Kerala

Kerala is a strip of coast behind the Western Ghats, and almost everything unusual about its religious composition follows from the fact that it was easier to reach by sea than by land. Roman, Arab, Persian and Chinese traders came for pepper and cardamom, and traditions came with them earlier than they reached most of the interior.

The Saint Thomas Christians trace their church to the apostle Thomas, held to have landed on the coast in the first century. The historical claim is debated and the antiquity of the community is not: there were organised Christians on this coast using Syriac in worship long before European contact, in communion with the Church of the East rather than with Rome, and the attempt by the Portuguese to bring them under Latin authority in the sixteenth century split the community into branches that persist today. Jewish settlement at Kodungallur and later Kochi is similarly old and has now almost entirely emigrated to Israel. Islam arrived by the same route, through Arab trading families, giving the Mappila community a history distinct from the Islam of northern India.

Hindu practice in Kerala is likewise its own. Temple ritual follows Tantric manuals rather than the northern pattern, matrilineal inheritance shaped several communities, and the pilgrimage to Sabarimala draws millions each season along a route that requires weeks of preparatory austerity.

Two things in Kerala show religion working at opposite ends of the social scale.

Theyyam is a ritual performance of the northern districts in which a man of a low-caste community, prepared over days with fasting, elaborate costume and face painting, becomes the deity rather than representing it. In that state he is approached, consulted and given offerings by people of every caste, including those who would not otherwise share a space with him, and he pronounces on their affairs. The reversal is the point, and it is temporary: the performer returns to his ordinary position afterwards. The forms number in the hundreds, each with its own shrine, story and costume, and many commemorate a person killed unjustly.

At the other end sits the Sabarimala case. The shrine of Ayyappa on a forest hill had excluded women of menstruating age, a practice the temple defended as intrinsic to the deity's celibate character. In 2018 the Supreme Court of India held by a majority that the exclusion violated constitutional guarantees of equality and of religious freedom for the women concerned. The judgment was met with mass protest in the state, very few women were able to enter, and a larger bench was convened to reconsider the questions it raised.

Both cases turn on the same question in different forms: who is entitled to stand in front of a god.