Should the Sabarimala temple in Kerala be permitted to bar women of child-bearing age from entry? That is perhaps the simplest phrasing of the dispute at the heart of Deepa Das Acevedo’s wide-ranging and surprisingly entertaining book. Page after page, though, with the engrossing momentum of narrative nonfiction, Das Acevedo complicates that simplicity, approaching the issue from different social positions, historical periods and legal provisions to reveal the many intricately imbricated stories needed to understand – which is not to say resolve – the conflict.
Das Acevedo adeptly situates us right in the midst of ongoing controversy. She introduces readers to the peculiarities of Kerala’s political history and sociological scene, setting up some key themes running through the book as a whole: multiplicity and internal tension. The story then springs from vantage to vantage, giving us in each chapter a view from a different perspective on the question of women’s entry to Sabarimala – and the way it implicates gender and religion in India. We learn about the Indian Supreme Court’s 2018 decision that women must be allowed entry and the reactions it attracted – from adherents continuing to forcibly keep women out to reverberations in national elections. Having shown how the Court’s judgment galvanized disparate social reactions, Das Acevedo takes us through each of the opinions in the case. Although this move from an active and dispersed social scene to the four corners of some long and complex judicial writings could have been jarring, Das Acevedo’s lively writing makes it feel natural, as does her way of treating the judges who wrote the opinions as themselves social actors with histories, backgrounds, preferences, and styles. Guiding us through the legal analysis also allows her to introduce some of the key principles surrounding the law of religion in India, including constitutional provisions that – as constitutional provisions so often do – can point in different directions at once. Das Acevedo’s commentary keeps readers alert to the choices that judges are making and the other options available – to the way, that is, that law on the books is itself a social product.
Das Acevedo then follows the conflict over women’s temple entry backwards in time, locating ever deeper roots and different perspectives from which to analyze the situation and interpret the legal products it yields. One chapter focuses on what is legally speaking a minor incident in the dispute: one woman’s confession of a purported visit to Sabarimala. The veracity of that confession has been questioned, and it never resulted in a legal judgment, but Das Acevedo shows how the controversy over the confession is key to understanding not just the women’s entry issue but the dynamism of the legal principles around it. Das Acevedo then harks back to an even older judicial opinion, which upheld the women’s entry ban. Having explained what was to come in its wake, she puts us in a position to appreciate the decision’s rationales, its weaknesses, and its enduring relevance. The book then goes back to the future, discussing the social (and social media) movements that coalesced around the question of women’s entry as the latest iteration of the conflict raged in the courts. This final chapter also gives Das Acevedo an opportunity to consider the changing dynamics of religion law in India, the relationship (and partial homology) between exclusions based on gender and those based on caste, and the complexity of the interaction between judges’ understandings of religion and religious practitioners’ understandings of themselves. She shows how women’s temple entry has become a site for reworking the relation of religion to law more generally.
The book’s multi-perspectival, non-chronological arrangement helps Das Acevedo’s project of avoiding teleological implications: none of these events, none of these legal decisions, had to happen as they did. None of them can tell the whole story. And none provide closure on the questions they raise: like any true political contestation, the conversation keeps going even as participants claim to bring it to a close. Das Acevedo’s writing style contributes here as well. Even as she meticulously explains the reasoning of a judicial opinion, for instance, funny little asides and ironic references – to the judge’s other writings or professional biography, to events or ideas not acknowledged in the opinion itself – break us out of the frame, reminding us that there are always other perspectives, alternative points of view, speaking through and around the text.
An anthropologist as well as a legal scholar, Das Acevedo weaves her two disciplines together to show off the best of each. (A brief appendix addresses the relationship directly.) She treats formal law – constitutional provisions, statutes, judicial decisions – seriously, skillfully explaining legal provisions and the norms of their interpretation. But she does not treat formal law as the final word. She explores, for instance, how judicial opinions follow certain norms but also play with them, stretch them. Fitting into genre conventions can involve using genre conventions to make a point: choosing what to foreground and what to downplay, finding places to nudge at the boundaries. Legal discourse often presents itself as a closed system of logical reasoning. Das Acevedo illuminates how that feeling of semi-autonomy is produced through writing practices, choices in style and substance, and decisions not to acknowledge surrounding social realities. And she treats the law itself as a social actor – that is, both affecting the world around and affected by it. The legal texts here are part of the story, not the end of it: they matter, but in the context of other things that matter too. The Battle for Sabarimala not only analyzes an important issue that continues to animate controversy. By showing how law is simultaneously a social construct and a social force, it also exemplifies a way to present law in society.
