The Defence of Aachaaram,Femininity,and Neo-Savarna Power in Kerala

‘Ready to Wait’ Women and the Defence of Aachaaram

Though understood presently as religious custom and practice authorized by the brahmin priesthood, aachaaram once embraced both religious and everyday practices in all social spaces. It was a web of rules of conduct in and through which a social order of difference and deference‒based on caste and dominated by Brahmins, with sudra groups in alliance with them (and so properly understood as the order of janma-bhedam, or difference-by-birth)‒reproduced itself (Bhaskaranunny, 2012). However, with the rising challenges from the avarna community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the savarna communities that benefited from aachaaram had to radically revise and shrink it. Aspects of aachaaram that had withstood the test of Victorian values and sexual morality were retained and valourized as the ‘true essence’ of savarna/Hindu culture; spatial taboos and exclusions were now limited to the interiors of savarna homes and temples (Devika, 2007). Savarna women entered public space and the job market by the 1930s, but strict gender segregation, particularly striking in Kerala even today, as well as weak capitalist growth ensured that the boundaries of specific caste communities remained mostly unchallenged. In the new gender ideals that circulated in 20th century community reformisms in Kerala, the new woman was expected to be the custodian of family piety and ritual, and charged with the task of raising children as believers; in other words, this was an inextricable aspect of the new femininity that was to replace traditional gender arrangements. But, despite an apparent decline in the mid-20th century, it made a massive comeback by the end of the century, and a cultural formation that may be called the ‘neo-savarna’ took shape around it. This included both the traditional caste-elite, who had by now supposedly ‘refined’ their aachaaram, and sections of avarna communities, who had now acquired wealth and sought upward social mobility (Roopesh, 2017). This as well as the galloping growth of ‘spiritual capitalism’ in recent decades, commoditising particular temples and deities that foreground certain kinds of aachaaram as indispensable, timeless and holy (Sreedhar, 2016), form the backdrop for the confrontation over the Supreme Court judgment that struck down certain crucial parts of the aachaaram at Sabarimala as unconstitutional and misogynist. ⁵

The most striking aspect about the conflict around Sabarimala is the strident claim to agency that neo-savarna women, describing themselves in universal terms as ‘women devotees of Ayyappa’, advanced right at the outset. In 2016, when the new CPM government came to power and readied to file a fresh affidavit in the SC stating that it supported the entry of women of all age groups to Sabarimala, a group of young, highly educated and independent women started the RTW hashtag campaign against it. The core group consisted of Shilpa Nair, a Dubai-based entrepreneur, president of the non-resident Indian (NRI) groups’ People for Dharma (2016) and member of the Kerala BJP’s NRI cell; Padma Pillai, an entrepreneur; and the Germany-based ‘independent researcher’ Anjali George, among others. The remarkable use of social and visual media drew thousands of women, including many non-Malayali Hindu women and NRI neo-savarnas, and attracted national media attention. ⁶ People for Dharma was later formed as a trust to file an application for intervention at the SC. The defence of aachaaram was couched almost entirely in the language of women’s agency and voice. Padma Pillai remarked: ‘If it was man-made and wrong, I will fight against the tradition. But if it’s in the shastras, it’s my right to fight to obey’. ⁷ Anjali George claimed that ‘Hindu women’s voices were absent’ in the debate, instantly projecting herself and the supporters as ‘true’ Hindu women and implicitly portraying other voices of women born or self-identified as Hindu as ‘false’. ⁸

This assertion of agency however came with the strong claim of being ‘non-political’. Not surprisingly, the demonstrations of women, though highly aggressive and militant, were called ‘prayer processions’, or namajapaghosha yatras. Commentators often ignore the undeniable social capital of the RTW core leadership, and their Sangh connections, referring to them as ‘ordinary housewives’. ⁹ The bottom-line privilege shared by RTW women was neo-savarna caste-power, which draws upon feminine maternalism, crudely displayed in the unquotable casteist abuse hurled publicly at Kerala’s avarna chief minister by a Nair woman who clearly seemed to be working class. She later apologized, asking those she had offended to ‘forgive this mother’. ¹⁰

The sentimental maternal agency (which, according to Padma Pillai, made them ‘sob heartbrokenly in front of the TV’ over the SC verdict ¹¹ ) is seen as an equalising factor. Claims about bhakta (devout) women being beyond all internal social divisions or interests abound in the videos posted by women telling ‘their stories’ on the RTW page. For example, Mekha S Gopi says, ‘Bhakti is an indefinable experience. …. It is women who have enjoyed that good fortune, women who have known the loving caress of spiritual pleasure, self-sacrifice, deep affection for the deity, and culture who stepped out into the street irrespective of age for the defence of aachaaram.’ ¹² RTW leaders have repeatedly testified that the mobilization happened on its own: ‘many mothers called us and let us know about namajapa groups. … now they call us as one among them, weep and request us to join them in the namajapam… Mala Araya women from near Sabarimala search for our numbers, call us and say, please come, they are destroying our temple. … we believers have no one.’ ¹³ Predictably enough, the clearly elite backgrounds of the protestors escaped notice, and therefore, Menon proudly says that these are not people amassed by political parties with promises of biryani or other such bribes.

However, this was not mere passive acceptance of a political line developed and endorsed well in advance by a male leadership. There is a sharp divide between the RTW position and the top intellectual leadership of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which favours women’s entry and is critical of aachaaram-centric Hindu worship. ¹⁴ In pro-RSS families, the RTW seems to have been an act of assertion by women. An RSS worker recounted such an incident in a Facebook post:

Though there were a lot of issues in Kerala after the SC verdict, I was determined to go to Sabarimala this year. I thought of taking the children, and as someone who agreed with allowing the entry of young women there, I thought, after all, the verdict has come, I will also take my wife, she’ll be happy. I called her and said, make the kids take the 41-day vratam, and since you can’t take it that long, keep it for 14 days. But she startled me by saying ‘Ready to Wait’! … The next day we saw, a huge rally at Pandalam. Most of the demonstrators, women. All of them saying, ready to wait … ¹⁵

In a less obvious way, the RTW’s defence of the argument that the presence of young women at Sabarimala may disturb the deity’s vow of celibacy would also render shaky the moral claims tacitly advanced by the RSS’s senior leaders’ practice of celibacy (Bacchetta, 1999). So it was no surprise that the RTW campaigners made many RSS intellectuals uncomfortable. This came into the open after the 2019 general elections, when the RTW campaigner Padma Pillai openly accused the BJP leadership of using the RTW campaign against the CPM for narrow electoral purposes. ¹⁶

The Savarkarite vision advanced by the male RSS leadership takes into consideration the question of caste inequality in Hinduism, but inadequately and definitely with no aim of dismantling either the caste order or the deep elitism of the Hindu shastras, as Gopal Guru (1991) has pointed out. It regards Hindutva as an unfinished project, while the RTW view either trivializes or ignores it, drawing from the more global Hindu right-wing discourse of right-wing scholars such as Koenraad Elst; for instance, his arguments in Who is a Hindu? (2001) claim that caste was impermanent in India until colonial rule, and originally represented the full flowering of diversity and a ‘harmonious integration within a functioning whole’. ¹⁷ In the wake of sharp attacks from RSS supporters, some RTW publicists shared hashtags such as ProudPagan along with ProudHindu, claiming that ‘Hindus who think globally will not be disturbed by the word pagan. Because this will make it easy for them to reveal to the whole world the roots of the propaganda unleashed against us by some, that we are oppressors of the dalits, women, and Nature … Because that single word, pagan, will be enough to show them that we are not the hunters but the prey.’ ¹⁸

In other words, we have the supporters of a regional, Malayali, aachaaram-centred Hinduism drawing upon global articulations of Hindu paganism to counter the nation-centred vision of RSS Hindutva. The RSS supporters of women’s entry into Sabarimala are sharply criticized as ‘ultra-progressive Sangh intellectual [pretenders]’ (atipurogamanasanghbu-jikal). ¹⁹ Padma Pillai ridicules the RSS supporters’ argument that any such practice can be changed through the convening of a Hindu aachaarya sabha, or national ritual authority. ²⁰ RTW supporters point out that Hindu swayamsevaks from North India are unable to comprehend the Hinduism of Kerala: ‘they are unused to the diversity of deities and forms of worship here.’ ²¹ Sanatana Dharma is itself equated with ‘pagan’ Hinduism, diverse enough to suit an infinite range of spiritual tastes. An RTW supporter has said, ‘If in a class of 60 students the teacher asks a question we can find 60 unique answers. Similarly, in Sanatana Dharma we have millions of gods to suit the taste of each.’ ²²

Thus, among the RTW supporters, there are conversations about how to recover older forms of worship that have been made impossible by the dismantling of joint families as well as other structural changes in Malayali society. Some argue that aachaaram as worship must be reinstated fully, that is, by bringing back the spirits of family elders through astrological inquiry and animal sacrifice, and by making non-vegetarian offerings and toddy. ²³ This is the attribution of the non-hierarchical pure difference characteristic of the relationship of Brahminical gods with local, non-Brahminical deities. Discussing the traditional significance of the lower-caste practice of odi, commonly thought to be a potent form of avarna magic, Padma Pillai remarked, ‘Odi-vidya was the knowledge of the indigenous people here. Till some thirty years back, people took children to them get rid of evil eye or fear, not to Brahmins. In every village there would be one or two women who knew it and one or two characters who knew koodothram and maaranam [local black magic]. [Many] believed that the Pulluvan’s song was more powerful than the thread blessed in a temple.’ ²⁴ Whether this implies that relations between caste communities was also one of pure difference is a question not often addressed, but arguments that women and men are equal in Hinduism because the Hindus worship female deities, that there are Hindu temples where only women are allowed and so on abound in the Facebook writings and videos of RTW women: ‘Now a lot of people are trying to show that this is discrimination. … If that were true we would not have had female goddesses, right? … Hinduism has temples where there are female deities where no men are allowed … The female deity does not want to see men, we respect that.’ ²⁵

The RTW campaign’s uniqueness lay in successfully presenting aachaaram as anything but related to caste-power. First, the very name ‘Right to Wait’ pointed towards agency; it papered over the fact that the stated reason for prohibiting women of reproductive age from Sabarimala had nothing to do with their readiness or unwillingness to wait, but was all about aachaaram, of the Malayali Brahminical kind, which specifically disallowed a sanyasi from seeing women, and instead made it a matter of women’s choice. Second, in social media posts, RTW supporters announced a determination, at times through their underage children, to defend aachaaram, which they now perceived as essentially harmless consumables or rights. For example, the RTW Facebook page introduced a post that it hosted under the hashtag KidsForSabarimala as making a ‘plea to the authorities for her right to be a Hindu, to enjoy different facets of Dharma that her parents and grandparents enjoyed and are protected by the Constitution of India.’ ²⁶ Third, aachaaram was made to look like a set of human arrangements made for convenience and apparently applicable to deities. A female aachaaram supporter said in her ‘RTW story’ video, uploaded on the RTW Facebook page, ‘Say you have a friend and he says I really want to study, I don’t want to be disturbed, but what you do is get a million other people and come to his house to party! … Why is it not moral? Because it is a matter of his privacy … We consider Ayyappan to be a real person, right?’ ²⁷ Fourth, many defined ‘purification’ not as caste practice, but related to maintaining ‘divine energies’ (‘purification is done when something not conducive to the aura of the temple has happened’). By that reckoning, aachaaram appears to be a neutral, almost scientific, process for maintaining divine energies. ²⁸

But fifth, and most interestingly, many women participating in this discussion understood aachaaram as practices necessary to protect the power of the deity which, if neglected, would lead to the deity losing his powers. A female devotee of Amritanandamayi quoted the Mata’s public defence of aachaaram at Sabarimala: ‘God is like a fish in the ocean who does not need to be taken care of. But the deity is like a fish in an aquarium and its needs to be cleaned’. ²⁹ This emphasizes the fragility of the deity, who needs protection, which calls upon women’s ‘natural instincts’ of caring and nurturing. Thus, participating in RTW would be the exercise of feminine, specifically maternal, agency: maternal devotees protecting a deity under assault by unbelievers.

The sentimentalized mobilization clearly correlates with a sentimentalized understanding of the Hindu gods as intimate and domestic, often reduced to other worldly counterparts of close kin. Thus, the Bhagawathy, often the family or clan deity once worshipped in joint families among Nairs, Ezhavas and others, is now being recovered and reinstated after a gap (coinciding with the break-up of the joint family and other changes), especially in wealthy homes, and is often referred to as ‘mother’ or ‘grandmother’. ³⁰ Evocative images have been created, such as the one below, in which Ayyappa bows down to the aged mother: ³¹

By doing so, these women reiterate the general gender conservatism in Kerala which recommends strict gender segregation and insists that the presence of female bodies acts as a temptation to men (essentially the rapist’s defence in patriarchy the world over), and often claim that the prohibition is not for Ayyappa but for the male devotees. A RTW supporter asks in a video, ‘Do women have the permission to enter a hostel in which only bachelors live? Or, we know, in ashrams male and female celibates live apart … Each Ayyappan [male devotee of Ayyappa] takes a tough 41-day vow to control all desires and wishes. We young women do not go because we want to respect their vow and their celibacy’. ³² For another, the waiting is an act of sentimental commitment: it is about perfecting love. She compares it to a woman’s dedication to her family that makes her patient and ‘adjusting’. ³³

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The significant extent to which the RTW women’s understandings of gender are rooted in the early 20^th century evocations of ‘authentic’ gendered subjectivity in Malayali society needs to be acknowledged. In other words, the Victorian lenses through which customary practice and belief were filtered remain more or less intact when it comes to gender (but not necessarily to worship, as is evident above, in the apparent sympathy towards traditional aachaaram, including animal sacrifice). It is important to note that RTW women’s claims rest on a male–female gender binary defended as ordained by both culture and nature. Despite all claims to ‘paganism’, aachaaravadi Hindu supporters are entirely Victorian in their entrenched hetero-patriarchal orientation. For example, RTW leaders seemed forgetful of paganism and vagina worship in their response to a progressive group that tried to initiate a conversation on menstruation at a public event with the main gateway to the venue shaped like a vagina. Padma Pillai used particularly Brahminical language suffused with deep Victorian indignation when she questioned if the female body was a mere machine for menstruation, giving birth, and sex–the last being referred to as garbhadaanam, which literally means ‘the gift of pregnancy’! ³⁴ The SC’s striking down of Section 497 in September 2018 is interpreted as a licence for sexual profligacy. ³⁵ The contours of such gender and sexual conservatism were well-developed by the mid-20th century, when the neo-savarna took shape. It is also important to remember that the vision of ideal society as a heterosexual order supposedly based on sexual complementarity was shared by almost all community reform movements of the time, including those that sought new forms of aachaaram, as did the dharma of Sree Narayana, which was one reason why the neo-savarna formation attracted many avarna as well.

Clearly, their silence on or dismissal of the caste question, combined with a distrust of the Savarkarite vision, boils the RTW position down essentially to a defence of neo-savarna power, but which in real terms benefits varna communities–the Nairs, the Kshatriyas, the Saamanthas and the Malayalabrahmins, and notthe avarna-born individuals and groups who also inhabit it. This is reminiscent of the anti-communist agitation in the late 1950s against Kerala’s first elected communist government, organized by powerful caste communities and led by Syrian Christians under the banner of ‘Christianity in danger’, and which ended up benefiting mainly the Christian caste-elite, the Syrian Christians (Thomas, 2018).

It was no accident then that the RTW campaign was embraced by the traditional ritual authority at Sabarimala, which comprises the tantri family and the Pandalampalace, by the Nair Service Society because it helped protect their direct material gains, institutional control and symbolic privilege, ³⁶ and, despite palpable tension, by the Sangh Parivar because the RTW appeared to be the best gateway to inaugurating effectively a discourse on ‘the Hindu in peril’ in Kerala. No wonder, then, that the BJP manifesto for the May 2019 national elections promised to ‘endeavour to secure constitutional protection on issues related to faith and to belief’. ³⁷

Frenemies with Feminism? RTW and Female Individuation

Many pro-Hindutva women activists now recall the Sabarimala conflict as crucial in their journey to becoming fulfilled Hindu subjects with a voice. For instance, Krishna Priya, a leading RTW campaigner, claims that when she first began to use social media, there were few voices heard in defence of Hindu culture, but now ‘Many hands rise today to hold high the spiritual and cultural torch of the Hindus. It is hard to express the happiness that one feels on seeing that most of them are bangle-adorned … that God willed it that I could be part of a struggle in which the Hindu’s viratswarup came into view is immeasurable divine blessing, I think’. ³⁸ On International Women’s Day 2019, the BJP mouthpiece Janmabhumi said: ‘Janmabhumi salutes the Hindu Feminine Force that Fought for Ayyappa’. ³⁹

Indeed, many women publicists of the RTW, and Hindutva in general, are highly individuated women who take explicit pride in their unique life trajectories. One of them spoke of her plans for an autobiography:

Twelve years in a US-based company with an asset-base of 72 million US dollars, eight bosses in twelve years, including two Americans, one Indonesian, and two Malayalees … Ending all that slowly and also life in Delhi … [mentions intention to publish her first book]. The loneliness and isolation that arose from the dreams that life kept aside for me, the struggles, journeys, the heart’s deep throbbing, romantic love, spiritual quests, the love for life that strayed off course reached D, the writer, and stays there now, I discover all these once again on my own, embrace the world, give them up, and move ahead. ⁴⁰

Many of these faces are far more acceptable to the NRI and middle- and upper-middle class neo-savarna than, say, the Hindu Aikyavedi president K. P. Sasikala, a school teacher known for her incendiary speeches, deeply communal statements and insulting comments aimed at the left. In contrast, the most visible faces of the RTW are elite upper-class women who suit the popular imagination of the well-groomed, articulate, mobile, ‘liberated’ woman, comfortable with English and fitting well into corporate backgrounds–someone who appears to be living evidence of the irrelevance of feminism as politics. A hatred of feminists connects women who otherwise differ in the degrees of ‘liberation’ they deem appropriate for women. ⁴¹ As is common on the national scene, also frequently found was the lauding of prominent women on their own side by comparing them to Hindu goddesses and heroines (Menon, 2010). ⁴²

One way in which women’s subordination is recognized as problematic even as feminism is rejected is through reducing subordination to an individual–psychological or sociological issue. For example, the explanation offered by an RTW supporter for a recent series of violent incidents against women and children in Kerala was the preference for non-vegetarian diets in the state, ⁴³ while another claimed that menstruation does not cause Malayali women to suffer any serious discrimination or disadvantage apart from mood swings, insufficient rest, etc., avoiding places of worship is voluntary and therefore not patriarchal! ⁴⁴ In a discussion of a case in which a (highly educated, elite) mother failed to protect her child from her live-in partner’s violence, ‘broken families’ (divorced parents) and ‘broken culture’ (atheist parents or their conversion to other faiths) were blamed for ‘unconscious insecurities’. ⁴⁵ Violence against young women has also been attributed to a lack of ‘anger management’, and even as schools are advised to adopt a more liberal attitude towards co-education, the recommendations‒legalization of prostitution and training girls in self-defence ⁴⁶ ‒are essentially individualistic and reinforce stereotypes of male ‘sexual need’ and female sexual vulnerability.

These ideas blend smoothly with the guru Mata Amritanandamayi’s regular advice on balancing family relationships, which is often directed at men and recommends the softening of patriarchal control through greater interaction among family members as well as greater flexibility in the division of labour and, simultaneously, the reinstitution of aachaaram in the home: ‘Perceive the kitchen to be just like the puja room. It must be clean and orderly. The fire there should be lit only after a bath, chanting prayers. Earlier, children would touch the feet of their parents every morning. This is lost now. Parents should now become a model by touching their parents’ feet’. ⁴⁷ Others interpret modernity as a spiritual quest for which aachaaram is necessary: ‘Modernity or empowerment for many like me is getting rid of all kinds of evils which derive from our own self and grow above this material world … For us empowerment is not just fulfilling the momentary pleasures of life or winning a right to enforce our notions on others’. ⁴⁸ The idea that the Hindu family is only occasionally or marginally patriarchal and that women’s individuation is continually shaped by it is reinforced through personal accounts. ⁴⁹

However, some RTW supporters agree that patriarchy does exist, more among the ‘Abrahamic’ religions but also in Hindu society, even if only in a marginal way, and as a negotiable arrangement. Alternatively, they claim that the Abrahamic religions infected the Hindu with patriarchy. In this, their arguments resemble those put forward by proponents of the so-called ‘matriarchal studies’, who blame Abrahamic religions (and sometimes Brahminism) for the spread of patriarchy worldwide and, by implication, claim that women are not oppressed in matriarchies. (For a largely uncritical glorification of Nair traditions, see Goettner-Abendoth, 2012). Among the RTW, such arguments are used to claim that aachaaram-bound practices such as the hypergamous relationships between Nairs and Malayalabrahmins or between Nairs and other sudras were based on mutual consent, and so on. ‘Hindu tradition’, it is claimed, needs no reform, because it is like a ‘flowing river’ that cleanses itself; the entire history of the encounter with colonial modernity is thus denied. Feminists are called out for drawing attention to the Nair origins of most prominent RTW leaders and condemning such traditional practices as the sambandham (alliances once common in Malayali society in which Brahmin men established relations with Nair/sudra women that were not permanent and did not involve inheritance), and are accused of racism and double standards. Yet, the tension of a past understood now in the sudra discourse of the NSS as an inferior one of submission to Brahmins does surface in the RTW women’s writing on tradition and patriarchy. ⁵⁰

Thus, it is not surprising that, except in aachaaram, these women demand state protection against almost every single form of patriarchal oppression named by the feminists–domestic violence, workplace harassment, unequal employment opportunities, unsafe and unequal public spaces, and so on. Indeed, they frequently claim that feminists need to focus on these instead of aachaaram, which they claim has nothing to do with patriarchy. Some RTW videos directly address the question of women’s empowerment: ‘Having the right to visit a deity in a temple is not empowerment … There are issues to be addressed urgently – sexual harassment, workplace discrimination, misogyny, domestic violence, hazaar issues harming thousands of women’. ⁵¹ In other words, the aachaaravadi women’s position appeals to neo-savarna women with aspirations to an independent life relatively free from patriarchal control, even as it massages their majoritarian fears of the minorities and justifies their caste privilege.

The last point is perhaps best illustrated by the menstrual hygiene education offered by the NGO Mythri, which offers advice supposedly vetted by ‘experts’, and proclaims a commitment to girls’ education and the dispelling of superstitions around menstruation that affects their mobility. ⁵² This organization is led by a pro-Sangh ‘menstruation educator’, Sini Joseph, who claims that the ‘actual’ experiences of women confirm that they conform to menstrual taboos not because of blind faith but out of knowledge accrued through experience, for example, some foods can exacerbate bleeding. She then cleverly brings in the ban on menstruating women in temples as though it is equivalent in effect to ingesting particular kinds of food. Since this is proclaimed as wisdom, that is, rational practice based on rational knowledge from long ago–she does not feel the need to offer any scientific proof to establish the claim that ‘Spaces like the Bhagavathy temple in Chengannur are capable of shifting women’s menstrual cycles to align it with nature’s cycles’, citing her ‘own experience’, by which she avers that the presence of Ayyappa devotees impacted her cycle.

Though clearly weak, the emphasis on women’s ‘lived experience’ (even though very problematically conceived) against ‘scientific reductionism’ (again, understood weakly) is sufficient to create a superficial similarity with feminist critiques of science. A comment on Sini Joseph’s article claimed that menstruating women’s bodies have ‘negative energy’, which clashes with the ‘positive energy’ of temples, and that two shamans in the US had ‘clarified’ that women absorbed negative energy from around them and released it into the earth during menstruation. ⁵³ These claims can meld with logically challenged yet superficially convincing arguments about non-Western knowledge. What is crucial is that they seem to serve a certain kind of woman, who, according to her self-description, is a ‘modern woman born in the 1990s. My parents have brought me up with the right blend of traditional and modern values … I am grateful to them for instilling in me our core ancient culture and values’. ⁵⁴ The argument about the deity’s divine energies being susceptible to the presence of women of menstruating ages, projected as a phenomenon not yet visible to modern science and defended as essentially unfalsifiable, is shared by highly professional women ranging from chartered accountants to cardiologists. ⁵⁵

Nevertheless, it is clear for many reasons that the even the RTW supporters who complain about patriarchy are not champions of gender justice or equality. The limits of their social media articulations are set by the echo chamber of the Hindu right wing. Thus, silence, dismissal through ad hominen or whataboutery is deployed to fend off accusations about Hindu right-wing attacks on women. If not, the self-criticism is always partial, as in the apparently rare example of an ardent RTW supporter condemning the violent and uncouth behaviour of the crowds of ‘devotees’ at Sabarimala towards young women who had tried to assert their right to worship: ‘it is not possible to accept on whatever grounds, even of the defence of the faith, the behaviour of the men and women who crowded on the roadside to boo and jeer when Rehana Fatima was arrested and led away. I am certain that no devotee who believes that gaining sight of Ayyappa can be possible only though observing a vow and adopting stringent self-control would behave this way’. ⁵⁶ However, it is also apparent that the author was concerned more about the breach of aachaaram, which devotees are bound to observe, than about the mockery and destruction of gender justice.

More critically, the manner in which avarna, especially dalit, women are rendered either invisible or reduced to non-agents in the RTW supporters’ discourse is telling of the latter’s moorings in casteist patriarchy. Padma Pillai feels free to characterize the young women who tried to enter the temple as ‘Mahishis and the Marava army’, referring to the popular Ayyappa myth in which he is born to eliminate Mahishi (the sister of the asura Mahisha, who was killed by Durga for tormenting the gods) and his defeat of the lower-caste army. ⁵⁷ When they seem to be accorded more sympathetic treatment, avarna women are inevitably reduced to victims who must be uplifted or saved, as was evident in RTW responses to recent news reports of violence against lower-caste women. Blaming the government for alleged negligence in a case in which the underage daughter of a nomadic couple was kidnapped by the son of a local communist party leader (it turned out later that the two had eloped), ⁵⁸ an RTW supporter wrote:

There’s not a single day in which one doesn’t murmur that this is a man’s world. … [But] it appears that many women like me cannot call this feeling ‘fear’. It can only be irritation … Because many of us who create a fuss over minor things are privileged [uses the English word] … What about women who are born without any of it? ⁵⁹

Hadiya Asokan, ⁶⁰ who converted to Islam and whose struggle to establish her agency culminated in the SC accepting her claims, is inevitable portrayed as devoid of agency and a victim of her ‘atheist’ father’s cultural neglect. For RTW supporters, neither educational achievement nor assertion of choice will suffice as a proxy for ‘true Hindu women’s agency’. Responding to a Facebook post by a rationalist who announced his daughter’s excellent performance in the matriculation exam without the help of religion or God, an RTW supporter reminded him that Hadiya’s father too thought so, once! ⁶¹ The striking absence of any engagement with dalit women activists and commentators, such as Mruduladevi Sasidharan and Rekha Raj, who actively challenged RTW claims in their writings, is not coincidental.

RTW women, however, are as vulnerable as feminists to the charge of being ‘not real’ women, of being ‘elite socialites’ who claim more credit than they deserve, and this became strikingly apparent in their public disagreement with RSS-affiliated men after the national elections in May 2019. Padma Pillai’s statement that the BJP was interested only in power and not aacharam led to RSS men immediately accusing her of being an elitist who did not participate in struggles ‘on the ground’ and claimed too much credit for ‘putting on make-up and yakking away in TV studios’ while the RSS workers were facing the police. ⁶² Anjali George was particularly vulnerable, probably because of her Christian-sounding name, and was accused of participating in a Christian-evangelist conspiracy against Sabarimala and Hindu culture. ⁶³ However, the accusation against Padma Pillai of being a non-activist was countered by her male supporters by using its flip side; they pointed out that she is a ‘housewife’, and so was doing more than what was expected of her. ⁶⁴ In other words, the logic of majoritarianism prevails in internal differences as well.