One of India’s finest photo-journalists, Prashant Panjiar first went to Ayodhya in April 1987, to photograph the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Virat Hindu Sammelan, one of the early mobilisations of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Five years later he was back on assignment for India Today, following L.K. Advani. His photographs of the Babri Masjid’s domes coming down are the only images of the demolition itself.
In December 2002, on the tenth anniversary of the demolition, he went back to Ayodhya, to see how the town was changing. And then he kept going back regularly, recording the change.
The earliest photographs in this book date from 1987. Most were made between 2002 and 2004, and from 2018 to 2026. Together they cover nearly four decades of Ayodhya: its ghats and akharas, Sufi shrines and Hanuman temples, barricades and barbed wire, and the laser shows and hoardings of the new temple town. With an essay by Valay Singh on how Ram was turned into a political symbol, this unprecedented book is a rare long view of a fabled town that became the epicentre of a campaign to reshape India.
