Supreme Court has upheld gender equality by questioning the ban on women of a certain age entering the Sabarimala temple
Devotion and faith have no gender and the seeker has the divine right to seek solace in a shrine without fear. In questioning the ban on women of a certain age entering the Sabarimala temple, the Supreme Court has pointed to both the fundamental rights of a citizen as well as our civilisational pride. One where Prakriti and Purush, the polarities and equal manifestations of creation, are equal and are meant to be treated so. The servitors of the Sabarimala temple trust had reduced the life-giving potential of the woman as a vice rather than virtue, the ban on 10 to 50-year-olds implying that menstruation was ‘unclean’ and desecrating rather than joyous and renewing. This at a time when menstrual health has been prioritised for the first time as part of a national health policy by the Centre and is breaking societal taboos. The Court also aptly observed that a temple, by its very nature, is all-embracing and cannot be treated like a private trust, a very crucial observation considering that many servitors and patrons shrines, not just of dharmic faiths but also religions in the Abrahamic sense, have kept rules that are toxically self-serving and monopolising, intended to keep devotees in awe. Most importantly, the Court could serve to iterate the worth of Hinduism as a dynamic religion that sustains through time and reminds us of a 5,000 year-old living tradition and philosophy that has always given women the right of way. Its pantheon has always prided the sacredness of both the masculine and feminine as essential attributes of spiritual enlightenment as evidenced by the presence of Radha-Krishna, Sita-Rama, Parvathi-Shiva and lakshmi-Narayana, where the sacred feminine is prefixed to the muscularity of the male divinity. The early Vedic texts are replete with references to women scholars, sages and priests. The corporatisation of priestly and temple duties came much much later as societies coagulated around male domination, in no small part aided by invaders and their impositions. Even today women priests, who have emerged out of familial roles, are conducting some rituals and rites. Pune is the hub with some women priest training centres. No intermediary can, therefore, reinterpret what has been encoded in a nation’s, nay a civilisation’s DNA and there simply can be no trust-deficit when it comes to women participating in temple duties.
Having said that, is it not time that our civilisational strengths are played up more than everIJ Shouldn’t the courts extend equal rights of prayer to Muslim women who are kept out of a public place of worship and gatheringsIJ Secluded at public shrines and kept behind screens or worse, confined to the privacy of their homes, these women are likely to feel more humiliated than elevated about their physical reality. The medieval idea of women as pollutants and distracting celibate keepers of faith is disfranchising to say the least. Our courts have by and large been reluctant to interfere in religion, particularly over Muslim rights issues, amid fears of a backlash and propaganda that majoritarianism was targeting minorityism. But in the end, a secular state of an Indic tradition has to enforce constitutional values of gender equality over faith affiliations.