Kishore Kunal in his book, Ayodhya Revisited, seeks to debunk the long-held belief that Babur built a mosque on the ruins of a temple he destroyed in Ayodhya. So, who didIJ According to the author, it was Aurangzeb
Enough has been written and said about the Ayodhya Ram temple-Babri mosque issue. People have made political careers out of it, liberals have embellished their secular credentials, and academics have crisscrossed the country spreading their respective versions of the story. If all that has been said and written is compiled in one volume, it would outclass the Ramayan in size. The mosque came down 25 years ago and the fires of that moment are dead. The embers continue to glow off and on, though, and lead to minor sparks here and there. And yet, even for politicians on all sides, the issue is no longer worth exploiting on a large canvas. The fatigue factor has hit everybody, and even the highest court of the land appears to be in no hurry to adjudicate the matter.
But what if someone were to come along and shake the very fundamentals of the narrative that we have lived with and learnt over the decadesIJ What if someone were to say: ‘But Babur never destroyed the temple’IJ Well said, the liberals would acclaim. And what if someone were to state: ‘Babur never built the mosque in the first place’IJ Hold on… say again. ‘Yes, Babur never built the mosque in Ayodhya that we have been calling as Babri mosque and that which was razed to the ground more than two decades ago.’ And, therefore, stop calling it the Babri mosque. Also, yes, the Ram temple did exist on the spot; except that it was somebody else and not Babur who had demolished it.
Heads would shake, eyes would roll, tongues would lash out, and the ‘seculars’ and the ‘saffrons’ would hurry to dispel the outrageous thought at the earliest. Surely, they could not allow this twist to ruin their game. But Kishore Kunal couldn’t care less. A former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer who later joined the Union Ministry of Home Affairs as Officer on Special Duty dealing with the Ayodhya dispute, he has written a 700-page book, Ayodhya Revisited, where he meticulously seeks to debunk the long-held belief that the Mughal ruler Babur had built a mosque on the ruins of a temple in Ayodhya. So, who destroyed the templeIJ Kunal says it was Aurangzeb, and the incident happened sometime in 1660.
In his capacity as an officer in charge of the Ayodhya issue, posted in the Home Ministry in 1990 during VP Singh’s tenure as Prime Minister, Kunal had access to loads of material collected and presented to the Government by the warring sides of the dispute. His claims cannot thus be dismissed as the rant of an uninformed but highly opinionated individual. He is less than tolerant of the rigid views held by both the sides — he calls the the left-liberal academics as “self-established” historians who have “established an academic empire and try to stifle any voice of dissent or truth”; and those of the opposite group as “enthusiastic historians”, most of whom “lack the skill of sifting the grain from husk”. Kunal finds the difference between these two kinds of historians “very thin”. Interestingly, both these sections agree that Babur had built the mosque — one asserts it was done on a barren plot of land, the other alleges that it was constructed after the temple’s demolition.
So, what makes Kunal to conclude that it was Aurangzeb and not Babur who had built the mosque after the temple’s destruction. He has depended on archaeological and other standard material, of course, that are available in the contemporary context. But more interestingly, the author has extensively cited 11 documents “of vital importance”, the earliest dating back to the 11th century and the latest to the 19th century, to establish his views. Thus, we have him quoting from the Vishnu Hari inscription found in the post-demolition debris to the notes of P Carnegy, the Officiating Commissioner of Faizabad and the Settlement Officer there for many years.
In the pursuance of his theory, Kunal points out that, for 240 years after its supposed construction in 1528, the reference to a Babri mosque “did not figure in any text written by any indigenous or foreign authority”. Surely a development of such importance ought to have, when smaller exploits by rulers were duly recorded by their faithful to pass on to generations. The author says that there is no mention of the Babri mosque in either Babur’s memoirs or the Humayun-nama (of Gul Badan Begum) or in the accounts of Abul Fazal’s Ain-e-Akbari or other works that came after the supposed construction of the mosque during Babur’s reign. The author argues: How could all these accounts miss outIJ
Kunal dismisses the inscriptions that were found on the mosque premises to suggest that Babur had built the structure, as “fake”. He says, “They were fixed subsequently on the structure almost 285 years after its supposed construction in 1528, and were replaced repeatedly.” The author refers to Jesuit priest Joseph Tieffenthaler’s notes on the mosque when the latter had visited the place sometime in 1770, and says even the priest, who was well-versed in Persian, had not noticed any inscription on any part of the mosque suggesting the structure had come up during Babur’s time. In fact, Tieffenthaler writes that Aurangzeb had demolished the Ram Kot and that some versions attributed the destruction to Babur.
Kishore Kunal quotes an account of a “contemporary independent literary source” — the Italian, Niccolo Manucci, who came to India in 1656 and sided with Dara Shikoh in the latter’s failed battle for succession. He recorded his observations in a meticulously maintained diary, and ended up converting the material into a book, which was first published in 1837 as Storia do Mogor (Story of the Mughals). Here is an excerpt which Kunal produces in his book: “The chief temples destroyed by King Aurangzeb within his kingdom were the following: Maisa (MayapurIJ), Matura (Mathura), Caxis (Kashi), Hajudia (Ayodhya).”
This and the authoritative accounts left behind by the Jesuit priest mentioned earlier, along with other circumstantial evidences, are, according to Kunal, ironclad material to suggest that Aurangzeb, and not Babur, was the destroyer of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, and also architect of the structure. If so, should we now refer to it as the Aurangzebi mosqueIJ
(The writer is Opinion Editor, The Pioneer)