Ayodhya Ram Mandir

Rāma Janmabhūmi of Ayodhyā

A birthplace, a dispute, and a temple consecrated in 2024

Rāma Janmabhūmi is the place in Ayodhyā at which Rāma is held to have been born, and the shrine there is the central temple of the town. Its significance has three layers which are often run together and should be kept apart: it is a place of worship in a long-standing cult; it is the subject of the longest-running temple-title litigation in modern Indian history; and since 22 January 2024 it has been the site of a consecrated temple built on the land in dispute.

The devotional history of the site is continuous. The Rāma-leelā path in Ayodhyā runs from the ghats through the Naimisāraṇya and the takṣaśilā to this place, and the area around it was for centuries a field and a set of shrines rather than a single temple; the Rāma Janmabhūmi shrine that stood in the medieval and early modern period, together with a structure known as Kānak Bhāwan, was repeatedly built up, damaged and rebuilt. The leelā tradition attached to the spot is much older than any building on it, and it should be described as a cult geography rather than as a monument.

The legal and political history is documented and should be given by date. The Executive constituted in 1949 tried to remove the disputed structures; litigation followed through the decades, and the Supreme Court held in 2019 for the Hindu claimants. A temple was consecrated on 22 January 2024, and the town around it has since been reconstructed with relocation and land-acquisition at its centre. Accounts of the period 1990–2024 vary sharply in emphasis, and the two frames — devotional history and legal-political history — are both legitimate; what this entry will not do is adjudicate between competing narratives, or describe the reconstruction in terms a reader could mistake for settled fact. The Ayodhyā entry should be read alongside the ones on Ayodhyā as a mokṣa-purī and on Rāma as the deity of the city, which is the older cult.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Rāmāyaṇa (Valmiki) — work level; the Janmabhūmi as a fixed place of the text is something to be checked, since the Bala Kāṇḍa does not locate the birthplace with modern precision.
• The Supreme Court of India, judgment of 2019 — the legal record, which exists in public and should be cited directly.
• Ayodhya District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — for the site and the town; its edition predates 2024 and cannot describe the present temple.
• Unverified: the frontmatter's "Epic period (c. 500 BCE–200 CE)" dating, the identification of this shrine as a Divya Desam, and every festival date listed there.