Hanuman Garhi, Ayodhya

Ayodhya keeps an order of precedence, and it is Hanuman's. The pilgrim climbs here first and goes to the Janmabhoomi after: the guardian's leave is asked before the Lord's own court is entered, and devotees hold that darshan of Ram Lalla is incomplete without it. It is the courtesy a bhakta owes the greatest of bhaktas, and the whole city moves by it.

What waits at the top is unexpectedly tender. In the sanctum, as the district records, is a beautiful murti of the child Hanuman seated on the lap of Mata Anjani — not the mountain-bearing hero of Lanka but the infant in his mother's arms, robed in sindoor and silver. The strength on which Ayodhya leans is worshipped here in its beginning.

Tuesdays and Saturdays fill the steps, and the Hanuman Chalisa runs on them from dawn; the chola of sindoor is the offering that never changes. Hanuman Jayanti, kept in Ayodhya on the full moon of Chaitra, is the great day, with Ram Navami earlier in the same bright fortnight and Deepotsav lighting the city in Kartik; through Jyeshtha, the Tuesdays of Bada Mangal — the Awadh region's own Hanuman observance — bring the crowds again. And it was at Ayodhya that Tulsidas began the Ramcharitmanas, and at Kashi that he finished it: the poet whose Chalisa these stones have heard more than any other verse.

The old quarter around the Janmabhoomi is called Ramkot, the fort of Rama, and above its lanes rises a mound crowned by a temple that is itself a fort. The name says as much: a garhi is a small stronghold, and this is the garhi of Hanuman. The district administration sets the katha down in a single line: it is believed that Lord Hanuman, Pavan Putra, lived here to guard Ayodhya. When the reign of Rama was done and the Lord returned to his own abode, tradition holds, he asked Hanuman to remain in the city — to stay while sun and moon endure and the Ramkatha is sung, and to keep the gate of Rama's fort.

An older tradition carries the shrine much further back: the district's account records that Vikramaditya had a temple raised here which came in time to be known as Hanuman Garhi. The garhi standing today, however, is an eighteenth-century work, and it belongs to the Ramanandi bairagi sadhus of the Nirvani akhara, who hold it still. Histories of Awadh trace land at the Hanuman mound allotted to their mahant, Abhayram Das, in the time of Sa'adat Khan, the first Nawab; further revenue grants under Safdarjung and Shuja-ud-Daula; and the temple-fortress finished in the reign of Asaf-ud-Daula. Tradition adds what the record does not: the first grant was given in gratitude, after the mahant's care restored a Nawab's ailing son.

The approach is the climb — seventy-six steps, as the count is always given, rising from the bazaar to the gate, steep enough, a much-repeated local saying holds, that no elephant could climb them. The gate carries a dome with slender turrets on either side, in the Awadhi idiom of the century that built it.

Within, as the Ministry of Tourism describes it, is a four-sided fort, its walls closing around the inner sanctum and its corners turned into rounded bastions; the complex rises in levels, each opening onto a wider view of Ayodhya. The garbhagriha is worked in silver, the walls about it carry the verses of the Hanuman Chalisa, and smaller shrines stand around the court. From the parapet the whole of Ramkot lies below, which is, after all, what a watchtower is for.