In anticipation of Deepa Das Acevedo’s forthcoming book, The Battle for Sabarimala, Ala spoke to Deepa about the nuances of the case, and the meeting of the old and the new in this heavily mediatised legal battle for women’s entry into a temple.
Deepa Das Acevedo
1) With the 2020 Supreme Court verdict, the Sabarimala case has come to the limelight yet
again. Could you talk a little bit about your journey with this case? When did you start this
work? What interested you in this work?
My point of entry into the Sabarimala dispute was actually ‘temple management’—not women’s
entry or even gender issues writ large! I’ve always been fascinated by temples as sites of socio-
political power, economic exchange, and cultural negotiation and have visited dozens all over India,
and especially in the South. As a college student, I became interested in the connection between
temple administration and secular governance, and I chose Sabarimala and Kerala (where my family
is originally from) for largely practical reasons: they provided fertile grounds for the research I
wanted to do in an environment I thought I could work in. As I progressed in my degree and my
career, though, the women’s entry dispute became the single most prominent aspect of my
research, and so a majority of my writing has focused on it as opposed to other aspects of temple
administration that I studied during my doctorate. (That’s not a complaint: it has been incredibly
fun—and more than a little nerve-wracking—to study something that is developing in real-time,
which is a thing that lawyers do often but anthropologists do rarely.)
2) How do you look at the question of Constitutional rights in this debate? What age-old
tropes of socio-legal conflict do this case rehearse, and what do we learn from this case
in particular?
I think we can take two broad lessons from the Sabarimala dispute: everything old is new again, and
there are genuinely conflicting impulses in the Indian Constitution. There’s a lot to unpack in each of
these so I’ll list a few thoughts in short form.
On the first point, let’s begin by noting two things. First, notwithstanding many meaningful
differences between the Sabarimala dispute and earlier analogues, it remains the case that we are
discussing the denial of temple access on the basis of ritual pollution some 100 years after the
Vaikom Satyagraha. Second, and again despite differences, we are talking about a ‘women’s entry’
dispute and even—sometimes— a ‘women’s issue’, which is a kind of rhetoric that’s remarkably
reminiscent of nineteenth and twentieth-century debates over the ‘women’s question’, howsoever
defined. If you could somehow excise the social media campaigns and effects of online journalism
from the most recent phase of the Sabarimala dispute, you might easily envision it occurring a
century earlier. That kind of endurance is remarkable.
Regarding the Constitution, I’ve long argued that India’s national charter reflects both
transformative and conventionally liberal impulses. This view runs contrary to much existing
commentary, which has overwhelmingly emphasised the transformational and revolutionary
qualities of the Constitution. But, as the Sabarimala dispute shows, there are viable constitutional
arguments to be made on both sides of most key debates. This goes beyond the simple fact that
constitutions, like all cultural artifacts, lend themselves to multiple interpretations. Rather, what I’m referring to here is the simultaneous affirmation of values that are quintessentially liberal (e.g.,
freedom of religion) and values that are transformative (e.g., the abolition of untouchability, the
opening of Hindu temples, and pretty much anything you like in Part IV of the Constitution). Put
differently, there are unusually strong arguments to be made on both sides that are deeply
grounded in constitutional text.
Both the Kerala High Court and the Supreme Court forgot this in their respective phases of the
Sabarimala dispute. During the Mahendran 1 phase (1990-91), the KHC held, in effect, that because Sabarimala’s religious hierarchy and prominent Ayyappan devotional associations said the ban was an ‘essential religious practice’, that was the end of the story. In other words, the court erased the very women at the heart of the dispute—not unlike what historian Lata Mani argued that colonial courts had done with regard to sati a century earlier. Meanwhile, during the IYLA efn_note] Indian Young Lawyers Association and Ors. vs. The State of Kerala and Ors. (2018) where a group of women lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court requesting a lift on Sabarimala’s ban on women of reproductive age.[/efn_note] phase (2006-18), the Supreme Court held that because Sabarimala’s ban was not enforced at all Ayyappan temples, and because Ayyappan worship wasn’t exclusive to other faith practices, the ban wasn’t an ‘essential religious practice’—in other words, the Court erased the fairly well-documented practices of Ayyappan devotees at Sabarimala. Despite what both the KHC and the Supreme Court said in their respective phases of the dispute, this was not a question with an easy answer—the Indian Constitution, by virtue of its conflicting impulses, ensures that there are few of those.
3) You note the contradiction between Kerala’s ‘progressive politics’ and its ‘conservative
norms’ in your introduction to the book. How do you see this tension as shaping the
Sabarimala case?
Kerala’s socio-political idiosyncrasies cast the Sabarimala dispute into unusually stark relief: after all,
at a foundational level, the dispute is about gender and religion in a state that’s supposed to have
unusual religious diversity and unusually high gender parity. It can seem puzzling that this dispute
unfolded in Kerala, of all places. At the same time, if you’ve been paying more than superficial
attention to Keralite political and socio-economic history, it can seem all too obvious that Kerala
would have been the venue for this kind of controversy: there is so much lying just below the veneer
of the ‘Kerala model’. That’s partly why I don’t think this is an exclusively Keralite story—it is ‘of
Kerala’ but it is definitely not something that could happen ‘only in Kerala!’ Moreover, it’s clear that
Kerala’s relative political marginality within India has not made the dispute any less comprehensible
or controversial outside the state.
4) You’ve termed your methods as comprising ‘constitutional ethnography’. Your writing
style, for one, invests in storytelling in ways that are unusual for academic writing on the
law. Could you tell us more about this approach, and how it might be relevant to
understand the life of law in general?
I think academic writing could benefit from taking itself a little less seriously: it could be more
conversational, more humorous, and less technical without sacrificing either insight or incisiveness.
This is equally true of law and anthropology, albeit in very different ways: they are both disciplines
that claim to be all about the human condition but produce prose that is often less than humane.
I’ve tried to write a book that someone without formal training in either law or anthropology could
read comfortably—and might even want to read for pleasure—but since this is my first attempt at a
monograph, I know I have room for improvement. At the same time, because form is inextricably
tied to substance, all of these ideas about prose style tie into the concept of ‘constitutional
ethnography’ (which is something I borrow from Kim Lane Scheppele). Law folk all too often forget
that law is lived in a way that transcends the courtroom, the constitution, or the judicial opinion.
Anthropologists, meanwhile, often overlook the fact that—as my good friend and fellow
anthropologist Leo Coleman says, ‘juridification is real!’ The substance of law matters and the way
it matters to ordinary (and extraordinary) people must be a part of any study claiming to be an
anthropology of law. That’s why I don’t just want to bring the methods of anthropology (or
ethnography) to bear upon law: I also want to bring the insights of law to bear upon anthropology.
Constitutional ethnography is a way of addressing both types of oversight.
5) We can’t wait to read the book! What are your upcoming projects?
Thank you! After so very long, I can’t wait for it to actually be a book! But I’m also already at work on
the next series of projects. Thanks to the Fulbright Scholar Program and the Chancellor of NLSIU, I’ll
be making some initial headway on this new research arc during a Fulbright fellowship in Bengaluru
between January-June 2024. This new arc is still in its earliest stages so, like all ethnographically-
rooted projects, I won’t know what it’s really about until the fieldwork tells me. But I am curious
about a few interrelated things: the phrase ‘constitutional morality’ that was brought to greater
popularity by Dipak Misra; the everyday life of the Constitution through its deployment by both legal
elites (lawyers, academics, judges, legislators) and non-elites (lay litigants, advocacy organisations
etc); and the process of re-imagining the connection between constitutionalism and democracy,
which is unfolding to rather spectacular effect in India as well as in many other places around the
world.
6) You note that the Sabarimala case has acquired an eclectic cast of characters—’a
hereditary priest of impeccable orthodoxy, his media-savvy grandson, an astrologer, a
minor actress, various religious associations and their feminist others, a housewife-
turned-activist, a college student, polished New Delhi lawyers, phlegmatic communist
state officials, a bachelor god, and a couple of Chief Justices eager to rehabilitate their
reputations’. Could you tell us about one or two of these ‘characters’ who interested you
the most in their association with the Sabarimala saga?
Oh, there are so many! I’ll leave for now the characters who have already drawn (and will no doubt
continue to draw) the most scholarly attention: Ayyappan himself, and the various Chief Justices of
India who have been involved in the dispute, especially Dipak Misra, Rajan Gogoi, and D.Y.
Chandrachud. Of the others, I want to highlight Bhakti Pasrija Sethi, who has led the litigation against
Sabarimala’s entry policies; Rahul Easwar, the Thazhamon grandson who has re-made himself
multiple times during the timeline of the dispute, and always emerges in a slightly more
controversial iteration; and someone who I do not mention in that sentence from the Introduction
(but do discuss later on in the book): J. Sai Deepak, the attorney for various actors defending
Sabarimala’s ban. Each one of them is more nuanced, and therefore more intriguing, than their
media depictions make them out to be. I try to spend a little time with all of them during the course
of the book.
About the Author: Deepa Das Acevedo is an Associate Professor of Law at Emory University
and a Trustee of the Law & Society Association. She earned her JD and PhD in Anthropology
from The University of Chicago. Her research focuses on religion-state relations, democratic
sovereignty, and constitutionalism in India. Her forthcoming book is titled The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
