Beyond Ram temple, Ayodhya's boom tells another story

AYODHYA: The Saryu River is in a restless mood. Swollen waters press against the steps of Guptar Ghat, the river running high after relentless monsoon rains in the hills upstream and the release of hundreds of thousands of cusecs of water from Nepal's barrages. Yet Sarayu remains within its banks, surging past the stone steps and ghats of Ayodhya.

Guptar Ghat is revered in Hindu tradition as the place where Lord Ram entered the Saryu for his Jal Samadhi. Just a few kilometres away, another sacred landmark, the Ram Janmabhoomi temple, is drawing an extraordinary stream of humanity. On an ordinary weekday, tens of thousands of pilgrims make their way to the temple; on festival days, the numbers can run into lakhs.

But here, beside the restless river, Ayodhya's much-celebrated pilgrimage boom is being counted differently. Photographer Kapil Yadav, who has worked here for three years, says he now takes around 100 photographs a day, compared with 200-300 earlier.

At Rs 10 a photograph, which he quickly transfers to customers using a data cable, the difference directly affects his earnings. “The recent controversy has left many disheartened and could be the reason for the low footfall,” he said, without referring directly to the alleged irregularities in handling offerings at the Ram Temple.

A vendor sells 'corn-on-the-cob' (bhutta) at Guptar Ghat on the banks of the Saryu river in Ayodhya. But the official picture of Ayodhya tells a very different story. Ayodhya District Magistrate Shashank Tripathi says there has been no fall in pilgrim footfall following the recent controversy. The administration receives daily figures, he says, and the numbers are actually 10–20 per cent higher than last year.

“The weekday footfall at the Ram Mandir is around 70,000–80,000, rising to about a lakh on weekends. During festivals, it can reach three lakh, while the highest recorded figure was five lakh during the Kumbh,” Tripathi told TNIE. There has been no fall in donations either, he said.

The temple administration's view is equally emphatic. Vandana Pandey, the SDM who recently took charge as Ram Janmabhoomi Temple Magistrate, says the rush at the temple remains what it was before. The current lull, she says, is largely because of the bright sun and heat. On Ram Navami and Diwali, the crowds become so intense that there is “practically no space to stand”.

Pandey brushes aside the controversy over the recent pilferage of offerings. “The controversy has nothing to do with this,” she says, describing it as an isolated incident that attracted enormous attention because of the temple's sensitivity. Devotion, she says, has shown no decline.

Yet the view from Guptar Ghat is more complicated. For Dashrath Nishad, who has been selling juice here for seven to eight years, the concern is not simply about the number of pilgrims entering the temple. It is whether Ayodhya's expanding pilgrimage economy creates enough reasons for those pilgrims to move beyond the temple and spend time elsewhere in the city.

Ayodhya and the burden of public trust“Whatever money comes should be utilized properly. Improve the places people come to, provide drinking water, seating and good lighting. If the facilities are better, more people will come, and people like us will also benefit,” he says, handing a glass of sugarcane juice to a customer.

And then there is Khursheed Alam, a local man who says he was born and brought up in Ayodhya. He does municipal work, moving and storing lighting and sound equipment, and says he earns about ₹11,000 a month. "The city is changing, new things are coming up, and people are coming. But this should also bring more work and income for people like us,” he says.

The city's transformation is happening around him in the form of new infrastructure and a rapidly changing pilgrimage landscape. But his measure of that transformation is still work and wages.

That is perhaps where the competing pictures of Ayodhya meet. The administration counts pilgrims. The temple counts devotion. But people like Kapil, Dashrath and Khursheed count customers, earnings and work. For them, the real measure of Ayodhya's boom is not simply how many people enter the temple, but how much of that enormous pilgrimage economy reaches the people who live and work here.

Divine tragedy: How widespread corruption is eroding the sanctity of India’s sacred spaces