The following is the exact text of the article, as it appeared on the online edition of
The Times of India on Nov. 10, 2019. Just preserving it... before it disappears! Claim no credit to the content of it, but doing it purely for documentation... as the article rightly states we Indians "disregard (for) documentation." All merit of content is to
The Times of India. The original online article can be read
here.
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Accounts of European priest, travellers suggest both faiths worshipped at Ayodhya site pre-1857
by
Vaibhav Purandare
P Carnegy is not a name that will ring a bell in contemporary India. But this
Britisher, an assistant commissioner of the Raj in Faizabad in the 1860s, is
among those who played, unwittingly, a key role in providing champions
of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement substantive material to make the
case that Hindus had launched their struggle for the ‘janmasthan’ in
Ayodhya much before the Ram Lalla idol was installed in 1949.
Writing a historical sketch of ‘Fyzabad’, as he spelt it, Carnegy wrote that
until 1855, the year in which communal violence broke out in Ayodhya
over possession of Hanuman Garhi and the ‘janmasthan’, “Hindus and
Muslims alike used to worship in the mosque-temple."
But “since British rule (in 1858, that is) a railing has been put up to prevent disputes, within which in the mosque the
Mahomedans pray, while outside the fence the Hindus have raised a platform on which they make their offerings.”
Carnegy wasn’t the first to point to “joint worship” in the inner yard. That credit goes to Austrian Jesuit priest Joseph
Tieffenthaler who visited Awadh circa 1770 and recorded that 12 “koti and kasauti” pillars supported the Babri Masjid’s interior
arcades and that there stood a square box called the “bedi” or cradle at the entrance, “where Vishnu took incarnation as Ram”. Tieffenthaler’s theory was that it wasn’t Babar or Mir Baqi in 1528 but Aurangzeb in the 17th century who had destroyed the
shrine “to deprive Hindus of their faith”. Yet, the Jesuit priest wrote, Hindus still came to the spot to do their circumambulation
and prostrated.
The first to refer to an inscription inside the masjid which stated it was built in 1528 by Babar’s chieftain Mir Baqi was F C
Buchanan, physician of Lord Wellesley, who visited Ayodhya between 1807 and 1814. And the first legal record came in 1822,
when a superintendent in Faizabad court, Hafizullah, submitted his report in Persian saying “the mosque founded by emperor
Babur is situated at the Janmasthana”, “adjacent to the kitchen of Sita”.
After that, records about the dispute and about the persistent Hindu claim to the disputed site piled up quickly, with other
European travellers following in Tieffenthaler’s footsteps and British officials such as A F Millet taking the path trodden by
Carnegy.
Millet, a land revenue officer of Faizabad district, stated in his report of 1880 that Hindus and Muslims had worshipped “alike”
inside the structure, and the writer-traveller Edward B Eastwick recorded in his ‘Handbook of the Bengal Presidency’ in 1888
that before 1858, namaz and puja were both performed inside the shrine. The British officials of the period demonstrated the
opposite of the well-known Indian disregard for documentation.
The gazetteers of 1854, 1881, 1892, 1905, the Archaeological Survey Report of 1891 and later archaeological and general survey
reports of the 1930s reinforced the theory of the mosque having been constructed after demolishing a temple and of
intermittent Hindu efforts to get the spot back.
The archaeological report of 1891 by A Fuhrer, who translated three inscriptions inside the mosque, corroborated Buchanan’s view that it was Mir Baqi who “by the order of Babar” had built the mosque circa 1520 “on the very spot where the old temple
Janmasthanam of Ramchandra was standing”.
The old temple, Fuhrer said, “must have been a very fine one, for many of its columns have been used by the Musalmans in the
construction of Babar’s masjid”. A police complaint launched by the muezzin of the Babri Masjid in November 1858 too became
part of the ‘janmabhoomi’ docket for the protemple side. Syed Muhammad Khatib, who used to call the faithful to prayer in the
mosque, had written to local cops a year after the 1857 revolt that a Nihang Sikh, a Bairagi (ascetic), was “on the rampage at the
Janmasthan."
He had forcibly built a “chabutra in the middle of the Babri mosque” and had raised the platform and placed a flag, a picture
and an idol, the muezzin complained, urging authorities to get the construction demolished and oust Hindus from the place,
where, earlier, the “nishaan of Janmasthan lay for hundreds of years and Hindus used to do puja.” These documents were put
forward by the Hindu side in the post-1985 VHP (and later BJP) agitation phase to buttress their case.
