Ayodhya

Ayodhya appears in the oldest Indian literature as the capital of the Kosala kingdom and the city of the Ikshvaku dynasty, and the Ramayana makes it the birthplace and royal seat of Rama. Hindu tradition counts it among the seven sacred cities whose visit is held to bring liberation. The town is important to Jains as well, as the birthplace of several tirthankaras, and to Buddhists, for whom it is identified with Saketa.

Under the Mughals it was a provincial centre, and in the 18th century the Nawabs of Awadh made their capital at Faizabad, a few kilometres away, before moving to Lucknow. Faizabad kept the Nawabs' garden tombs and its bazaar. The British annexed Awadh in 1856, one of the grievances behind the rebellion of the following year, and the district settled into a quiet agricultural life around the pilgrim trade.

The modern history of Ayodhya is dominated by the dispute over a site at Ramkot, where the Babri Masjid, a mosque dating from the 16th century, stood on ground many Hindus regard as Rama's birthplace. The mosque was demolished by a crowd in December 1992, an event followed by riots in several parts of India. After decades of litigation the Supreme Court of India ruled in 2019 that the site should be handed over for the construction of a temple, with land elsewhere in the town allotted for a mosque. The Ram temple was consecrated in January 2024, and the town has since been rebuilt around it with an airport, widened streets and a much larger railway station.

Ayodhya's culture is the culture of pilgrimage. Its calendar is made of bathing days, processions and parikramas — circuits walked around the sacred area, the longest of them lasting days — and much of the resident population is connected to the temples as priests, musicians, flower sellers, boatmen or lodging keepers. Hundreds of temples and monasteries, many belonging to Vaishnava orders such as the Ramanandis, run their own kitchens, schools and guest houses, and saffron-clad ascetics are a constant presence in the lanes.

The Ramayana shapes everything. Recitations of Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, the 16th-century Awadhi retelling, are heard from temple courtyards; the Ram Lila, the dramatised cycle of the story, is performed in the autumn; and bhajan singing and kirtan go on through the night in the larger temples. Awadhi, a dialect of Hindi, is the everyday speech, and the courtesy formulas of the old Awadh region survive alongside pilgrims' greetings of Jai Shri Ram.

Faizabad gives the district a second layer. The Nawabi town has a Muslim population, Urdu culture and the tombs and gardens of the 18th-century court, and the two places have long lived side by side, although the dispute over the temple site made Ayodhya a focus of national religious politics for decades. Visitors find the town welcoming and intensely devotional, and are expected to behave as guests in a place of worship rather than as sightseers.

The old pilgrimage town is small — around 55,000 people at the 2011 census — while Faizabad, the administrative and commercial centre seven kilometres away, is several times larger; the two are administered by a single municipal corporation, and the joint urban area holds a few hundred thousand people. The district beyond is farmland, growing wheat, rice and sugar cane.

The economy runs on religion. Pilgrim numbers rose enormously after the temple was consecrated in 2024, and hotels, guest houses, shops, transport operators and guides have multiplied to meet them; construction of roads, a riverfront and new tourist facilities has been the other big employer. Faizabad supplies the offices, courts, colleges and markets, and many families still have members working in Lucknow, Delhi or the Gulf and sending money home.

The day begins before sunrise with bathers at the ghats and the first temple bells, and the lanes fill with pilgrim groups until the temples close in the middle of the day. They reopen in the late afternoon, and the evening ends with aarti at the river and lamps floated on the water. The rapid rebuilding is the main subject of local argument: land prices have jumped, shops and houses have been cleared for wider roads, and residents disagree about how much of the old town should give way to the new.

Ayodhya eats as pilgrim towns do: vegetarian, simple and sweet. The standard meal is a thali of dal, a seasonal vegetable, rice and chapatis, often cooked without onion or garlic in keeping with temple practice, and served in small dining rooms around the bazaar and at dharamshalas. Breakfast is puri with spiced potato curry, or kachori, a fried pastry stuffed with lentils, eaten with hot jalebi straight from the pan.

Sweets are made and eaten in quantity, because almost everything offered to the deity is a sweet and is returned to the worshipper as prasad. Besan laddu, peda and barfi, all made from gram flour or reduced milk, are stacked in shop windows near the temples; rabri, thickened sweetened milk, and malpua, a fried pancake in syrup, appear at festivals. Thick lassi is drunk from clay cups, and tea is sold at every corner.

Faizabad is where the district's Awadhi cooking survives. The Nawabi court left behind biryani, korma and slow-cooked meat dishes, and the kitchens of the old Chowk bazaar still make them, alongside kebabs and the rich breads of the region. Because the two towns sit in the same municipality but keep different habits, it is common for visitors to eat vegetarian in Ayodhya and cross to Faizabad for anything else.