People's Democracy

THE PLANTING OF FALSE EVIDENCE 

  The “Vishnu-Hari Temple” Inscription

Allegedly Found At Babri Masjid

  From Our Correspondent

AFTER the VHP karsevaks demolished the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, a new “discovery” was immediately announced --- that of a Sanskrit stone inscription allegedly found within the Babri Masjid structure. This, according to VHP notables, like the “art historian” Swaraj Prakash Gupta, confirmed that the Masjid had occupied the very site of Lord Rama’s birth (Ramajanmabhumi), and that it had been marked by a splendid Rama temple of ancient times, last “reconstructed” in the 12th century under the Gahadavala rulers of Kanauj and Varanasi. The inscribed block (in two pieces) was handed over to the government of India’s custody after much fanfare.

SAMPLE OF VHP LIES

As some independent experts examined the inscription, it became clear that the VHP “archaeologists” had, as is their wont, freely lied about its contents. As Dr K V Ramesh, former director (epigraphy) in the Archaeological Survey of India, in his translation of its text (submitted by VHP itself to the High Court’s special bench) has established, the inscription did not refer to any place as the Ramajanmabhumi; it simply styled the family (kula) of the donor as “the birthplace (janmabhumi) of valour.” Such expressions are very common for the Sanskrit inscriptions of the time. For example, a Buddhist inscription of Samvat 1276 (AD 1219), found at Sahet Mahet (near Balrampur) within Gahadavala dominions, describes a person Janaka as “a birthplace (janamsthana) of fortune” (See A Fuhrer, The Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur, pages 71-73, for the text and translation of this inscription). No site of land is thus at all implied by such use of the word janmabhumi or janmasthan. And Lord Rama is nowhere concerned!

As to an age-old Rama temple being “reconstructed,” the inscription’s text gives a lie to that as well. K V Ramesh’s translation here loyally conforms to the original text, when he thus renders the relevant phrase: “[there] was erected this beautiful temple of Vishnu-Hari” by the local ruler. There is no question here of any rebuilding or repair of an older temple. It is also to be seen that the temple is not at all related, directly or by implication, to the site of Lord Rama’s birth. Equally significant is the name of the deity --- “Vishnu-Hari.” In his comprehensive work on Ayodhya, Hans Bakker (Ayodhya, Part I, page 54) says that the “Vishnu Hari” temple was located by the Ayodhya Mahatmya on the Sarayu river, and local tradition says it was washed away by the river. In other words, the inscription must originally have been installed at this Vishnu-Hari temple quite a distance away from the Babri Masjid.

INSCRIPTION OR A SIMPLE PLANT?

We come next to the VHP’s claim that the “Vishnu-Hari” temple inscription --- or “the VHT inscription” as we may for convenience sake call it now ---came out of the debris of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. We may here recall that the Babri Masjid had been examined many times, and the inscriptions found there were fully published in the official publication, Epigraphia Indica, Arabic and Persian Supplement, 1965, pages 58-62. No Sanskrit inscription had ever been seen there. It was, therefore, claimed that the VHT inscription was hidden inside the rubble of the Babri Masjid wall, exposed only when the karsevaks pulled the whole structure down. Strangely, however, no person who had actually pulled out the inscribed stone has come forward to claim the honour though more than ten years have passed.

The only witness the VHP has produced up till now is a member of staff of the RSS mouthpiece Panchajanya. Deposing before the court, he claimed that the inscription fell from a height out of the rubble within the Masjid wall. Under cross-examination, he admitted that having been taken out of the rubble, the inscription was covered by mortar.

Now, this is a most interesting admission. Medieval lime, bitumen and gypsum mortars are strongly bonding and cannot be removed without leaving scratches and other traces. But the two stone pieces of the VHP inscription are without any such traces whatsoever. Clearly, the inscribed stone, which the Panchajanya staffer claims to have seen, cannot be the same as the two stone pieces that carry the VHT inscription.

In other words, the inscription is a simple plant and has never at any time been installed in the Babri Masjid.

We here come to the final part of the story: If the VHT inscription is a plant, where has it been brought from?

IMPORTANT LEAD

A very important lead was provided when it was discovered that an important inscription of the same period, found at Ayodhya some 120 years ago, disappeared some time before 1992. This inscription was described by A Fuhrer in his official report of archaeological surveys, published in 1889, under the title The Sharqi Architecture of Jaunpur. On page 68, in his notice of Ayodhya, the following statements occur:

“Inscription No. XLIV (serial number for use in the report) is written in twenty complete lines on a white sandstone broken off at either end, and split in two parts in the middle. It is dated Samvat 1241, or AD 1184, in the time of Jayachandra of Kanauj, whose praises it records for erecting a Vaishnava temple, from whence this stone was originally brought and appropriated by Aurangzib in building his masjid known as Treta-ke-Thakur. The original slab was discovered in the ruins of this Masjid, and is now in the Faizabad Local Museum.”

For some reason, this inscription was never edited and translated, and is not even mentioned in the comprehensive lists of Gahadavala inscriptions published by H C Ray (1931) and Roma Nyogi (1959). The inscription drew the attention of Hans Bakker in his Ayodhya, Part I, published in 1986 (though the research was done in 1984 and earlier). He noted that the inscription described by Fuhrer nearly a century earlier “has never been published.” He, however, added the information that the inscription had now been transferred to the Lucknow State Museum, and bore the number Arch. Dep. 53.4.

MUSEUM SPRINGS A NEW SURPRISE

The story now takes a remarkable turn. Anxious to track down another possible act of temple destruction by Aurangzeb (who, incidentally, never visited Ayodhya, contrary to Fuhrer’s supposition), Jahwani Shekhar Roy, a student of Dr T P Verma, a VHP “historian,” proceeded to Lucknow Museum and asked to see the inscription that Fuhrer had described. A stone inscription marked ‘53.4’ was duly produced. It was broken into two parts down the middle, but had only ten lines, not twenty. Moreover, there was no reference to Jayachandra, or to any Vaishnava temple, or any date whatsoever. Ms Roy gave expression to her disappointment in “A Note on Ayodhya Inscription,” read at a seminar in February 1992, and published in Ayodhya: History, Archaeology and Tradition, edited by the late Professor Lallanji Gopal, Varanasi, 1994. (To Ms Suman Gupta, an enterprising journalist of daily Jan Morcha, Faizabad, goes the credit of tracking down this paper.)

When recently the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) raised the question whether the VHT inscription, planted by the VHP at Babri Masjid, might not be the same as the one described by Fuhrer, and called upon the Lucknow State Museum to produce the latter, a new surprise was in store for all. The museum brought out a two-piece inscribed slab of twenty half-lines, also marked ‘53.4.’ This was not the same inscription as had been shown to Ms Roy in 1991-92, and, of course, had nothing in common with the one described by Fuhrer. There is no Jayachandra here, no Vaishnava temple, nor any date. Each line has barely five or six words, and it is difficult to make any sense out of them.

The Lucknow State Museum must answer how two totally different inscriptions have been produced as bearing the identical numbers 53.4, and where the original, historically valuable inscription of Samvat 1241/AD 1184 has gone from its vaults.

We are, perhaps, ourselves quite close to answering the second of these questions. The VHT inscription planted at the Babri Masjid has striking similarities with the one described by Fuhrer. Of white or off-white sandstone, it too is “split in two parts in the middle,” the split beginning near the middle at the top and then running diagonally downwards to the right. It has exactly twenty lines, nearly all incomplete (as in the Fuhrer inscription) owing to the loss at the edge of the split. Like the Fuhrer inscription, it is defective at both its beginning and end. As to contents, it concerns the building of a “Vishnu-Hari” temple, which fits the designation of “Vaishnava temple” given by Fuhrer. It records the rather strange name Anayachandra (line 13) and then Ayushyachandra (line 16), either of which Fuhrer might have misread as Jayachandra. Finally, the date: Where in the middle of line 20 the date should have occurred, there seems to be a deliberate chipping off of the stone to remove all traces of it, with a chiselling of the line carried on further to the right. If the date is now absent, it is because it has been removed. Had Samvat 1241 been allowed to remain, it would have, of course, become immediately apparent that the VHP’s “find” of 1992 and the inscription reported by Fuhrer are the same. The date had, therefore, to go.

JUST ONE INDICATION OF VHP’S METHOD

All the evidence at present available thus points to two outstanding probabilities:

(1) The Ayodhya inscription, bearing the number 53.4 at the Lucknow Museum, and apparently examined by Hans Bakker in 1984 or a little earlier, disappeared from that Museum before late 1991 or early 1992, when Ms Roy sought it there. Two other broken and historically insignificant inscriptions have since been produced by the museum, possibly out of its junkyard, as replacements of the original one.

(2) The VHP inscription, allegedly found at Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, is a mere plant, and must have been obtained from some other place. It has such striking resemblance in both shape and contents with the one that the Lucknow Museum has lost, that a transfer from the museums vaults to the VHP’s secret storerooms must be presumed.

This is just one indication of the methods adopted by the VHP for building its spurious case for a Ram temple below the Babri Masjid.