Sabarimala Temple: How millions of women joined hands for gender equality

By the time we get to aachaaram proper, however, we have arrived at something rather more than discrete observance or simple obligation: we encounter instead a ‘massive, inter-connected, all-pervading web of practices, rituals, and ideas’. Aachaaram is what produces small restrictions, like the conservative dress codes obtaining at many Keralite temples, and aachaaram is what produces great cruelties, like (to take just one intentionally upper caste example) the peremptory shunning of Nambudiri women who are suspected of so much as appearing within eyeshot of an unrelated man. Aachaaram is rightness, cleanliness, purity, and circumspectness; things that are perpetually under siege and worth unapologetically protecting.

The network of women

In the years leading up to the Indian Young Lawyers Association (IYLA), aachaaram had produced a great swelling of energy and enthusiasm among Keralite Hindu — especially upper caste Hindu —women, for whom the foundational assumptions of the PIL case constituted both misunderstanding and conceit. Shilpa Nair, a Dubai-based entrepreneur, founded People for Dharma in response to media coverage of the Sabarimala hearings; her organization—‘sup[1]porting and defending Indian traditions and value systems’—would go on to become a prominent anti-entry voice during the hearings themselves as well as during the review petition process that followed IYLA’s 2018 release.

Anjali George, a self-declared ‘Internet Hindu’ based in Germany and a member of Shaktitva, a group whose name may not-unreasonably be translated as ‘goddess-ness’, led the #ReadyToWait campaign during the Sabarimala social media wars of 2015–16. Both women appear, via the movements and organizations they led, in later portions of this book. They and their colleagues spoke in the established vernacular of female Hindu activists across India, demarcating religion as explicitly apolitical and themselves as its avenging, nurturing, technologically adept, and already-liberated mothers. After the Supreme Court issued its opinion in September 2018, the considerable network that these women had established hustled to rhetorically and visually articulate a critical response that was characterized by a respect for aachaaram.

Supporters and critics alike had nearly three weeks in which to muster their initial reactions to IYLA because Sabarimala, which adds to its many idiosyncrasies by only opening during select periods of the year, was not accepting any visitors (of any gender) on the date, 28 September, when the opinion was released. Because that date was neither the Keralite New Year (which falls in mid-April), nor part of the annual pilgrimage season (November-January), and because it did not fall within the first five days of a Malayalam calendar month and was not linked to any of the small festivals observed at Sabarimala, the temple was closed and would remain so until 17 October.

When the trouble truly began

Even after Sabarimala reopened in October, however, and for a little over three months thereafter, reactions to the Supreme Court decision would remain merely contentious. There were marches, to be sure, as well as blockades, editorials, and vituperative tweets. But in a state that is habituated to collective displays of traffic-stopping indignance as a result of union strikes, student strikes, and political party strikes, among other things, the early demonstrations prompted by IYLA v. State of Kerala were a very mild and familiar annoyance for a slightly less familiar cause.

In the next phase, between 17 October and 31 December 2018, over twenty women tried, with varying degrees of failure, to visit Sabarimala. The avarna activist and schoolteacher Bindu Thankam Kalyani, who made the attempt on 22 October, was forced to turn back, then forced to vacate her residence, and finally forcibly transferred to another school after supporters of the ban harassed her landlord and her employer.9 The Chennai-based progressive women’s collective Manithi sent eleven of its members as part of a 23 December attempt; those women spent ten hours at a base camp on the way to Sabarimala’s hilltop location before being chased back down towards the valley by scores of male devotees.

Kavitha Jakkala, a reporter from Hyderabad, and Rehana Fathima, a former telecommunications technician, were similarly rebuffed, and Fathima — who is the only Muslim woman I know of to have tried visiting Sabarimala during this period, besides being something of an agent provocateur — was fired by her employer and, seemingly, by her faith. Yet another visit, from the media-savvy community organizer Trupti Desai, received national attention. Nevertheless Desai, too, returned home after making an extended sojourn in Kochi International Airport that generated, in mid-November, an exciting day’s work for scores of television reporters but little else. Thanks to this steady stream of female volunteers, as well as a veritable ocean of frequent female protestors, the Sabarimala dispute continued strong through the closing months of 2018. Nevertheless, it was not until New Year’s Day, 2019, that the trouble well and truly began.

On 1 January 2019, my part of the globe woke up to the knowledge that several million women in another part of the globe had joined hands, quite literally, in support of gender equality. The vanitha mathil (‘women’s wall’) ran for some 600 kilometres alongside Kerala’s western coast, following the bustling National Highway 66 that connects Kanyakumari on the subcontinent’s southern end with the outskirts of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. After the manner of all things Keralite, the wall was simultaneously an expression of highly centralized state authority — it was organized by the Department for Women and Child Development — and also the product of grassroots efforts by local groups, over 150 of whom cooperated with the government to bring the wall into being.

Excerpted from The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India by Deepa Das Acevedo, with permission from Oxford University Press.