The Babri canon: Putting words to complex emotions

Literature on the events of 1992-93 capture the stories of ordinary people caught in a pivotal moment in history

- Aditya Mani Jha

It's been 31 years since the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, was demolished on 6 December 1992. In 2019, the Supreme Court allowed the building of a temple on the site while allocating five acres of land for a mosque to be built in Ayodhya. Last month, it was reported that the ground floor of the new Ram Mandir had been finished and would be open to visitors starting January 2024.

Journalistic responses to the tragedy are well-documented, but it's also worth our while to see how some of our bestknown novelists responded. Documenting the facts and the figures associated with a tragedy is essential for any act of remembrance. At the same time, the role of literary representations, in fiction, in poetry, and more, cannot be discounted. There are solid reasons behind this. First, a powerful novel or short story can contain the emotional kernel of a large-scale tragedy quite effectively; Shirley Jackson's (short story) The Lottery (1948) has retrospectively become a part of Holocaust literature, for example, despite having no plot details that identify it as such. Second, survivor memories are best expressed in narrative form, especially since trauma doesn't work the same way as the rest of our memory. Imre Kertész, the Hungarian writer and Nobel Laureate, was also a Holocaust survivor and his novel Fatelessness (2002), set in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, has the iconic line summing up this phenomenon: "I couldn't command my memory to follow order"."