (and mainly Buddhist) Saketa came, by ca. 500 CE to be associated with the imagi- nary Ayodhy~ and bore this name for a thousand years---only to revert back, when the real Ayodhy~ had become associated with mleccha rule and the Bud- dhists all but forgotten, to being an earthly reflection of the divine archetype of Saketa. The significant city, indeed, is always ideal rather than actual.

Agradas might have liked the motto Urbs in horto, for he is said to have been fond of meditating in gardens and to have planted them around Rama temples; his Saketa is a garden city built around a palatial pleasure-park that is the scene of Rama and Sita's intimate pastimes (Si .mha 1957: 379-81). Other texts would go still further: the (late sixteenth-century?) Bhugun..dT Ramaya.na delineates a Saketa man. d. ala of twelve forests in which the young Prince Rama herds cows by day and sports nightly with thousands of gop~s. The Ayodhyi of such texts is a clearly imaginary city and shows no familiarity with the topography of the Avadh region, which the poets may not have even visited--for the Hindu recla- mation of the area, due to political considerations, lagged behind that of Vraja. Even Tulsidas (author of the most popular Hindi version of the Ramay.ana), who seems to have resided in Ayodhyi for a time in the 1570s and who praises it highly in his Ramcaritmanas (e.g., 7.4.2-7, wherein R~ma states that it is dearer to him than Vi.s.nu's divine city of Vaikuo..tha and bestows salvation on all who reside in i0, makes no mention of specific sites or activities, apart from pilgrims bathing in the Sarayfi on the occasion of R~_rnanavami (1.34, 35.1--4). As I have noted, Ayodhyi at this time remained a Muslim provincial headquarters, and the kind of tangible landscaping that the V.rnd,~vana Gosvamis and their patrons were

Imagining Ayodhya / 41

able to achieve would have to wait until the Nawabs withdrew their capital, fast to Faizabad, and then (in 1765) to more distant Lucknow.

By that time, Mughal hegemony had disintegrated, many Hindu landed gentry and adventurers had assumed princely rifles and perquisites in the region, and a new foreign presence--the British--had begun to broker the relations between competing local forces. Coincidentally, the influence of the IQ..sn.a tradition's pastoral-eroric scenario began to wane, as new classes of religious patrons--the resurgent Raj~ and their courtiers began to invest heavily in the reconstruction of RErna's capital. Their efforts characteristically assumed urban and regal forms, such as the palaces of Da~aratha's three queens, the immense temple of Kanak Bhavan (the 'golden mansion'), built in 1891 on the alleged site of R~na and Sita's private residence, and even the folksy 'Sit,~'s kitchen.' In the twentieth century, mercantile and industrialist patrons largely replaced the landed aristoc- racy, and their contributions to Ayodhyi's expanding theme park emphasized nationalism and orderly administration. Whereas Kr..sna was a lovable, if debauched, nobleman and V rndivana his lush country playground, R~ma was now presented as a fastidious but beneficent bureaucrat/statesman and Ayodhya as his 'office' (I have heard it so described by local storytellers). Modem guide- books directed his pilgrims' feet not only to private apartments and gardens, but to such edifices as Rimajharoki ( 'R~na's audience window'), 'the place where petition letters for decisions on legal cases were received during R~na's reign'; R~nakacahari ('R~una's courthouse,' of which a guidebook observes, 'we may call this the "Secretariat" of the Treti Age'); and Ratnasi .mhEsana (the 'jeweled throne,' which is styled 'the famous courthouse of the Solar kings') (Tripi.thi 1984: 79-80). As in any bureaucratic office in India, the petitioning process would move along most effectively if one first ingratiated oneself with an influ- ential subordinate of the Great Man; in Ayodhyi, this meant that the first temple visit for most pilgrims was to Hanum~mg~hi, the seat of Rama's approachable regent-cum-secretary--an imposing citadel held by 'fighting' naga sadhus that featured a ring of (decorative) cannon. More recent developments include the empire-building of ambitious local religious leaders like the R~rn~nandi mahant N.rtyagop~ldas, whose (ironically named) Cho.~ Chavni ('little camp') expanded during the 1970s and 1980s to include 'Vilmilci Bhavan' (an immense hall containing the inscribed text of the Sanskrit Ramayan. a, obviously built to one- up Banaras's famous Tulsiminas temple, which is inscribed with the Hindi epic) and a string of temples enshrining full-size replicas of the ~rivai.s.navas' Rat~gan~tha and the Gau.diyas' Jagannitha--'so that' (in the words of an official of the trust) 'pilgrims can have holy sight of all the sacred dhamas in one place' ----or viewed from another angle, can savor a monument to Rfun~mandi sectarian imperialism. Rarna's own militancy as dharma-warrior is the newest theme in

42 / Philip Lutgendorf

the park and bespeaks a reinterpretation of the royal city as ma.ndala of the modern nation-state, now conceived along communal lines. The success of this new and controversial variation on the ancient formula 'god-king = temple city = world order' can be clarified, I believe, through an examination of a final and chronologically recent category of texts.

IMITATING ITIHASA

The great Hindi literary scholar Hazariprasad Dvivedi once wrote that, although the Sanskrit word itihasa (literally 'so it was') had come to be used in modern Indian languages to translate the English 'history,' it could never be altogether separated from its epic and P u r ~ c resonances (Si .mha 1964: 201). Whereas post-Enlightenment Euro-American discourse commonly posits history as a grimly edifying record of human folly which we should ideally strive to avoid repeating, 2° the Hindu usage of itihasa is more characteristically imbued with a nostalgic reverence. It is the product of an ideological universe governed by a cosmological schema of progressive decay, as well as by historical experiences of conquest and domination, in which the lost past is generally more glorious than the tawdry present, and in which the endeavor to improve the world must focus on recovery and restoration. As a result, movements of social reform in India have commonly portrayed themselves as purifying revivals; examples include the foundational legends of practically all the medieval bhakti sects, 2~ and in more recent times, the nineteenth century attempt by the ,~u'ya Samij and other groups to restore Vedic traditions, and twentieth-century Dravidian sepa- ratists' efforts to invoke a pre-Th"yan past. Even the Indian National Congress at the time of Independence, with its ostensible commitment to a new secular agenda, had to conceptualize itself as inheriting the mantle of past empire, though this required sifting all the way back to Emperor Agoka, whose lion and dharma- wheel became the national emblems. Similarly, it appears clear to outsiders that the increasingly homogeneous brand of popular Hinduism that began to develop during the latter half of the nineteenth century, spread by new classes of patrons through new media, in response to new cultural and political challenges, was something quite innovative; yet to its adherents its most salient feature--sig- naled by its name--was that it was 'immemorial tradition' (sanitaria dharma).

The theme of restoration permeates an assortment of published tracts purport- ing to record the 'traditional' or "oral' history (janagruti) of Ayodhyg (e.g., P~m...dey 1976, 1987; see also Saccidinand D~s Rarn~yani 1985; ~arm~ 1986; Tripi.tlff 1984, 1989). This literature is presented in pilgrim guidebooks and

Imagining Ayodhya / 43

garish pamphlets trumpeting titles like 'The blood-smeared history of the ~ri RErna janmabhami' which sell for a few rupees in bookstalls, but it reflects a body of legend that has become familiar to millions of pious Hindi-speaking Hindus through such influential magazines as Sanm~rg and Kalydn. and through the discourse of traditional orators; most recently, one version of it has been widely circulated by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) in the form of a video- cassette. 22 Significantly, tiffs legend is absent from the older Sanskrit mahatmya literature and can be traced only to the late eighteenth century (Bakker 1986, 1: 30)-----that is, to the beginning of the reclamation phase in Ayodhyi to which I have referred above. Using a Sanskritized-yet-rustic Hindi rhetoric that combines the stock formulas of the Purh0.ic mythologies with the kind of attentiveness to geographical and statistical detail characteristic of modern schoolbook histories, these writings present an argument more readily believable to millions of people than the interpretations of academic historians. 23

Although the pamphlets vary in certain details, they recount basically the same sequence of legends and together may be said to constitute portions of a modern 'site history' (sthalapur~.) of the city. They typically begin, in classic Pura0.ic style, with the re-creation of the universe after one of the periodic cosmic inun- dations, identifying the current site of R~tma's city as 'the first land that became visible to Brahma.' They then offer a condensed genealogy of the Solar dynasty, placing R~na in its sixty-fourth generation, to be followed by a further thirty sovereigns, until the lineage terminates in the Mahabhhrata War, ushering in the present kaliyuga (Tripa.~ 1984: 4, 8-9). An important detail in all accounts is the existence, in the citadel of Ayodhyi, of a hall containing eighty-four columns of black kasau.tt- stone, carved at the order of the nineteenth king of the dynasty, An~an. ya, but stolen from him by the ruler of Laftki---either R.~va0. a or (in some versions) one of his forbears--and later restored by the victorious Rhrna. 24 The theme of exemplary sovereignty being cemented, so to speak, by an act of archi- tectural restoration is thus early introduced.

There follow formulaic descriptions of the grandeur of Ayodhyi in the days of King Da~aratha--its wide streets, lush gardens, and gem-encrusted mansions. But with the departure of RLraa from the earth, this fabulous city is deserted by its inhabitants, who follow their adored ruler to heaven, and falls into ruin. In time, it disappears so completely that even its location cannot be determined. Its restoration will depend on another king in search of legitimation--or rather, a pair of kings. Rij~ Vikram.~ditya of Ujjain comes to the banks of the SarayQ in the first century BCE, it is said, having annexed the territory by defeating the king of Srhvasti, in order to reclaim the site of R~ma's capital. He can find no trace of the lost city, however, and sits gazing at the river in bitter disappoint- ment. Suddenly a majestic horseman appears on the riverbank, in kingly raiment

44 / Philip Lutgendorf

and with jewel-encmsted crown, but in both person and garb he is jet-black----even to his horse, his jewels, and the flowers in his garlands. As the king watches, this black man enters the river astride his black horse and emerges moments later wonderfully transformed: every detail of horse and rider has turned radiant white. In response to Vikramiditya's query, the mysterious horseman identifies himself as Rija Prayaga, the 'king of pilgrimage places' (the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers at modern Allahabad), and explains that he repairs to this place each year on Ramanavarni in order to cleanse himself of the accumu- lated sins of the millions who bathe in his own waters at the time of the annual Makara Sankranti festival. Such purification is possible, he explains, because this is indeed the site of Ayodhya, the capital of the exemplary man, RErna. Prayiga then instructs Vikramaditya to rebuild the lost city by finding, first of all, 'that spot at which the root of joy, Raghu's delight, descended to earth from Kansaly.~'s womb' (Tripi.thi 1984: 15). When the king protests that he has already undertaken this task and failed, his supernatural preceptor instructs him to procure a cow that has recently calved and to lead her around the area on Ramanavami; when the cow reaches the site of the Lord's birth, a stream of milk will sponta- neously gush from her udders, z5 The king carries out these instructions and the promised miracle ensues; subsequently, guided by a Pur~a, he is able to deter- mine the location of every other important site by reference to the birthplace and gradually delineates the template of an eight-gated royal city. This he rebuilds in suitable fashion, down to the last detail. At the janmabhffmi itself he constructs a huge temple, incorporating the eighty-four kasaua columns which he discovers buried in the earth, and installs therein an image of Rama, his brothers, and Sit.~, likewise made of kasau.n_ He then institutes suitable worship by various classes of functionaries. The restored Ayodhyi becomes Vikramiditya's capital, and with its restoration there commences, literally, a new age: the Vikrama Era or Sariavat, which is usually calculated to have begun in 57 BCE (and which remains in wide use in India alongside the Julian calendar). 26

The legend recapitulates a theme that is by now familiar: the need for an ascendant king to establish a royal capital that is at once 'new' and a restoration of a lost archetype. Thus the city of the primordial lawgiver King Manu is restored to its former glory by Lord Rama, the 'exemplar of order' (maryada purus.ottama) and reviver, during the second cosmic era, of the golden age of the first. He is followed in due course by Vikramiditya, another figure associated with cultural revival after a period of disorder. The tale of his encounter with King Prayaga obviously serves the interest of the local pilgrimage industry by affuming the supremacy of the Sarayfi' s waters over those of other arthas; this kind of claim is an invariable feature of a mahatmya. But the implications of the story go further: just as Prayaga becomes cleansed of impurity by bathing at

Imagining Ayodhya / 45

Ayodhy,~ on R~manavami, so Vikramiditya will cleanse and correct himself by restoring Ayodhya to its pristine condition. Purgation and purification are central motifs here, conveyed through the striking image of the black king who turns white. 'Sin,' in the Hindu sense of papa, mala, or kalma.sa, is the accumulated dross of time which must be periodically cleansed. This is achieved on an indi- vidual level through bathing rituals and on a social level through the restoration of dharma. King Vikramaditya does not merely relocate his capital in Ayodhyi, he recreates Ritma's city down to the last detail, and it is this fidelity to the past which brands him as an exemplary ruler, capable of inaugurating a 'new' era in historical time. This understanding of the legend makes clear why the symbolic reclamation of Ayodhya through the reconstruction of ajanmabh~mi temple is claimed by the VHP-BJP as an obligatory first step in its program of Hindutva - - the purification and reconstruction of the Hindu 'nation.' Once again, the equation of 'god-king = cosmic city-state = world order' is encoded in narrative.

The structure of the story also parallels two significant processes, the one historical, the other ritual. As Peter van der Veer (1988: 9-17) has pointed out, the oldest Hindu shrines at Ayodhy~ appear to be the gha.ts and Saiva temples of the riverfront t[rtha, where an immemorial routine of purificatory and life- cycle rituals without direct reference to the R~.mayaga narrative is carried on under the guidance of pilgrimage priests. As we have seen, the reconstruction of the urban sites was historically a much later phenomenon. Contemporary pilgrims likewise begin their visit with a bath in the Saray~, generally accompanied by Vedic-style ceremonies and worship of the Saiva shrines along its bank. They then proceed into the city, which is to say, into the Ranu~yan. a narrative--they move from the atemporal realm of ritual accompanied by Vedic mantra to the temporal realm of itihasa. How they choose to construct this narrative depends to some extent on individual inclination--there are hundreds of temples and shrines to choose from--but nowadays certain stops are de rigeur: Hanum~n- ga[hi, Kanak Bhavan, and the janmabhami. In making the rounds of such sites, pilgrims recapitulate Vikram~ditya's labors and reconstruct, station by station, the signifiers of a royal city. This rebuilt capital of the utopia of Ramraj encodes a powerful message of stability and order, hence it is no accident that this city's star has continued to rise during the second half of the twentieth century, when the Indian body politic, purged of the impurities of foreign rule, has been wrestling with the problem of how to (re)constitute itself.

The ideal of the Hindu royal city has proven tenacious, but the reality of Indian urban experience has continued to challenge it, first with the 'chaotic' and impure cities of subcontinental Islam, and later with the mercantile outposts of the British, which grew into the great but troubled megalopolises of the twentieth century. Surveying modem Marathi literature, Mahadeo Apte (1970: 200-202)

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perceives a shift from a more 'optimistic view' of urban life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction (wherein the city is a progressive environment offering escape from rural poverty and caste oppression) to 'a pessimistic and cynical attitude' after 1940, characterized by realistic portrayals of overcrowding, poverty, and the breakdown of family structure. As a greater proportion of Indians come to reside in cities, they experience tensions common to urban dwellers the world over: alienation resulting from the loss of traditional kinship and commu- nity networks, the frustration of competition for scarce resources, the corruption of ensconced bureaucracies and self-serving politicians. Such experiences feed nostalgia for an imagined urban past--a model capital ruled by a just king--and astute politicians make capital of such longings, particularly among the urban middle classes--the prime constituency of religious nationalism.

Such appeals to the past are of course neither new nor unique to India. In the heavily-urbanized United States, politicians and other publicists may invoke images of a simpler, rural life: the (unbroken) family sitting by the fireplace of their log cabin. Pastoral imagery has played a role in modern Indian imaginings of the state as well; M. K. Gandhi (whose childhood in Gujarat was permeated by Vai.sn.ava devotionalism) championed a vision of a nation that would be decentralized and self-sufficient--a neo-Goloka of industrious kisan (peasant- farmers), contented cows, and whirring spinning-wheels. But this Gandhian ideal received little more than lipservice from most other nationalist leaders, and Gandhi himself was inclined to lace his talks with invocations of Ramraj, the righteous kingdom of RSana, to which he gave his own distinctive interpretation (Lutgendorf 1991: 378-82). After Independence, more urban and industrialized models quickly supplanted Gandhi's rural vision; Jawaharlal Nehru pledged himself to building 'new temples' in the form of dams and steel mills, to produce the amenities that real kisans evidently wanted as much as did urbanites: elec- tricity and running water, and then (with the consumer revolution of subsequent decades) minivans and cable TV. Nehru's less-committedly-seeular colleagues, even in the Congress party, had other temples in mind as well, and in the 1950s many supported a campaign to construct a huge new Somanitha (Siva) complex in Gujarat, to replace one allegedly demolished by M .al)mQd in ca. 1025, applaud- ing when then-president of India, Rajendra Prasad (a south Indian Brahma0. a), personally performed the installation ceremony of the Siva lihgartt. (van der Veer 1992: 89-93). Ayodhyi, too, would become the site of government-sponsored excavation and reconstruction. In the 1970s, the Archeological Survey of India sponsored excavations in the R~ako.t area, as part of a wider program of search- ing for tangible remains of 'epic-period' urban centers. And in December, 1982, the Congress (I) chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state announced at a religious mela in Ayodhy~ a grandiose and costly scheme to rebuild the city's 'ancient'

48 / Philip Lutgendorf

riverfront (left drylocked when the SarayO shifted its course) involving the

construction of an artificial channel lined with multi-leveled ghats, esplanades, and pavilions--a project that continued throughout the decade, even as the Vishva Hindu Parishad's janmabhami temple campaign heated up and began to attract national coverage.

But it was the leaders of the VHP and its political ally the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) who made the most effective use of the ideologically resonant image of Ayodhy~. They utilized a potent body-language of archetypal forms and gestures to elicit mass participation in their program of 'liberation' of R~ma's birthplace: elaborate motorized 'chariots' wending their way from the Somanitha temple to Ayodhy~; lamps lit from a Vedic fire kindled at the janmabhami, distributed to Hindu homes at the time of the Divali festival; and, most effective

of all, thousands of 'consecrated bricks' fabricated in villages and towns by local committees and transported to the holy city for the construction of the new temple - - the visible substance of urban renewal (Davis 1996; van der Veer 1994: 1-8). The ideology of restoration, so successfully used by Vai.sn. ava devotees from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, thus resurfaced with (literally) a vengeance in the late twentieth. Its aim was no longer sectarian, but communal; its goal no

longer pietistic devotion, but religious nationalism. Since 1990, a new poster has appeared throughout India, in which a frowning

RSana, arrow in hand, stands before an immense white edifice in the royal north- em style, with multiple porticos and a soaring spire, above the Hindi slogan 'We will build the temple at that very spot!' In a compressed and strident manner, this icon recapitulates and recasts the formula: 'god-king (R~'na) -- holy city (birthplace temple) = cosmic moral order (now usurped by "we," the people; the "Hindu nation" under the aegis of an exclusionist religio-political party).' It tells us that the patriots' dream of a millennial Hindutva will necessarily require as

its cornerstone an alabaster city--but not without human tears.

Notes

1. The writings of Gopal and Srivastava present the secularist argument put forth by a group of academic historians; those of Chandran, God, Elst, and Shourie respond to this, generally favoring the Vishva Hindu Parishad position; the collections edited by Engineer and by Aggarwal and Chowdhry attempt a non-partisan approach incorporating an array of source materials, though Engineer clearly favors the Muslim position.

2. Thus A. K. Ramanujan (1970" 233-34) notes that the poetic description alludes to all of the criteria for urbanization (centralized authority, class structure, agricultural surplus, and so forth) identified by archeologists in analyzing the great river-valley civi-

Imagining Ayodhyd / 49

lizations of antiquity.

3. Based on a comprehensive reading of source materials in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Hindi, as well as in English and several European languages, supplemented by fieldwork carried out in the early 1980s, it was completed prior to the adoption of the local janmabhami issue by the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata party as a rallying point for Hindu sentiments. The work of a Dutch scholar, it avoids giving undue weight to (subsequently much maligned) British colonial sources, and the greater part of its argument is based on pre-modern textual and archeological evidence. That argument is, regrettably, couched in the intimidating form of an almost eight-hundred-page Euro- pean dissertation, formidably priced.

4. One of the V ~ t a k a kings, Pravarasena II (431-39), is the alleged author of the Setubandha K~vya, a retelling of a Rdrndy~. episode that stresses R~ma's identity with Vi.sn.u. The same king is said to have built a new capital city, Pravarapura, with a central

Vi.sn.u temple (Bakker 1986, 1: 61-62). 5. On Gupta-era Sftketa/Ayodhy~, see Bakker 1986, 1:11-12, 25-33, 37-44. 6. Like most scholars who wrote prior to 1987, Bakker took for granted, on the basis

of archeological and circumstantial evidence, that there was substance in the local tradi- tion that Babur's mosque was erected after the demolition of a Vai.sn. ava sanctuary asso- ciated with the birth of R~ma. Due to subsequent political events, this assumption has come under intense scrutiny, with historians at Jawahaflal Nehru University (and else- where) maintaining that the local traditions concerning the janmabhFoni were themselves the remnant of a fiction promoted by the British as part of their policy of 'divide-and- rule' (see Panikkar 1991; Srivastava 1991b).

7. So convinced is Pollock of the absence of R~ma worship prior to Hindu-Islamic contact, that he dismisses as 'dubious' Bakker's impressive circumstantial evidence of Gupta/V~a~.t~a patronage of a Rimaite Vai.snava cult. Yet the fact that the later Guptas were themselves besieged by an alien 'other' (the HQn.as), in fact, lends support to Pollock's argument regarding the polemic uses of the R~,u~y . a~ paradigm.

8. On the various stages of development of the Ayodhya Mahatmya and a pr6cis of its contents, see Bakker 1986, 1: 125-81. Part 2 of Bakker's study presents a critical edition and translation of this text.

9. The wording suggests why a dedicated absolutist like Akbar (who is known to have issued coins with R~ma and Sft~'s image) would have found the Ranu~y .arm appealing.

10. Compare a similar phenomenon in ancient Egypt, where 'royal capitals... continued to have a temporary and improvised air....But temple cities, like Memphis, remained a sacred community for fifteen hundred years' (Mumford 1961: 82). For India, the Ramaya.na's hyperbolic example (2.40) is instructive: when R~na prepares to depart Ayodhy~ for the forest, all its citizens plan to leave with him.

11. One may observe too that contemporary north Indian villages and towns in Hindu- majority areas are typically subdivided according to caste and occupation; see, for

example, the map of the Rajasthani town of Mandi (Cottam 1980: 328). 12. Ibn Ba..t~.ta spent many years in Tughlaq-period Delhi, and although his detailed

diary often cites beliefs and customs that he found unusual, the almost complete absence

50 / Philip Lutgendorf

of description of the city suggests that its physical layout likewise conformed to his expectations.

13. Compare Tulsidas (Ramcaritmanas 7.100.5-6, 9), on the horror of 'telrs, kumh~ras, can. d alas' (oil-pressers, potters, leather-workers), and so forth becoming renunciant sanny~.sTs, and ~fidras sitting on high seats, expounding scriptures.

14. Bakker (1986, 1: 122), citing Hemadri's encyclopedic Caturvargacintaman.~ (composed at Deogiri in the Deccan in ca. 1270), anticipates Pollock's argument to some extent. The composition of such works had already begun under the G~aO. avila kings in the twelfth century, whose inscriptions likewise refer to Turkic incursions; compare the huge K.rtyakalpataru of Lak~.midhara (Bakker 1986, 1: 51).

15. I am indebted to Professor Gaeffke and his article both for having brought the KTrtilata to my attention as well as for a number of the interpretations that follow. My reading of the poem, however, relies substantially on the modem Hindi commentary and historico-linguistie analysis of $ivprasid Si .mha (1964).

16. The name is thought to derive from the Sanskrit Yavana-pura, and thus may be translated (depending on how generically one construes yavana) as 'Muslim-town' or 'foreigner-ville' (Si .mha 1964: 250).

17. Note, however, that Bakker's research (1986, 1: 125) implicitly challenges Vaudeville's argument concerning the 'Vai.s.navization' of folk religion, by suggesting that the popular north Indian sant poets' devotion to the divine name was itself but another example of compensation for the absence of major temples that characterized the Sultanate period.

18. Compare Tulsid~s' famous verse, presented as proverbial utterance by the god of ocean in Book Five of the Ramcaritmanas (59.6), 'Drum, villager, ~0dra, beast, and woman--all these warrant beating.' Although the inclusion of ~0dra (member of the servile fourth class) and woman in the list has been widely problematized in twentieth century discourse, the mention of gartt, v(tra (variously glossed as 'villager,' 'rustic,' and 'boor'), still appears scarcely to warrant mention by most commentators, as if the justifi- cation for beating such a person is self-evident. Likewise, the romanticization or even accurate description of village life, or the conceptualization of it as the 'real India,' is largely a product of twentieth century ethnography and Gandhian nationalism.

19. A precis of Agradis's poem appears in McGregor (1983: 237--44). McGregor's argument that the Mahjarf simply recapitulates, for R~na devotees, a scenario developed by the Vraja poet Nandd~s in Iris Ras Pahc(ulhyay~ is unconvincing, although IGLs...naite influence on the R~maa rasika tradition is indisputable.

20. For example, George Santayana's remark, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it' (1905, 1: 284); and Jos~ Ortega y Gasset observes, 'We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it' (1957 [1932]: 96).

21. For example, the ~rivais.n.ava legend of the rediscovery of the 'lost' songs of the Tamil Al.var poet-saints and the comparable story among the followers of ~aiva Siddhanta tradition; similarly the VTra~aivas and the various later northern sant sects regarded their venerated founders (Basavan.n.a, Kabir, and others) as revivers of

Imagining Ayodhya / 51

immemorial traditions.

22. Made for the VHP by Jain Studios of Delhi in 1991, the video was banned by the Indian government, but widely reproduced. It bore as its title a half-line from the R ~ m c a r i ~ (2.28.4), Pr(m j~hum, paru vacan na j ~ (We'll sacrifice our lives but not our vow).

23. Neeladri Bhattacharya (1991: 122-40), one of the few historians to discuss this literature, charges that the pamphleteers seek to blur the distinction between 'myth' and 'history' in order to win over two distinct audiences. Yet the pamphlets conform to a well-established itihasa style of discourse, which makes no such distinction and musters all available arguments to serve its polemic purpose.

24. Kasau.a is a black, slate-like stone, celebrated in Hindi literature as a 'touchstone' on which the genuineness of gold may be assayed. The fact that fourteen columns of kasaut.L identified by art historians as probable Hindu workmanship of the eleventh century, were incorporated into the walls of the B~tbr[ masjid (and two more were hammered upside-down into the ground at the nearby grave of a Muslim saint) has been considered by many as evidence that the mosque was erected on the site of a demolished temple (see Bakker 1986, 1: 44). The Ayodhya guide has no doubt that these columns were the very ones commissioned by R~j~ Aniran. ya.

25. Thus P~..dey's account (1987). T r i p i ~ (1984: 16-19) has the king draw a dagger line in the earth around prominent sites pointed out by Raja Prayiga, but alas, these marks vanish when the horseman does---repeating the motif of loss and recovery--and the king must then go to Banaras to seek the blessing of ,~iva, who advises him concern- ing the divination-by-cow. The latter motif, and that of the spontaneous flow of milk identifying a buried image, both occur in the sthala pura.nas of numerous ~aiva sites in south India, as well as in Gau.diya and Vallabhite sectarian legends of the reclamation of

Vraja. Note particularly the very similar story of the rediscovery of the lost villages of Vraja by King Vajranabha, guided by the guru of the Gopa lineage (Vaudeville 1976: 201).

26. Bakker (1986, 1: 30) speculates that this legend might reflect the Gupta-era shift of a royal capital to the former Srlketa, and its re-visioning in terms of the Rdmdyan. a narrative.

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PHILIP LUTGENDORF teaches Hindi and Indian literature at the University

of Iowa.