Midway through a documentary ( Kettukazcha ) by the filmmaker and scholar, Madhu Eravankara, a deep truth emerges: “The most obscure history is the history of the obvious”. Few social relations are more commonplace in Kerala, or much of India, as a temple and its devotees. Fewer histories are more obscure than that relation, the evolution of ritual, and the source of its vitality. In his methodically documented film, Professor Eravankara traces the life cycle of a temple festival in Chettikulangara, deep inside southern Kerala. Early on, we see men and women, young and old, across castes, work under the fierce tropical sun to construct large sized wooden structures on wheels. There is a physicality to this worship of the goddess, where human bodies struggle and sweat, where there is no reward but the very labour of ritual itself.
It is hard not to be moved by this — ordinary craftsmen, traders and housewives in service of an ideal. For much of urban India, these rituals/ festivities are indistinguishable from chaos, exotica, and, ultimately, a form of mania. What is lost in this distancing is the recognition that these festivities and rituals are lived manifestations of answers to a question rarely asked: what is the ultimate aspiration that governs a Hindu’s world view? These rituals are the bedrock on which the edifice of Hinduism as a living practice stands.
The ultimate value
Asking similarly about the ultimate philosophical value of Western societies, we learn that their thought returns time and again to the question of the greatest social Good using Reason. Who is eligible to this Good has changed over time, but the preoccupation has remained consistent. From Plato’s Republic to John Rawl’s ‘veil of ignorance’, the question of maximal good has found frequent expressions. Over millennia, the resultant institutional manifestation of an answer to this question has taken various forms: from the cruel Spanish Inquisition to Hobbes’s Leviathan to social democracies, and so on.
In Jewish and Islamic societies, the answer to the question about the ultimate value leads us to their steady commitment to manufacture, sustain, and regulate group solidarity. The great Maghrebi historian of the medieval era, Ibn Khaldun, calls this asabbiyah. This solidarity is not for solidarity’s sake, but rather a preparatory groundwork for the arrival of what Biblical scholars call eschaton , the Muslims call qiyamat , or the end of time. Thus we find institutions in these societies making efforts to regulate identities through circumcision, prayer laws, marriage, even death. The goal is to demarcate clearly who is within and who is outside the sphere of commitment and affiliation.
When we ask what is the ultimate value of Indic religions, the answer has traditionally been ‘freedom’. A freedom from a cycle of birth and death. This freedom, according to Indic thought, is derived from our abilities to control not just the external world but also the worlds within. How does one achieve self-control? The answer to this question has been an elaborate set of rituals that demands behavioural and psychological modifications. At an institution such as the Sabarimala temple, these rituals include letting one’s beard grow, abstaining from sexual relationships, avoiding certain foods, adopting dress codes, and so on. The body is intended to be trained to be shorn of vanity, comfort, and pleasure; the body is to become a temple of restraint, a site where involuntary bodily functions are to be minimised, including erotic desire. At the pinnacle of this test for self-control is the deity of Ayyappa itself.
About Sabarimala
What is important to note is that temple rituals in Hinduism are highly localised, unlike liberal aspirations or Semitic religions that are universal. It is this structure of discrete belief production — an archipelago of distinct rituals bound by a common sea of soteriological doctrines — that makes the architecture of Hinduism complex. This understandably poses difficulties for the state, which prefers a more homogenous tradition that it can uniformly regulate, as well as for progressive liberals, who must make space for nuances when their instinct is for universalisable norms. It is little surprise, therefore, that the Supreme Court’s failure of imagination, facile equivalences, and a lack of empathy towards the sentiments of ordinary religious Hindus has incited the extraordinary protests at Sabarimala, including violent ones this week. What the Sabarimala struggles reveal is that in absence of explicit harm to any group of persons, the wisest course of action in matters of religion is to let communities of believers evolve norms on their own. We’ve seen this time and again in Hindu society. Reactionary backlash is least when reform comes from within.
