[In the wake of that ruling, a dozen women tried in October to climb a slippery path leading to the temple. None of them made it, as men screamed in their faces and hurled coconuts.]
By
Kai Schultz
KOCHI,
India — One morning this
month, Bindu Ammini stood at the base of a steep, forested trail in southern
India and looked up: She was a three-mile hike away from making history.
Two hours later, at 3:45 a.m., Ms. Ammini and
a friend became the first women to enter the Sabarimala Temple, a centuries-old
Hindu shrine, after India’s Supreme Court struck down a longstanding rule
preventing women of menstruating age from visiting.
In the wake of that ruling, a dozen women
tried in October to climb a slippery path leading to the temple. None of them
made it, as men screamed in their faces and hurled coconuts.
Video of Ms. Ammini’s journey on Jan. 2 shows
two women in long black gowns striding through a gilded archway. They maneuver
past mostly placid men. “Our visit has been very smooth,” Ms. Ammini, 40, says
to the camera.
A few hours later, the rest of India woke up.
Pandemonium followed.
Protesters in the state of Kerala, where the
shrine is, threw crude bombs at the police. Over 3,000 people were arrested. At
least one person was killed. Dozens more were injured.
Within hours of the women’s trip, a priest
had shut down the Sabarimala Temple to sprinkle water for a “purification
ritual,” evidence to some that the ban was rooted in a belief that menstruating
women were dirty.
For days this month, Ms. Ammini has been on
the move: bouncing from one safe house to the next, separated from her husband
and daughter and weighing the risks of returning home.
Still, in an interview near the city of
Kochi, she said the trip had been worth it. A lower-caste woman who had grown
up in grinding poverty, Ms. Ammini emphasized that her entering the temple
should not fall under the category of activism. All she was doing, she said,
was exercising a constitutional right to equality.
“We were not trying to start trouble,” she said.
“Our goal was only to visit the temple. For the next generation of women, this
is motivation.”
Every year, millions of people wait for hours
to climb the 18 gold-plated steps leading to the Sabarimala Temple, one of
Hinduism’s holiest shrines. For centuries, however, pilgrims say they have
observed a de facto bar against women between the ages of 10 and 50, thinking
that to allow menstruating women inside would disturb the temple’s celibate
deity, Lord Ayyappa.
Though the historical record suggests that
women had sporadically visited the temple for years, Kerala’s High Court made
the tradition a law in 1991, which was subsequently overturned by the Supreme
Court.
In the face of the ensuing protests, Kerala’s
governing Communist Party of India offered protection to women who wished to
visit the temple. But the police struggled to contain crowds blocking the
trail. Rosters of the women who had tried to visit the temple spread on social
media. They were marked as “Hindu haters,” Maoists, atheists, Muslims and
“Xtians.”
Ms. Ammini said she was unsurprised; many of
the protesters were Hindu nationalists. Fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling
had emboldened far-right groups to promote anti-women “Brahmanical interests,”
she said. These were issues she had thought about for most of her life.
Born to illiterate parents in Kerala, Ms.
Ammini described her childhood as perpetually unstable. Tired of beatings by
her husband, Ms. Ammini’s mother fled their small village with her young
children, taking menial jobs in hotels and on farms.
Growing up, Ms. Ammini was always a bit of a
rebel, bending rules that had restricted the lives of so many Indian women. She
fell for an upper caste boy. At 17, she joined a feminist group.
The risks of speaking out were underlined
during that period. Shortly after a local girl was raped and murdered, Ms.
Ammini said she and two other women marched into the office of a senior police
official and called for the arrest of the men responsible for the crime.
“They were siding with the criminals,” she
said.
Instead, a few days later, the police
arrested Ms. Ammini, she said, accusing her of attacking a man and knocking out
one of his teeth. After a night locked in the police station, she escaped by
jumping from the building’s first floor.
(Ms. Ammini said she was not convicted in the
“fake case.”)
The first in her family to attend college,
Ms. Ammini gravitated to leftist circles at the University of Calicut and
joined the Communist Party of India. She also met her future husband, K.V.
Hariharan, a party member, bonding with him over books by Pablo Neruda and
humanist writers.
“Even his love letters were serious,” Ms.
Ammini said.
With little money, Ms. Ammini wore a $2 sari
to her wedding in a building called “Freedom Fighters Hall.” A few years later,
she gave birth to a daughter, B.H. Olga, naming her for Olga Benário Prestes, a
German Communist who was killed in a Nazi gas chamber.
In her 20s and early 30s, Ms. Ammini earned a
law degree and climbed up the ranks of the Communist Party of India, weathering
splits and realignments. She was often one of the few women at meetings, an
observation that pressed on her. Fed up with the direction of the party, she
left politics eight years ago and settled into a position teaching law at
Kannur University in Kerala.
Then news of the Supreme Court’s verdict
captured her attention.
In December, Ms. Ammini joined a Facebook
group for women who were interested in visiting the temple. She connected with
Kanakadurga, 39, a government employee who came from a Hindu family that had
opposed the Supreme Court’s verdict. The women teamed up. Some 4,000 women had
registered similar intentions with the police.
On Dec. 24, they made a first attempt to
reach the temple, but retreated after a mob attacked police officers who were
escorting the women. Officials encouraged them to forget it and return home,
but Ms. Ammini refused.
“I decided I would start a hunger strike,”
she said. The police backed off.
On Jan. 1, inspired by news that several
million women had joined hands across Kerala to form a “women’s wall” for
equality, they decided to try again, recruiting a few police officers to
accompany them.
At 1:26 a.m. Ms. Ammini and Ms. Kanakadurga,
who uses one name, started the climb toward the temple. Near the mouth of the
complex, the women beelined for an entrance for V.I.P.s, seeing that the main
door was too clogged with people.
But inside, nobody confronted the women, Ms.
Ammini said. A pilgrim offered her water. They capped off a short visit by
praying to the deity. “The violent mob was out of that place,” she said. “No
devotee raised any voice against our journey to the shrine.”
On the way down, Ms. Ammini said she stopped
cooperating with the police, who tried to keep her head covered with a shawl.
The women lingered at stalls to buy rice and lemon juice.
“Some of the media said that the police used
us,” she said. “The fact is that the police were always the ones who were
afraid.”
In the days after the visit, other women
tried unsuccessfully to visit the shrine. This week, two women in men’s
clothing were turned back. Another woman angrily claimed that she was prevented
from going to the temple even after telling the police that she had no uterus.
Ms. Ammini burst out laughing when she heard this.
“We definitely have uteruses,” she said.
New challenges await the women. The Supreme
Court plans to consider review petitions, though lawyers do not expect a
reversal of the verdict. Earlier this week, after the women left a safe house,
Ms. Kanakadurga’s mother-in-law beat her so badly with a piece of wood, she said,
that she was hospitalized.
Ms. Ammini said she was realistic about her
safety, fretting about a recent ominous “silence” in Kerala. But the way
forward — “to serve the society, work with Dalits, women, for blacks” — had
never been plainer or more urgent, she said.
“They may attack me, they may kill me, but I
feel no fear,” she said. “I am struggling for existence.”
Follow Kai Schultz on Twitter: @Kai_Schultz.