Non-Brahmin priests in TN waiting for their prayers to be heard

G Balaguru, a Dalit priest, has spent most of his adult life waiting for a job. It’s been 14 years since the 39-year-old underwent a formal training to become a temple priest, a vocation earlier reserved for Brahmins only.

Balaguru was among the first batch of 207 archakas (priests) trained at the state-run centres across Tamil Nadu. In 2007, he enrolled into the training centre in Chennai – one of the six such centres opened by the then chief minister M Karunanidhi to welcome members of all castes to be trained as priests. The main aim behind the move was to end Brahmin hegemony in temples and ensure social justice.

However, Balaguru still doesn’t have any stable means of income. Despite years of wait, there is no change in his social status as well which his training was supposed to bring for him.

“I finished the training in 2008. I am 39 now and have spent years waiting for a job at a government-maintained temple to dedicate myself to God. But the truth is that today I am struggling to make ends meet. All I have been able to achieve is find some work in small private temples where it is impossible to make a decent living,” Balaguru tells The Federal.

Although appointing archakas of all castes has been the pet project of the two major Dravidian parties — Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) — in Tamil Nadu, the project has failed to make any substantial change on the ground. For every step the project has taken forward, it has been pushed two steps back. A Madras High Court order passed this August has made their appointment even more difficult.

Making priesthood all-inclusive

It was social activist and politician EV Ramasamy, popularly known as Periyar, who first talked about the inclusion of non-Brahmin priests as part of the self-respect movement way back in the 1930s. Periyar had called the caste-based discrimination in Hindu temples a thorn in his heart and wanted people of all castes to access the sanctum sanctorum of Hindu temples. Following the demands for priesthood in Hindu temples to be opened up to all castes, the then chief minister M Karunanidhi in 1970 amended the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious Endowments Act to abolish the concept of hereditary appointments of priests in temples and enacted a law to appoint temple priests from all castes. However, the new law was challenged in the Supreme Court, which in 1972 delivered a verdict against its implementation.

The court ruled that priests should be appointed according to the respective norms of a temple while also upholding the Tamil Nadu government’s amendments as valid and “essentially secular”.

In 2006, when the DMK came back to power, Karunanidhi tried to reintroduce the law. This time the DMK administration passed a special government order that declared any person with the “requisite qualification and training” eligible for the post of archaka in one of the 44,713 temples under the state’s department of Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment (HR & CE).

Under the plan, an 18-month course was introduced in 2007, which would train interested candidates of all castes in priesthood. Of the 240 people who enrolled, 207 graduated from the course in 2008.

However, none of them could land a job because the All India Adi Saiva Sivacharyargal Seva Sangam filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the archaka training schools. Eight years after the schools were set up, a Supreme Court verdict allowed the course. In its 2015 order, the top court asked the Tamil Nadu government to make appointments based on agamas – treatises/norms that govern temple worship (To know more about agamas, read this detailed report by The Federal.)

Following the order, while the archaka training schools stayed inoperational, students who graduated in 2008 found their life stuck in a limbo.

First appointment

The first ray of hope, meanwhile, came in 2018, when the then AIADMK government managed to appoint T Marichamy as the state’s first non-Brahmin priest at a temple in Madurai managed by the HR & CE department.

Marichamy, who was trained in 2007-08 at the archaka centre, says he applied after coming across an advertisement in newspapers and managed to clear the interview.

“Nobody pursued the case. After the 2015 judgment, I applied to various temples managed by the HR & CE department. However, they kept rejecting me for reasons not known to me. Finally, I got through in 2018. Although it was a small temple, I am happy that I finally got a job at a temple maintained by the HR & CE department,” Marichamy tells The Federal.

Like Marichamy, P Thiyagarajan, another non-Brahmin priest who trained in 2007-08, was lucky enough to get into a temple managed by the HR & CE department in Madurai in 2020.

According to Thiyagarajan there were several openings and interview calls for the position of priests in various temples. But he was rejected everywhere. Even now, he believes, he has been selected only because it is a small temple that is affiliated to a bigger one.

“I am happy that I got a job and am able to eke out a living. But my colleagues who underwent the training are still struggling to make ends meet,” he says.

In 2021, after the DMK came to power, it fulfilled its poll promise by appointing as many as 24 priests of all castes, including five from the Scheduled Castes, six from the Most Backward Classes and 12 from the Backward Classes and one from the General Category. In August this year, the MK Stalin-led government went ahead and inaugurated six archaka training centres in a bid to revive the centres after a gap of 14 long years.

I am happy that I got a job and am able to eke out a living. But my colleagues who underwent the training are still struggling to make ends meet – P Thiyagarajan

The achievement and the jubilation it caused lasted only temporarily. Even though the government managed to appoint them, five priests who were appointed by the DMK resigned soon after citing discrimination by their Brahmin colleagues.

“People accepted us. But the fellow Brahmin priests never allowed me to touch the idol or perform the temple rituals. The discrimination was so evident that I couldn’t tolerate. After fighting against all odds to reach this place and get a job and still being denied entry into the sanctum sanctorum was not something I could accept. So, I resigned,” says a non-Brahmin archaka who wishes to remain anonymous.

All five non-Brahmin priests who were forced to quit say they were allocated temple work that did not involve the rituals or getting near the sanctum sanctorum.

When the news reached officials of the HR & CE department, four of them were reinstated but one of the priests refused to return to work, saying “the humiliation was too much to take”.

While only 26 of the 207 trained non-Brahmin priests have got jobs at temples across the state so far, including the two who were instated as priests in 2018, 40 of them have crossed the age limit of 35, which made them ineligible for entering state government services. Keeping that in mind, the state government has now passed an order relaxing the age limit for the priests to 40 years.

For those like Balaguru, the clock is ticking. And age is not the only concern.

A new challenge arose recently after the Madras High Court ruled that the appointment of priests of all castes could be done only at the non-agama temples as the agama temples have their own set of traditions, customs and norms to appoint priests.

“This is a new roadblock standing in the way of appointing priests from all communities to Tamil Nadu temples. Already, non-Brahmin priests are not being appointed in any big temples and this is a huge blow to the trained non-Brahmin archakas,” says V Ranganathan, state coordinator of Tamil Nadu Archakas’ Association.

He also called it a tactic to delay the appointment of archakas in Tamil Nadu temples. “The state has waged a long legal battle in appointing priests of all castes. The AK Rajan committee report clearly states what agama and non-agama temples mean. Now, a new confusion is being manufactured,” Ranganathan adds.

Another non-brahmin priest, waiting for a job, says the Madras High Court order of August 2022 has again put their lives at risk as it would take a long while to get past the legal tangle.

“We are somehow surviving with the meagre amount we get through pujas (rituals) conducted in small temples and at people’s houses. We were all hopeful that we would soon get posted as the government was also reacting positively to our appointment to temples. Now, we are sceptical. It’s too late to change our profession also,” says a 38-year-old non-Brahmin priest from Trichy district in Tamil Nadu, on condition of anonymity.

Justice (retd) Hariparanthaman, a former judge of the Madras High Court, however, thinks there is a way out of the impasse.

We were all hopeful that we would soon get posted as the government was also reacting positively to our appointment to temples. Now, we are sceptical. It’s too late to change our profession also
– 38-year-old Non-Brahmin Priest

“If the Madras High Court order is challenged, it would take a long legal battle and we would not know when to expect the final verdict. Instead of waiting for the courts, the state government can bring in an Act based on which the appointments could happen,” he says.

The state government, he adds, has already formed a high-level committee [headed by retired Justice AK Rajan] to clear the confusion over agama and non-agama temples and that report is good enough to make decisions on the appointment of priests. The Justice AK Rajan panel was constituted in 2006 by the Karunanidhi government to make suggestions on the issues of age, minimum qualification for receiving government’s archaka training besides submitting reports about the temple traditions followed in the state. The committee had submitted its complete report in 2008.

When asked about it, Justice AK Rajan tells The Federal that most of the temples in the state don’t have any agama norms.

“Even the ones that claim to have agama rules and follow it, do not know where it came from. So, in most places, there is no material evidence to substantiate anything. Still, the report has the details of all the temples, including the ones that follow agama and the ones that don’t,” he says.

Meanwhile, priests like G Balaguru have pinned all their hopes for ‘justice’ on one authority. “Who else but God.”