Ayodhya

Ayodhya sits on the Sarayu River in Uttar Pradesh and is revered in Hindu tradition as the birthplace of Rama and the setting for much of the Ramayana, ranking among the Sapta Puri, the seven cities Hindu tradition holds to grant liberation. Pilgrims have visited its temples for centuries, and the city carries an accumulated layer of shrines, monasteries and bathing ghats along the river comparable to other major Hindu pilgrimage cities such as Varanasi and Mathura, Krishna's traditional birthplace.

This religious standing is separate from, and uncontested by, the modern legal dispute over one specific plot inside the city, covered in the companion article. Ayodhya's wider sanctity to Hindus was never itself in question in that litigation; what was disputed was title to a single site, and this atlas records the two facts, citywide sanctity and site specific dispute, as distinct rather than treating either as settling the other.

Ayodhya today functions as both a functioning pilgrimage city, with ongoing worship, festivals and temple construction, and as the subject of the most closely watched religious property case in modern Indian legal history, and visitors and scholars alike generally distinguish the devotional city from the litigated plot even where both occupy the same few acres of ground.

A mosque known as the Babri Masjid, built in 1528, stood on a disputed plot inside Ayodhya until a large crowd of Hindu activists demolished it in December 1992, an event that triggered nationwide unrest. Hindu litigants held the plot to be the precise birthplace of Rama and the site of a prior temple; Muslim litigants held the mosque itself to be a place of worship whose demolition was unlawful regardless of what, if anything, had stood there before. India's Supreme Court ruled on the title dispute in November 2019, awarding the plot to a trust for construction of a Ram temple, consecrated in 2024, while directing that alternate land elsewhere in Ayodhya be granted for a new mosque.

Peter van der Veer's study of religious nationalism in India situates the dispute inside a longer contest over how India's religious and national identities relate to each other, rather than treating it as a purely local property question. Whether a Hindu temple predated the mosque on this exact plot remains a question historians and archaeologists read differently: excavation findings by the Archaeological Survey of India were read by some scholars as evidence of an earlier structure and by others as inconclusive or open to alternative interpretation, and the Supreme Court's judgment itself acknowledged that the archaeological evidence did not establish what religion any earlier structure belonged to.

This atlas states the documented legal timeline as settled and the underlying historical question as genuinely contested rather than adjudicating it, following the same practice as its treatment of other disputed colonial and postcolonial era records.