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Deepa Das Acevedo — The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India
68 Plays1 year ago
Today’s guest is Deepa Das Acevedo, Associate Professor of Law at Emory University. In this episode, we talk about her forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, “The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India.” The book tells the complex and ongoing story of the Sabarimala Temple in Kerala, India —–a site of heated dispute over gender equality, religious freedom, and religion-state relations. Drawing on more than a decade’s worth of research, the book delves into the intersection of anthropology and law, providing innovative solutions that effectively navigate the intricate legal landscape of the temple, while also contextualizing it within the larger framework of Indian and constitutional law.
In this conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including the background and historical importance of the Sabarimala Temple, why recent disputes can be considered a turning point for the Indian judiciary, and the relationship between anthropology and law.
- Deepa Das Acevedo faculty page: https://law.emory.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/acevedo-profile.html
- Deepa Das Acevedo website: https://www.deepadasacevedo.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Judicial Transformation in India
00:00:03
Speaker
The Shabrimullah dispute, even though it concerns this odd, unusual temple in an odd, unusual state, actually is caught up in and reflects and drives a story about judicial transformation and challenges writ large.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:25
Speaker
Welcome to the Interactions Podcast, brought to you by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Now in its 40th year, our center explores the interactions of law and religion through research and scholarship, teaching and training, and public programs. This season of the podcast explores recent scholarship in law and religion from members of the center community. This podcast is produced by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and in collaboration with CanopyForum.org.
Deepa Das Acevedo's Forthcoming Book
00:00:53
Speaker
Today's guest is Deepa Das Acevedo, Associate Professor of Law at Emory University. In this episode, we talk about our forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, The Battle for Shabri Mela, Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India. This book tells the complex and ongoing story of the Shabri Mela Temple in Kerala, India, a site of heated dispute over gender equality, religious freedom, and religion-state relations.
00:01:19
Speaker
Drawing on more than decades worth of research, the book delves into the intersection of anthropology and law, providing innovative solutions that effectively navigate the intricate legal landscape of the temple, while also contextualizing it within the larger framework of Indian and constitutional law. In this conversation, we cover a lot of ground, including the background and historical importance of the Shabri Mela Temple, why recent disputes can be considered a turning point for the Indian judiciary, and the relationship between anthropology and law.
00:01:49
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the Interactions Podcast. My name is Whitney Barth, the executive director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory and the Charlotte McDaniel Scholar. My name is John Bernah, a sociologist and director of digital scholarship at the Center. Today, we're joined by Dr.
Shabri Mela Temple's Significance
00:02:08
Speaker
Deepa Das Asavado, associate professor of law at Emory University. Deepa, thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me.
00:02:16
Speaker
To start, I wonder if you could briefly tell our listeners a bit about yourself and your professional work.
00:02:22
Speaker
Sure, so I am both trained in law and anthropology. I did my PhD in sociocultural anthropology and then decided that I really was too interested in the law after all and went to law school. I have two primary areas of research and teaching. I do a lot of work in the labor and employment law space and that's where a lot of my
00:02:47
Speaker
law school instruction is located, but I have a long-standing interest in comparative constitutional law with a particular focus on religion-state relations in India. Great. Thank you so much for being with us this afternoon. And so you have this new book forthcoming from Oxford University Press titled The Battle for Shabri Mala, Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India. And this book is about the long-simmering dispute over women's entry into the Shabri Mala Temple in Kerala, India.
00:03:17
Speaker
Can you briefly describe for our listeners the significance of the temple, the context for that dispute, and how you came to study all of it? Yeah, so on the one hand, Shabri Mala is a very unusual temple, and maybe both the temple and the location that it's in would make you think that it wouldn't be the site of one of India's most contentious religious freedom disputes.
00:03:43
Speaker
But on the other hand, some of the things that make Shabri Mala so unique and even idiosyncratic really set up the circumstances for this dispute to unfold.
Temple Practices and Gender Dispute
00:03:54
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So on the one hand, it is an extremely wealthy institution. Shabri Mala is probably in the top three richest religious institutions in India, which means that it's one of the richest religious institutions around the world.
00:04:10
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It's a large, now national, formerly, largely local or regional pilgrimage site. So there are folks coming from all over the country to this one temple in this relatively minor state at least once a year.
00:04:26
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Partly because it's a difficult-to-access pilgrimage site, but also due to other factors. Shabimeleh is a religiously and socially prestigious temple. There's a lot of spiritual and social clout to be had in saying that you made the trek to Shabimeleh.
00:04:47
Speaker
And then there are a couple of things that are specific to the deity and to the temple's practices that make it particularly unusual. So Shabbi Mala has always allowed men of all faiths, not just Hindus,
00:05:03
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to enter the temple's premises.
Anthropology and Law in Research
00:05:05
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And this is pretty out of the ordinary in southern India and particularly in the part of Kerala where Shepri Mala is located. It's not common for non-Hindus to be granted access inside Hindu temples.
00:05:19
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It's also unusual because the presiding deity of the temple, Ayyappan, is a male deity who is born of two male deities, conceived while one of them assumed a female form.
00:05:35
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in many renditions of the temple's origin story, has promised to stay in a state of lifelong celibate bachelorhood in the service of his devotees. So there's a lot of things that kind of come together to make Shabrimullah particularly unusual and therefore create the conditions of possibility for this kind of dispute to happen.
00:06:02
Speaker
I came to the temple and to the women's entry dispute kind of circuitously. So I've always been interested in secular governance and religion-state relations.
00:06:16
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have long viewed, pretty much since I started writing my undergraduate thesis, temples as still important, prominent sites of socioeconomic production and exchange. Temple access in India has been one of those key definitional issues for kind of political belonging in the way that
00:06:40
Speaker
at other times in India or in the US, we think of access to schools or public accommodations as being important for establishing political belonging.
Emory's Interdisciplinary Approach
00:06:52
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I started exploring a lot of these issues with dual sites, temples in both Kerala and the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu.
00:07:01
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But the logistical requirements of conducting fieldwork and actually gathering enough data to be able to write a dissertation in reasonably good time meant that I gradually narrowed and narrowed. And Shabri Mala just happened to provide me with a range of issues and approaches to understanding religion-state relations in India that made it kind of the temple that I ultimately settled on in terms of my focus.
00:07:28
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So the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory is an interdisciplinary center. We have colleagues from law, history, religion, philosophy, sociology. So one thing that we talk about a lot is the aims and objectives of different disciplines, especially the use of language or jargon, depending on which side you're on, and how that relates to inclusivity.
00:07:51
Speaker
And in the first appendix of your book, you talk about the choice to leave most of this academic terminology and disciplinary history out of the main text, partly to foreground the story of the temple, but also partly to just make the book more readable. But I wonder if you could tell us a bit about what it means to be situated between anthropology and law. How does each tradition inform the story that you tell?
00:08:18
Speaker
One of the interesting things about both anthropology and law, and particularly about their nexus, legal anthropology, which is the sub-discipline that I primarily locate myself in, is that both of them are interested in asking variants of the question, what is law? Anthropologists who study law and politics have been asking this, what is law question?
00:08:43
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for decades. They have obsessively considered how is this thing that we call law distinct from something we might understand as custom or as norms. And if there isn't any real difference between law and these other things, these other forms of social control,
00:09:02
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then why would we study it separately under the banner of something we call the anthropology of law or legal anthropology?
Exploring 'What is Law?' with Anthropology
00:09:10
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The sub-discipline basically wrote itself into non-existence in the 70s and 80s, but now I think that there are a lot of often dual credentialed scholars like myself who are interested in picking up that conversation. And I think it's also worth acknowledging that anthropology is a discipline writ large.
00:09:31
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It carries a lot of baggage with respect to law as a form of social control and systemic oppression, colonial and otherwise. There's an association with doctrinal law as being excessively formulaic and divorced from everyday life and subjective experiences.
00:09:55
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So, I think that as a discipline, even though anthropology has often asked, what is law? It's been a long time since anthropologists have taken legal doctrine or concepts seriously, even though many of our interlocutors do. On the other side, lawyers, I think, regularly ask, we often ask our students in class, what is the law?
00:10:21
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the principle, the doctrine, the statute on this particular question. What's the answer? What's the fix? Often, how do I make it better? There's often this prescriptive element in asking that question that exists among lawyers that doesn't necessarily exist among social scientists. How do I use the law, however I've identified it, to my or my client's advantage, hopefully the latter, right?
00:10:49
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For me, I think what has been really interesting is to use language that I borrow from Kaushik Sundarajan and that I discuss in the appendix to think about the intersection of law and anthropology
00:11:06
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via the lens of cultivated attentiveness. I say in the appendix that cultivated attentiveness is what makes anthropology, quote, surprising, insightful, novel, useful, meaningful, close quote. And it has this effect because
00:11:24
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The anthropologist just attends to things differently, not necessarily better or with greater perspicacity, but just with a different eye. This is a kind of estrangement that I think is fundamental to the discipline. You see yourself seeing others and processes around you.
00:11:46
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So for me, I think bringing these two things together and understanding of and suppose respect for the content of law as lawyers and lay persons might see it with an understanding that there may not always be a prescriptive fix at the end of it all or there may not need to be one for worthwhile, insightful analysis to take place.
00:12:16
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That's how I hope to bring anthropology and law together.
Writing Challenges and Accessibility
00:12:22
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I think that's really powerful as a vision for the book and how that plays out and how you structure the book and talk about the research. This book is an impressive result of over a decade of research that included interviews and archival work and observation. I'm wondering, what were some of the challenges you encountered in your research or in writing this book?
00:12:45
Speaker
So I'm not sure if it counts as a challenge, but it's certainly something that I've carried as something of a chip on my shoulder, which is that I've never actually been to Shabri Mila. Whenever I present this material, whether it's the book or some of the previous articles that the book builds off of, I inevitably get the question,
00:13:05
Speaker
So have you been to the temple? And I have well-reasoned, grounded responses that usually have something to do with the fact that this isn't a temple ethnography but an ethnography of law. But the fact of the matter is, at some point, if the issue of women's access were legally clarified,
00:13:27
Speaker
I would have wanted to go. Even if it is now at this point, I'm not sure that I will, but I might send my husband, which is something that I've always been tempted to do. Maybe a bit more seriously, one of the biggest challenges with this project has been
00:13:44
Speaker
Finding a way for ethnographic field work and anthropological analysis, not only of that field work, but with regards to the archival materials or the doctrinal materials that the book engages with, finding a way for these social science methods that I've been trained in to have something interesting to say about legal doctrine, kind of traditional legal material because constitutional law, after all,
00:14:14
Speaker
is core legal doctrinal material. And particularly one of the challenges that I faced is finding a way for this ethnographic and anthropological approach to say something interesting about legal doctrine in a way that both lawyers and anthropologists and other social scientists might find interesting and worthwhile.
00:14:39
Speaker
I'm not sure that I've done it, but the process of trying to do it was challenging enough. And the last thing I think that comes to mind is the process of writing both
00:14:55
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law things and anthropology things without resorting to the sort of technical language and conceptual and terminological inside baseball that I think has a way of making both fields seem off-putting to outsiders. That has definitely been a real challenge because I have drunk the Kool-Aid. I study law. I study anthropology.
00:15:21
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And I do that because I think they're both fascinating and they tell us amazing, powerful, valuable things about the human condition, but I think they often tell us those things in ways that make other people not want to listen.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yeah, we've talked about some of the challenges. I wonder, were there any surprises that you encountered in the process of writing the book? That it was fun to write a book. And honestly, that it was still fun to write anything about Shabimullah. I mean, I've been working on this topic for over a decade. I've written about most stages of the dispute. I've written about a lot of other things with respect to Shabimullah and temple management in Kerala.
00:16:04
Speaker
I thought I was so done with the whole thing, but I've never told it as a unitary holistic story. And I had never written a monograph before I did this. I'm currently working on two other projects, but this was the first time I had written a monograph. And books are stylistically and structurally really liberating. It's awesome.
00:16:30
Speaker
That's great, that's great.
Indian Judiciary's Transformative Moment
00:16:34
Speaker
So turning a little bit to the law part, the legal part, at one point toward the beginning of the book, you call this dispute, and maybe you could tell us a little bit about the legal dispute itself, but you call this dispute something of a turning point for the Indian judiciary, and I was hoping you could explain for us what you meant by that.
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah, so the kind of dispute in a nutshell is that women between the ages of 10 and 50 have traditionally not been allowed to enter the temple's premises on the grounds that the presence of fertile women, not just menstruating women, but fertile women is offensive to Ayyubin, the presiding deity at Shabrimullah.
00:17:12
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There was a public interest petition that was brought by a couple of lawyers in New Delhi way back in 2006. That petition kind of went through pleadings over and over again for
00:17:27
Speaker
goodness, something like nine years, almost ten years, until various events led the Supreme Court to start holding hearings in a meaningful way. And ultimately, we got this opinion, Indian Young Lawyers Association versus the State of Kerala in 2018. The reason I say that that IYLA opinion that came out in 2018 is
00:17:51
Speaker
something of a turning point for the Indian judiciary. And it's because I think it shows how the Shabri Mala dispute, even though it concerns this odd, unusual temple in an odd, unusual state, actually is caught up in and reflects and drives a story about judicial transformation and challenges writ large.
00:18:20
Speaker
The Indian judiciary may be even more so than the American judiciary is kind of dominated conceptually and legally by the Supreme Court, and to a lesser extent, the higher courts. The Supreme Court has been encountering really hard times for a while now. There have been a bunch of scandals involving multiple recent chief justices of India.
00:18:44
Speaker
There are accusations that the Supreme Court's jurisprudence has become sharply more pro-government and maybe now more socially conservative, which might actually be the more severe criticism of the court in the context of India's legal community.
00:19:06
Speaker
rampant docket overload, despite the fact that Indian judges work far more days in the year than their American counterparts, has meant that the Supreme Court is fundamentally less accessible to the average Indian, and there is a strong view that
00:19:24
Speaker
in the presence of legislative and executive officials who are often either facing political stresses or corruption charges or bureaucratic inefficiencies. The court has really been an avenue for good governance and a way for the Indian citizenry to make themselves heard in a democratic system.
00:19:52
Speaker
The Shabri Mala dispute kind of figures into a lot of the challenges that the Supreme Court and by extension the Indian judiciary writ large has been facing and I think actually contributes to those tensions as well. So for example, typically chief justices of India issue landmark opinions that are usually progressive decisions.
00:20:22
Speaker
a couple of days before they retire. It's kind of like exiting with a bang, right? And since they control the docket and the roster of the Supreme Court, it's well within their ability to do this, right?
00:20:37
Speaker
But this opinion, IYLA, which was very much part of the former Chief Justice Deepak Mishra's exit strategy, elicited massive resistance. It was not an unambiguous triumph of progressive jurisprudence, which is maybe what it was envisioned as being.
00:20:57
Speaker
And it never really, practically speaking, got implemented, you know. There was no point at which women between the ages of 10 and 50 had meaningful access to Shabri Mila notwithstanding what the Supreme Court said. The nationally powerful Hindu Right views IYLA, I think, as largely offensive to Hinduism.
00:21:21
Speaker
because it is a judicial opinion that tells a temple it may not continue a practice that has been observed perfectly or otherwise for decades. I don't think there's any dispute on that score, right? After all of this,
00:21:37
Speaker
the Supreme Court agreed to a review petition. And a review petition is a difficult thing to explain. It's difficult to explain to Indian lawyers. It's definitely difficult to explain to lawyers who are trained in the U.S. But it's not an appeal. It's essentially a request that the Supreme Court, which is kind of the court of ultimate decision-making authority, especially in constitutional matters,
00:22:04
Speaker
that it either confess itself mistaken as to its own interpretation of law or that there has been some significant factual or developmental occurrence that has come up since the opinion was issued.
00:22:24
Speaker
or there's some other satisfactory reason why a considered opinion of the Supreme Court of India should be changed or undone in some way. So the Supreme Court agrees to hold these review petition hearings.
00:22:41
Speaker
And even more interestingly and perhaps unsettlingly, it agrees to revisit and most probably overturn an almost 70-year-old precedent and judicial doctrine that is kind of a mainstay of Indian religious freedom jurisprudence and is meant to restrain state authority over religious life, whether or not it's actually been deployed to those ends in the recent past.
00:23:10
Speaker
the developments regarding that essential religious practices doctrine and honestly involving the IYLA opinion more broadly, I think are very much emblematic of and exacerbate the turmoil and the transitions that are currently facing the Supreme Court and the Indian judicial system at large.
00:23:40
Speaker
Deepa, I've been thinking a lot. In a lot of social science, writers will set up an intricate descriptive account of their topic. And then in the conclusion, they'll offer a hasty normative argument or a fix to the problem they've been describing. And at one point in the book, you compare this practice to rushing through a beautiful meal to get to the very tiny dessert at the end, which I think is a great allegory.
00:24:04
Speaker
One of the takeaways from your book is that there were always many desserts or fixes to choose from. There's no path dependency towards a given outcome. And you say specifically that both outcomes of the IYLO case have ample constitutional foundation. Can you tell us how you think about this indeterminacy in the story of Shabri Mala?
00:24:29
Speaker
Yeah, so I think part of my resistance towards offering a descriptive account and then offering a kind of normative or prescriptive fix at the end of it is caught up in my determination to neither be an anthropologist nor a lawyer. And I'm sure there are plenty of readers who would agree that I am, in fact, neither one of these things.
00:24:55
Speaker
But I think often anthropologists who study law will have a great deal to say about how people imagine their interactions with legal institutions or practices, but be very averse to acknowledging that there are normative implications to the things that they're uncovering. Conversely, I think often legal scholars will
00:25:22
Speaker
skip ahead to the part that offers a to-do list, which is understandable given the enormous impact that these regulations or principles can have on our lives, but often tends to shortchange that intermediate part where we really dive into the lived experiences and the competing perspectives
00:25:46
Speaker
that inform or should inform what any ultimate normative outcome is going to be. So part of my approach is simply a reflection of me trying to be two things or neither of two things at the same time.
00:26:05
Speaker
It's also, though, I think the outgrowth of a long-standing substantive argument that I've been trying to make about Indian constitutional law and kind of liberal democratic politics in India.
00:26:22
Speaker
So, comparative constitutional law scholars often tend to speak of constitutional frameworks as being either militant or acquiescent vis-a-vis the societies or the social orders that they're meant to provide structure for. The American Constitution is widely considered to be rather status quo, preservationist, acquiescent.
00:26:47
Speaker
And, you know, there are obviously both benefits and negative consequences to this. India's constitution is also widely believed to be one of these things, but it's believed to be transformational or kind of militant to really authorize the state to step in and to act with a kind of agency and independence
00:27:13
Speaker
vis-a-vis citizens, vis-a-vis society to say, this is what India should be. This is how Indians should be. And I think there's ample grounds in the Constitution and actually in legislation and in decades of case law to say that both of these visions exist simultaneously.
Writing for a Broad Audience
00:27:35
Speaker
Both of them were meant to exist simultaneously.
00:27:38
Speaker
And so the way that I originally came to the Shabri Miller dispute and the women's entry dispute in particular was by trying to reconcile seemingly conflicting actions or perspectives that I saw in case law and judicial approaches
00:27:55
Speaker
to understanding how courts, as an arm of the state, were supposed to interact with individuals when it comes to these fundamental questions of individual state relationships. Great. Thank you for that. Sandeep, just one final question for you. Who is this book for?
00:28:18
Speaker
It's for my mom. So it's dedicated to both my mother and my husband, but I explicitly wrote it with my mother in mind. And I often find that it's most fun and
00:28:32
Speaker
very helpful to write with a specific real human being in mind. It gives you a kind of cabining device to imagine what your reader knows or doesn't know, what they're interested in, what they might want you to explain further or might want you to just, you know, be quiet and move along as expeditiously as possible.
00:28:55
Speaker
And obviously that reader that you are imagining is never going to represent all of the potential readers of your book, but there's no such thing as a truly representative reader, right? There is at the same time a reader who allows you to tell the story in the most
00:29:18
Speaker
reasonable, accessible, engaging way that you are capable of telling it. And for this story, for me, that person was my mother. Nonfiction actually has a wide readership in India. And so I can see a lot of people who are broadly similar to my mom, an educated non-specialist. She's actually a professor, but not of law or religion or anthropology or South Asia.
00:29:48
Speaker
An educated layperson who understands a lot of the events that I'm talking about, has kind of seen headlines flash at them, but has never read up extensively on those events and is kind of curious. You know, what would that person get? What would they not get and want you to explain a little bit more to them?
00:30:13
Speaker
I wrote it for my mom, but I would like to think that there are a lot of people like my mom, not only in India but elsewhere, who could pick up the book and
00:30:27
Speaker
find lots of points where they get either the jokes or the references or the material and then there are many points at which they don't understand but they're glad to have it discussed in a way that is accessible but also, you know, does them respect as intelligent interlocutors.
00:30:51
Speaker
Deepa, I'm not an anthropologist, but my sense of anthropology is that there's a lot of detail. There's a sort of anthropology lives in detail, and I'm just wondering, you know, how you navigated sort of the expectations of the discipline with your readability.
00:31:09
Speaker
a tendency in anthropology as a discipline to dismiss books that are too readable, that
00:31:23
Speaker
speak the jargon, don't allude to the right intellectual ancestors, and I went out of my way to not do either of those things precisely because I want to be a serious anthropologist, because I want to pick up threads and topics and events that matter to people and talk about them
00:31:53
Speaker
in a way that people might want to read and be able to understand. I think that anthropology as a discipline once did this with great success.
00:32:05
Speaker
It's been a while. And so in a sense, this book is an effort on my part or call on my part for anthropologists to let themselves be intelligible without fear of being underestimated. Deepa, thank you so much for your time. It was great to have you on the show.
00:32:34
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me, John and Whitney. It was really lovely.
Conclusion and Resources
00:32:38
Speaker
It was our pleasure. Deepa's book, The Battle for Shabri Mullah, is out soon from Oxford University Press. We'll include a link in the show notes, as well as a link to Deepa's faculty page and a link to the recent event that we had hosting a book panel discussion about the book here at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion. We'd like to thank everyone for listening to this episode of the Interactions podcast and look forward to next time.