AYODHYA. The name lights up a horizon of thought where the celestial meets the terrestrial—a rich, lambent, ambivalent zone. Is it of this earth, or of the beyond? In India’s supra-rational imagination, it’s both at once. Even in its highest idealisations as a city of paradise, its ethereal light was not devoid of a glint of steel. Prefixed by the negative ‘a-’ in a pattern common to Sanskrit, a-yodhya literally means ‘that which cannot be won in battle’, a place beyond the reach of the warrior’s sword. This is the sense in which it makes its first appearance, in the Atharvaveda, around 1200 BC. Here, Ayodhya is the human body. The metaphor reappears a few centuries later, circa 600 BC, in the Taittiriya Aranyaka—the body, with its eight chakras and nine dwaras, is devanam purayodhya, the impregnable fortress of the gods. It’s not yet a name, more an adjective. The city on the Sarayu, the abode of Rama Dasharathi, is yet to fully emerge from the mist at this point. But Ayodhya is already living its duality, on the cusp between the transcendental and the very, very earthly.
Cut to the January of 2024. The present-day town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, heir to the old of Kosala, is marking itself on a millennial calendar. From a soil that bears all the stains of the profane world, an ornate three-storeyed edifice is reaching for the skies—in the grand Nagara style of temple-building minted long ago in the northern Indian plains. Around it, Ayodhya is being lavished with every bounty an indulgent parent-state could bestow on its favourite child. The result: a physical transformation that is, well, epic. A whole in the age of hyper-modern travel. In the language cultivated by the politics of Hindu revivalism, often innocent to its own ironies, they are calling it “the new Vatican” or, alternatively, “the Indian Mecca”.