Fiction has approached too, but always from one direction: the wound. Taslima Nasrin’s ‘Lajja’ traced the aftermath of the demolition across the border. Salman Rushdie folded the fallout into ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh.’ Shashi Tharoor’s ‘Riot and Raj’ Kamal Jha’s ‘Fireproof’ wrote the communal fires that followed. Indian fiction, in other words, has written Ayodhya as catastrophe, as memory and as grief. What it has never attempted is Ayodhya as a functioning institution: the money, the management, the employment, the daily machinery of organised faith.
