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HomeIndiaNew book delves into Babri Masjid demolition & why Ayodhya still 'remains...

New book delves into Babri Masjid demolition & why Ayodhya still ‘remains a divided city’

Published by HarperCollins, ‘Ayodhya: Past and Present’ by Sutapa Mukherjee will be released on 5 January 2023 on ThePrint's Softcover.

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New Delhi: On 9 November 2019, a five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the land where the Babri Masjid once stood in Ayodhya belongs to Ram Lalla. The decision was expected to end the ‘conflict’ between two communities in India, who have been asserting their religious rights over the 2.77  acres of disputed land for five centuries. But a new book ‘Ayodhya: Past and Present’ shows how Ayodhya still ‘remains a divided city’.  

The author, Sutapa Mukherjee, has frequented the town since 1998. After the apex court decree, she returned to the land now ‘gifted’ to Lord Ram and reconnected with the locals.  Her narrative takes off from the historic 2019 Supreme Court judgment, traces the  milestones of the seventy-year-long legal battle for the disputed land and even goes back a few centuries to give cultural and civilisational context to the ‘conflict’ in Ayodhya, before  culminating in a ground-zero account of the Babri Masjid demolition. 

Published by HarperCollins, ‘Ayodhya: Past and Present’  by Sutapa Mukherjee will be released on 5 January 2023 on Softcover, ThePrint’s online venue to launch non-fiction books.

The book gives voice — through innumerable personal interviews — to the people of the pilgrim town, both the movers and shakers of the Mandir–Masjid tussle as well as the commoners caught in the crossfire. The book brings alive the reality of this once-quaint town that is on its way to becoming a commercialised  pilgrimage destination.

Swati Chopra, Associate Publisher, HarperCollins India, says, “The story of Ram’s Ayodhya goes back in time; the story of the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement in Ayodhya is a  more recent phenomenon. In this book, veteran journalist Sutapa Mukherjee provides a  masterful account of the latter while dipping into the former to provide necessary context.  

“We publish in time for the 30th anniversary of the event that changed Ayodhya, and in  many ways India, forever – the demolition of the Babri Masjid – which the book chronicles in great detail, as it does the story of the town and its people thereafter. Necessary reading  for anyone who is interested in contemporary Indian politics and Ayodhya’s imprint on it.” 

Sutapa Mukherjee has worked as a full-time  journalist with The Pioneer and Outlook, and as a stringer with Associated Press, Agence France Presse and BBC online.


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