A mosque known as the Babri Masjid, built in 1528, stood on a disputed plot inside Ayodhya until a large crowd of Hindu activists demolished it in December 1992, an event that triggered nationwide unrest. Hindu litigants held the plot to be the precise birthplace of Rama and the site of a prior temple; Muslim litigants held the mosque itself to be a place of worship whose demolition was unlawful regardless of what, if anything, had stood there before. India's Supreme Court ruled on the title dispute in November 2019, awarding the plot to a trust for construction of a Ram temple, consecrated in 2024, while directing that alternate land elsewhere in Ayodhya be granted for a new mosque.
Peter van der Veer's study of religious nationalism in India situates the dispute inside a longer contest over how India's religious and national identities relate to each other, rather than treating it as a purely local property question. Whether a Hindu temple predated the mosque on this exact plot remains a question historians and archaeologists read differently: excavation findings by the Archaeological Survey of India were read by some scholars as evidence of an earlier structure and by others as inconclusive or open to alternative interpretation, and the Supreme Court's judgment itself acknowledged that the archaeological evidence did not establish what religion any earlier structure belonged to.
This atlas states the documented legal timeline as settled and the underlying historical question as genuinely contested rather than adjudicating it, following the same practice as its treatment of other disputed colonial and postcolonial era records.