The tragedy at Ayutthaya. Yet again! And at Ayodhya too :(

As has become my habit, I picked up the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times from the library's newspaper shelves and got myself a comfortable seat by the window and, predictably, I reached for the WSJ first. I was saddened to look at this photo:

It is one giant statue of the Buddha in Ayutthaya (a UNESCO World Heritage site,) sometimes referred to as the reclining posture, while a few others describe this as his enlightened state as he breathed his last.

The floods are making quite a mess of Thailand, with more than 260 dead and quite a bit of destruction to property.  I am able to relate to the area, its peoples, and to this Buddha statue thanks to having been there--the photo below is from my trip a couple of years ago:

I liked this photograph because the humans standing there gives the viewer an idea of the size of the statue.

Now, all these areas are flooded.

Death and destruction at Ayutthaya are, however, not anything new. If at all, humans have caused a lot more destruction, which, ironically, was because of the wars between the Buddhists in Burma and the Buddhists in Thailand!  I was almost teary when I saw a row of Buddha statues--beheaded by the invading Burmese.

Ayutthaya is, yes, named after Ayodhya. It was founded in 1350, and served as the capital for more than 400 years before it fell to the invading Burmese forces. It is a cruel irony that many a devastating wars have featured in the history of these two neighbors, which are home to millions of followers of Buddha, who preached non-violence!

Ayodhya is one of the holiest places in Hinduism. It is located in northern India, not far from the Nepal border, and is believed to be the birth place of the Hindu god Rama—to whom I owe my name!

Like most religious Hindus, my grandmothers immensely valued making a pilgrimage to Ayodhya. Though they were born in villages far away from Ayodhya, my grandmothers made it, unlike their previous generations who could only dream of going there in their lifetimes, but never did because of resource and transport constraints. After all, it is almost a three-thousand mile round trip between their villages and Ayodhya, and travel before the advent of modern transportation would have been extremely challenging.  My grandmothers would have been ecstatic if I had visited Ayodhya—but, visiting Ayutthaya may have been good enough for them, given my atheism :) 

Anyway, after the fall of Ayutthaya, Bangkok has been Thailand's capital since 1782. The king assumed the official title of “Rama I,” thereby further cementing the symbolic association with Ayodhya.

Ayutthaya is about 85 kilometers—about 50 miles for the metric-challenged—from Bangkok. The contrasts are profound. Bangkok is modern, bustling, congested, noisy, dusty, and crowded. Ayutthaya, on the other hand, is everything that Bangkok is not—calm, and with lots of ambulatory space, and feels a tad cooler too. After spending a few hours walking through the ruins, it is not difficult to imagine the life that once flourished in Ayutthaya during its years of glory.

At least Ayutthaya’s days of battles are over. Ayodhya, on the other hand, continues to be a flashpoint because extremist Hindus claim that there ought not to be a mosque—the Babri Masjid—in the piece of land where, it is believed, a temple for Rama once stood.

The spread of Islam, and the arrival of Central Asian Muslim warriors, who founded the successful Moghul Dynasty, resulted in the destruction of more than a few Hindu temples in India, and some that did not face destruction were converted as mosques. The Babri Masjid is from that era, and its name is in honor of Babur, the first of the Moghuls.

The destruction and alteration of property was not anything unusual—historically, it is something that humans have done pretty much in every culture across the planet. Rare would have been the case when the invading forces did everything possible to preserve the “enemy’s” life and property.

However, and unfortunately centuries later, Hindu extremists launched a holy war to restore the temple of Rama. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), through which the extremist Hindu concerns are politically represented, decided to make the converted mosque a big part of their politics. Thus, despite India’s Supreme Court warning against any vandalism and destruction of Babri Masjid, the fanatics from the BJP ended up destroying the mosque in 1992—a horrific act, that severely escalated religious tensions in the country.

I am confident that my grandmothers would never have supported the destruction of a mosque, despite their devotion to Rama and, therefore, to Ayodhya. It is a tragedy that throughout history we humans have intentionally destroyed our fellow beings and their settlements and, along with that, traditions and cultures. While we might be vaguely familiar with the adage that “Rome was not built in a day”, we do not seem to truly understand that it takes only a short time to destroy that which took years, perhaps even centuries to build.