There is no crop
other than god
and god is harvested here
around the year.
—Arun Kolatkar, verse 22, Jejuri, 1976
Located in the ancient city of Ayodhya in northern India, the Ayodhya Temple, is one of the significant spiritual landmarks. Revered as the birthplace of Lord Rama, a central figure in the Hindu epic Ramayana, the temple embodies millennia of religious devotion, mythological heritage, and cultural significance.
The Ayodhya Temple has become the pièce de résistance of the Hindutva imagination, a shrine not only to Lord Rama but to the political prowess of the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and its saffron-clad constellation of ideological allies. It was reconstructed after a historic legal and political dispute, the temple symbolizes both the enduring faith of millions and the complex intersections of religion and modern India.
This year at the Ayodhya Temple as the Shri Ram Lalla Vigraha consecration unfolds on January 11th, an event cloaked in spiritual garb yet steeped in political calculation, it becomes imperative to interrogate the forces that shape India’s intellectual and cultural landscape. The Ram temple in Ayodhya, framed as a potent cultural symbol within an overtly Hindu narrative, appears to reshape the established boundaries of postcolonial collective memory—challenging the state-sanctioned, authoritative modes of commemorating events deemed nationally significant. “The Temple is being displayed as a new official site of national memory.”
In a stroke of theatrical genius, it has been reimagined from a site of ancient devotion into the pulsing heart of a new nationalist mythology—a place where faith merges seamlessly with the choreography of majoritarian politics. No longer merely a temple, it now stands as a monument to the BJP’s ideological ambition, a stage where the gods are summoned to endorse a vision of India rewritten in saffron ink. Ayodhya is no longer just a city; it is a brand, a fulcrum of power where centuries-old religious yearning is repackaged into the sharp rhetoric of identity and dominance, all under the banner of cultural revivalism that is as polarizing as it is politically potent.
A rallying point for majoritarian politics, merging religion with nationhood in a spectacle of saffron nationalism, it brings back the memory of how, in August of 2020, the unveiling of the Ayodhya Temple witnessed a curious spectacle: the invocation of Milan Kundera’s dictum from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ As if it were an intellectual talisman, the quote became the peg on which writers hung the newsy opinion. For example, see how the Telegraph and the Open Magazine landed on the exact phrase.
Like laughable laughter, the quote, seductive in its literary elegance, seems almost lascivious, a voice hovering over a cockfight of memory and forgetting—a semantic hoax, tricking us with its simplicity. This seemingly profound statement, however, turned out to be a rhetorical sleight of hand, a hollow echo reverberating through the cacophony of conflicting narratives. The Ayodhya spectacle, with its colossal structure concealing a calculated political agenda, epitomised the insidious project of historical manipulation: the ruthless suppression of dissenting voices and the relentless imposition of a singular, monolithic narrative.
Ayodhya aside, what piqued my interest was more about the quote from Milan Kundera’s work. Why Milan Kundera? This question is not a facetious remark in the vein of a Bloom-esque dismissal of Kundera or “the Prague Moment”! In 2002, “The Prague Moment’ has gone by,” Bloom wrote in a short essay on Kundera. “Young people no longer go off to the Czech capital with Kundera in their backpacks.”
Yet Kundera persists, his aphorism reduced to a meme, detached from the context of Mirek’s petty motivations—love letters, not liberty.
Kitsch and the Totalitarian Aesthetic
Yet this project of reclamation is riddled with contradictions. In Ayodhya’s moment of triumph, Kundera’s aphorism acquires a disquieting resonance. It is not just memory that is celebrated here but also forgetting—a deliberate erasure of histories that do not fit the script of Hindu nationalism. Today, beyond liberalisation and in the name of Ram, with much of the politics dictated by the excursion of the selfie, an Instagram pixelation and an aphoristic Twitterati, Kundera seems ripe for the Indian totalitarian kitsch.
Kundera’s insight into kitsch—”the absolute denial of shit”—is disturbingly relevant here. Kitsch thrives on erasure, smoothing over the messiness of history to present a pristine, idealised vision. In the saffronised India of today, the temple embodies this aesthetic. Its soaring spires and ornate carvings mask the violence of its origins, transforming a site of destruction into a spectacle of devotion, a disillusioning sight for those who see beyond the facade. The past is sanitised, its complexities flattened into a single, triumphant narrative of Hindu resurgence.
Just like Mirek, the character who utters the line, often quote, is more concerned about retrieving his epistolary artefacts—the love letters. There is no politics or state intrigue that propels him to action. Rather, his singular aim is to retrieve them from a former lover. The quote falls into the domain of a social criterion losing its aesthetic impulse, much like a vacuous truth. The literary context of “the marginalised literature “and the likes of Kundera’s struggle with literary and publishing hierarchies and orders are lost.
Living in our Balcony times, the irony of the novel’s opening scene, set on a balcony of the Kinský Palace, cannot be missed—the scene etched between the Czech communist leader Gottwald and his comrade Clementis. It is eerily similar to that of a charioteer and a pracharak in front of massive crowds!
The erasure extends beyond individuals to entire communities. The Muslims of Ayodhya, once integral to the town’s fabric, are now its ghosts, their stories erased, their presence reduced to an absence. This is the politics of forgetting at its most brutal: not the benign forgetfulness of Mirek’s love letters but a deliberate, systemic obliteration of inconvenient histories.
Like the fur hat in the novel, the crown of Ram is firmly in place on the head of the pracharak, while the charioteer in the name of Ram is airbrushed from history. With their bricks for the Ram Temple and their novel, the Kar-sevak seem like novelists at work. As Kundera puts it, “The novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel.” The pracharak is more about the Art of the Novel: “Before it becomes a political issue, the will to forget is an existential one: man has always harboured the desire to rewrite his biography, to change the past, to wipe out tracks, both his own and others’.”
In this appropriation lies the essence of Hindu nationalism’s contemporary chaos: a politics of kitsch, where symbols are severed from substance and deployed as tools of power. The Ayodhya temple is less a testament to faith than a monument to a manufactured memory, a reconstruction not of devotion but of domination. Every brick laid is a chapter rewritten, every chant a history erased.
Footpaths of Memory
I can distinctly recollect the contentious times in Ram’s name and the divorce case of Shah Bano growing up in India in the 1980s.
Also, the 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of a curious tableau of Milan Kundera and Ayan Rand, their battered covers whispering of borrowed ideals and contested identities on the streets of India. I remember how on the cracked pavements of India’s street-side bookstalls, be it by the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, or Kolkata’s College Street, Mumbai’s Fort area, Kolkata’s College Street, or Delhi’s Daryaganj where pirated copies of Milan Kundera and Ayn Rand jostle for space with self-help manuals, pulp fictions and cheap romances, the politics of imagination plays out in the yellowed newsprint pages. In these informal libraries of the street, Kundera’s meditations on Czech identity, post-war European disillusionment, and his fraught dance with Communism found unlikely kinship with Rand’s uncompromising gospel of self-interest.
In a marketplace as informal as the intellectual consumption it sustains, these stalls, as much about negotiation as they are about narrative, hold a subtext as sharp as the haggling—what one reads here is as much about who we are as what we long to become. Just as the consecration in Ayodhya seeks to inscribe a definitive version of India’s heritage, the enduring appeal of these foreign authors reflects a parallel struggle: a battle over ideas over which memories are preserved and which futures are imagined. Together, they quietly shaped how a generation of Indian readers grappled with questions of freedom, individuality, and power—a reflection of the nation’s precarious balancing act between tradition and modernity.
One of the steady sellers, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, celebrates individualism and capitalism, presenting a dystopian world where society collapses under the weight of collectivism, mediocrity, and state control. The novel’s protagonists, a group of visionary industrialists, retreat to a secluded haven, leaving the world to its self-inflicted chaos. Rand champions the “virtue of selfishness,” portraying the individual’s triumph over societal conformity. In the Indian context, this ethos of individual supremacy can paradoxically resonate with the rise of Hindu nationalism, which simultaneously invokes a collective identity and rewrites historical memory to assert a singular, dominant narrative. The chaos of memory—marked by erasures and selective retellings—mirrors the ideological battle in Rand’s novel. Just as Atlas Shrugged pits the individual against a manipulated collective, the rise of Hindu nationalism exploits historical grievances to create a homogenised identity, undermining India’s pluralistic past and reconfiguring the social order to privilege one vision of the nation.
Perhaps a particular anomaly towers above the rest: stacks of Mein Kampf, unapologetically displayed, their austere covers daring the passerby to glance twice. Here, Hitler’s name—uttered in hushed disdain or fiery condemnation elsewhere—drifts into conversations with an almost cavalier ease, occasionally adorned with praise that veers from the absurd to the unsettling. It is a spectacle not just of intellectual consumption but of historical amnesia, where the banalisation of infamy turns a manifesto of hatred into a casual commodity, its very ubiquity a grim irony in a nation that once bore the weight of colonial subjugation. As this reportage suggests, Business students find them in the ilk of Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? that unfolds as an allegorical fable, distilling the disquieting inevitability of change into a deceptively simple maze of mice and men. Beneath its unassuming narrative lies a stark meditation on the human condition: the paralysis of fear versus the liberation of adaptation.
The Chaos of Hindu Nationalism
Hindu nationalism’s rewriting of India’s biography is not merely a political project but an existential one, a quest to construct a nation that aligns with its vision of Hindu supremacy. The temple is its manifesto, its declaration of a new Indian republic—one where secularism is sidelined, pluralism is suspect, and dissent is treason.
This new republic thrives on chaos, and its leaders are masters of contradiction. They speak the language of development while nurturing the fires of division, extol digital India while weaponising WhatsApp rumours, and invoke Ram Rajya while perpetuating inequality. Chaos is not a flaw but a feature, a deliberate strategy to disorient and dominate.
To honestly grapple with memory in India, we must move beyond Kundera’s simplicity to thinkers and writers illuminating its messy, contested, and often violent terrain. In stark contrast to the chaotic instrumentalisation of symbols in Hindu nationalism, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s work offers a vision of politics deeply anchored in metaphysical principles, challenging the disjunction between power and sacred purpose. Where the Ayodhya temple embodies the severance of substance from the symbol, Coomaraswamy’s exposition seeks to reconcile spiritual authority and temporal power, presenting a governance rooted not in domination but in dharmic alignment.
To invoke Kundera uncritically in contemporary India is to risk-reducing memory to a platitude, detached from its fraught and often violent entanglements with power. Memory here is no neutral terrain; it is both a site of resistance and a weapon of domination. The Ayodhya narrative, for instance, exemplifies how selective remembering—no less than deliberate forgetting—becomes an instrument of erasure, transforming history into a malleable tool of political expedience.
Yet, to truly navigate the contested terrain of memory and its ties to faith, we must look beyond Kundera’s abstractions to thinkers who grapple with the complexity of India’s cultural and political inheritance. Here, Coomaraswamy offers a vital counterpoint. Where the Ayodhya temple signifies the severance of substance from the symbol in Hindu nationalism, Coomaraswamy’s Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of Government reveals a vision of governance that seeks to reconcile dharma and artha, illuminating a sacred politics unmoored from the alien paradigms of colonial modernity.
But why stop with Coomaraswamy? Why not turn to Arun Kolatkar, whose poetic engagement with India’s preoccupation with faith and idols provides another critical lens? In his 1976 Commonwealth Poetry Prize-winning Jejuri, Kolatkar exposes the thin, fragile line dividing god from stone, dismantling the façades of piety to reveal a history inscribed in disillusionment rather than divine grace. His verse, sharp as a scratch on the stone, evokes a meditative reckoning with faith as cultural inheritance and human artifice.
Here is one such verse—A Scratch (22)—that lays bare the precarious entanglement of devotion and disenchantment:
What is god and what is stone
the dividing line, if it exists, is very thin
at Jejuri
and every other stone
is god or his cousin.
There is no crop
other than god
and god is harvested here
around the year.
Between Coomaraswamy’s quest for a metaphysically anchored politics and Kolatkar’s unsparing gaze at the sacred, we glimpse two profound engagements with India’s cultural soul—one seeking harmony in universal principles, the other uncovering the fractures within the nation’s spiritual landscape. Together, they challenge us to rethink the foundations of memory, power, and faith in a deeply contested present: to reckon with India’s multitudinous and often conflicting histories—of Dalit assertion, Mughal syncretism, Gandhian idealism, or Hindutva’s militant rewriting of the past.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.
