Constitutional secularism, with its rhetoric of inclusivity, is rendered impotent here because the quest for purity thrives on the very refusal of the secular contract.
Published Aug 28, 2025 | 12:00 PM ⚊ Updated Aug 28, 2025 | 12:00 PM
Jasmin Jaffar and Banu Mushtaq.
Synopsis: Recently, South India witnessed two incidents that could be described as deliberate attempts to “other” people solely on the basis of their religious identity. At first glance, these may appear to be isolated controversies, but they reveal exclusionary practices that undermine India’s secular and democratic ideals.
The past week witnessed two unsettling episodes in South India that deserve deep contemplation and deliberation.
In Kerala, the Guruvayur temple authorities conducted a punyaham purification ritual after Jasmin Jaffar, a social media influencer, washed her feet in the temple pond, branding her act as “defilement.” In Karnataka, prominent Kannada writer and Booker Prize laureate Banu Mushtaq faced objections from political and religious groups, including a Union minister, when invited to inaugurate the state’s grand Dasara festival, because she was a Muslim.
At first glance, these may appear to be isolated controversies, one concerning ritual practice and the other concerning cultural representation. Yet, seen together, they expose a troubling pattern: The persistence of exclusionary customs that undermine the secular and democratic ideals South India once claimed as its strength, from Kerala’s 19th-century renaissance to Karnataka’s pluralist heritage.
The recent punyaham ritual performed at the Guruvayur temple, supported by the Devaswom Board, a quasi-governmental body, once again demonstrates that the concept of “purity” in religious practice is never truly about the body, though many reformers once assumed it to be so. Earlier, the distinction that structured purity and impurity was drawn along the lines of caste, upper-caste Hindus versus lower-caste Hindus or non-Hindus.
Now, it appears, the boundary has shifted but not disappeared; the operative divide is simply Hindu versus non-Hindu.
I recall an incident from nearly three decades ago that illustrates this unchanged logic. A colleague of mine from South Korea, who then enrolled in the population program at Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram (CDS), had converted from Buddhism to Hinduism. According to his wish, I accompanied him to the Padmanabha temple in Thiruvananthapuram.
However, the temple authorities refused him entry. They did not accept his own self-declaration that he was a Hindu, insisting that only I could proceed. We were compelled to return. Had we entered undetected, and his presence later been discovered, the temple would almost certainly have ordered “purification” rituals, just as they have now done for the social media influencer in Guruvayur.
In other words, the apparatus of ritual cleansing is not new — it is an entrenched mechanism that has simply found new targets.
The irony is unmistakable. During the Vaikom Satyagraha of the 1920s, when reformers demanded that Dalits and other subaltern communities be allowed to walk on the temple paths, they invoked a striking image: If dogs and cats could freely move along these roads, why should human beings be barred? A century later, the same trope returns with bitter resonance.
The Guruvayur pond already shelters turtles, fish, snakes, and lilies, yet the simple act of a human rinsing her legs is deemed polluting merely because she belongs to another religion.
The irony deepens when one recalls that Guruvayur itself was once the central plank of anti-caste agitation. In 1931–32, leaders such as K Kelappan, P Krishna Pillai, and AK Gopalan spearheaded the historic temple entry movement there, challenging entrenched hierarchies and demanding access for all devotees. That movement, part of a broader current of Kerala’s renaissance politics, marked Guruvayur as a site where the very meaning of religion and social equality was contested.
Now, to see the temple resort to “purification” rituals against a woman washing her feet is to witness a painful reversal of that legacy: a space once claimed in the name of equality is again fenced off by the logic of exclusion.
In Kerala, religious enthusiasts often recall the story of Sankara, the legendary Advaitin, humbled when Siva appeared before him in the guise of an outcaste. When Sankara asked the figure to move aside so as not to ‘pollute’ the holy man, the outcaste posed a searing question: Was it the body or the soul that should give way?
Yet, in practice, the Guruvayur Devaswom Board seems to be proclaiming loudly that religion is nothing beyond custom. They have reduced faith to a rigid set of procedures, incapable of generating meaning beyond their own repetition. Religion here survives only as a semiotics of the sacred — a language of signs and rituals emptied of spiritual significance.
All religions contain internal contradictions. However, the greatness of a living tradition lies in the ability to confront these contradictions by reconnecting ritual with theology and custom with philosophy. That task has been abdicated. Instead, temples cling to hollow symbols, failing to answer the basic question: when a woman washed her feet in the pond, was it her body or her soul that supposedly rendered the water “impure”?
The obvious truth is that there was no impurity at all — only the most natural of acts, a human being cleansing herself in water. If anything, it was an act of purification, not defilement.
Sree Narayana Guru, in his ‘Jati Lakshanam’, described otherness in terms of Inam (species):
“All that unite in embrace and yield progeny,
Share kinship in species; the rest remain distinct.”
This verse carries a profound message: humans, irrespective of caste or creed, remain one species. There can be no fundamental otherness among them. Sree Narayana Guru, himself from a subaltern caste, once remarked that he had to claim he received sannyasa from the British, invoking the story of Sambooka in the Ramayana to suggest that under the traditional Hindu order, he might have been annihilated for his “sin” of asceticism.
Yet, in this poem, he does something far more radical: He chooses the term Inam (species) rather than Jati. In doing so, he strikes at the very foundation of the caste system in India while simultaneously confronting the racial hierarchies of colonialism. By shifting the register from caste or community to species, Guru redefines human equality in a language that transcends both indigenous stratifications and imperial racism.
By this measure, the entire edifice of “pollution” and “purification” collapses, for it is a fiction produced by social hierarchy, not by any truth of human existence.
Here, Ambedkar’s critique of caste resonates sharply: Caste, he argued, survives only by manufacturing notions of purity and pollution, which in turn re-inscribe inequality into every aspect of social life. What is called “custom” is in fact an ideological system designed to enforce separation, exclusion, and hierarchy.
The Guruvayur punyaham thus exemplifies what Roland Barthes called the mythological function of signs: Ordinary acts (washing one’s feet) are transformed into coded rituals of pollution, where meaning is stripped from the act itself and replaced with the authority of custom.
In this sense, what we see is not religion as spirituality, but religion as the mere performance of a symbolic code. Mircea Eliade once noted that sacred symbols should open the believer to transcendence, but here they do the opposite — they imprison meaning within ritual repetition, incapable of reaching theological depth or ethical universality.
If religion cannot transcend its own customs, it collapses into a semiotics without spirit, a theatre of signs without life. The Devaswom, by clinging to this logic, demonstrates a failure to resolve internal contradictions by returning to its own theology.
In the story of Śaṅkara and Śiva, the question was whether it is the body or the soul that must step aside. By refusing even to consider this, the institution loudly proclaims: Only the body matters, only exclusion matters.
But the truth is simpler. A human being washed her feet in a pond. Nothing was defiled; water received her as it receives fish, frogs, and lilies. In that moment, she enacted purification, not pollution. To deny this is to deny our own shared Inam — our kinship as one species.
The uproar around Banu Mushtaq inaugurating the Mysuru Dasara festival bears a striking resemblance to the Guruvayur punyaham incident in Kerala. In both cases, the logic of exclusion is cloaked in the authority of “religion,” transforming civic and cultural spaces into sectarian battlegrounds.
Where Kerala’s temple authorities resort to notions of ritual impurity, Karnataka’s detractors raise questions of religious identity, implying that a Muslim woman cannot preside over what they see as a “Hindu” festival.
To understand the stakes, we must situate Mushtaq’s literary presence. Her acclaimed collection Heart Lamp, which recently won the International Booker Prize, portrays Muslim lives in India with a stark emphasis on patriarchy, violence, and the oppressive weight of tradition. These stories can — and indeed should — be criticised for their archaic view of Muslim society. They often bypass the complex ways modernity has reshaped Muslim lives in India, choosing instead to dwell on the dark residues of feudal and patriarchal structures.
The critique is not irrelevant, for patriarchy within Muslim communities, as in all communities, is a lived reality. Yet, Mushtaq’s lens does not offer balance; it tilts heavily toward exposing the darkest corners of gendered oppression.
Still, her position as both a woman and a Muslim lends her critique an undeniable credibility. The voices of insiders, especially those who risk ostracism by revealing uncomfortable truths, carry a weight that cannot be ignored. To dismiss Mushtaq’s authority to speak, or to strip her of her right to inaugurate a state cultural festival, is to silence precisely those voices that expand literature’s capacity to interrogate society.
This is where the controversy over Dasara becomes revealing. Mysuru’s Dasara is not simply a ritual for the goddess Chamundeshwari; it is also Karnataka’s Nāḍa Habba, a state festival that belongs to all citizens irrespective of faith. To argue that only a Hindu can inaugurate it is to confuse civic culture with ritual practice, just as Guruvayur confuses an act of human washing with cosmic pollution. Both logics collapse culture into custom, and democracy into sectarian control.
Mushtaq’s stories may be unsettling; they may even be unbalanced in their portrayal of Muslim life. Yet her literary stature, her ability to push uncomfortable truths into public visibility, mark her as one of the important writers of our time.
The controversy around her presence at Dasara is not, therefore, about literature’s limitations but about society’s refusal to uphold its own secular traditions. Karnataka has a long history of pluralism, and Dasara has often included Muslim administrators, artists, and poets as part of its public celebrations. To now question Mushtaq’s presence is to erase that heritage in favour of narrow religious gatekeeping.
If Kerala’s punyaham exposes religion reduced to a “semiotics of purity” without spirituality, Karnataka’s Dasara row reveals culture reduced to an identity test. Both instances remind us that democracy is sustained not by defending custom but by affirming the equal stature of all citizens. Mushtaq, whatever the critique of her stories, embodies that principle.
As a Muslim, as a woman, and as a major Kannada writer who has brought unprecedented global recognition to the language, her right to inaugurate Dasara is beyond dispute.
The issue, then, is not whether her stories are balanced portrayals of Muslim society, but whether we are balanced enough as a democracy to allow such a writer to stand at the forefront of our shared cultural life.
The meaning of secularism in India has been debated at length, shaped by histories of religion, colonialism and nationalism. Scholars have pointed to its layered and often paradoxical character: neither a strict separation of religion and state as in the West, nor an uncritical accommodation of all traditions. It has been described as “principled distance,” as tolerance, as pluralism, and as equal respect.
Yet, notwithstanding these nuanced arguments, secularism in India remains above all a constitutional guarantee and a political slogan, a safeguard against fundamentalisms and sectarian perspectives. Its core function is clear: To protect citizens from exclusion and discrimination justified in the name of religion.
The lessons of both Kerala and Karnataka are clear, and they speak to the deeper contradictions of our present. Importantly, these two episodes are neither unique to these states nor random occurrences within them. They form part of a wider pan-Indian conflict between tradition and democratic values, one that is not confined to a single region, nor restricted to a single tradition.
Across the country, we encounter the same tension: inherited customs that insist on exclusion, and modern democratic ideals that demand equality and inclusion.
Kerala has long cultivated a self-image rooted in its 19th- and early 20th-century renaissance, animated by figures such as Ayyankali, Sree Narayana Guru, Vakkam Moualavi and Poykayil Appachan. Each, in his own way, insisted that society must break out of the narrow enclosures of caste and sectarian difference if human dignity was to be affirmed.
Ayyankali challenged practices that denied Dalits even the most basic rights of mobility and education. Narayana Guru envisioned a radical egalitarianism, speaking in terms not of jāti but of Inam (species), thus reimagining equality beyond both caste and race. They had exposed how caste survived by reproducing notions of purity and pollution, urging a democratic reconstitution of social life.
Karnataka, too, has its pluralist exemplars: Dewan Mirza Ismail, who embodied cosmopolitan governance in Mysore, and poet KS Nisar Ahmed, who inaugurated Dasara in 2017 with verses that underscored its identity as a festival for all. To betray these legacies is to betray the very spirit of India’s renaissance and democracy.
If we are to remain true to that spirit, then neither temple ponds nor public festivals can be fenced off by purity codes. They must remain open spaces where our shared humanity, our shared Inam, is recognised and celebrated.
The punyaham is less a ritual than a signifier that endlessly defers its own meaning: “Purity” here is not about water, body, or soul but about the production of a boundary, the inscription of an identity that must continually purify itself against an imagined contaminant.
In this sense, in both the cases of Jasmin Jaffar and Banu Mushtaq, purity functions as the metanarrative of exclusion, a hyperreal performance that sustains the illusion of community precisely by disavowing the democratic promise of equality.
What we witness is not tradition but simulacrum, an apparatus that pretends to guard the sacred while in fact rehearsing power’s most archaic gesture: The drawing of a line between the “inside” and the “outside.”
Constitutional secularism, with its rhetoric of inclusivity, is rendered impotent here because the quest for purity thrives on the very refusal of the secular contract. Identity, therefore, emerges not as an emancipatory affirmation but as a compulsive return to the myth of difference, a recycling of symbolic violence disguised as custom.
(Views are personal. Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
