Mukulika Banerjee : My parents bequeathed to me a lived liberalism. From Dec 6, 1992, that virtue, that country, is besieged
I had a dream on the
night of December 6, 1992, the day the Babri Masjid was destroyed.
It went like this:
My parents and I are
travelling in an open top safari-style jeep. We are looking over the sides,
scanning the trees on either side of the rough road, searching for something.
And then one of us shouts to indicate they had spotted something and we come to
a halt and scramble out. Pulling the thick undergrowth aside, we find what we
are looking for - large white human bones, that resemble the rounded form of
Henry Moore’s sculptures. My father says, “there he is, there is Gandhi. We can
take him back with us now”.
As we lift the pieces carefully, we realise that in
our frantic search we had unknowingly crossed a line, a border of some sorts,
across which “Gandhi” lay. Realising we would not be allowed to bring him back
from across the border, we lower the pieces we had so eagerly picked up and
drive back the way we came, looking over our shoulders and thinking how close
we had come to the treasure we could not claim. I have only once in my
life had a dream like this, but it has stayed with me forever. I remember
narrating it to my doctoral supervisor in his Oxford office. Even though its vividness
felt real, it had come across as embarrassingly heavy with meaning and
symbolism in the telling and so I rarely spoke of it again.
But the dream has
never gone away and this year especially, it gives expression to inchoate
emotions that have dominated the last few months. This will be the first
December of my life without my parents. My mother died exactly two years ago,
on my parents’ 56th wedding anniversary and my father at the end of May this
year, a week after the new Indian government took office. With them, they also
seemed to have taken an India that they had given my generation and me. ...
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/babri-masjid-demolition-new-india-ram-janmabhoomi-ayodhya-ram-temple-6152805/