THE INTERTWINING OF CHURCH AND STATE IN INDIA
This is an unusual book about “a dispute over an unusual god, his unusual temple, in an unusual state, in India” (Das Acevedo Reference Das Acevedo2024, xi). The book charts the legal disputes regarding the famous Sabarimala temple in the Indian state of Kerala, which had barred the entry of women between the ages of ten and fifty. The temple’s presiding god, Ayappan, was born out of a sexual union of two male gods. During his earthly life, Ayappan turned away marriage proposals from women he had liberated from a curse. He declared that he would only marry when no one else needed his help and that till such time, he would remain a celibate youth. Because of this vow of celibacy, the story goes, women of childbearing age are prohibited from entering the Sabarimala temple (though they may enter other Ayappan temples). The question before courts and in duelling public discussions was whether it is constitutional for women of childbearing age to be barred from entering the temple.
The book does not answer this question. The courts also struggle to reach a final decision on this issue. Though the Supreme Court issued a judgment called the Indian Young Lawyers Association (ILYA)—the judgment at the heart of the book—which enabled the entry of all women to the temple, the court is, at the time of writing of this essay, reconsidering this question.
Just to pose the question of whether it is constitutional to bar the entry of women into a temple points to the intertwined nature of the state and religion in India. The book uses the ways in which authorities and courts have attempted to answer it to animate several conceptual issues: what does the trajectory of the dispute tell us about the location of sovereignty in contemporary India? What do debates on the proper relationship between the state and religion tell us about both? What do the cases about Sabarimala tell us about gender and caste discrimination in contemporary India, and the state’s role in dealing with these—often violent—practices? The book also poses methodological questions: How does one take the technicalities of law seriously while acknowledging that the law has a life in society? How does one do an anthropology of the law while considering the specificity of the legal form?
The book argues that there are two imaginations of sovereignty—one, that the sovereignty lies with “the people,” and the state is subservient to “the people”; and the second, that sovereignty lies with the state, that is supposed to reform a society that is marked by, often violent, hierarchies. Both these visions of sovereignty are encoded into India’s constitution, and any litigation around the freedom of religion must contend with these duelling visions of the relationship between the state and society. In engaging with these questions, Das Acevedo has produced an entertaining, theoretically lucid book that straddles the genres of academic writing and narrative nonfiction.
CULTIVATED ATTENTIVENESS TO THE FORM OF LAW
I am tempted to write here: “Just as Ayappan is an unusual deity born to two male gods, this book is born out of an unusual encounter between law and anthropology.” This is a bit too laboured. Let me, instead, taking a leaf from the book’s simplicity of language (more on that later), be direct: this book is not what one might expect from a standard anthropological account of law.
Ethnographies of Concepts
Most ethnographies of the law in India are focused on a particular place or a particular set of actors, or a particular type of dispute. (Take, for example, my own work on terrorism trials in Delhi (Suresh Reference Suresh2023), or Pratiksha Baxi’s (Reference Baxi2014) book on sexual assault trials in the Indian state of Gujarat.) In focusing on the long durée of the Sabarimala dispute, the book’s focus “is not a place, a practice or a set of people.” Rather, it is an ethnography of concepts underlying the dispute—secularism and sovereignty. The book provides narratives of how this constitutional idea of “secularism” is articulated in the dispute (through doctrinal tests associated with it, like the ‘Essential Practices Doctrine’) and around the dispute (such as in public discussions, protests and counter-protests about the case). It also seeks to understand the location of sovereignty in Indian political and legal thought: is it in the state, which aims to reform “the people”? Or does it lie with ‘the people’ to whom the state is subservient? In tracking these debates, the book gives us a ‘constitutional ethnography’ of the Sabarimala disputes. According to Scheppele (Reference Scheppele2004), from whom Das Acevedo borrows this idea, “[c]onstitutional ethnography is the study of the central legal elements of polities using methods that are capable of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape” (ibid., 395). Das Acevedo provides an account of how the idea of secularism—that is, the relationship between religion and the state—emerges in the political history of Kerala, in constitutional litigation around temple-entry, and in public discussions about the entry of women into the Sabarimala temple. With one foot in anthropology and the other in law, this mode of approaching law enables Das Acevedo to conceptualise law as “concretised bits of culture, floating in and out of self-consciously legal venues and demanding that we follow their unpredictable journeys off the written page in order to reveal their (often carefully hidden) assumptions” (Reference Das Acevedo2024, 171). In tracking the idea of secularism as it moves through and off the pages of legal texts, she shows how the idea of sovereignty is located alternatively and simultaneously in the people and the state.
For a book that is an anthropological account of law, where one might ask, are the thick descriptions made from direct observation and participation in ordinary life in specific milieus? How is this an ethnography? How is a discussion of the itineraries and technicalities of the Indian constitutional idea of secularism, an anthropology of law? Scheppele’s answer might be that this constitutes an ethnography as it tries to understand the life of an idea as it is articulated and moves through different institutional spaces (2004, p. 397). Das Acevedo, building on this, argues that this work would constitute an anthropology of law as it is the result of a “cultivated attentiveness” to the law. “Cultivated attentiveness is what distinguishes the anthropological endeavour,” Das Acevedo (Reference Das Acevedo2024, 168) writes. It is an approach that seeks to focus on things that are taken for granted, to understand their implicit foundations and to explore their workings. Das Acevedo argues that “cultivated attentiveness is anthropological without necessarily being ethnographic” (Das Acevedo Reference Das Acevedo2024, 169). For Das Acevedo, this cultivated attentiveness to law involves both attending to things that anthropologists of law have been concerned with (such as its aesthetics, institutions, material forms, performative practices, etc.), but also a close attention to what lawyers understand as law: judgments, statutory text, and administrative rules. This leads Das Acevedo, as a lawyer, to take seriously how lawyers understand the law, and, as an anthropologist, to ask what law tells us about society. (Ibid., xi). This idea—that the content of the law (that is, the lawyer’s law) is as important to understanding law as a social phenomenon (that is, anthropologist’s law)—structures the book and the narrative it contains. Joining other anthropological works that seek to understand the law on its own terms (Riles Reference Riles2005; Li Reference Li2023), Das Acevedo shows what a cultivated attentiveness to the law can achieve.
Humour and the Cultivated Attentiveness to Milieu
While the cultivated attentiveness to the law is something that is explicitly articulated, the intimacy with the milieu emerges in another way: through its humour. This is a remarkably funny book—funny for a non-academic book, let alone an academic one (a low bar, I know). Its sentences embed sarcasm, witticisms and humour in narrative and conceptual points. Take, for example, the assertion that the Sabarimala dispute throws light on broader, Indian understandings of secularism, and is therefore “no more an exclusive Keralite phenomenon than either communism or coconuts” (p. 17). She describes “Indian secularism” as being “every bit as secular as french fries are French” (p. 35). She describes judgments issued by India’s Supreme Court as violating “basic principles of authorial decency” (p. 67) as they are marked by lexical obesity, the absence of sentence structure, and inconsistent formatting. The judgment at the heart of this book is described as written with the “determination no less […] anaesthetizing than the biblical patriarchs” (p. 67). This form of writing, where larger theoretical points emerge through sarcasm, humour and wordplay, is itself a reflection of the ‘cultivated attentiveness’ to the location from which the Sabarimala dispute emerges: Kerala.
Satire as a form of political commentary has deep roots in Kerala’s public culture. A noted Malayali journalist and cartoonist claimed (in jest, perhaps) that “Kerala has the highest per capita output of cartoons among all the regions in India” (Abraham Reference Abraham1995, 62). In the 1700’s, around the same time (as Das Acevedo’s book tells us) that temples were being drawn into discourses of sovereignty in states that preceded what is now Kerala, the poet Kunchan Nambiar created a new form of satirical performances that formed a political critique that ridiculed kings and gods (Narayanan Reference Narayanan2001, 181). These forms of writing did not just serve to expose the functioning of power but also built intimacy with divinity and sovereignty through their mockery. It is this form of humour that Das Acevedo employs in her book, which is built upon an attentiveness and closeness to its subject matter. While I wonder what the limits are in employing humour, in this book, this mode of writing enables Das Acevedo to make deeper observations that may not have been possible had she adopted a more standard academic tone.
A New Form of Academic Writing
Anyone looking for the standard trappings of an academic book—a literature review, the coining of new concepts while heavily referencing older concepts—will be initially disappointed. (An explanation for their relative absence is relegated to Appendix A). The disappointment one may feel, however, quickly dissipates. The stripping away of the trappings of academic texts reveals a form of writing that privileges the narratives of the Sabarimala case, which is as entertaining as it is theoretically nuanced. Shorn of conceptual elaborations and in-text references, the book tells us (again, in the appendix) that its writing was guided by a “desire to follow the grade school maxim about showing, telling and the superiority of one over the other” (p. 166). This is coupled with the idea that complex ideas are best articulated through simple and direct language—something that Das Acevedo has written about elsewhere (2025).
THE ARGUMENT: DUELLING VISIONS OF SOVEREIGNTY
As I stated earlier, the argument of the book is that there are two competing visions of sovereignty in Indian constitutional law and public discourse. These competing visions of sovereignty play out in public debates and in the nuances of constitutional doctrine. With these competing imaginations of sovereignty playing out both in public protests and legal reasoning, the book blends legal stories with social and political ones. This idea that the “content of the law… is an equal partner in the analysis of social phenomena” (p. 9) informs both the content and form of the book.
Following anthropological norms of writing, the book starts by setting the scene. It introduces us to the imagination of a progressive politics of Kerala, an imagination that helps cover discriminatory practices that are endemic in the state. It also provides us with a brief history of how sovereignty, governance and divinity came to be intertwined in precolonial, colonial, and contemporary Kerala.
After providing a setting for the dispute, it charts key moments in the dispute. The book avoids a chronological ordering of events, as that would imply that certain events are predicated on those occurring before. The non chronological ordering of events helps the reader understand the events on their own terms. This also enables us to see conceptual linkages, rather than causation between events. Chapter 2 of the book starts the day after the Supreme Court’s 2018 judgment declaring the ban on women between 10 and 50 as unconstitutional. It charts the protests and counterprotests to the court’s judgment and looks at how the judgment was mobilised by various political parties in elections and public discussions of the judgment. It looks at how women were mobilised both in favour and against the judgment.
The book next takes us deep into the logic of the judgment, which was delivered against the waning public legitimacy of the Supreme Court. In looking at the three concurring and sole dissenting judgments, Chapter 3 takes us through the nuances of Indian constitutional jurisprudence regarding the relationship between the state and religion. There is no space here to discuss the determination of whether Ayyapan devotees were a separate religious denomination or the details of the Essential Religious Practices Doctrine. But what is important to note in this chapter is the imaginations that the majority and dissent have of the Indian state and society, and how these feed into legal reasoning. Premised on a series of oversimplifications, the chapter argues that the judgments collectively erode the balance between the twin visions of sovereignty set forth in India’s constitution.
Moving backwards in time, Chapter 4 takes us to 2006, when an actress, Jayamala, allegedly confessed to visiting the temple in 1987, when she was in her mid-twenties. The confession came about during a ritual to discern the deity’s wishes, during which the presiding priest found that a woman had entered the temple in the years before. Das Acevedo uses this scandal and the events around it to reveal the inner workings of the temple’s priestly bureaucracy, the scandals surrounding them, and their relationship to the government and the judiciary. In tracking the various investigations and court cases arising from the Jayamala case—even if those investigations and cases led nowhere—Das Acevedo argues that the incident set the stage for questions that would linger over the subsequent decisions about Sabarimala: when is a practice essential to a religious group? Who decides this? Lurking behind these questions are more fundamental ones about the relationship between religion and the state, and the location of sovereignty. While none of these questions was answered in the cases that arose from Jayamala’s purported entry into the temple, they presaged issues that would arise in subsequent cases about Sabarimala.
We are taken further back in time, as Chapter 5 takes us to a case about women’s entry into Sabarimala that preceded the ILYA judgment. Here, Das Acevedo discusses the case of Mahendran, a judgment issued by the Kerala High Court. The case is used to discuss how intertwined governmental structures are with temple administration. The financial management, the conduct of rituals and the appointment of priests are—to varying degrees—controlled by the government and the High Court. The Kerala High Court has a specific ‘temple bench’ to hear cases pertaining to temples in the state.
The Mahendran case arose from such a temple bench, when a complaint was made to the presiding judge of the bench that wives of VIPs were being given special treatment and were being allowed to enter the temple, in defiance of the custom. Unlike the ILYA judgment, which sought to bring practices at Sabarimala in line with constitutional principles, the Mahendran judgment was driven by a different logic: a colonial-like desire to impose the uniformity and regularity of rules upon an errant local institution. In doing so, the Mahendran judgment not only, for the first time, judicially recognised the ban on women between 10 and 50, but also extended it to a year-round ban, when the custom until then was to prohibit women during the pilgrimage months. While the Mahendran judgment has now been overruled by ILYA, Das Acevedo argues that it demonstrates how Indian law grapples with religion and how two imaginations of sovereignty are at play. While Mahendran seemingly restricts state authority (by effectively carving out an exception to constitutional mandates of equality), it expands state authority by the imposition of uniformity of rules. In doing so, the judgment reflects the tension between the two imaginations of sovereignty, where the state and people can hold each other at bay.
The last chapter takes us to a few years before the eventual ILYA decision. She focuses on two public campaigns led by women. One campaign, #HappyToBleed, was started in response to the head of the Kerala temple board, who said in an interview that women should wait until after their menstrual cycle to enter a temple. The second was a campaign by women in another state, where the priests conducted a purification ritual in a temple after women had reportedly entered this temple. The women who were a part of this campaign repeatedly attempted to enter this temple. These campaigns were very different. The first was waged largely online and was argued from a secular sensibility. The second was by Hindu housewives (who did not fit the stereotypes of feminist activists) who attempted to physically enter temples, which barred the entry of women, as an attempt to claim a space within Hinduism. As Das Acevedo argues, both these movements “spoke in a language that appealed to the law, and confronted opponents whose authority was grounded in law”. Both likened the ritual prohibitions on women to practices of caste untouchability - practices which had been outlawed by the constitution and subsequent legislation. These arguments made their way into the Supreme Court hearings of the ILYA case. Demonstrating, again, the porous boundaries between the courtroom and public discussions outside of it.
ACADEMIC WRITING AS CREATIVE NON-FICTION
The book represents a new way of doing socio-legal scholarship. The book seeks to bring together two ideas, that both the social life of the law and lawyers’ understanding of law—two ideas that have not often been brought together in socio-legal scholarship. It seems obvious now that these two things cannot be understood without one another, but it begs the question as to why this has been so difficult to do so far. The other thing that is novel is the mode of writing, which emphasises narrative and a crispness of prose. The genre of creative non-fiction that is adopted by this book is premised on the notion that concepts are best revealed through narrative. While some may bemoan the absence of obvious concept-building, what is gained from this is a theoretically rich and engaging story about the itinerary of the idea of sovereignty as it is articulated in the relationship between religion and law.
