ABSTRACT
In what can be seen as the climax of the long-running Hindutva project promised by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, the ground-breaking ceremony of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya took place on 5 August 2020. A highly controversial move, especially given the background of the collapsing Indian economy and the larger spectre of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Ram Mandir and the Ramayana have a longer history of being used as political and ideological tools for the Hindutva narrative. For instance, the immensely popular 1987 Hindi television serial, Ramanand Sagar's Ramayana, was telecast again after the announcement of the Coronavirus lockdown in India. In the late 1980s, many scholars and intellectuals had raised concerns about this televised version becoming the dominant narrative, and thus eclipsing other, diverse, contradictory tellings of the myth. With eerie accuracy, historian Romila Thapar questioned the long-term political and ideological motives at work. Thapar argued that such representations were part of the state's nationalistic project to create a homogenised, uniform culture which was easy to control and identify with. Thus, Rama and his mythology have increasingly come to be the face of a militant form of Hinduism.