Book Review, Mail Today, October 30, 2011
HERE’S something that would terribly disappoint the defenders of the dubious faith who brought the Babri Masjid down and their cynical political patrons who reaped rich returns on their riotous investment.
A 100- year- old travelogue by a Chitpavan Brahmin has a detailed account of the birthplace of Lord Ram. And according to Vishnu Bhatt Godshe Versaikar (whose account has been translated by Mrinal Pande as 1857: The Real Story of the Great Uprising), it was not under the central dome of the Babri Masjid.
The political Ramayana of the Parivar insists that the Babri Masjid was built in 1527after the demolition of a temple that celebrated the birthplace of the Lord. So the saffron goons brought the mosque down in 1992 to build a magnificent temple at the “janmasthan”.
Probably the Marathi- reading Chitpavan Brahmins of the Hindutva fold had always known that their political parable was not the dominant Hindu belief during the medieval period, which obviously fashioned the mythology of Lord Ram’s birthplace around the mid- 1800s. Versaikar’s book was a popular Marathi account of the Great Uprising.
Versaikar was at Ayodhya, probably in 1859, during Ramnavami to bathe in the Sarayu river and to worship the Lord at His place of birth. This is how he describes the experience: After the bath, the crowds left for the temple with tulsi leaves, areca nuts and coins clutched in their hands as offerings. Offering tulsi leaves to the Lord at this spot is said to be especially beneficial. I too arrived, like the others, with my offering at the birth spot of Lord Rama. The fabled spot is merely a large waist- high platform in an open area. It is made of limestone and surrounded by a wall about three or four feet high. Grasses and weeds grow all over, and in the distance one can see the remains of what must have been the walls of an old fort. The place where Lord Rama’s mother Kaushalya’s palace is said to have stood is just a flat piece of land now.”
It is abundantly clear from the description that this “ flat piece of land” was deified as the birthplace of Rama in Ayodhya in the 1800s. And that the Babri mosque did not even form distant backdrop and is not mentioned at all. Versaikar’s Ayodhya visit, though, is just a brief episode in a grand narrative that brings life Tatya Tope, Nana Saheb and most of all Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi.
Versaikar’s Majha Pravas: 1857 Chya Bandachi Hakikat ( My Travels: A Factual Account of the 1857 Mutiny) was published as a work of fiction in 1907, after the author’s death, to save him from possible British censure. It was translated twice into Hindi, with the text getting restored only with the second translation.
Non- Hindi- speaking students of Indian history will always be grateful to Mrinal Pande for this brilliant English version.
A young Brahmin from what is now Raigad district on the Konkan coast, Versaikar had crossed the Vindhyas in search of prosperity with his uncle, only to return penniless, but with what is possibly the only eyewitness native” account of the rebellion.
Indians are said to be unreliable chroniclers contemporary events. By choosing to translate this work, Pande has unveiled the treasure trove of texts lying unknown in Indian languages that could shed some post- colonial light into our not- so- distant past.
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