Sabarimala Temple – Elite Vs The Native

Shailendra Dhar

Sabarimala is not a restaurant or picnic spot.

Followers of Ayyappa are a group of believers held together by commonly held beliefs and practices. If you don’t like it, don’t be part of it; in fact, by definition, you are not part of it. Period. You can’t judge or intervene in whatever they believe in, as long as they don’t impose their beliefs on people outside that community of believers—i.e., on those who don’t want to follow Ayyappa. If I or you are an atheist or don’t belong to that community of believers, we are obviously not part of them. Nothing of what they do applies to us. How and when their deity is to be worshipped, what is sacred, and when, can ONLY be decided by the believers of Ayyappa.

Stripped of legalese, the petition in the SC by a certain Indian Young Lawyers Association, headed by one Mr. Naushad Ahmad Khan, amounts to the following:

I don’t believe in Ayyappa, nor do I honour their beliefs or practices. It, therefore, affects me in no way, but I want to defile what they hold as sacred and disrupt their way of prayer.

Why should the intolerance of a few, aided by the arrogance of the westernized elite, insist on “prevailing over” and not respecting “little traditions”? The Sabarimala verdict is a victory for cultural colonizers who insist on creating a flat world devoid of diversity, suppressive of “other” traditions. The Sabarimala verdict is a war cry against cultural subalterns, minority traditions, communities, and groups—a victory of the totalitarian desire to destroy, defile, and subdue localized cultural impulses and practices that make a people.

Colonizers, Elite, and the Western Liberal Order

There are numerous other Ayyappa temples where women can go. But it was important for cultural aggressors to deny them one particular manifestation at one particular place, to defile the beliefs and practices of thousands of believers—practices that don’t hurt anyone. There was nothing terrible happening there. But it was an occasion for the elite to declare and assert its sovereignty over the native. Indian liberals are the foot soldiers of the global western liberal order, which seeks to create a flat world driven by its own cultural prejudices, covenants, and assertions, celebrated by the national elite as “universal” and “modern”; to create a homogenous, soulless, culturally neutered, uprooted workforce for the corporates.

Shani Shingnapur, a village deity, has fallen, so has Ayyappa. It is a matter of time before Kamakhya, Amarnath, various Sufi traditions, and dargahs (not masjids) will be forced to surrender to the savagery of the elite.

Let’s defend and uphold the diversity of cultural existence. People, their anxieties, their beliefs, and practices make and hold together this nation. Let’s resist and reclaim our nation.

This impulse to subsume diversity is essentially fascist in its character, structure, and dynamics. And this mindset, this structure of suppression and subjugation of nativity—of particularity, singularity, and individuality—must be dismantled.

This construct of a “superior self to colonize an inferior other” feeds and directs our state and its institutions and “builds” social and cultural conversations through media, cinema, serials, and education: for self-approval and validity, and for sacrificing your particularity to the “universal” of the elite. It colonizes you. Clones you. Like an autoimmune disorder, it weakens your defenses against attacks on your self.

It must be fought in all its manifestations. That is, if you have to survive as a nation, as a people.