Faith and Fiction

“We felt strange and insecure in a society where religious animosity had reached unmanageable proportions.” Sushil Srivastava, a professor of medieval and modern history at Allahabad University, wrote these words in the preface to his 1990 book, The Disputed Mosque: A Historical Inquiry, an account of the nineteenth-century origins of the communal dispute that would culminate in the destruction by a Hindu mob of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, on 6 December 1992.

When I met Srivastava, shortly before his death earlier this year, he was living those words, feeling strange and insecure in a society governed by those forces of religious animosity. His professional career had been derailed in the years since he wrote the book, and he had been threatened with violence. His book itself, and the history it laid out, had largely disappeared from the public consciousness. He had been