Before India called itself secular, it had already learnt how to keep the sacred and the political apart. For nearly 25 years after Independence, the Constitution did not contain the word secular. Articles 25 and 26 guaranteed religious freedom and the right of every denomination to manage its own affairs. When the 42nd Amendment inserted the word during Emergency, it named an existing constitutional philosophy, not a licence for governments to become custodians of religious institutions. Somewhere along the way, that distinction blurred. Regulation became administration. The State ceased merely to uphold the law and began to act as manager.

A thousand years before India debated secularism, Tamil temple walls already recorded a different constitutional imagination. Chola inscriptions documented elections to temple committees, guild grants, irrigation accounts, endowments for schools, and penalties for misusing public funds.

The temple was never simply a place of worship. It was a civic institution — a treasury, granary, school, and the moral centre of its settlement. Kings endowed and protected them, but did not manage their daily affairs. The sacred and the political met without merging.

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