Where Is Valmiki’s Ayodhya?

A Scriptural, Archeological, Architectural, and Epigraphical Inquiry

Sprawling megapolis, well-laid arterial network, royal highways, multistorey edifices, huge arched gateways, gem-studded mansions, lush gardens, neatly lined markets, deep moats, impregnable fortification, plentiful farms—this is how Ramayana describes Ayodhya, the birthplace of not only Rama but India’s first epic.¹ The word megapolis is not used lightly here. The city, in Ami Ganatra’s picturesque elaboration, was nearly five times the size of today’s New York.² Of course, enormous would be a gross understatement, but a far more remarkable takeaway is that an agglomeration of this size was at once beautiful and peaceful, superlative on both counts. A more utopian city has not existed in all of human history. You tend to prosper when you’re at peace. Strife does the opposite. And peace endures when a city cannot be invaded, as testified by the very etymology of this city. Ayodhya is literally the negation of yodhya, Sanskrit for “conquerable.” This inspires awe. And questions.

A most immediate question once the awe tempers is, is it true? Unfortunately, that’s an extremely charged question and connotations can range from harmless skepticism to ideological violence, from prudish ignorance to flat-out Hinduphobia. So, let’s ask the same question a little differently. Ramayana is held as practically primordial, going as far back as 1500 BC by some reckoning. There are those who go even further, but this is the most commonly accepted dating. We won’t go into the scientific and archeological veracity of such a dating, least of all in matters of faith such as this one. But we can now rephrase our question with this vintage in mind. Is it possible for the city described in Ayodhya Kanda to have existed in modern-day Uttar Pradesh 3,500 years ago?

Related to this question is another. We know one of Daśaratha’s wives was Kaikeyi, who came from the kingdom of Kekeya, a polity that lay between modern-day Punjab and ancient Gandhara. In fact, the Ramayana itself locates it bordered by the Beas River to the east and Gandhara to the west. And Kosala, as we all know, was in central Uttar Pradesh. And this raises the question, how probable was a marital alliance across such vast distances in those days? In other words, could a king this deep in the Gangetic heartland think of marrying a princess from a place as far as modern-day Afghanistan-Pakistan, skipping neighbors like Videha, Kashi, Magadha, Panchala, and even Kuru? How did they communicate?

These are no new questions. They had already been asked more than forty years ago by eminent subject matter experts like archeologist Hasmukh Dhirajlal Sankalia. These are not popular questions for obvious reasons, but they stand, nonetheless. This essay does not expect to answer them, but it does hope to get somewhere charting the course taken by giants like Sankalia, Lal, Cunningham, and others. To distill everything that we discussed so far into a single, portable problem statement, is the Ayodhya of today the Ayodhya of Ramayana?

Indian historiography is a hotly contested space. ideologically and politically charged. It’s no secret that there are two broad camps with two conflicting objectives—Hindutva and Marxist. Calling one more eminent than the other, tempting as it may seem, is a grossly inaccurate oversimplification. They just come with different endgames, that’s all. This difference does not affect their scholarship, it only affects how they deploy that scholarship and to what end.

The choice of Sankhalia is of interest and merits some explanation. Right off the bat, it’s the fact that he was the first to ask these questions, but more than that, Sankhalia is held in high regard by all with no ideological ascriptions tarnishing his legacy. If anything, it’s said he harbored “a strong sympathy and desire to ‘prove’ the existence of traditional accounts” or Ramayana,³ and yet was objective enough to ask difficult questions. This makes him a worthy participant in any conversation on Ramayana. He comes with no political baggage. And also, as “father of post-Independence archeology,” he has much of immense value to offer. But we’re not listening to Sankhalia alone. In a tradition we’ve consistently maintained since inception, we will listen to experts with political baggage too. We will listen to Marxist historians, and we will listen to Hindutva historians. This will be a long discussion.