20 • History and the Judgement of the Allahabad High Court
PAPER II
The Judgement and the Lore of Ramjanmabhumi
2.1. While there was no disagreement among the parties involved in the suit that the belief in Ayodhya being the birth-place of Lord Rama is currently widely held (Para 4316), this is far from saying that this belief goes in time to remote antiquity or that Ayodhya has always been a great pilgrim-centre on account of its association with Lord Rama’s birth-place or that the worship of Lord Rama has been conducted there (or at any site therein) from “time immemorial”, as decreed by Justice S. Agarwal (Para 4070) 2.2. Justice Sudhir Agarwal rightly regards inscriptions as a primary piece of evidence (Para 4146), so let us first see what the Sanskrit inscriptions tell us. None of the Sanskrit inscriptions at or relating to Ayodhya before 1528 contain any reference to Lord Rama directly by that name or to any sanctity attaching to Ayodhya on account of its being the place of his birth. 2.3. The first inscription at Ayodhya dated to the first century BC/ AD on palaeographic grounds is in Sanskrit, by Dhanadeva, the ruler of Kosala, who built a shrine ([ni]ketan) in honour of his father Phalgudeva (Epigraphia Indica, Vol.XX, pp.54-58). There is here no reference to any deity at all. A memorial inscription at Belgaum, Karnataka, of AD 105 (published in Epigraphia Indica, XXXIX, pp.183-188), is inscribed on a memorial pillar raised for a Brahman of the Kashyapa gotra hailing from Sâketa (Ayodhya) who is praised for his knowledge of the Yajurveda and performance of sacrifices, but with no reference anywhere to his worship of Lord Rama or even devotion to Vishnu. 2.4. A copper-plate containing a grant made by Samudragupta, the famous Gupta conqueror, and dated to Year 5 of the Gupta era (=AD 328-29) was issued from “the great camp of victory, contain-