Ayodhya of the South?: The Logics, Logistics, and Poetics of Unsharing a Sacred Site

Over the last three decades, a shrine in the coffee growing mountains of Karnataka has steadily shifted from being celebrated as shared by Muslims and Hindus and managed by a Muslim caretaker to a place widely known as the “Ayodhya of the South.” I first heard this moniker in the early 2000s at a time when the actual Ayodhya case remained in uneasy stasis following the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid and long before the January 2024 opening of the Ram Temple on the masjid’s site. Though seemingly an unlikely candidate for a similar mass mobilization (limited accessibility, poor infrastructure, remote location), the campaign to ‘liberate’ the Baba Budan Shah Dargah from any Islamic history and purify it for exclusive Hindu usage as a Dattatreya Peetha has proceeded through multiple strategies: political, judicial, and devotional. Today the fate of the site remains ambiguous as some tactics gain traction and others become less salient. By examining the ebbs and flows of the spiritual, legal, and partisan approaches to laying claim to this site, we see how the more capacious and variable frames of the past are increasingly foreclosed by the stratagems of the present. The situation is exacerbated by degradation due to protest actions, architectural instability, and environmental conditions. Where some constituents see the situation as the unfolding will of the divine forces at play, others clearly regard it as a human responsibility to actualize that will. Both perspectives require disciplined practice grounded in conceptions of divine and worldly sovereignty that are rarely captured in the political and juridical discourses that determine this worldly territorial ownership. This paper will elucidate the tensions and contradictions between the arenas of authority mobilized in the struggle to claim exclusivity at a once-shared sacred site.