Ram Janmabhoomi (Ram Lalla)

For devotees this is the janmasthan of Vishnu's seventh avatar — the exact ground of Rama's birth, which makes it, with Krishna's Mathura, one of the two great birthplace shrines of the Hindu world. Ayodhya stands first among the Sapta Puri, the seven moksha-giving cities, and tradition holds that darshan here carries the merit of the holy city itself: Rama and Ayodhya are inseparable.

The deity is worshipped as Ram Lalla — Rama as a five-year-old child — continuing the form under which the Lord was venerated on this spot through the long decades of dispute, when the murti sat in a canvas tent awaiting its temple. The tenderness of the child-god is the emotional key of the shrine: pilgrims come less to petition a king than to adore an infant.

Each Ram Navami, at solar noon, a ray of sunlight is guided by an optical assembly onto the deity's forehead as a Surya Tilak — the sun saluting the scion of its own Solar line on his birthday. And each Deepotsav, on the eve of Diwali, the Sarayu ghats blaze with record lakhs of lamps, welcoming Rama home to his city as Ayodhya once welcomed him from Lanka.

Ayodhya on the Sarayu is remembered in the Ramayana as the capital of the Solar dynasty and the city where Vishnu took birth as Rama, son of King Dasharatha and Queen Kausalya. The Ram Janmabhoomi — the birthplace itself — has been the heart of that memory for as long as the city has been sung, its praises gathered in the Ayodhya Mahatmya of the Skanda Purana, which walks the pilgrim shrine by shrine to this very ground.

The site's modern history was long and contested. A sixteenth-century mosque stood upon the spot from the Mughal period, and the question of the ground beneath it ran through petitions and courtrooms for over a century, becoming one of the defining legal disputes of modern India. In November 2019 a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in a unanimous verdict, awarded the site for the construction of a Ram temple, directing that alternative land be granted for a mosque.

The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra trust, constituted in February 2020, oversaw construction; the foundation ceremony followed in August 2020, and on 22 January 2024 the new murti of Ram Lalla was consecrated in the sanctum in the Pran Pratishtha ceremony led by the Prime Minister — a moment watched across the world and celebrated in Ayodhya with lamps, as at a second Diwali.

The temple, designed by Chandrakant Sompura with his son Ashish — heirs to a long line of hereditary temple architects — is built in the Nagara style in its ornate Maru-Gurjara manner. The main structure stands 380 feet long, 250 feet wide and 161 feet to the crown of its shikhara, in three storeys of about twenty feet each, borne on 392 sculpted pillars and entered through 44 doors.

It is raised in pink Bansi Paharpur sandstone from Rajasthan upon a granite plinth, and — remarkably — uses no structural steel or iron anywhere; the engineering, executed by Larsen & Toubro, marries traditional temple-building with modern seismic design intended to last for centuries. Five mandapas — Nritya, Rang, Sabha, Prarthana and Kirtan — lead the devotee to the sanctum, where the 51-inch Ram Lalla murti, carved by the Mysuru sculptor Arun Yogiraj from dark Krishna Shila stone, stands beneath the shikhara.

A rectangular parkota, a colonnaded rampart of about 732 metres, encloses the temple, its corners carrying shrines of Surya, Bhagwati, Ganesha and Shiva, with Annapurna and Hanuman on its arms; temples of Valmiki, Vasishtha, Agastya, Nishad Raj, Shabari and other companions of the Rama story rise across the wider 70-acre campus, much of which is kept green.