As it does every day, dusk fell on Tuesday, October 13, 1925. But this Tuesday was different: an act of defiance was taking shape, one that would leave a lasting mark on India’s social landscape and the Indian independence movement. A devotee named Murugesan, recorded in the court proceedings also as Ethiraja Dasari, and a man who in today’s vocabulary would be called a Dalit, is remembered for daring to cross the stone thresholds of the Sri Padmavathi Ammavari Temple at Tiruchanoor, near Tirupati, in present-day Andhra Pradesh. According to former Union minister and Tirupati MP Chinta Mohan, who announced the centenary celebrations at a press conference in Hyderabad on September 21, 2026, he walked into the temple and lit a karpura harathi. The flame flickered, briefly illuminating the face of the goddess. But it also exposed how deeply the caste system was rooted in the psyche and society of colonial India. Murugesan was arrested, held in the Tirupati sub-jail and charged under Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, which punished the defiling of a place of worship with the intention of insulting the religion of any class of persons.For the conservative sections of the Madras Presidency, Murugesan’s prosecution was a routine intervention to preserve the ritual purity on which the graded hierarchy of caste rested. For the trajectory of civil rights movements in India, however, it was a radical leap. At the same time, the subcontinent’s attention was fixed on the Vaikom Satyagraha in neighbouring Travancore, where, as Mary Elizabeth King documents in her study of the movement, Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India (2015), activists had been waging a protracted struggle since March 1924 for the right of avarna communities, so-called lower castes and untouchables, to walk along the public roads that surround the Vaikom temple. While Vaikom’s focus was on the outer boundaries of public space, Murugesan’s quiet act at Tiruchanoor breached the temple itself! Today, a century later, as I remember and write about this milestone, there is a need to go beyond mere celebration of this heroic act. It calls for a critical examination of the lessons this event and the struggle taught; of how its courtroom strategy converged with the social upheavals of Western India; and of how those unfinished battles continue to shape the fight for institutional representation today.The classroom of the courtroom: Rajaji’s legal defenceMurugesan was tried and convicted by the lower court, and the local administrators expected the matter to end there. Instead, there was a twist. When his appeal came before V. Ramaswami Iyer, the Sub-Divisional Magistrate at Chittoor, in December 1925, the defence counsel, Munisami Naidu, sought the court’s permission for another lawyer to argue part of the case. That lawyer was Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, fondly known as “Rajaji.” The magistrate allowed him to appear even though he came dressed in khaddar rather than the prescribed court attire. This was itself remarkable. Rajaji had been one of the most successful lawyers in Salem. Still, he had given up his practice in response to Gandhi’s call to boycott the colonial courts during the Non-Cooperation Movement. Murugesan broke that vow. As he wrote to a friend, quoted by the historian Ramachandra Guha, the prosecution of this devout Dalit “took me out of the mechanical groove of doctrine.” The prosecution’s case rested on the conventional logic of untouchability: that the mere physical presence of an “untouchable” polluted the sacred space.Rajaji brought to the case a sharp grasp of law and the moral conviction of Gandhian constructive work in the 1920s. After the violence at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, the Congress Working Committee’s Bardoli resolution suspended mass civil disobedience. It shifted the movement towards building society’s moral strength, with the removal of untouchability as one of its central planks. Rajaji’s argument went to the heart of Section 295, which required an intention to insult a religion. He argued that Murugesan had intended no insult, and that in fact no one had suffered any. In effect, a devotee who enters a temple to worship cannot be said to insult the very faith he has come to worship. Notably, this was an argument made from within the faith: Rajaji was himself known as a devotee of the Lord of Tirupati, and later wrote the much-loved song Kurai Ondrum Illai in his praise. Reports in The Hindu in December 1925, later traced by the historian and parliamentarian Jairam Ramesh, record that the magistrate accepted this reasoning and set aside the conviction.Rajaji’s courtroom success should not be viewed as an isolated incident. The order of a sub-divisional magistrate did not bind other courts. Still, its moral and symbolic force was considerable: a colonial court had accepted that a Dalit’s act of worship was not a crime. It showed that legal reasoning and the Gandhian moral campaign against untouchability could work together, and that dismantling “untouchability” was not just a theological debate but a question of rights that could be defended in a court of law.The South-West axis of reformThe Tiruchanoor case cannot be seen as an isolated, localised Southern event. If it is, we miss the broader picture of Indian social reform, which ran parallel to the political movement and was soon energised by Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s zeal. Just two years after Murugesan’s acquittal, in 1927, the year of Ambedkar’s Mahad Satyagraha, Dalits in Amravati in Berar launched a satyagraha for entry into the Ambadevi temple. As the historian Eleanor Zelliot records in From Untouchable to Dalit (1992), it was led by Dr Panjabrao Deshmukh and G.A. Gawai. This was followed in March 1930 by the historic Kalaram Temple Satyagraha in Nashik, led by Dr Ambedkar together with the Dalit leader Bhaurao Gaikwad.While these temple entry movements shared similar goals, they were the manifestations of distinct philosophies. The Southern model under Gandhi and Rajaji used law and moral persuasion to push for reform from within the fold. Dr Ambedkar approached the temple gates with an entirely different conceptual weapon: the demand for equal citizenship for Dalits. For him, temple entry was not about spiritual validation. It was a political test of whether caste Hindus, and an independence movement fighting for political freedom, were ready to recognise Dalits as fully equal human beings. Speaking at Nashik on March 4, 1930, he made it clear that entering a temple would not, by itself, solve the problems of the depressed classes; it was a means of forcing that question into the open.These regional struggles, the legal and moral pressure in the South working alongside the radical citizenship demands in Western India, acted as a pincer movement against the graded hierarchical structures of caste. When the Constituent Assembly later met in New Delhi, the lessons of Vaikom, Tiruchanoor, Mahad, Amravati and Nashik informed its work. Article 17, adopted by the Assembly on November 29, 1948, abolished untouchability and forbade its practice in any form. Article 25, while guaranteeing freedom of religion, expressly empowers the State under clause (2)(b) to throw open Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus, the constitutional answer to the question Murugesan had posed at Tiruchanoor.Contemporary gates of exclusionToday, a century after Murugesan’s case, the legal right to enter temples has been decisively won, though in practice that right is still denied in many places. As a close observer of Indian democracy, I must acknowledge that exclusions based on gender and caste, which are intertwined, have not vanished. They have migrated to new arenas. The true “temple entry” struggles of 21st-century India are waged over access to democratic institutions: the institutions that command wealth and power and set the narrative. The cost of that exclusion is visible in the deaths by suicide of students from marginalised communities on our premier campuses, from Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad in 2016 to Darshan Solanki at IIT Bombay in 2023.To understand these new exclusions, one need only look across editorial desks, corporate boardrooms and, most critically, the higher judiciary. All these state and non-state institutions lack diversity and representation. The benches of the Supreme Court and the high courts do not represent India’s diverse population proportionately. In March 2025, the Union Law Minister informed the Rajya Sabha that of the 715 high court judges appointed since 2018, only 22 were from Scheduled Castes, 16 from Scheduled Tribes, 89 from Other Backward Classes, and 37 from minority communities. The government itself noted that the Constitution provides no reservation in these appointments. This is alarming, as it raises serious questions about the constitutional promise of equity and equality. In a modern republic built on the ideal Ambedkar set out in Annihilation of Caste (1936), of democracy as “a mode of associated living,” the courts, policy chambers and halls of state serve as the new inner sanctums. When the voices of the marginalised are missing from these high tables of power, it violates the true spirit of the Tiruchanoor acquittal.This October, Tirupati will mark the centenary of Murugesan’s act with celebrations announced by Chinta Mohan. This commemoration will serve as a living manifesto and a reminder that, while the courtroom battle of 1925 was won, the road towards substantive social democracy remains to be travelled. The gates have shifted today, but the struggle to enter continues.This article marks the centenary of the October 1925 Tiruchanoor temple entry.Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule writes on constitutional law. He is a John Dewey Emerging Scholar and a Creighton Peden Scholar in the USA. He tweets @Surajya_Raje_.