Sabarimala

Sabarimala is the clearest case in India of a constitutional ruling that remains good law and is not, in practice, followed. It is worth setting out carefully, because it is usually reported as either a victory or a defeat and is neither.

The restriction

Women between roughly ten and fifty, that is, of menstruating age, were barred from the shrine. Two justifications were offered, and they are different from each other:

• The deity's character. Ayyappan is understood as a naishtika brahmachari, a permanent celibate ascetic. The presence of women of childbearing age is held incompatible with that vow.
• Purity. The older and cruder argument, from menstrual impurity, which the temple's defenders in court largely moved away from.

The Kerala High Court upheld the bar in 1991.

It is worth noting what Sabarimala does not restrict. It has long admitted men of every caste, and Muslim and Christian pilgrims make the climb. On caste and religion it is among the more open major temples in India. Its exclusion is specifically of women.

The judgment

On 28 September 2018, in Indian Young Lawyers Association v State of Kerala, the Supreme Court struck the bar down 4-1. The majority held that the exclusion was not an essential religious practice protected by Article 25, and that it stigmatised women and denied them equal access.

Justice Indu Malhotra dissented, the only woman on the bench. Her reasoning was not that the practice was good but that courts should not be in the business of deciding what a religious community treats as essential, and that rationality review of religious practice would not stop at Sabarimala. It is a serious argument and it has been vindicated to the extent that the referral now pending covers other faiths' practices too.

What followed

Not compliance.

• Mass protests blocked the forest paths. There were clashes through October 2018.
• On 2 January 2019 two women in their forties entered under police escort. The head priest closed the temple and performed a purification rite, a public statement that the court's order had polluted the shrine.
• Violence followed across Kerala, with one death.
• On 14 November 2019, the court referred the review petitions to a larger bench by 3-2, on broader questions about judicial review of religious practice. It did not stay the 2018 judgment.

The position now

The 2018 judgment has never been overturned and has never been stayed. It is therefore the law. It is also not observed: women of the excluded ages do not, in practice, complete the pilgrimage.

That gap, between a ruling that stands and a ruling that operates, is the actual state of affairs, and it is not a tidy one.

Reaching Sabarimala is supposed to be as significant as arriving, since pilgrims are expected to spend forty-one days preparing before they ever set out.

Forty-one days first

Pilgrims observe a vratham, a period of austerity lasting forty-one days before the pilgrimage itself, involving abstention from meat, alcohol and other worldly comforts, wearing black or blue clothing, and maintaining strict personal discipline, a preparatory practice treated as inseparable from the pilgrimage rather than as an optional prelude to it.

An eternal celibate

The temple's deity, Ayyappan, is described in tradition as born from a union between Shiva and Mohini, an enchanting female form taken by Vishnu, and is venerated specifically as a Naishtika Brahmachari, a lifelong celibate ascetic. This characterisation of the deity has traditionally been cited as the theological basis for excluding women of menstruating age from the temple, the practice at the centre of the legal dispute covered in this entry's companion article.

A climb, not a drive-up

The temple sits deep in forest terrain reached only by a demanding trek on foot along a traditional route, a physical difficulty that pilgrims frequently describe as part of the vow's fulfilment rather than an incidental obstacle to be minimised, distinguishing the pilgrimage's physical character from more accessible major Hindu temple sites elsewhere in South India.