No mantra for change in Kerala’s temples

Every morning, in the small town of Paravur in south Kerala, 24-year-old PR Yadu Krishna walks past strolling groups of septuagenarians on his way to work. He gathers hibiscus and jasmines growing on the premises of the Kurungazhipu Bhagavati Temple before locking himself with his beloved deity. Around him, the idyllic town wakes up to chores, and some come to the temple for the morning pooja and communicate with their god through Yadu Krishna, who is the only santhi (priest) in this tiny temple. He also happens to be a Dalit.

Back in 2017, barely a month into his job at the Vallanjavattom Mahadeva Temple at Thiruvalla in Pathanamthitta, the Kerala Santhi Kshema Union (AKSKU), an organisation of brahmin priests in Kerala, had complained that Yadu Krishna was frequently late to the temple. It was later proved that it was a substitute who had been late when Yadu Krishna was on leave.

Brushing off this episode as a misunderstanding, the young Dalit priest says, “I haven’t faced any discrimination either from the temple staff or the devotees. Instead people have been supportive.”

It’s two years since the Kerala government appointed five Dalit priests in a handful of government-owned temples. They were among the 35 new priests recruited from various non-Brahmin castes. Job security and perks aside, have the appointment of these priests brought about collective change?

Kerala is a state that boasts a transgender policy, shares deities with Dalits and rewrote history to ensure menstruating women were not prevented from visiting the celibate god at Sabarimala. But during this period, it has also witnessed two brutal ‘honour killings’, the lynching of a tribesman even as a mob clicked selfies, and prevented Dalits from participating in certain rituals during the annual festival at a temple run by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kannur.

At a time when landmark decisions and nightmarish realities coexist, what are the makings of a successful milestone?

It took the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) — an autonomous temple board under the government that runs 1,252 temples including the Sabarimala Ayyapan Temple, and employs over 2,500 — nearly half a century to attempt to set things right. The first time the TDB recruited priests from backward communities, as early as 1970, it met with severe resistance. It then redesignated the appointed priests as clerks. But in 2016, when it decided to adhere to the quota system calling for 32 per cent caste reservation in all appointments, the vociferous applause all around took it by surprise. Yadu Krishna, Pradeep Kumar KM, Manoj PC, Jeevan G and Sumesh PS were appointed as priests across central Kerala in October 2017. In a society that still uses religion to justify injustice, does this overdue move call for a celebration? After embracing stardom and controversies alike, and being promoted as permanent part-timers, has anything really changed for these priests?

Work is worship: Manoj PC (left) and PR Yadu Krishna (centre) were among the five Dalit priests appointed to government-run temples in Kerala in 2017

Born to a farmworker, Yadu Krishna remembers hiding behind the pillars of a temple near his home in Chalakkudy to observe the priest conducting the morning prayer. Fascinated by the rituals and other religious observances, the young boy desired to become a priest. As a first step he gave up meat and fish at the age of eight and started off by helping collect flowers, cleaning the temple premises and washing utensils. He became a disciple of Anirudhan Thanthri, who runs the Gurudev Vaidik Tantra Peet to train aspiring priests.

Yadu Krishna began performing rituals from the age of 15, while training under Thanthri for 10 years. He appeared for the TDB’s recruitment exam in 2016 and ranked first among the Dalit candidates and fourth in the final list of appointments.

His life remains largely unchanged after a brief brush with fame, when he was touted as a living example of social inclusiveness. These days, besides calls from a few young and aspiring priests, mostly from Tiruvalla, where he was first posted, there is very little to remind him that he was part of a history-making decision. “Nothing much has changed for me. I used to get many calls from the media. After all, I am the first from my community to get a government job as a priest. But these days I am treated like any regular temple priest,” says Yadu Krishna, who is now a permanent part-time employee at the Bhagavathi temple in Paravur. His annual pay will increase slightly once he’s made a full-time employee, but he is unsure whether he wants to stay on. He intends to pursue astrology and learn complex pooja kriyas to expand his repertoire of priestly duties.

The connecting ‘thread’

What separates Yadu Krishna from the woes of his ancestral past, really, is a piece of thread. It is worth wondering how the devotees would react if their priest wasn’t wearing a poonool . In medieval times, Upanayana — a ceremony wherein a young boy is given the sacred thread and his guru initiates him towards vedic knowledge and Brahmin rituals — was restricted to the Brahmins. Today, if members of another caste have to be purified through Upanayana to wear the casteist poonool , does that mean creating an upper echelon within the Dalit/backward community? If so, is it a regressive way of social inclusion?

Jeevan G: who works at a Maha Vishnu temple in Kaduthuruthy, says a wider acceptance of Dalit priests will take time

Jeevan G has been wearing the sacred thread for 10 years. “For a priest to even gargle and spit there are guidelines. While the sacred thread can easily be misinterpreted as a caste costume, the truth is that a poojari (priest) doesn’t need a poonool . But I’m from the Pulaya caste, the Dravidian race, and for me to perform vedic rituals I have to convert to the Arya race, which is why the poonool ,” he explains. Jeevan is the only priest in a small Maha Vishnu Temple in Kaduthuruthy, Kottayam. For him the toughest part of the job lies in taking leave. “Soon after I got this job my mother passed away. Even at such a traumatic moment, I had to find a replacement poojari at short notice. Being the only priest it’s my responsibility to see that the temple functions every single day.”

Even though this seemingly reformist and revolutionary move appears to be sudden, the groundwork had been laid centuries ago. The first recorded account of protest was in 1803 when 200 Ezhava men — a community traditionally of toddy tappers and agricultural labourers — tried to make their way to a Siva temple in erstwhile Travancore. They were threatened by a dozen armed Nair warriors and, in the pandemonium, three Ezhava men drowned in the adjacent Dalawa pond. Decades later, Sree Narayana Guru and poet Kumaran Asan also were prohibited from using the temple road. Sree Narayana Guru, a spiritual leader and social reformer who was born an Ezhava, found an answer to the many injustices his people faced in the 19th-century caste system in a piece of rock.

Prayers and protests: Social reformer K on a fast in 1931 to demand entry for so-called untouchables to the Guruvayoor temple. Beside him is communist leader AK Gopalan (centre)

After consecrating the rock in Aruvippuram in 1888, he called it the “Ezhava Siva” to give his community a deity of their own, as a way to lure them away from the Hindu temples that spurned and often humiliated them. Nearly 90 temples for the Ezhava caste came into being during Sree Narayana Guru’s lifetime, and many more were built later. The Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP), which was founded in 1903, gave Dalit men such as Jeevan access to equality in worship but are now panned for being mere imitations of Hindu temples that have little to do with their core philosophy of ‘One caste, one religion, one God for all’.

“The organisation allowed Dalit men to learn about temple rituals. I worked at an SNDP temple for quite some time before joining the Devaswom board on a contract basis. I would have continued at the SNDP temple but the pay was a meagre ₹6,000,” says Jeevan.

The 28-year-old priest recounts an instance from two years ago when he was assigned special duty to distribute offerings during the annual temple festival of the Vaikom Mahadeva Kshetram. However, his name was suspiciously missing from a second list for inner sanctum duties. “A couple of friends took to Facebook and the Devaswom and Tourism minister Kadakampally [Surendran] himself made sure that the issue was sorted and I was back on the list,” he recounts. He reasons that such huge changes will take time before gaining wider acceptance. “Barring one or two such incidents, people are generally supportive. I have even accompanied the Guruvayoor and Sabarimala melsanthis (head priests) in poojas many a time,” he says with pride. Jeevan is hoping to be appointed full-time in a year’s time.

Thus far and no more

Sunny Kapikad, a Dalit writer-activist, explains why members of his community hesitate to voice the prejudices they face. “They are worried it would affect their newfound opportunity. If they openly admit to discrimination it would reflect poorly on their religion.” So they dissolve their caste identity in their religion, and some even turn into its advocate, he says.

“Would a Dalit priest ever be invited to a brahmin’s home for performing any ritual?” Kapikad asks. “The risk of being labelled a caste crusader ensures he doesn’t even bring up the issue in any public forum. This is a new trend, Dalits becoming advocates of Hinduism.”

Kapikad has time and again ridiculed these appointments as a bluff. “The malaise of caste system is deep-rooted and the decision to hire priests from backward communities wouldn’t create any social integration. The Dalit appointments have been made to temples of lesser significance while retaining the inherent hierarchical structures in the brahminical social order,” he adds.

Some believe while the frameworks are being reconstructed one brick at a time, these are merely chinks in a deeply unequal society. As a community, Dalits never wanted to become temple priests, argues Kapikad. But now that they are embracing a new identity, shouldn’t the Brahmins give up their belief that they constitute the mouth of Purusha, the primordial being, while shudras are born from the feet. If you extrapolate American writer James Baldwin’s view on race and identity — namely that interracial drama has not only created a new black man, but also a new white man — then shouldn’t a society that has created a new Dalit create a new Brahmin too?

Akshaya Pillai is an independent journalist in Thiruvananthapuram