Ram Navami

Ram Navami celebrates the birth of Rama, the prince of Ayodhya revered as the seventh avatara of Vishnu and, in the devotional traditions, as the model of righteous conduct (dharma) and the ideal king. It falls on the ninth day (navami) of the bright fortnight of the month of Chaitra (March-April), the ninth and final day of the spring Navaratri, and tradition places his birth at noon. His story is told in the Ramayana of Valmiki and, for many devotees, in Tulsidas's Hindi Ramcharitmanas: the exile of the rightful heir, the abduction of his wife Sita by the demon-king Ravana, and the war of recovery that ends in Rama's victory and return.

The day is kept with fasting, temple worship and the continuous reading or recitation of the Ramayana, and at temples the birth is marked at midday with the cradling of an image of the infant Rama, echoing the observance of Krishna's birth. In Ayodhya, held to be his birthplace, and along the routes of his story, the festival draws large gatherings and processions. Ram Navami often closes a nine-day spring Navaratri devoted to the Goddess, so that the two great strands of Hindu devotion, to the Goddess and to Vishnu's avatars, meet at its end; and Rama's reign, Ram Rajya, remains in Hindu thought a byword for the just and ordered society.

Ayodhya's identification as Rama's birthplace, referenced in this entry's first article, sat for decades at the centre of one of modern India's most prolonged and consequential legal and political disputes, centred on a specific site where the sixteenth century Babri Masjid mosque stood until it was demolished by a Hindu nationalist mob in 1992, an event that triggered widespread communal violence and years of litigation over rival Hindu and Muslim claims to the land beneath the demolished structure, with Hindu litigants arguing the site was the precise birthplace of Rama and had been the location of an earlier temple.

India's Supreme Court issued a unanimous verdict in November 2019 awarding the disputed land to a trust to build a Hindu temple, while directing that alternative land be provided elsewhere for a new mosque, a ruling that closed the specific legal dispute even though the underlying historical questions about the site's earlier structures remain debated among historians and archaeologists; construction of the new Ram Mandir proceeded on the site in the years following, with the temple's main sanctum consecrated in a large ceremony in January 2024, so that Ram Navami is now kept at a site whose religious significance and physical form were both, within living memory, the subject of exactly the kind of contested and litigated history this atlas records rather than glosses over.