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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

How Ayyappa went from a local forest deity to Kerala’s most controversial God

The taboo on women’s entry was in practice by 1820, when the British lieutenants Ward and Conner wrote of the Sabarimala temple.

Over the next weeks, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court is hearing petitions that may lead to the most significant judgments on religious freedom in India. At the heart of all this is the question of a woman’s right to enter the temple of the god Ayyappa at Sabarimala. A 2018 Supreme Court order to enforce access provoked both a Right-wing backlash and progressive mobilisation around the issue.

However, the god has a longer history beyond this controversy. The focus on ‘essential’ religious practices in India forgets how traditions are constantly being reshaped and projected backwards—primarily by upper-caste voices. From ancient nature-spirits to Chola-era religious assimilation, from Dravidian activism in the 1950s to Ayyappa’s women-exclusive worship in a Coorg temple, here is the god’s epic story.

The origins of a Hill-God

Over the decades, several scholars have attempted to understand where and how the worship of Ayyappa began. While his temple at Sabarimala draws the most pilgrims (and is most visible in the national news cycle), forms of Ayyappa are worshipped in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka as well. In Coorg, Karnataka, he is worshipped as a hunter. In Tamil Nadu, he is known as Ayyanar, and is more of a village protector-god. It is in Kerala that his mythology is most integrated into the Puranic and Brahminical traditions—though even this seems to be relatively recent.

Like with many Indian gods, the evolution of Ayyappa was a back-and-forth process, tied to cultural and political currents across regions. According to historian Fred W Clothey, in his paper “Theogony and Power in South India”, the earliest evidence of a divinity called “Ayyan” dates to after the 3rd century CE. The Kalittokai, a compendium of early Tamil poems, mentions that Ayyan was revered by peasant chieftains called the Ay, active in the Western Ghats. Around the same time, the epic Silappadikaram mentions a hunter god known as Chattan and Ayyanar, though it’s not clear which—if any—of these figures came first.

Also read: Shaivites wiped out Jain influence in medieval Karnataka—200 years before Delhi Sultans

Convergence and divergence

By the 7th and 8th centuries, a deity known as Shastha, the Teacher, was mentioned in Tamil devotional literature, and early images of this god began to........

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