What Happened in Ayodhya?

WHAT HAPPENED IN AYODHYA? Perspectives and A Response BALAGANGADHARA S.N. Universiteit Gent March 2024 PART I Reading reports and opinions on the Ram Mandir event in Ayodhya is depressing and puzzling. It is depressing because intelligent people show a penchant for writing unintelligibly on prominent issues. Even though they see something, they stop short of saying what they ‘see’. Consequently, the reader is helpless. Hence the puzzle: why bother to write when indifferent to the reader? Whatever the reason, as readers, we must at least scratch where it itches. Since unintelligibility is present on the surface, scratching here could reveal what lies beneath. The surface is the “consecration”; the visible is the equivocation; our sources are reports and opinions in The Indian Express. All answer the same question: what happened in Ayodhya? A ‘consecration’, answer some. In that case, who consecrated what? Here are some answers: (i) an idol, (ii) a temple, (iii) Hinduism, (iv) the Hindu collective narcissism. Surely, if saying what occurred in Ayodhya depends so much on individual whims and fancies, it speaks of the inability to identify the object of consecration. Some use Pran Pratishtha here, but what is its role? Is Pran Pratishtha a synonym for an English word, or does it merely name the act of consecration? Some, like Liz Mathew in her report of 24th February in the Indian Express, suggest that ‘inauguration’ and ‘consecration’ are synonyms: “the Ram Temple inauguration” in one paragraph becomes “the Ram Temple consecration” in the subsequent one. Some even imply the consecration of God and religion (Hinduism) in Ayodhya. The problem is that neither is possible. First, consecration requires transmitting a superior force or quality to an object. The word 'God' loses meaning if something superior to God exists. Second, since consecration occurs within religion, what could consecrate religion? If religion cannot consecrate itself, no religion can consecrate another religion if these words have any meaning. In short, these claims confuse us if taken as descriptions or identifications of the same event. Not because they are descriptive but because of equivocation, which generates ambiguity about the event’s identity. Thus, what occurred in Ayodhya? To reduce ambiguity and equivocation, let us formulate the above question using Indian words: was there pran pratishtha of the Vigrah or murti of Rama, or was there also pran pratishtha of the Mandir? Is pran pratishtha of a dharma (‘religion’) possible? Is pran pratishtha the name of a ceremony, a segment in the act of consecration or the result of consecration? Could there be pran pratishtha of Atman or Brahman? It is important to note that these questions are not confusing. For instance, we can intelligibly say that pran pratistha applies to objects (Vigrah’s or murtis, mostly). It excludes mandirs but applies neither to qualities or properties of objects nor to Atman or Brahman. We exclude conceptual or psychological entities (say, like narcissism) from its scope. The pran pratistha of dharma is impossible even though there could be its samsthapan, and so on. We might need help to clarify and defend these claims or even give wrong answers. But they are neither nonsensical nor confusing the way they are when we speak of consecration in Ayodhya. We can answer, 'What occurred in Ayodhya?' because we used Indian words to formulate questions. Let us notice what happened in these two cases. When we used the English word, the question went unanswered because the answers were incoherent. Using some Indian words, we can tackle the question because the answers do not threaten to become unintelligible. Even though 1 we speak of the same event in both cases, we do it differently depending on our linguistic choices. When speaking in vernaculars, we express our intuitions regarding language use. But we fail to do the same when using English. There is a breakdown of sorts in the second case. Even where the English sentences are correct, they render the event's identity and consequences hazy. However, there is no comparable confusion when using the Indian vernaculars. Why? Drawing an analogy could help. Imagine an infected biological sample on a glass slide placed under a microscope. Two people observe it: one ‘sees’ it as a virus and the other as a bacterium. We can assess both sightings and there is no linguistic issue about using the correct word. Instead, it is about knowledge: Is it bacteria or viruses? Seeing it as either bacteria or a virus is insufficient to answer this question. We need bacterial and virological theories, among other things. The above analogy holds good for us. The vernacular and English words are both linguistically legitimate. Both could describe the world. In English, we see the Ayodhya event as consecration; in the vernacular, we see it as pran pratishtha. These two different ‘seeings’ give birth to two distinct consequences: the “Indian seeing” allows an intelligible description that is either true or false; the “English seeing”, by contrast, generates unintelligibility. In the second case, the description is a mere conglomeration of sentences that confuses and, therefore, cannot qualify as knowledge even if some sentences are true. What is at stake is the nature of an event. Its description must answer the question: what occurred in Ayodhya? Our vernaculars help in giving intelligible answers that are either true or false. Using English not only muddies the waters but also generates ignorance. However, in identifying phenomena in the world, our descriptions rely on languages. As embedded cultural entities, our intuitions are indelibly cultural. Indeed, most Indian writers and intellectuals share similar cultural and linguistic intuitions. Yet these intuitions go haywire when writing in English. Why? In the analogy I used above, two issues are of importance. The first is when we see an object, we mostly see it as something. One person sees the Ayodhya event as consecration, and the other sees it as Pran Pratishtha. Why do they see the same event in two diverse ways? The second critical issue is that they use different theories that make them view the world differently. In one case, when using English unreflectively, we use theories about consecration implicit in that language without awareness. None of the reporters or commentators show any learning or knowledge about the theories of consecration they use. Yet, the grammatically correct use of English words hides ignorance. In one sense, they do not see consecration but use the word to cover up a failure. Indians, too, use theories when speaking in vernaculars. Even though this knowledge is implicitly present in their language use, it enables reflection and thinking. We can formulate the above argument differently when we realize this idea identifies our predicament today. Our political and economic theories, our sociologies and anthropologies, our historiographies, and our theories in psychologies are all on loan from Western culture. Even those who make their living selling ‘Indic’ thoughts in India or abroad use Western frameworks to earn their wages: their ‘ontologies’, ‘epistemologies’, ‘ethics’, ‘metaphysics’, etc. are all borrowed from the West (‘realism and nominalism’, ‘norms and values’, ‘particulars and universals’, and so on); their ‘Hinduism(s)’, ‘Buddhism(s)’ and ‘Saivism(s)’ need ‘theologies and theocracies’, ‘deities 2 and their worship’, ‘idols and idolatries’, and even an occasional ‘sanctum sanctorum’. Of course, western terms are spiced appropriately with Sanskrit words to make the dish appear entirely Indigenous. This situation indicates that we have massively borrowed theories from Western culture explicitly and implicitly. However, thoughtless borrowing does not give us automatic access to that culture or help us understand its biases. It is akin to borrowing money without knowing that we owe interest on the sum and that there is a due date. It is even worse: Indian intellectuals do not even seem to know that they have taken vast and massive loans to meet daily needs. The lender will send strong-arm men to beat us into submission and force a payback. If, in regular instalments, the EMIs bleed us to death, it is this anaemic patient that you see in the reports and columns on Ayodhya. If we are oblivious to what we have borrowed (from whom and how), is the resulting ignorance a wonder? Our reporters and intellectuals know the English syntax but do not realize that ‘knowing English’ includes seeing the embeddedness of languages and their words in cultures and theories. Because they are not mere linguistic particles, words generate consequences. If ill-understood but still used casually to frame descriptions of the world, they merely adorn ignorance. The current writings on Ayodhya are its exemplifications. How can we take such writings seriously? What about their further claims on polity, society, and the people of Indian culture? These are our questions today. But before going there, we must heed two warnings. The first is about the newspaper reporters. One does not expect them to have expert knowledge of consecration or a grasp of Latin. Why then write of consecration and use the Latin phrase "sanctum sanctorum" to speak of garbhagriha? They believe this is how one writes in English, or each reporter merely imitates the more ‘experienced’ colleague. Whatever the case, my criticism is not about their ignorance of the meaning of 'consecration’. The second warning is about a pernicious trap. Even though I am not speaking about words or their uses, the temptation is to assume this is the crucial issue. We can ask: 'What does it matter which word we use, consecration or Pran Pratishtha, to speak of the Ayodhya event?' The answer is obvious: it matters the same way whether we use ‘acidity’, ‘ulcer’, or ‘stomach cancer’ to indicate abdominal unease, prescribe and take medications. The other aspect of the trap is to think that the problem is a translation issue. It is not. Whether one believes that ‘Prana Pratishthapana’ is an “Untranslatable Sanskrit” word or that translating the English ‘consecration’ into Indian languages is a “cultural” and not just a linguistic problem, the result is the same. You will merely go down the proverbial rabbit hole. 3 PART II In this part, I look at columns in the Indian Express on the Ayodhya event authored by three respected Indian intellectuals. Before that, some preliminary thoughts are in order. First, even though there is a talk about the Ayodhya event in these reports, they confuse us by sheer vagueness: they claim to have seen a consecration, but the focus and the scope of the event are up for grabs. Second, the puzzlement increases if we read what they say because they could not have seen what they describe. Third, the columns express a double ignorance: one about the nature of the phenomena they see and the other about the intellectual resources they use to describe them. Fourth, they draw the same conclusion despite depicting the situation very differently. Typically, if there is no clarity about the nature of an object, no consensual structure can be found in different descriptions. If an object is a cute little puppy to an observer but is a supernova or a quantum computer to the other, it would be surprising to find these descriptions arriving at the same conclusion. Yet, that is the case here. They all see the cementing of a tie between politics and religion. This bond appears to undercut the enunciated ideals of the Indian constitution. The current political party is held responsible for this. Indeed, they could not see these in either the act or the ceremony of the pran pratishtha. These cannot be seen in the constructed temple, complete or otherwise. As a result, a gulf opens between what they could have seen in Ayodhya and what they say about the event. Furthermore, the descriptions are internally incoherent. I explore these issues, which are present in the three columns. Mehta’s Heroics In the Indian Express piece of January 22nd, Pratap Bhanu Mehta claims that the Ayodhya event was an unprecedented “watershed moment in history”. It is crucial that “Pran Pratishtha following the foundation stone of Ayodhya marks the consecration of Hinduism as a political religion pure and simple". This thought is cognitively impenetrable and lies in how it goes further. Here, Mehta picks up the 17th chapter from the Gita, where Krishna uses three classificatory categories while answering Arjuna's question. One such is Rajas (the other two are Satvik and Tamas). In the 18th verse, a tapas evincing rajas is spoken of; in the previous verse, it was about the satvik tapas. Not only does Mehta quilt, but he also distorts and mangles what he quotes. If this verse can do anything in our context, it is to classify pran pratishtha as a tapas expressive of rajas. The correctness of this characterisation is not at issue; what Mehta does with the verse is. He makes the word ‘tapas’ in this verse into a translational equivalent of “penance and austerity”. The problem with this equivalent is that penance is an act of self-abasement or devotion expressing sorrow and repentance for sin or compensation for an offence committed. If one insists that pran pratishtha is rajotapas in Mehta’s description, it becomes (i) a mode of worship and (ii) a name for a spectacle. It would (iii) originate from pride and (iv) produce passions and emotional resonances. Finally, (v) its performance is intended to obtain nontransient benefits to the performer. Here, Mehta does not understand borrowed words like ‘penance’, ‘consecration’, ‘worship’, etc., or his culture’s understanding of ‘tapas’, ‘rajas’, ‘pran pratishtha’, and so on. This double ignorance is built into his description of the Ayodhya event. Mehta says that Hinduism was consecrated as a political religion. Even a ‘political’ religion is still a religion, but the pran pratishtha, says Mehta, marks the moment “where Hinduism ceases to be religious”. How could an entity that ceases to be religious continue to be a religion, 4 whether political or not? What does it mean to say that Pran Pratishtha consecrated religion (Hinduism) into another entity (a political religion)? Who consecrated what? Did Ram Lalla perform the consecration? This absurdity becomes painful when we ask what a ‘political’ religion is. Some political theorists use ‘political religion’ to say phenomena like Authoritarianism, Fascism and Nazism, Communism, Islamism, etc. Mehta could have this in mind. Even then, the use of this word is problematic in our case: except for ‘Islamism’, the other phenomena mentioned above did not have prior existence as religions. Thus, it follows that the ‘Hinduism’ after Ayodhya is to Hinduism before Ayodhya in the same way that Islamism of today is to Islam of yesterday. Mehta does not make the bold claims that Islam is dead as a religion and that Muslims have become Islamists. He only says that ‘Hinduism’ is dead as a religion today. Thus, if Hindus continue to practice Hinduism after Ayodhya, it entails that all Hindus now practice a political religion. Mehta does not draw this logical conclusion explicitly; he merely notes that there is no ideological counterpoint to this. This claim can only mean that this new political religion is an ideology. But what precisely is the ideological element here: Hinduism or politics? Politics is different from 'ideology'. In this case, Hinduism is the ideology from which the political religion gets its ideological element. This claim is both inconsistent and disingenuous. Mehta should at least know that “bearing witness” if that is what he wants to do, requires that one truthfully says what one sees. In any case, according to Mehta, this event further marks the emergence of “collective narcissism”, an entity made in “the image of God”, an image that we now worship. Thus, we do not worship God, but an entity made in His image, an entity of our creation. Such worship must make us into “idol worshippers”. Mehta agrees. He says that Hindus do worship idols. But this putative claim creates new problems: (a) How could idol worshippers ever create anything "in the image of God"? Their ‘idols’ would resemble their creators, human beings, but not an entity they could not possibly know, namely, God. (b) If human beings can create entities “in the image of God”, do they not become equal to God? People have believed that God created Man "in His image". If we can also do so, have the Hindus attained full Godhood post-Ayodhya? Is Mehta saying that pran pratishtha of Ram Lalla marks the self-deification of the Hindus? He also claims that worshipping idols is central to Hinduism and that idol worship gave a playful intimacy to Hinduism. Odd. Idol worship (‘idolatry’) names wrongly practised or wrongly directed worship. Is Mehta saying that this wrongness is central to Hinduism? Besides, how can idolatry make religion playfully intimate? With whom is such a religion playful and intimate? From whence the demonic power of idol worship to change religion itself? Idol worship cannot change the nature of divine worship, while divine worship can break and destroy idol worship. Such is worship as we understand it today. Philosophically and theologically speaking, worship is a serious affair. To many, it was and stays the most serious activity. These people think that the sole purpose of human existence is the proper worship of God. As a result, we cannot worship God playfully as though we are playing a game. One might seek intimacy with the object of worship, namely, God. But such a human quest is neither ‘playful’ nor a ‘game’, even if the world is a game that God plays. Be it as that may, why would Hinduism prescribe (or recommend) idol worship? To Mehta, this has to do with the fact that “concentration on the idol was a path to self-consciousness”. This sentence, too, obscures. If self-consciousness is the goal of human existence, why recommend the worship of either God or the Devil? If the desire is to reach self-consciousness, why 5 concentrate on idols, whatever they are? If the ‘I’ (a reflexive pronoun) indicates selfconsciousness, is it not advisable to focus on this 'I' to realise self-consciousness instead of something else? Upanishadic thinkers thought so. No, says Mehta, the focus on ‘I’ reeks too much of “I-doll”, a possible American spin on the etymology of idolatria, as Mehta would have Arindam Chakrabarti say. In any case, these issues get short-circuited when Hindus exchange ‘new’ idols for the ‘old’ ones in Ayodhya. This thought is even odder. If Hinduism ceases to be religious, should worship not follow the same route, even if it is idol worship? Should this religious act not disappear as well? If it does not, is it because Hindus are born idolaters? No sensus divinitatis in us then? On the one hand, religion cannot be consecrated, yet Hinduism is; religion cannot have a punarjanma, yet Hinduism dies as a religion only to be ‘born again’ as a political religion; the Hindu idols too are reborn as “mega showpieces”; Hindus engender “collective narcissism” and consecrate it since they have hewed it in “the image of God”. On the other hand, tapas becomes ‘penance’ to end up as a mode of worship. Yet, this is not the case because this tapas is a mere “spectacle”. Accepted by the gullible as a “mega-showpiece”, it is choreographed by those who “make a show of their worship in what is a sign of lack of real faith” because they “care about the flag more than they care about dharma”. But who can provide the required ideological counterpoint when the political universe is governed by the duplicitous and the disingenuous, the Dharma Dwaji’s as they are named? Here is the double ignorance I spoke about. Mehta’s impenetrable thoughts are neither Western nor Indian, nor are the two intelligibly or intelligently mixed. At the end of his column, despite the virtuoso, we stay as ignorant about idols, what their worship entails, what consecration is, what religion is, and what happened in Ayodhya as we were before reading it. Varshney’s warning Of all the op-ed pieces and the newspaper reports I have read, Varshney’s piece (January 27th, the Indian Express) is the only one to appeal to a dictionary explicitly. Though laudable, there is an issue here: what does the act show when we look up a word in a language dictionary? It means our assumption that the word has its home in a natural language and is not a technical term. If it were a technical term ('mRNA Vaccines' or 'Quantum Entanglement'), we would not search Merriam-Webster to find out its meaning or use but look elsewhere instead. There are other resources, including multiple encyclopedias. Thus, if Varshney had used other resources, he would have discovered that ‘consecration’ is a heavy-duty technical word at home in Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Church Latin; that it has come into the English language carrying an enormous religious load from the Testaments, both Old and New. He would have known that consecration has a rich past. Some practices have been legally codified for a millennium (the Canon Law of the Catholic Church, for instance). These tell us of the word’s specialised uses; its use in English does not and cannot violate its technical meanings. ‘Was the Ayodhya ceremony a consecration?’ is a question requiring theoretical, theological, scriptural, and empirical investigations. One cannot consult the Webster’s or the OED to answer it. However, it is only sometimes possible to know whether some or another term is technical before looking it up in a dictionary. Here is where the dictionary look-up helps. If a term of the art 6 is at issue, it would be difficult to understand the dictionary ‘meaning’ properly. Varshney’s “simple question” tells us why: “Can a Prime Minister lead a ceremony of religious consecration? To consecrate, according to the dictionary, means “to make or declare sacred.” That is typically done by a “holy” or religious figure.” To begin with, Varshney speaks of ‘religious’ consecration as though there are others: political, psychological, social, economic, cultural, etc. This qualification makes sense if there are other kinds of 'consecrations' whose notable instance is religious. Not otherwise. Further, we discover many difficulties in this definition: ‘sacred’, ‘holy’ and ‘religious’; ‘consecration’ can make or declare; and the ‘holy’ does or can consecrate. These have an unavoidable reference to human actions, which have causal consequences. The presence of these words as a cluster and what they refer to are sufficient to suggest that ‘consecration’ is a term of the art and that we should know something about the discipline whose technical term it is. Further, both Varshney and his readers who accept this definition must also assume that these phenomena exist in our world. They could not 'make', 'declare' or 'do' if they did not. The definition traces causal consequences in the world: an act makes a thing sacred; it is udertaken by a person who has the properties of being holy or religious. Thus, understanding this dictionary definition demands knowing what is 'sacred', 'holy', and 'religion', what they do, and assuming their existence in our world. Since a good encyclopedia would say that the word meanings and their existence as phenomena in the world have been (and continue to be) matters for disagreement, taking a dictionary definition does not settle the case of knowing what they are. It teaches us word meanings and their use. A dictionary is not knowledge of phenomena. Thus, to those who know what a dictionary is and what it does, this definition says that consecration is an object of study in specialised literature and requires domain-specific knowledge. There is something more. We see that 'consecration' is defined using words without clear meanings. This situation tells us that ‘consecration’ involves other words also part of this domain-specific knowledge. As a result, we see that our problem is not to find a suitable Indian equivalent for ‘consecration’. An interrelated cluster of Indian words and concepts is required to make sense of this English word. Thus, we do not face a ‘translation’ problem or a disguised cultural problem. It cannot be called ‘cultural’ without explaining how and why 'holiness', "religious', and 'sacred' are cultural but not sociological, psychological, or political. Varshney claims that a holy or a religious figure typically makes or declares the ‘sacred’. Here, the qualification guards by immunising it from counterexamples. One can protect oneself while confronting cases where ‘unholy’ or even ‘a-religious’ figures consecrate an entity by labelling them ‘atypical’. This academic tendency to ‘hedge’ fails here because the phenomenon of consecration allows us to ask: “Do such atypical cases exist, or are they impossible?" To make his “simple question” (about a Prime Minister leading consecration) into a weighty objection, Varshney needs heavy artillery that includes answers to the following: (a) why are some figures religious or holy? (b) How does this property enable the making or declaration of the sacred? (c) What kind of ability is it: genetic, political, cultural, psychological, social, or religious? (d) Is authority attached to this position? (e) If yes, what kind of authority is it? (f) Why cannot it be a political authority? Without answers to these problems, Varshney’s question returns: why cannot “a Prime Minister lead a ceremony of religious consecration”? 7 Because, Varshney suggests, “the very idea of a politician leading a consecration ceremony in modern times would be abhorrent to most religious leaders and theologians”. Whether such an action generates abhorrence or not depends on whether ‘consecration’ is an event that (a) is neutral towards all religions, (b) occurs outside religions, (c) is universally present across cultures, and (d) has the same structure and typology across the globe. Not otherwise. There were ‘religious figures’ from some Indian sampradayas present at Ayodhya, yet others followed the event closely, but none expressed any abhorrence at a politician leading the ceremony. If the “four Shankaracharyas…had led the consecration”, Varshney might be prepared to call it “a purely religious event”. Suppose we agree to this suggestion for the sake of the argument, the issue becomes: did they find it abhorrent that the Indian PM led the event? They do not appear to have said this because these four Acharyas believed an incomplete temple could not ground a pran pratishtha. The point here is, whether right or wrong, they did not express 'theological' disgust at the PM leading the event. Whose abhorrence is Varshney talking about? In whose theology is it abhorrent that a politician leads consecration? Christian and Jewish theologies? Islamic religious leaders? While these possibilities could be true, what do they have to do with an Indian cultural event, the pran pratishtha, which appears not even remotely connected to consecration, ‘religious’ or otherwise? Varshney’s “simple question” is not solved; it comes back again. Varshney begins his column with an ominous warning: the consecration of a temple has “dealt a monumental blow to India’s constitutional republic”. This blow, however, is “symbolic and discursive”. In our world, symbols do not go around dealing blows because they cannot causally interact. No symbol of a Hero can ever kill the symbolic villain: even if Rama ‘killed’ Ravana in a discursive universe, neither of the two did or could do anything in Lanka as symbols. Words cannot deal blows either to human actions or to physical structures. Nor can such blows ever land. Thus, if ‘consecration’, a symbol, deal a symbolic blow (even a symbolically monumental one) to another symbol, namely, India’s constitutional republic, then these symbols must also exist in the reader's symbolic universe. If they do not? Well, nothing happens. Anyway, in his world, Varshney also detects “a paradox” between “symbolic and discursive” objects and “political and legal” entities. What exactly is the paradox? On the one hand, ‘consecration’ (an entity in one discursive universe) has “fully invalidated the principle of the state’s religious neutrality” (an entity in another universe). How does an entity in one universe “invalidate” the principle existing in another universe? If in some universe ("a possible world") the sum of three angles of a triangle is more than 180°, this does not and cannot “invalidate” the principle in another universe (that is, in another possible world) that such a sum is exactly 180°. Knowledgeable people would merely assume that this difference tells us about space in these two universes: one is an n-dimensional space (with more than two dimensions), and the other, perhaps, is only bi-dimensional. So, how does Varshney perform his magic? I do not know. In any case, since this invalidation is “complete”, we must assume that the secular state is severely damaged. Further, the consecration is complete, but the envisaged ‘Hindu state’ is incomplete. We learn that it might never even be completed. A pity, perhaps, but where is the paradox? Is it generated by the difference between “incomplete construction” and “finished consecration" or because one is "finished" (the consecration) and the other is "unfinished" (the Hindu state, the temple)? In both cases, it is a nonsensical claim. Paradoxes are linguistic, logical, mathematical, or semantic. There is no paradox between 'finished' and 'unfinished', ‘complete’ and ‘incomplete’, or between ‘construction’ and 8 ‘consecration’. When this is the case concerning independent entities in the same linguistic universe, it is even more so when the entities populate different universes. There is no logical, mathematical, semantic, or linguistic paradox between the symbol of consecration in one universe and an incomplete secular state in another. Hence, there can be no paradox between consecration in Ayodhya and an incomplete Hindu state in India if 'paradox' has any meaning. A paradox could nevertheless exist in the symbolic, discursive world constructed by Varshney. However, in that case, it is invisible to mere mortals. Varshney insists that “political practice is normally not analysed in binary terms (“yes or no”). It is appraised on a scale (“more or less”)”. How, then, can we either see the blow or assess its monumental impact in a "non-binary" fashion? Again, I do not know. If what happened in Ayodhya was not a consecration, claiming that a Prime Minister led a religious consecration there is false. Modi could have neither taken part in nor led an event that did not occur. We would not learn much about the blow and its monumental impact by entering Varshney's “symbolic and discursive” or "political and legal” worlds. Palshikar’s Guilt Much like his colleagues, Suhas Palshikar is tripping even before he begins. He says we are “witnessing a transition” without recognising that “its nature and consequences are deeply controversial”. Really. When we witness a transition, we recognise that there is a transition (that is its nature, after all) that aims at an end-state. (This is its consequence.) The end-state could have consequences, but the transition is not the cause. In that case, what exactly is controversial? Palshikar finds “the “building” of a new temple” as the focal event in Ayodhya. Here, he zeroes in on “the moment (that) represents our collective entry into an era of erasures”. He lists three of them: plurality, coexistence and guilt. Let me begin with what erasure is: it obliterates. What is erased could be writing, a painting, a carving, a society, or even life. Usually, erasure removes all traces: we cannot discern what was there earlier or whether anything ever was. However, if we can count them (Palshikar counts three) and identify and differentiate them from each other (plurality, coexistence, and guilt), then, strictly speaking, we have ‘palimpsests’ on our hands. In Archaeology, Architecture, Art, Cultural Studies, etc., the word suggests that something is altered in an object but continues to bear traces of an earlier form. The issue is about more than choosing a proper label. If we admit that we are talking about palimpsests but not erasures, we must also acknowledge that controversies we might have will be about the past we want to keep. Altering a past would be different from erasure or writing Stalinist historiography. However, if the goal is to induce righteous indignation in a people to condemn building a temple morally, we need erasures, not palimpsests. Thus, the need of the hour is guilt, the third erasure. Palshikar calls this the “most tragic erasure”. Even in 1996, he notices “among Hindus, there was a sense of guilt, an admission that something wrong was done”. What on earth does this mean? Surely, recognising wrongdoing is not tantamount to an admission of guilt: the recognition that Hitler, Pol Pot or Stalin did wrong is not an admission showing our guilt. Hindus might have felt that "a wrong was done". However, this cannot generate a sense of guilt in them unless they are the actual perpetrators. Sensing a wrongdoing is not the same as admitting to a crime. 9 This sloppiness is more than just a one-off or a casual mistake. It is systematic: “huge resources were generated by a community to avenge the past”, and it happened apparently without guilt. This assertion defies all reason: my resources are limited but can grow to a considerable sum if many more people contribute. Assume this happens. Should I feel guilty of wanting to see a temple built? Am I guilty because others support this project? What is my guilt: to financially contribute to an unbuilt temple when the “community” intends to avenge the past by building it? It needs to be clarified what is wrong: is seeking to ‘avenge the past’ the forbidden act here? If building a temple where a Mosque stood earlier is forbidden, is it the act or the intention (“avenging the past”) or the goal (seeking ‘revenge’) that is prohibited? Since building the temple is not illegal, either the intention or the goal is forbidden. Why should either of the two generate guilt in me? Moreover, we can deal with our past only if it continues to survive in the present. If not, the vengeful act would be futile because it will have no object (‘the past’) to act on. In short, we still do not know who is guilty and why. Yet, we are guilty of more. "Unimaginable political investment was made into an exercise that should have been a matter of spiritual pursuit and religious learning," and this too without guilt. Who is guilty of what? We cannot answer the question because we cannot even begin to make sense of this sentence. However, “What does the new temple mean?" elicits the answer, "It is the erasure of guilt." How could a temple, any temple, erase guilt? Palshikar claims that the Ayodhya temple “not just absolves the society or any group or party… it simply erases that fact from history.” If a temple gives absolution, it also formally releases the accused from guilt and punishment. Absolution is an ecclesiastical declaration (i.e., a declaration given by the religious or the Church hierarchy) of forgiveness: one could forgive a sin, a debt, or a punishment. Inducing amnesia is of no help here. There is a vast difference between forgetting an act and forgiving it. This difference is not about what the two words mean but is about two different kinds of actions: forgetting occurs in memory, and its nature depends on the nature and structure of memory. (Memories are of various types, including 'episodic memory'.) Psychology, Cognitive science, and Brain sciences study this aspect. Forgiving, by contrast, is moral or religious aimed at a particular act: trespasses or violations committed only by human beings. Ethics, Theologies, and Moral psychologies study this phenomenon. Absolution is not forgiveness alone; it further requires that the absolver have the religious, moral, or legal authority to do so. Since the temple itself is guilty and must be “made guilt-free," it needs an “effective instrument” to do this, which Palshikar finds “in the SC ruling." Without warning, the guilt shifts from a people or their community to a physical structure. Now, the court has the authority to absolve. Even this authority is spurious in our case. Over the years, “our politics made sure that the guilt was softened and then pardoned. …the Court put a stamp of formal approval”. So, this court does not make the temple guilt-free, i.e., it does not absolve. It is approved formally. What does it so approve? The court agrees that politics manages, softens, and ensures the guilt is pardoned. Does the court merely approve or also approve of this fact? To keep Palshikar consistent, we must read him as saying that politics made sure that the court obeyed its dictates, which is why the Supreme Court ruling is a stamp of formal approval. Whether true or false, where does this bring us? To confusion. We neither know who absolves nor who the guilty is or why. We do not even know what guilt is. Who or what is erased, then? 10 Apparently, Hindus are guilty of just about everything because they recognise wrongdoing and therefore admit guilt. They are also guilty of wasting unimaginable political investment in trivial pursuits and collecting considerable resources to build temples. The temple can absolve and free society or its members from guilt, yet it is guilty of seeking vengeance against the past. Formally, it can declare and forgive the sins of a people, but to effectively free itself from guilt, the Supreme Court is needed. The court can do this only because it is politically managed. Until politics, the true absolver, enters the picture, we are all guilty of any trespass someone else commits. Finally, every act can become a trespass because of the absence of the requirement that it should be an ethical or legal violation. Any which way, the Hindus are guilty until absolved by politics. Between the lines, one could read that ‘absolving politics’ is not a generic entity for Palshikar but has a specific ‘Hindu’ identity. Here, we confront the same problem that we met earlier -- borrowing from elsewhere without knowing what is borrowed or what debt is incurred. It is unclear what ‘guilt’ is: now it is “a sense”, then it is “an awareness”. It is a violation of law once (“criminal vandalisation"), a search later for the forbidden (“seeking vengeance”). Why is vengeance forbidden, and by whom? Should ‘a’ community obey this dictate, or is an individual agent subject to it? Guilt requires absolution but, clearly, can also be managed without it. Politics softened guilt, apparently, but it is not clear what hardens guilt. Guilt envelops Hindus from birth, and whether only Hindu temples succumb to guilt or all temples do (the Jewish ones, for instance) is unknown. And so on. It would be illuminating to go into the history, ontology, and psychology of guilt, but space forbids such an exercise here. But this much can be said: even though Palshikar seems to think that guilt has something to do with violating the law, he does not seem to realise that this insight, even when vague, hides a more profound question: why should any violation of law generate guilt überhaupt? Indeed, in this context, Palshikar knows of a derivative question central to Western political thinking, viz., the problem of political obligation. A Conclusion Where are we after reading these three pieces? The most straightforward answer: nowhere. This answer would be wrong because much is seen by our thinkers, even if what they say about their sightings could be better. In a way, their failure is our failure as well. We have inherited languages and vocabularies from elsewhere, another culture, but we need to understand the talk and, therefore, walk the walk. Nothing in our languages or experiences allows us to sensibly speak of the sacred and the profane, the holy and the consecration, the penance and the austerities, sin and absolution, forgiveness and guilt, confession and repentance, reconciliation and salvation, etc. We believe that we know what religion is, how they die, whether they are reborn, and what idol worship is all about. We do not: even though we know that the British talked this way, these notions are not original to them. We cannot talk that talk by speaking English. In knowledge domains, realising the extent of our ignorance requires knowing whether we know our ignorance. One of the preconditions for knowledge is awareness of our ignorance. A denial here is not conducive to producing knowledge; instead, it is a hindrance. Forgiveness of ignorance, whether by God or Man, is not an option here. ‘What happened in Ayodhya?’ stays unanswered, it appears. In the final and concluding part, I will answer this question unorthodoxly: I will endeavour to show that these respected thinkers have seen ‘something’ and are not blind. Even if what they say is unintelligible, they are not 11 unintelligent people. The unintelligibility has an outside source and has little to do with their capabilities. I have partially identified it but have yet to address so far whether we can do something about it. Ayodhya makes an answer to this more urgent than before. 12 PART III The Indian traditions speak of tatvadarshis in this world. Who are they? The Sanskrit phrase is a compound of darshi and tatva. ‘Darshi’ is someone who sees or has seen. What? ‘Tatva’ is a word compounding tat and tva. ‘Tat’ means ‘that’, while ‘tva’ qualifies. It is the “-ness” in kindness and good-ness. In our case, the compounded words give ‘that-ness’. Thus, a tatvadarshi has seen ‘thatness’. What does this mean? When we see an object, we see it as something as a thing with shape, form, size, and other properties. The world and our abilities, both physical and cognitive, jointly give us what we see, namely, something which is this or that object. Assume you see an object without knowing or recognising it as a specific object. If asked what you see, you can point your finger and say, “I see that”. Suppose you do not use the finger but want to communicate that you see something. How could you do so? Well, you can say, “I see thatness”. Here, you communicate seeing something but are unable to identify it. By ascribing the property or quality of ‘that-ness’ to the object, you use language to point at an object. In a sense, every seen object is a ‘that’ and knowing it as ‘thatness’ does not tell us what we see. In simple terms, you have seen something, but you cannot identify what it is. Thus, you say you see ‘thatness’. These are tatvadarshis. Even though they see something, it stays unidentified because they do not know what they have seen. These are our intellectuals as well. They see but do not know what they see, even if they think they know. They are Tatvadarshi's, not Jnanis. We need the knowledgeable (the jnani) to tell us what happened in Ayodhya. The tatvadarshi cannot do this, but they are our only jnanis. Why did this come about, and how? Though it is an important question, I will not answer it here. Instead, my focus is more modest: What was there to be seen in Ayodhya? To do this, we rely on extant reports. Hence, we began with our tatvadarshis. These intellectuals saw the uncommon and the out-of-the-ordinary in Ayodhya. Whether a glitzy affair or a mega-spectacle, the event appeared to astonish. It was as though the new but the familiar replaced the old and the familiar: Rama is the old and familiar King of Ayodhya; the Ram Lalla, the five-year-old, is new but the familiar Rama; the centuries-old mosque, its familiar structure dotting the skylines of many generations, is violently replaced; even though an unfinished temple takes over its place, Rama’s new temple is familiar even to those who have not seen it. Our tatvadarshis see politics leading a profoundly religious ceremony. Thus, they wonder what the event portends. Of course, our tatvadarshis have said more, but this small clutch of sentences is sufficient for now. They refashion these sightings into descriptions of the Hindu state, the demise of secularism, Hindu Fundamentalism, the emergence of Hindu majoritarianism, the effaced boundary separating religion from politics, and so on. Is this the only reasonable description of the event, or is a cognitively better alternative possible? One could give a coherent and consistent description of the Ayodhya event, which, if true, predicts a disaster. However, an alternative description is possible that promises and delivers. Neither the promise nor an impending delivery makes the alternative better. What does this is its cognitive superiority: the alternative’s assumptions are less suspect, shed better light on issues, and resonate more intimately with experience. Equally important is that such an alternate description generates new and exciting cognitive problems and productively opens novel research areas. I outline three reference 14 points that function as indicators and, in what follows, suggest a different route to answer the question, “What happened in Ayodhya?” 1. Varshney sees Modi using “new vectors of language — such as Dev se desh (divinity to nationhood)”. The ‘vector’ in this language is not new but ancient, especially if ‘dev’ moves towards ‘desh’. The Jews became a nation, i.e., acquired their nationhood when Yahweh, the Jewish God, entered a covenant with them. We should not ascribe novelty to an old use of language. Whether Modi used new vectors or stuck to the old, his speech in Ayodhya will be my first reference point. Even here, I isolate one striking thought. Modi suggests that we look at what is happening in Ayodhya not as an event in the calendar but as something else, namely, the Kalachakra from which a new age emerged. What could this thought say? This question is not about what Modi thought, tried, or wanted to say because I have no clue. I do not need to know them to make sense of the thought. As we know and practice it, Historiography maps a domain of events to another domain consisting of units of time. This mapping is not strict or one-to-one. Many elements from one domain can be mapped to a single element in the other domain. Then we have a many-to-one mapping: many events occurred on 15th August of 1947. We could also go the other way and map many time units to a single event. The Indian independence movement could be an example of mapping multiple time units to a single event. Thus, some simple arithmetical operations in one domain might not be possible in the other: hours, days, weeks, etc., give us an arithmetical sum when added together; an operation in the events domain could add up to one event. Subtracting multiple units would give their arithmetical result in the domain of time units, but we could also have one event despite deleting various events. Consequently, relations and structures from one domain are not mapped on to the other. The mapping represents a situation where many elements are associated with a single element from another set. Invariably, historiographies guide such mappings by adding garden-variety claims about economics, politics or anthropology, human psychology, sociology, etc. Some of these assertions are presented as historical explanations. Whether explanations or not, these transient events are historical, i.e., possessing 'historicity'. Thus, any set of ideas that appears to have the form of an explanation becomes “historical” if it is about an earlier event. Of course, we must 'prove' their occurrence, requiring archival research, etc. Such a mapping of the Ayodhya event to a calendar is not appropriate, says Modi. What is? We do not expect a philosophical explanation in Modi’s speech, but we do get a contrast. That is, the contrast is between events in calendars and events from the past. Events and the units of time are the elements that give us historiography. By contrast, events neither “occur in time” nor are they mapped to time units in the Kalachakra. Events structure time here, or time emerges from events. We can linguistically communicate through such a process, which would not re-count events but narrate them instead. This story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But ‘the’ past has no place here because any event in Kalachakra is past relative to the chosen beginning. The same applies to future events. 15 Thus, Modi’s remark contrasts history with the past. Historiography gives us the first; narratives or stories give us the second. Both are structured entities: classificatory units of time provide a structure to the first; salience gives a narrative structure to events in the second. These are alternatives: as I have noted elsewhere, to gift history to a people is to destroy their past. The story that made Rama live and die is a narrative that enables Rama to become a child again in our present. ‘The’ past that historiography traces are transient. Hence, it must disappear from our lives. Ayodhya and Rama of ‘the’ past might be significant to the archaeologist or a historian but not to us. A narrative past, by contrast, lives in our daily lives as it is an integral part of the story of Rama. That is, the past merges with the present. Modi draws this contrast when counterposing the calendar to Kalachakra. What is the new age he talks about, though? 2. In this new age, the tatvadarshis see the fusing of politics and the state with religion. If the boundary between religion and politics blurs, the secular and the religious intersect, then a religion of the majority ends up as Hindu majoritarianism. They see this new age emerging, explicitly confirmed in the event where the PM of a nation leads religious consecration. To assess this description better, consider the fragmentary video clips circulating in social media about Modi’s motorcade in the streets of Srirangam. He was en route to taking a dip in the sea, one of the many acts meant to qualify him for pran pratishtha. As the vehicles pass through the town, we hear some chanting and see some people raising their hands. The raised hands were from older men, naked from the waist up, wearing yagnopavita, and carrying marks on their foreheads. I learnt later that the chanted verse was from the Ramayana, the verse ascribed to Kausalya, Rama’s mother. I did not have to decipher the chant to recognise 'Ashirwad’ in the gestures of these old men. I have no clue whether Modi knew this or what he thought about it. But evident to any who could see was the solemnity of this event. Modi senses it; his folded hands do not return people’s greetings as much as acknowledge and accept the Ashirwad. Why the verse and why the Ashirwad? I seek neither the motives nor an explanation here but something else. To begin with, we seek a description of an event that tells us what makes old men come to the streets to give Ashirwad to a politician, a Prime Minister, for finding their ‘lost’ would-be King. A king is a paradigmatic political function. So is the prime minister of a country. Were the people lining the street unaware of this? No, they were aware of the political nature of the event. Why sing a verse from the Ramayana, a story of kings, otherwise? If their Ashirwad was to Modi, a human being, a Gujarati, or a person, they could have chanted more suitable verses for such an act. Yet, they did not. Without orchestration by a spin doctor, they chose a verse from an epic about politics. One could say that the older men on the pavement were religious, and even deeply so (Sri Vaishnavas, probably). Their raised hands were not signalling political messages, like the Hitler Salute. Ashirwad’s primary place is in festivals and ceremonies expressing the ‘religious’; streets and motorcades do not attract them. These were not the blessings of a Pontiff to the believers thronging the streets either. The people in the streets of Srirangam were Hindus, yes, but all of them were not followers of the RSS or the BJP, even if some of 16 them were. Yet, all recognised a political event and acknowledged and celebrated the return of a king. Their Ashirwad focused on a politician. As though this was not enough, they sang a verse about the King. In short, yes, politics entered daily life, but it did so with the full knowledge of the actors. As far as these people were concerned, it did not interfere in a ‘religious event', whether it included taking the ritual dip in the sea or involved raising hands in Ashirwad. ‘Religion’ mixed with politics, yes. In the streets of Srirangam, the religious became what it is in India because politics adorned it, even if no conductor made the choir sing a political verse in chorus. I speak of Srirangam because what happened there happened in Ayodhya as well. Politics did mingle with ‘religion’, and this was so experienced by every Hindu (if not every Indian). When people resonated with the Ayodhya event, they responded to it in an astonishing way that did not indicate either acceptance or surrender of people to the BJP or the RSS propaganda. “Positive” talks about Hinduism by the functionaries of the state do not motivate people. It is the event alone, which is neither “purely religious” as our tatvadarshis wish nor an admixture of politics and religion, making them “impure”. What am I trying to say here? In the intellectual world we inhabit, the sacred and profane, religion and the secular, are intrinsically different realms because God and the world are separate from each other. That is, the world of the gods is not and cannot be the world of men. The Creator and His creations are separate realms in ways that make God’s intervention in our world, the interference of God in the affairs of Human beings, an exceptional event. Islam does not allow such interventions, but both Judaism and Christianity need them. Without the covenant with Yahweh, there is no nation of Israel; before led into the promised land, the Jews were strangers or slaves elsewhere. Without the Messiah, there is no Christianity or hope of salvation or the atonement of sins. Even if God is outside time and space, Semitic religions insist that He created the Cosmos located in time and space. Whether God is humanly accessible or not, whether He intervenes in the world or not, the realms do not meet or mingle. If we attempt mixing these, the world becomes impure, and we blaspheme. Human history records the results of trying to add religion to politics, law to religion, or religion to human affairs. Derived from an exegesis of the gospel of Luke, the story of the two swords (the material and the spiritual) is long and tragic. Who should wield these swords, the Pope, or the emperor? Whatever the answer, this much is clear: mixing religion and politics has led to strife, pain, and human suffering. While this is true, this story could become our story if and only if there is an ontological separation between our world on the one hand and what makes us into “God’s people”, namely religion, on the other. Sheldon Pollock, a respected Sanskritist-cum-Indologist, authored a book some time ago titled The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. In one sense, the title is appropriate if we think of Hebrew and the tower of Babel. In another sense, it suggests an incomplete thought because, among other things, the book is about Sanskrit, the “daivabhasha”, and India. Here, we pursue a different train of thought. Devabhasha can exist in the world if and only if the Gods live in the human world or if humans live in the world of divinities. I do not suggest that Indian culture requires seeing the world as ‘sacred’. The Bible would agree here because God’s creations are sacred. They reflect His Glory. But I do suggest what is a trivial piece of knowledge to all Hindus, if not all 17 Indians: whatever exists in this world has existence only in this world (Jagat, Vishwa) because there is nothing outside this. The Gods may have their own worlds but are also in the Vishwa. The world or the Jagat encompasses all that was, is, and shall be. Nothing is far enough in space nor distant enough in time for it not to exist in our cosmos. If this were not the case, we could never access the Gods because nothing outside this world is accessible to us. The human and the divine conduct their affairs in this world, and, of necessity, there will be interactions in this single Vishwa between these two miniworlds. We might know nothing about the nature of these mini-worlds or the lokas of Gods; we might not know details and specifics of the hows and whys of these interactions. It might even be the case that the gods are not there at all and that their worlds have no existence. Whatever the facts of the matter, we do know there are no separate realms of existence, speaking ontologically. We and the gods exist together if either of us exists at all. Thus, our question becomes: what is politics in such a world? If politics is about human affairs, what exactly are these affairs? Do they exclude the gods, and if we tried, could we succeed in excluding them? Who or what can direct and steer the gods if their affairs include interfering in human affairs? The issue is about something other than whether you think Ganesha or Kali exist somewhere in the cosmos, on some unexplored planet or in an unknown galaxy. It is this: working within the circumscription of the framework just sketched, how could people think about politics in this culture? Surely, our ancestors thought about politics and formulated some questions and answers about social and human existence. It is essential to notice the focus and the scope of my claims: the assertion is not that the Ancient Indians have answered or could address problems of our 21st century world. However, the way they formulated issues and the lines they sketched when pursuing their enquiries are what we need today. Living in a world without knowing the ontological separation between religion and politics, our ancestors formulated questions about politics. Even though our world is the same as the one they lived in, the languages we use, and the conceptual frameworks embedded in these languages differ. We need clarity about their questions and see the world we share with them. While we pontificate about secularism, we do so with few clues about what religion is or even what it does. Idol worship, the holy, consecration, penances, etc., do not belong in our cultural world, which is why we fail to identify them. If we want to talk about the affairs in this world, should we not try to find out how our ancestors thought and talked before there was a Locke or a Mill or a Rawls? We should. This understanding of the world implies an exciting experience of politics that differs from what we have been fed. Our knowledge of politics and the nature of our political practices (to the extent it depends on what we think politics to be) would then be different from what we know about either of the two today. If politics has to do with governance, we will investigate the what and the how of governance differently. What happened in Ayodhya expresses this different awareness, which resonates deeply with what lives in our culture. Modi signalled this difference while speaking of a new age and trying to draw a contrast between history and the past. We might want to heap insults on him, draw on third-rate political psychology to sketch his personality, and do 18 ‘comparative politics’ by bringing Putin, Trump, and Erdogan into the picture. Such activities might endear us to some while irritating others simultaneously. Trolls might even love us because it would encourage their favourite pastime, trolling. However, if we focus on this, we will miss a crucial insight: the psychology of an individual is deeply influenced by the cultural psychology of a people, which, in turn, impacts social psychology as well. The intellectual poverty of both these psychological domains in Western thought can only be assessed by those who appreciate the richness and sophistication of Indian thinking in these areas, even where they are millennia old. 3. The third reference point is also about politics, expanding the previous thread by partially outlining our task. This act has two players but revolves around Rama Lalla, the princeling currently resting in the palace. Mehta puts the issue this way: “Prime Minister Narendra Modi (is) now donning the mantle of Hindu kingship…” Well, here is what a Hindu might say in reply: with the pran pratishtha, Rama is back in the palace. He is around five and must grow up to become an adult before building his Kingdom, the Rama Rajya. Because he is still a child, he cannot immediately ascend the throne to rule the Kingdom. Currently, the Amatya or the Maha Mantri stands behind the empty throne, advising when needed, serving the land and the throne in the name of the would-be King. He serves but does not rule, which is perhaps why he calls himself a pradhana sevak. Whatever their moral characters, such political figures are known to us as the Regents. In any case, this Maha Mantri can “don the mantle of kingship” if and only if he usurps the throne, but not otherwise. Only as the usurper could he become the King. The question is obvious: apart from acquiring the title of ‘consecration’, does the Ayodhya Pran Pratishtha celebrate usurpation as well? Why would anyone (however duplicitous) bring the rightful heir back to the palace and seat him next to the empty throne in the royal court, only to don the mantle of kingship thereafter? Is this “the election steal” the US knows so much about? In any case, for the young prince to grow up and build his Kingdom, he must receive the required education that makes him fit to rule and be the King he would become. This means forming and grooming him, and that he acquires knowledge. He must learn many skills as well. To be fit for the empty throne, the prince needs a teacher. Not anyone can “don” this mantle: such a person must deserve to be a rajaguru, the one who teaches the prince to become a king. The problem, of course, is: where and how is this person to be found? To begin with, the Maha Mantri should seek such a figure now. Playing the regent and standing behind the empty throne also gives him this responsibility. It is imperative and onerous but highly urgent and essential. He is the first of the two players. We are the second players. As intellectuals, we must produce knowledge. Chanting Western mantras has not helped so far: the fifty-fifth genealogy of the social contract, the thousandth commentary on Plato’s Republic or Locke’s Two Treatises, and the millionth hurrah song on constitutional democracy are useless. Our culture provides the heuristics required to think creatively, productively, and originally. We have inherited interesting questions and the ability to think through them. As we proceed, we can make the required alterations and modifications, developments, and enlargements. We can 19 sketch alternatives to what exists. With robust theories in place, we can end our mindless mimicry. “Alternative theories in politics” is neither a slogan nor a joke. This goal requires creating alternatives to sophisticated practices and complex institutions that have been with us for three thousand years. No individual, group or generation could accomplish such a mammoth task. Yet, the task remains ours. Knowledge is needed when ignorance rules. We cannot use vague slogans as new and exciting knowledge because we do not confront toddlers. As in the old days when learned people came together to endow the titles of Brahmasri, our Western colleagues will test our mettle today. They will judge, umpire, and referee because our public is not entirely or only Indian. We face many dangers here because our society ceaselessly incentivises mimics, grows parasites, and stimulates and rewards salesmen selling snake oil. Still, the young prince, Rama, patiently awaits his Rajaguru. Such a guru can only come from those in whose hearts Saraswathi has taken a permanent abode. It is possible, just possible, that the Ayodhya event indeed portends this new age, the Indian Pratyabhijnana. 20