Uttar Pradesh

Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state and it holds more founding sites than any other. Varanasi on the Ganges is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and is the principal place where Hindus come to die and be cremated, on the understanding that death there releases the soul; its riverfront steps are the visible form of that. Prayagraj, at the meeting of the Ganges and the Yamuna, hosts the largest Kumbh Mela, which at its full cycle assembles tens of millions of people in a temporary city built on the sand.

Ayodhya is the birthplace of Rama in the Ramayana; Mathura and Vrindavan, a hundred kilometres downstream from Delhi, are where Krishna is said to have been born and to have spent his childhood, and Vrindavan's economy still turns on the pilgrims and widows who settle there. Sarnath, on the edge of Varanasi, is where the Buddha gave his first teaching after awakening.

The state is also central to modern South Asian Islam. The seminary founded at Deoband in 1866 shaped a reformist current now influential from Britain to Indonesia, and the Nadwatul Ulama at Lucknow was founded shortly afterwards with a different curriculum and a different view of how to meet the colonial situation. Lucknow was the capital of Awadh, whose Shia court gave the city a distinctive Muharram observance that continues.

The longest running religious dispute in modern India was decided in this state, and the way it was decided is as significant as the outcome.

The Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, built in the sixteenth century, stood on a site many Hindus hold to be the birthplace of Rama. Images were placed inside the mosque overnight in December 1949, the building was locked by the authorities, and worship of those images continued while Muslim prayer did not. Litigation ran from then on. In December 1992 a very large crowd assembled by Hindu nationalist organisations demolished the mosque, and riots across India followed in which around two thousand people died.

The Supreme Court of India gave judgment in November 2019. It held unanimously that the placing of the idols in 1949 and the demolition in 1992 were both unlawful acts, that the evidence did not establish that a temple had been destroyed to build the mosque, and that a structure of some kind had preceded it. It then awarded the disputed land to a trust to be constituted for the building of a temple, and directed that five acres elsewhere in Ayodhya be provided for a mosque.

The judgment is studied as much for its structure as its result, since it finds the possessory claim proved on the balance of evidence while condemning the acts that produced the situation, and commentators disagree sharply about whether those findings sit together.