Sabarimala’s restriction on women is more
elastic than its postures let on, so why was the media in a froth, asks
Paul Zacharia
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Paul
Zacharia |
First the basics.
The Sabarimala temple belongs to the Travancore Devaswom Board and is
its biggest money-spinner. The money, of course, goes to the Government
of Kerala to pay babuji salaries and whatnot. A place of worship is
free to impose what restrictions it may feel fit on its visitors. In
Sabarimala’s case, one of the rules is that females in their menstrual
life-phase shall not climb the holy hill or visit the Lord.
It was a kind of
loose, unwritten rule, half-followed and half-broken till 1989, when
a cinema team shot a dance sequence right on the holy ‘18-steps’
of the Lord’s abode. Trust film-wallahs to overdo a thing. There
was a hue and cry and the high court of Kerala ruled that the age of
women pilgrims to the hill be between 10 and 50. That’s biology
for you, loosely.
But it is also
a fact that the owners of a place of worship are free to waive conditions
at their discretion. Therefore, the common sense notion about Sabarimala
is that from time to time the women-folk of various kinds of Kerala
vips who wished to take a look at Lord Ayyappan have done so umpteen
times. Irrespective of biology. After all, it is a government temple,
and the government is, after all, Us. Understandable.
What Kannada actress
Jayamala is accused of is the sin of disobeying the owner’s condition
of entry. What she says is that the owners at the time waived the condition
for her. She also should have said: Just as they have done for many
others. Jayamala was at the temple in 1987. Mind you, two years later
in 1989, a horde of extra-girls were dancing on the holy steps —
of course, at the owner’s discretion. That led to the court order
and the posting of police-women at Pampa, the entry-point. It’s
doubtful if police-women are great biologists, either. If you can judge
body-chemistry by sight, that’s it.
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Sabarimala’s
code for women was a loose, unwritten rule, half-followed and
half-broken till 1989, when a cinema team shot a dance sequence
right on the holy ‘18-steps’ of the Lord’s abode.
Trust film-wallahs to overdo a thing |
Non-mythological
history points to Lord Ayyappan’s hill abode having been either
a tribal place of pilgrimage or a Buddhist one. As is the case with
hundreds of temples in Kerala, newly arrived Hindu gods and their mythologies
took them over more than a thousand years ago. Ayyappan himself seems
to have entered Kerala’s Hindu mainstream about 600 years back,
and fabulist mythologies mushroomed around him as his deep-jungle dwelling
became a magnetic destination. It was a mixture of bhakti, danger and
adventure that drew people there. The trek to Sabarimala was so deadly
that many pilgrims even went through token last rites before setting
out. There was no guarantee you would return.
This was one of
the reasons why women kept away from or were kept out of the pilgrimage.
The other reason was perhaps more biological and stronger. Men went
through a 41-day period of abstinence before the trek and it included
strict brahmacharya. It was only natural that wise counsel prevailed
in the matter of sending up lots of women into the jungle in the company
of impatient brahmacharis. It would have been nothing but asking for
trouble.
As years passed,
it was concluded that Ayyappan, the bachelor, did not like sexually
active women. The hang-over of an Ayyappan mythology with a strongly
negative female role — that Ayyappan was a motherless foundling,
that his step-mother ill-treated him, and that he renounced his girl-friend
— also might have had something to do with the anti-women taboo.
Menstruation is, after all, not such a dread sin for everyone in Kerala.
There is even a temple where the devi’s ‘menstrual blood’
is revered.
Given the topography
of the sanctum sanctorum at Sabarimala, it is indeed doubtful if Jayamala
really touched the idol. Chances are that she didn’t and, although
true to her conscience, is hallucinating somewhat. It also seems probable
that the astrologer who conducted the devaprasnam — the astrological
reading of the Lord’s and the temple’s present situation
— knew about Jayamala and all the other women-pilgrims and made
it an item in his prediction-list, which led to Jayamala’s confession
and all the present media-mela.
The fact is that
Sabarimala is Kerala’s most coveted money-centre in the spiritual
realm and there are hundreds of interests at work there, all at cross-purposes
but with a single target: Sink your hand up to the arm-pit into the
honey-pot of Sabarimala’s moola. I will not be surprised if it’s
true that the devaprasnam itself was tutored.
The long list of
ills pointed out by the astrologer, who became famous as Jayalalithaa’s
personal advisor, contains spiritual and material irregularities so
grave that Jayamala’s touching of the Lord becomes piffle. But
the media decided to celebrate Jayamala because, of course, it was so
much more saleable. The Hindu mainstream in Kerala hardly reacted to
the ‘sin’ factor, but they certainly relished the filmy
goings-on and the way the big-wigs of the temple administration lost
face. The newspapers and the channels went into a frenzy of outraged
faith and ‘defiled’ divinity that could have put Sadhvi
Ritambhara to shame. I saw a young Kerala reporter of a New Delhi channel
— cnn-ibn, I think — literally frothing over how Jayamala
had destroyed Ayyappan and all sanathan Hindu values. For the ordinary
Malayali and Hindu, the whole controversy is just one more of those
things that press, priest and politician are capable of putting up for
sale.
And they are lapping
it up.
The saddest part
of the story, however, has to do with the famous feminists of Kerala.
Not a day has passed recently without the media, directly and indirectly,
pouring calumny on women, denigrating them and, so to say, raping their
spiritual dignity in the name of Jayamala and Ayyappan. But, believe
me, the silence from the all-powerful feminist ranks is so ear-splitting
that one doesn’t know where to look. Feminists like ex-Naxalite
Ajitha seem to recognise only adultery as anti-women, even though it
takes two to accomplish that sin.
Ayyappan is sure
to be happy for the Jayamala-type interludes. He must be horribly bored
by the never-ending flow of that black-robed, bearded, grim and glum
crowd of male brahmacharis in a hurry to get back to their routine after
dumping their sins on him.
