Rama's birthplace is the most politically consequential claim about any figure in this atlas, and it is worth separating the parts.
Valmiki's Ayodhya is described as the capital of Kosala and the setting of the opening books. Whether the modern town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh is that place is not established archaeologically; the identification is traditional and long-standing, and the question of continuity of occupation is contested.
The Babri Masjid, built in the sixteenth century, stood on a site that a body of Hindu tradition identified as the exact birthplace. Legal disputes over it run back to the nineteenth century. The mosque was demolished by a crowd in December 1992, and the riots that followed across India killed roughly two thousand people.
The Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment in the title suit in November 2019. Its findings are worth stating precisely because they are widely misreported in both directions. The court held that the demolition was a serious violation of law; that the archaeological evidence showed a pre-existing non-Islamic structure beneath the mosque but did not establish that a temple had been demolished to build it; that the archaeological report could not be used to determine title on faith grounds; and it awarded the disputed land to a trust for the construction of a temple while directing that separate land be provided for a mosque.
The judgment is a legal resolution of a title dispute. It is not, and does not claim to be, a finding about where a figure of the epic was born.