28 years since a mob destroyed the #babrimasjid, a rare Babur-period mosque. How much do you know about this event and its repercussions?
On some of the lead-up to this terrible event:
Basic timeline of key events (note that 300+ year gap between events 1 and 2... the #babrimasjid dispute has always been a modern issue, not a premodern one): bbc.com/news/world-sou…
The Babri Masjid's destruction reverberated throughout the academy also. One example, this set of articles digging into the evidence of temple desecrations in premodern India: columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pri…
The Ayodhya verdict was a watershed moment in the Babri Masjid dispute and the development of the Hindu Rashtra. I wrote about some of it here [replug]: caravanmagazine.in/religion/ayodh…
Now, a temple is being built on the spot of an illegally destroyed mosque...
There is a logic to that Ram temple of identity with the state that rings a bit familiar to me as a historian. Although it is a logic that many of us preferred to leave in the past.
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Folks, I'm on a real bender of reading up on colonial-era India (don't judge; this is just how historians are). My recent and current reading lists include:
Durba Mitra's Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought amazon.com/Indian-Sex-Lif…
Debjani Bhattacharyya's Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta amazon.com/Empire-Ecology…
To suspend this professor is a horrifying example of Western hegemony, cultural ignorance, and anti-Chinese bias.
@USC -- There are words in lots of languages that sound off to English speakers. Learning and overcoming one's own biases are part of learning a foreign language.
I once had an English-only American tell me that Pakistan should change the name of Lahore, to avoid confusion in English. No joke. I responded: "Maybe you should learn Urdu."
Sikh. As in, imagine in an intro to South Asia course, "The person you see on this slide is Sikh."
Note that there is a clear difference between the Indian term (in many languages) "Sikh" and English "sick", but English-only speakers usually cannot hear the difference.
A few follow-ups, largely for the benefit of @BloomsburyIndia. They should see what they are doing with an unvarnished gaze.
Many observers and scholars consider the Delhi riots a pogrom, i.e., an organized massacre of an ethnic or religious group. In this case, Muslims.
During the 2020 Delhi riots / pogrom, Hindu right-wingers targeted Muslims with violence.
This wasn't a debate; it wasn't a clash about which reasonable people can disagree. One group tried to massacre members of another, and succeeded in taking dozens of lives.
A few points of clarification, especially for those not super familiar with US law and culture—
In the US, you have freedom of speech, but no right to a platform. Supremacist groups are free to articulate offensive views, but no company must give them advertising space.
Most Americans still know nothing about Hindutva. But one way of thinking about this issue in the US is as follows:
Would you platform white supremacists?
If yes, then give Hindutva ideologues airtime. But if not, then steer clear of hateful Hindutva.
The Babri Masjid was probably built in 1528 by a general of Babur. At the time, it likely wasn’t a big deal. Babur doesn’t even mention it in his memoirs.
Babri Masjid may have been built over temple ruins, but, owing to bad and politicised archaeology, we aren’t sure.
If it was built on temple ruins, they could be Jain, Hindu, or Buddhist in origin. They also could’ve been ruins for hundreds of years by the 1520s (or not).
Basics -- The #Mahabharata is an epic narrative that centers around two sets of cousins who both want a specific throne in northern India and fight over it in a cataclysmic war, with lots of side stories thrown it.
It was first written down in Sanskrit ~2,000 years ago.
When asking questions about historicity, whether something is true, some basics-
Onus is on proving it is true, not that it is false.
The answer doesn't have to be either-or; it can be fuzzy.
Historians care about beliefs & myth because they tell us what people think and value