THE Mandir WAPSI MOVEMENT
Once upon a time, there was a king—three quarter Rajput and one quarter nomad by lineage—and he built one of the most beautiful monuments in the world….’ Facts are only the bare bricks. Finally, it is the stories we tell ourselves that matter—how we select bricks and weave shapes in the mind, and mortar them into our imagination. Those first lines are as factual a statement about the Taj Mahal as any other. Shah Jahan’s mother was Rajput, and his father was half-Rajput. His son, Aurangzeb, had Rajput blood from his father and Persian from his mother. So only a small fraction remained of that old Chagatai Mughal bloodline from Central Asia, with which we associate him most fervently. The one metaphor that has saturated the air for a century or two, altering India’s political and social landscape in decisive ways, is that of the ‘Muslim as foreign invader’. The fact that the last three of the six ‘Great Mughals’ were products of intermarriage complicates that simplistic trope.
Examining those archetypes is vital because they underlie everything else that happens. And something, indeed, is happening. The Indian republic is plunged headlong into an unprecedented moment of crisis—one that cuts across society, politics and government, law and the Constitution. A permanent simmer on low flame arriving, out of the blue, at a point of combustion—like someone suddenly turned the knob on high. Before it singes the more abstract realms, it reaches the street. Out by Gate No. 4 on the spanking new Kashi Corridor, sandwiched between mandir and masjid, you can practically feel the air crackling. That easy bustle is not there. Barricades have replaced it. Court-appointed commissioners come and go. Normally a placid, laid-back town that wears its tourist millions lightly, Kashi is spending this summer on a rapier’s edge. Hotel owners talk of a 60 per cent drop in footfalls.
The Gyanvapi controversy has revived what seemed like a settled issue after the Ayodhya judgment of 2019—disinterring a ghost that was supposed to have been laid to rest with’. And not just those two. The upsurge is threatening to prise open all the crevasses in history—real or imagined. From known cases of Muslim imperial vandalism to disputes of interpretation, like Baba Budangiri in Karnataka’s coffee-flavoured Chikmagalur, everything is fair game. Even the celebrated Taj Mahal has seen claims being advanced of having been built over a temple. The website Article 14 lists not only a flurry of “identically-worded suits” on Gyanvapi, but “12 similar claims on mosques and Islamic-era monuments” across four states. An outfit called the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti has drawn up a list of 1,862 mosques across India it wants reclaimed for Hindu worship.
