Temple as the Site of Struggle: Social Reform, Religious Symbols and the Politics of Nationalism in Kerala

Copyright © 2013 M. R. Manmathan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The temple entry movement of the 1920s and ’30s in Kerala, South India, has become a landmark in the history of social reform and nationalist movements for its uniqueness and sweeping success. Popular his-tory has presented the episode as an integral part of the Nationalist Movement and the Gandhian Con-structive Programme mainly because the temple-entry issue was endorsed by the Kerala State Congress Committee and the agitation was concluded under its auspices. But this popular and idealist impression of the movement has been challenged from various quarters. It is pointed out that there have been very little attempts at linking the event with the advancing civic rights movement led by the lower caste people for freedom of worship and social equality which was gaining a radical turn by the 20s and 30s; the pressure exerted by the untouchables to achieve civic freedom even at the cost of renouncing Hinduism had created an alarming situation which no caste-Hindu could ignore. Even more surprising is the absence of aca-demic attempts to link the agitation with the Malabar Rebellion of 1921; in fact the Rebellion had chal-lenged the very survival of the Congress organization in Kerala; this factor forced them to retreat from th