A personal childhood story from a visit to Ayondhya in 1989!

Ayodhya has long been considered the capital of Sri Ram's kingdom and also his birth place. It is located east-wards of Lucknow in the state of Uttar Pradesh, along banks of river Sarayu. In fact I was surprised by this (the Sarayu bit), I had always thought that such a holy town would be located along the Ganga, or at least Yamuna. Sarayu was a new river to me then.

For long the city has been in conflict because of the presence of a mosque at a location claimed to be the birthplace of Rama. The area housed the Babri mosque since 1528 till a Ram idol appeared mysteriously in 1949 when members of a religious group broke into the mouse and placed the idols, after that the gates were locked till an order was passed to open the gates in 1986. This was later followed by the destruction of the mosque in 1992.

Here is an interesting account on Firstpost about how the turn of events in the 1980s made a mess of the entire affair.

It's very interesting now to write about a trip I made about 20 years ago (in 1989), especially when the mosque is no more there, and the entry to the site is much more restricted. It's also quite a mystery to me why we went there since we as a family don't usually visit temples for vacations.

Ayodhya by river Sarayu (photo credit: Ramnath Bhatt)

I visited the place with my parents, sister and my paternal grand-father way back in the early 1980s. The doors of the temple had just been opened and my otherwise not-so-religious family decided to make an outing to Ayodhya. Of course it was in the news even back then, the gates for the temple had been opened and everyone wanted to offer prayers. As a kid I had phenomenal interest in politics even back then, and knew a bit about the dispute even then.The trip became even more interesting due to that.

The place was much calm back then, there was a make-shift temple in the Masjid complex (which looked odd and completely misplaced) and there was a long queue to reach there. I remember being asked to remove all leather items, and hence had to walk with sagging shorts, more interested in saving my modesty than in the temple.

Outside the disputed area, someone showed us Sita's kitchen. It immediately caught my attention, for it was a multi-storeyed building and I was quite impressed with a kitchen that size. The place, back then, was infested with monkeys. They took away lots of our food - biscuits, bananas etc. There were just too many of them, my grand-father also took my side in my dislike for them, something which was much more uncommon between us.

It was summers and we retired for lunch under a tree in a town park, far away from the monkeys (I still wonder how). It was home-cooked puri-subzi and water in our huge Milton water container; packaged bottles didn't exist back then. I wonder if the place was any cleaner due to that.

This is it. I remember nothing else about the trip, it was just a day long trip and ultimately very tiring. We had travelled to the mosque-temple town in a taxi from Lucknow and the journey took quite sometime. I am somehow very glad that we visited the place while it was still calm and far away from the present controversy, too many vested interests seem to have a stake in the place now.