Many of the bright, articulate and informed women I know are from Kerala. It is shocking therefore that so many women from the state are protesting against the entry of women of menstruating age into the Sabarimala temple. They quote tradition, ritualistic practices, the apparent negative energy in a woman’s unfulfilled womb (a lower chakra) that sanction the ban. I am both puzzled and angry.Tradition is not a high-security prison. It is a form of collective memory, sometimes documented, but often, as in India, not. As we all know, memory is notoriously unreliable. It is definitely malleable. Even if tradition has to be respected, norms do change. The Bhagavatam tells us that every yuga has its own religious, spiritual practices that may be followed in one epoch but do not apply to another. So then?Also Read: Sabarimala Pilgrimage: Women Stopped From Travelling to the Temple, Protests ContinueIf women between puberty and menopause are banned from entering the temple because menstrual blood is considered by some to be impure, then do men not have excretory functions? Are they not polluting agents too? Perhaps, if men were endowed with a uterus, the rule of entry into a temple may have been different.It is ironic that Ayyappa is sitting atop Sabarimala. Sabari was a great devotee of Sri Rama, and a woman. It may be argued that she is always depicted as an elderly person, but she was not always old, was she? Certainly, her devotion started early, through years of menstruation and it is believed that her faith was nurtured by her guru, the great Rishi Matanga. So then?Ayyappa, Sabarimala’s deity, is regarded as being in deep meditation. He has left the delights and the temptations of the plains and has established himself in a place of isolation for his tapasya. If that is what gives him extraordinary spiritual power, should we not respect his need for privacy, men and women? Only those with deep devotion, those who have practised austerity and self-discipline for long, sustained periods and not just for forty days, should be able to approach him. These could be both men and women of all ages. Allow women the freedom to walk a difficult, spiritual path; allow them that choice not when they are too immature to understand or so aged and possibly infirm that they do not have that choice at all.The Kerala I knew gifted me an expanse of mind, permitted me an irreverence and yet asked me to venerate all faiths, respect all aspects of the created world. Women of Kerala, if you allow yourselves to be subjugated, to draw prison bars across yourselves, your daughters and granddaughters will not forgive you.Neither will that great mystic Sabari.Poile Sengupta is a novelist, poet, playwright and short fiction writer, for both children and adults.
