Temple entry movements in India
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Vaikom satyagraha (1924)
Arjun Sengupta, March 21, 2024: The Indian Express
Running for over 600 days, the Vaikom satyagraha was the first among many temple entry movements in India. Amidst the national movement, it foregrounded the issue of untouchability and caste oppression.
The princely state of Travancore had a “feudal, militaristic, and ruthless system of custom-ridden government,” cultural anthropologist A Aiyappan wrote in Social Revolution in a Kerala Village: A Study in Culture (1965). The idea of caste pollution worked not only on the basis of touch but also sight — lower castes were forbidden entry to any “pure” place, such as temples and the roads surrounding them.
The second half of the 19th century saw several social and political developments ushering in unprecedented social change. First, Christian missionaries converted large sections of lower castes seeking to escape the clutches of caste oppression. Second, the reign of Maharaja Ayilyam Thirunal Rama Varma (1860-80) saw many progressive reforms, such as universal free primary education — including for the lower castes.
By the dawn of the 20th century, “there had begun to emerge among caste Hindus, Christians and even avarna Hindus, especially Ezhavas, a significant educated elite,” historian Robin Jeffrey wrote. (‘Temple-Entry Movement in Travancore, 1860-1940’: Social Scientist, 1976)
While religion and custom remained pervasive, the absolute material and intellectual deprivations of lower castes did not continue. The Ezhavas, in particular, emerged as “the most educated and organised untouchable community in Travancore”, historian Mary Elizabeth King wrote in Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India (2015).
But government jobs were still reserved for upper castes — in 1918, caste Hindus, a numerical minority, held 3,800 out of 4,000 jobs in the state’s revenue department. This meant that education itself did not act as a means of socio-economic advancement.
Also, while a small Ezhava elite had started to emerge, in many cases, the ritual discrimination, overrode material and educational progress. Take for instance the story of Aloommootil Channar, an Ezhava, and one of the few people in Travancore to own a car in the early 20th century. Whenever the automobile reached a road where the Ezhavas were not allowed to pass, Channar had to get out of his vehicle and take a detour on foot.
Road to agitation
The issue of temple entry was first raised by Ezhava leader T K Madhavan in a 1917 editorial in his paper Deshabhimani. Inspired by the success of Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement, by 1920, he began to advocate for more direct methods. That year, he himself went beyond the restrictive notice boards on a road near the Vaikom temple.
But upper-caste counter-agitations across Travancore made any progress difficult — and the Maharaja, fearful of caste Hindu backlash, shied away from reforms.
It was the entry of the Indian National Congress into the picture that changed the dynamics. Madhavan met Gandhi in 1921, and secured the Mahatma’s support for a mass agitation to enter temples. In the 1923 session of the INC in Kakinada, a resolution was passed by the Kerala Provincial Congress Committee to take up anti-untouchability as a key issue. This was followed by a massive public messaging campaign and a movement to open Hindu temples and all public roads to avarnas. Vaikom, with its revered Shiva temple, was chosen as the location for the very first satyagraha.
The Vaikom satyagraha
Madhavan and other leaders took the strategic decision to initially focus on opening up the four roads around the temple — not the temple itself — to avarnas. Early morning on March 30, 1924, “a Nair, an Ezhava and a Pulayu, dressed in Khaddar uniforms and garlanded, and followed by a crowd of thousands, attempted to use the roads”, Jeffrey wrote.
They were promptly stopped and arrested. So, the next morning, another three men entered the forbidden roads and courted arrest. This went on every day — until the police stopped making arrests on April 10 and barricaded the whole area instead.
From then through September, protesters sat in front of the barricades, fasting and singing patriotic songs. Leaders such as Periyar, who was arrested multiple times, and C Rajagopalachari came to Vaikom to offer support and lead the protesters. At the same time, counter-agitations raged on, and the satyagrahis often faced violence and intimidation from caste Hindus.
In August, 1924, the Maharaja of Travancore died, following which, the young Maharani Regent, Queen Sethulakshmi Bai, released all prisoners. But when a large group of protesters marched to the royal palace in Trivandrum, she refused to allow all castes access to temples.
In March 1925, Gandhi was finally able to iron out a compromise: three out of the four roads surrounding the temples were opened up for everyone, but the fourth (eastern) road was kept reserved for brahmins. This was finally implemented in November 1925, when the government completed diversionary roads that could be used by the low castes “without polluting the temple”. The last satyagrahi was recalled from Vaikom on November 23, 1925.
Legacy and aftermath
The Vaikom satyagraha was a remarkable movement, which sustained itself for over 600 days, amidst hostile social forces, police crackdowns, and one of the worst floods in the town’s history in 1924. The satyagraha also saw previously unseen unity across caste lines, which was crucial for its continuing mobilisation.
But the final compromise disappointed many. Famously, Periyar, who had envisioned a far more spectacular outcome, fell out with Gandhi over the issue.
In November 1936, the Maharaja of Travancore signed the historic Temple Entry Proclamation which removed the age-old ban on the entry of marginalised castes into the temples of the state. This, along with the demonstration of Gandhian methods of civil disobedience as effective tools of protest, was the great success of the Vaikom satyagraha. As King wrote: “Despite its shortcomings … the Vykom satyagraha brought untouchability, unapproachability, and unseeability to the forefront of political issues in India.”
West Bengal
Gidheswar temple, 2025
Adithya Reddy, March 19, 2025: The Indian Express
Gandhi did not call for a state-imposed language policy. In 1918, he issued an appeal for six Tamil and Telugu youths to come forward and learn Hindi and propagate the language in the Madras Presidency
The Dravidian movement, right from its initial phase, found a link between Hindi and North India on the one hand and Sanskrit and Brahminism on the other. In other non-Hindi-speaking states that were formed after linguistic agitations, the anti-Hindi sentiment never took off because this link was not clearly established. In 1917, long before the anti-Hindi agitations began to break out, Mahatma Gandhi said, “It is not correct to say that in Madras one cannot do without English. I have successfully used Hindi there for all my work. In the trains I have heard Madrasi passengers speaking to other passengers in Hindi. Besides, the Muslims of Madras know enough Hindi to use it sufficiently well.”
The prevalence of Urdu among Tamil Muslims and the basic Hindi skills of communities making a livelihood near pilgrimage sites and in trade centres meant that Hindi could not be an “alien language”. The Dravidian movement seemed to succeed in making it appear alien to most Tamils. That may change with time.
The public response evoked by the DMK government’s protests against the National Education Policy, 2020 (NEP) is nothing compared to the mass anti-Hindi protests earlier. Even in 1986, the anti-Navodaya school agitations led to 21 self-immolations and 20,000 arrests. The DMK has picked the wrong policy in a desperate bid to revive that sentiment. After all, the NEP does not even mention Hindi in its language policy. It only talks of the benefits of multilingualism. But the centrepiece of the major anti-Hindi agitation in the late 1960s was also multilingualism. It is reported that Tamil Nadu had the highest enrolment of students with the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha among southern states in recent times. While peoples’ attitudes may be changing, the Dravidian resistance is very much alive.
Gandhi’s dream
In 1903, Gandhi brought out Indian Opinion in South Africa to uphold the rights of Indians. Notably, it used to be published in four languages — Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati and English. Some of his closest followers and associates in the Natal Satyagraha were Tamils. His fondness and respect for the language and people of Tamil Nadu need no mention. After returning to India, he gave a call for making Hindi the national language. In later years, he may have conceded that status to Hindustani. The demand for a national language did not only emanate as a “Hindutva” ploy for uniformity. In fact, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Jana Sangh, was highly cautious while endorsing Hindi as the official language in the Constituent Assembly. While decentralised polity meant everything to him, he also wanted a national language. It is easy to be misled to see this as a contradiction in Gandhi. Both the pragmatic and philosophical sides of Gandhi were at play. A village-centred and diverse society can rise up to the challenges of modern times only if its members shed parochial tendencies and develop a sense of brotherhood across local communities. During Gandhi’s time, the challenge was carrying forward the freedom struggle. He saw the learning of another language as a sacrifice that the Tamils had to make for the nation and was equally clear that this sacrifice should not come at any cost to the growth of Tamil itself. One can also see in Gandhi’s stand the same absence of linguistic antagonism as when Swati Thirunal wrote songs in Hindi and Raja Serfoji composed operas in Tamil.
It is also important to note that Gandhi did not call for a state-imposed language policy. In 1918, he issued an appeal for six Tamil and Telugu youths to come forward and learn Hindi and propagate the language in the Madras Presidency. This led to the formation of the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, an organisation of volunteers, which has endured violent attacks and hostile politics over the decades.
Ideas for reform
If one looks at the debates surrounding language policy in the past decades, one finds interesting suggestions that do not seem to attract attention nowadays. It was not only the Congress leaders of Tamil Nadu who backed the cause of a national language. Nationalist leader Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar also wanted Hindustani as the national language but with Roman script. The rationale for this combination is explained by scholar and former Union education minister V K R V Rao in an article: “English as a language will continue to be learnt even if it is not the official language; the Roman script will therefore have to be learnt by a growing number of the people. If Hindi could also be learnt in the Roman script and official documents and other material made available in this script, one major obstacle to the learning of Hindi by the non-Hindi regions would have been removed.” He added, “Moreover the country has had considerable experience in teaching Hindi through the Roman script in its defence forces and by all accounts no difficulty has been experienced in the process.”
Another suggestion is found in the Constitution itself, in one of those many articles that have remained in obscurity. Article 351 directs the Union to develop Hindi “…by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule.” Rao explains that for this, “what we need is a corps of Hindi writers whose mother tongue is not Hindi and who are equally proficient in both their own languages and in Hindi”. Through their efforts, the idioms and styles of other languages, including Tamil, can be introduced into Hindi. Initiatives like this cannot happen without substantial effort by the government.
The government should concentrate on studying and implementing such suggestions, where feasible, through autonomous bodies like the Kendriya Hindi Sansthan, and encourage more voluntary activities for the spread of Hindi. The change has to happen through consent for divisive politics to take a back seat. One only has to remember Mookerjee’s chiding of the pro-Hindi lobby in the Constituent Assembly: “If the protagonists of Hindi will pardon me for saying so, had they not been perhaps so aggressive in their demands and enforcement of Hindi, they would have got whatever they wanted, perhaps more than what they expected, by spontaneous and willing cooperation of the entire population of India.”
The writer is a lawyer in the Madras High Court
