The current situation at Kerala’s Sabarimala templehas its genesis in the application made by S. Mahendran against the apparent violation of the traditional ban upon seeing the picture of former Devaswom Commissioner Chandrika conducting a rice-feeding ceremony of her granddaughter in the presence of her daughter at the Sabarimala temple in 1990. He filed the public interest litigation (PIL) before the Kerala High Court which upheld the ban in 1991. This formalisation was challenged in 2018 by the Indian Young Lawyers Association before the Supreme Court which delivered its judgement in favour of the petitioners declaring the restriction on women as invalid on 28 September 2018.
The judgement of the Supreme Court led to a movement which vigorously opposed the judgement. It must be kept in mind that the Supreme Court treated the case as one of gender discrimination and thus saw itself as striking a blow for emancipatory modernity against discriminatory tradition. The elite discourse in India is overwhelmingly in favour of modernity and Kerala is considered one of the most progressive states in India. This agitation must be considered extraordinary in view of the fact that the state of Kerala, by several indices, such as literacy (94%), life-expectancy (74.9 years, and the highest), rate of infant mortality (5.59 per 1,000 live births) and so on, is considered one of the most progressive states in India. It is also, perhaps, India’s most religiously diverse state with the following religious demographic: Hinduism 55%, Islam 26% and Christianity 18% (Census 2011). Furthermore, the ratio of unmarried women to the population is also the highest in India while the per capita income is sixty percent higher than the national average. In other words, Kerala is among the most literate, prosperous, progressive, and modern states of India. Its daily paper Malayali Manoroma, published in the language of the region, Malayalam, almost matches the nationwide circulation of The Times of India, India’s most widely read English daily (Trak.in, 2014). One would therefore expect that the decision of the Supreme Court would be welcomed by such a state.
The response from Kerala, however, was counterintuitive and took the form of state-wide protests against the decision of the Supreme Court. Women particularly were active participants in this agitation and many of them joined it in large numbers with the slogan ‘Ready to Wait,’ the obvious implication being that they were ready to wait till they were past the reproductive age to embark on a pilgrimage to Sabarimala (Ranipeta, 2018).
Right after the Supreme Court decision of September 28, 2018 a voice of protest was raised by a Hindu outfit on October 15, 2018 when the Shiv Sena threatened to stage mass suicide, a threat which was not followed up (IANS, 2018). Protests intensified with the formal opening of the temple when some women within the reproductive age bracket tried to enter the shrine in conformity with the decision of the Supreme Court but were forced to return from the halfway point. A New York Times female journalist was also forced to return as well despite heavy police protection. A women’s rights activist, Rehana Fathima, managed to go up to the Valiya Nadappandhal but was forced to return owing to violent protests. Emotions ran so high that even a woman past her reproductive age was forced to return (Deepika, 2019). The next noteworthy incident took place on December 17, 2018 when four transgender women were allowed to enter the temple after being initially blocked. No biologically-born woman had been able so far to uphold the verdict of the Supreme Court. That happened on January 2, 2019 when two women Bindu and Kanaka Durga ‘made history’ by setting foot inside the sanctum santorium of the Sabarimala temple. They were escorted under heavy police protection, which included a posse of one hundred policemen under the direct supervision of Malappuram Deputy Superintendent of Police, Jaleel Thottathil (Deepika, 2019). This outcome, however, was secured through a ruse, after these two women had been passed off as transgenders to get them past the agitators (BBC News, 2019).
The state government of Kerala then tried to counter this agitation by organising a Women’s Wall as to express solidarity with the Supreme Court judgement. It consisted in forming a ‘620 km human chain’ stretching from the Kasaragod to Thiruvanthapuram in favour of the removal of the ban (BBC News, 2019). The agitators, against the Supreme Court judgement, responded by organizing their own version of the wall as a counter-protest. In anticipation of the left-wing coalition government’s Wall scheduled for January 1, 2019, the Sabarimala Karma Samithi, backed by the BJP, organised the Ayyappa Jyothi—their own human chain with lamps from Kasaragod to Kanyakumari on 26 December 2018—in protest against the decision of the Supreme Court (TNM Staff, 2018).
As protests mounted, a number of petitions were made to the Supreme Court to review its decision on Sabarimala which it had thrown open to women of all ages. On February 6, 2019 it relented to review its judgment in the matter at a future time, but without suspending the operation of its existing decision. These petitions urging reconsideration of the judgement were opposed by the Kerala’s Left Democratic Front government. Another interesting development around this time is represented by the decision of the Travancore Devaswom Board to inform the Supreme Court that they no longer opposed the original decision. It should be noted that the Devaswom Board is not a totally autonomous body and includes appointees on it by the government (Mathur, 2019).
The Sabarimala Temple then opened from February 12-17, 2019 for the five-day monthly poojas for the Malayalam month of Kumbhom under heavy security. Thereafter, the Sabarimala issue gradually receded into the background as campaigning for the national elections, scheduled for April 11 to May 23, 2019, intensified. The attitude of the BJP, which went on to prevail electorally, is worth noting in the context. According to some observers, the BJP was a bit ambivalent on the issue. On the one hand, the Hindu configuration of the case had an obvious appeal for the BJP at the regional level. However, the BJP seemed to have held back for fear of being portrayed as opposed to women’s rights at the national level if it backed the agitation too enthusiastically. Now that the elections are over, and that the new parliament is in place, the issue shows signs of surfacing again. One of the earliest items for consideration before Parliament is a private member’s bill tabled by Premachandran on 14 June 2019 urging the government to undo the decision of the Supreme Court through legislation (Chatterjee, 2019). The election results in Kerala did not see a breakthrough of the kind the BJP expected, and which it did achieve in West Bengal where it is perceived to have made remarkable gains. Interestingly, the electoral beneficiary of the agitation turned out to be the Congress. The incumbent government, however, suffered badly in the elections and the new Kerala government has toned down its stance on the Sabarimala issues following the election.
CONCLUSION: THE BAN, THE RESTRICTION AND HINDUISM
The ongoing controversy surrounding Sabarimala is of great potential significance for Hinduism. It involves several historical, legal, social, political and other dimensions.
The rest of this paper will examine only one issue, namely, whether the exclusion of women of reproductive age at Sabarimala involves gender-discrimination. In other words, does the restriction placed on women of reproductive age from participating in the Sabarimala pilgrimage violate the principle of gender equality? In order to answer this question, we will need to have a clearer understanding of the equality principle, or egalitarianism. It is important to distinguish among three forms of egalitarianism: monothetic egalitarianism, polythetic egalitarianism, and synthetic egalitarianism.
As these descriptions are perhaps being introduced for the first time in this discourse, it might be useful to say a few words by way of explanation.
Let us take the hypothetical case of a father who has a son and a daughter of approximately the same ages and decides to make a settlement of his property. If he divides his one house equally between his son and his daughter, then it would be a case of monothetic egalitarianism. Let us now suppose that he has two houses, more or less similarly equipped and in the same locality. He now divides these houses between his son and his daughter assigning one to each of them. This is a case of polythetic equality. The point to note here is that if he had decided to divide both his houses down the middle to his son and his daughter, then this would have been a case of monothetic egalitarianism. If he now gives one house to his son and another to the daughter while also allowing free access to both houses to each of them on special occasions, then it would be a case of synthetic egalitarianism.
It might be helpful to clarify the distinction between the three forms of egalitarianism further, as they are crucial to the argument of the paper, this time with the cruder example of bathrooms. If men and women have equal access to a unisex bathroom, then it would be a case of monothetic egalitarianism. If, however, men and women both have separate bathrooms assigned to them, equipped with similar facilities, then it would be a case of polythetic egalitarianism. Finally, if men and women have separate bathrooms with the understanding that each could use the bathroom of the other in a crisis, then that would be a case of synthetic egalitarianism.
How do these distinctions help us understand the Sabarimala impasse on the issue of gender equality?
Those who insist that both men and women should have equal access to the Sabarimala shrine are advocating monothetic egalitarianism. Those who insist that there is no need to do so are arguing that just as the Sabarimala shrine of Ayyappan is open only to men, there are also other shrines of Ayyappan which are open only to women are arguing for polythetic egalitarianism. The main point to keep in mind here is that both these forms of egalitarianism are non-discriminating. It is, therefore, possible to argue that the real issue of Sabarimala is not equality versus inequality, it is really a case of monothetic equality versus polythetic equality.
It does not take one long to see how the complexion of the case under discussion is altered by the introduction of these distinctions. Here are some of the issues which arise if the concept of polythetic egalitarianism is taken on board along with that of monothetic egalitarianism. Consider for example the question of tradition and modernity. Sometimes the Sabarimala issue is considered as one of clash between tradition and modernity. But, by now, modernity itself has become a tradition with its own agenda of monothetic equality, while tradition seems to finetune the concept of equality in a way which might help modernity deal with the issue with greater sophistication. It is also ironical that perhaps the most modern state of India, in terms of education, infant mortality rates and female empowerment, namely Kerala, witnessed such a vigorous defence of the Hindu tradition and that too, by women, against a law which was supposedly intended to liberate them. The West seems to intellectually acknowledge, only a notion of monothetic equality, while Indian ethics contains conceptions of both monothetic and polythetic equality. Does gender equality, in other words, mean that only unisex bathrooms are non-discriminatory? Feminism also becomes involved in this issue. Is feminism too white and Western for India? Would ‘womanism’ answer India’s needs better? Or does India need a feminism of its own?
This is the second and concluding part of the article, ‘Women and the case of Sabarimala pilgrimage’ (27 February).
The writer is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at the McGill University in Montréal, Canada. He is also associated with the Nalanda University in India. The views expressed are personal.