Opinion What Kerala temple purification incident tells us about the state’s flawed progressive politics

Non-Hindus have always been barred from entering Hindu temples in Kerala — or have they? Syrian Christians, regarded in all respects as savarnas, were once an exception. They were prominent donors to temples and participants in festivals, and had “the right of access to all Hindu temple precincts”, Susan Bayly writes in a 1984 paper. Then, in the early 19th century, something changed. British attempts to mould the local Christians into a loyal client population hardened the lines between them and Hindus, pushed them to abandon many of their syncretic practices, and stirred up conflicts that led to their presence being regarded, for the first time, as polluting Hindu sacred spaces. Religious identity solidified, savarna solidarity took a back seat, and Syrian Christians were now excluded from Hindu temples. A hundred years later, something else changed when the hitherto excluded avarnas won the right of temple entry and eventually, even began to be appointed as priests. Thus, ritual purity negotiated with the forces of social change to reorient itself from the axis of savarna/avarna to that of Hindu/non-Hindu. This dynamism, an unacknowledged capacity for reinvention, may play a part in the resilience of ritual purity as a hegemonic force. Ahistoricity is the handmaiden of reinvention: What is so now, has been so since time immemorial, as far as society is concerned. Ritual purity has not been secularised or modernised away, but rather, has been expanding its ambit through creeping Sanskritisation; “impure” offerings of non-vegetarian food and toddy to the gods of the avarnas are being phased out. It is happening in the absence of a robust ideological movement to challenge it, the legacy of Kerala’s early-20th-century reform movement having faded away decades ago.

The latest example of that resilience is the ruckus over social media influencer Jasmin Jaffar, a Muslim woman, filming a reel of herself washing her feet in Guruvayur Temple’s pond. The incident is trivial; the reaction is telling. The temple board complained to the police over the violation of the temple’s sanctity and defiance of a High Court order prohibiting videography in the area. More pertinently, the authorities decided to hold a “cleansing” ritual. Ritual purity has updated itself for the Instagram age, and finds itself violated both by the fact that the temple premises are being exploited for reels, and by the fact that it’s a non-Hindu doing it. Last year, the presence of a priest’s powerbank in the sreekovil (sanctum sanctorum) also occasioned a purification. 

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The hegemony of ritual purity

This is not to say that many old shibboleths of ritual purity don’t survive, the lines of caste and gender being the most obvious. The appointment of non-Brahmin priests continues to be met with resistance, with the state’s first Dalit priest, one of six appointed in 2017, having faced a campaign by Brahmins to expel him. The Kerala High Court has also upheld the rule that only “Malayala Brahmins” can be head priests of Sabarimala Temple. A row over the appointment of Ezhava candidates selected through the Kerala Devaswom Recruitment Board to the post of a functionary at Koodalmanikyam Temple refuses to die down. Facing resistance, the first appointee resigned, while the appointment of the next person on the rank list — also an Ezhava — has been stayed by the High Court, all ostensibly due to the hereditary claims of an upper-caste family to the position, despite allegations that it was simply caste discrimination. There are many instances of temple arts performers from the oppressed castes facing discrimination and boycotts. Women, meanwhile, face their own purity tests. They are expected to avoid going to temples if they are menstruating, and the Sabarimala controversy was about being of “menstruating age”. And if you’ve eaten non-vegetarian food, you are expected to bathe before going to the temple. 

All these can be looked at through the separate lenses of caste, gender and Hindu/non-Hindu — or they can be seen holistically as manifestations of the overarching, hegemonic phenomenon of ritual purity. The hegemony, which was never dislodged as the underlying power structure of society, is such that the progressive politics of Kerala, under whichever party, is usually unable or unwilling to challenge it. When they do so sporadically, the backlash is overwhelming, as seen in the row over women’s entry to Sabarimala Temple. That case itself was a challenge to rules implemented by the state government — the Kerala Hindu Places of Public Worship (Authorisation of Entry) Rules, 1965 — while the requirement that Sabarimala’s head priests be “Malayala Brahmins” was stated in a recruitment notification by the Travancore Devaswom Board, which is overseen by the government, showing the state’s complicity in upholding the hegemony of ritual purity. Unless the state itself takes up the responsibility to confront the embedded Brahminical thought, the social architecture is unlikely to change.

rohan.manoj@expressindia.com