The Golden Chisel: The Story Behind the Making of Ram Lalla

In temple towns, devotees bow before sacred idols, admiring their beauty yet rarely wondering about the hands that shaped them. This book turns to the man behind one such image: the sculptor of the mesmerizing Ram Lalla idol at Ayodhya’s Ram Janmabhoomi Temple.

While the long history of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement has been widely told, the story of the smiling black idol of five-year-old Lord Ram, consecrated on 22 January 2024, has remained in the background. Through months of intimate conversations, master sculptor Arun Yogiraj recounts the nine demanding months of creation, marked by doubt, discipline, faith and moments he describes as divine.

The book also revisits some of his earlier works, including the Adi Shankaracharya statue at Kedarnath and the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose statue at India Gate, tracing the journey of an artist entrusted with shaping the icons of a nation.

This is the story of devotion carved in stone, and of the quiet, exacting life of the man chosen to give form to Ram Lalla.

Seethalakshmi S. is an award-winning journalist and the former metro editor of The Times of India, Bengaluru. An alumnus of the US Government’s premier International Visitor Leadership Program, she now co-heads an independent think tank, Antardhwani. She has also received a European Union scholarship for a malnutrition project. Her prominent accolades include the Namma Bengaluru Award for excellence in journalism, the best young journalist award by Zee Group and the Editor of the Year Award 2017. She co-authored the first-ever lead article of The Journal of the Indian Institute of Science (October 2020 issue). She has advised and helped IIIT Bangalore with innovative outreach initiatives. She is one of the contributing authors of Perils in Practice: The Prevention of Violence Against Healthcare Professionals and Dr Mathai’s ABC To Health. She featured among the 15 prominent women personalities from across India in the initiative ‘A Gem of a Woman’ by CKC Group in 2022. Rahul Nandan is an independent journalist and former deputy news editor of The Times of India, Delhi and Bengaluru. He has held various editorial positions in some of the country’s leading news publications including The Times of India, The Indian Express and The Statesman. He is the co-head of a Bengaluru-based non-partisan think tank, Antardhwani. He attended the Global Smart City Conference in Singapore in 2015. Selected by the US Department of State for the prestigious Foreign Press Reporting Tour on ‘Emerging Women Entrepreneurs in America’ as a prelude to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2017 held in India, he studied and reported on the thriving immigrant women ecosystem in America. He continues to write across a wide range of areas. As a former senior consultant, he advised and helped IIIT Bangalore with innovative outreach initiatives. He is the co-author of the first-ever lead article of The Journal of the Indian Institute of Science (October 2020 issue) on digital health and one of the contributing authors of Dr Mathai’s ABC To Health.