In Search of the Unexpected: The Supreme Court, Menstruating Women and Untouchability

Presenter:

---

Abstract

This paper begins at Hannah Arendt’s bidding to bring forth the ‘unexpected’. Communities, religious sites and ideologies of difference are the breeding ground for this ‘unexpected’. Sabarimala’s community of believers disallowing menstruating women from temple entry has been held by the majority bench of the Supreme Court as amounting to discrimination/untouchability. This paper takes as its point of entry the event of two women entering the temple premises (Bindu and Kanakadurga) in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s verdict allowing women entry. The purification rituals conducted by the temple priests is central to this paper’s analysis. It explores the allegation of untouchability that has been pursued against the temple authorities to show the enchanted subject hood of the temple authorities, who cleansed the temple once the two women had left its premises. It pursues the stories of the two women who were ostracized by their communities on returning from Sabarimala. The discriminations against them since their entry into the temple premises will be examined viz-a -viz the text of the verdict that explores the question of untouchability as not restricted to a particular caste/community or class alone. The paper attempts to understand the nature of discriminatory practices launched on the bodies of women in the preservation of male virtue/celibacy. It hopes to expose how discrimination is narrativized/ spatialized and styilized through participant religious practices. Rituals and rites of purification associated with women’s bodies will be examined to raise the question regarding the recognition of gender discrimination as untouchability within religious practices.