The Temple Entry Proclamation of Travancore

The proclamation is one paragraph of operative text. Professing our deep conviction of the truth and validity of our religion, believing that it is based on divine guidance and on all comprehending toleration, and knowing that in its practice it has throughout the centuries adapted itself to the needs of changing times, the Maharaja declares that there should be no restriction placed on any Hindu by birth or religion on entering or worshipping at temples controlled by the state.

The exclusion it removed was not a matter of temple etiquette. In Travancore the barred communities were the numerical majority of Hindus, and the prohibition extended in places to the roads approaching a temple, so that a man of the wrong caste could not walk past the gate, let alone through it. Untouchability in Kerala had been enforced by distance rules that specified how many feet a person of each community had to keep from a Nambudiri brahmin.

The proclamation applied to temples under government control, which in Travancore meant a very large number, since the Devaswom administration held the major shrines. Privately controlled temples were not covered, and some remained closed. Its immediate implementation was rapid: the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple at the capital, the state deity's own shrine, was opened within days.

The proclamation was granted, but it was not given freely. It closed twenty years of organised pressure.

The Vaikom satyagraha of 1924 and 1925 contested the roads rather than the sanctum: volunteers, including Ezhavas, Nairs and Christians, occupied the approaches to the Vaikom Mahadeva temple to establish a right of passage. It drew Periyar E. V. Ramasamy from Madras, brought Gandhi to negotiate in 1925, and ended with three of the four roads opened. The Guruvayur satyagraha of 1931 and 1932, led by K. Kelappan, targeted a temple directly and included a fast; a referendum of caste Hindus in the locality returned a majority for entry, and the temple's authorities still refused.

Behind the campaigns lay a longer social movement. Narayana Guru, an Ezhava ascetic who consecrated a Shiva image at Aruvippuram in 1888 with the announcement that it was an Ezhava Shiva, had spent forty years arguing that ritual exclusion had no basis in the tradition it claimed. His organisation, the SNDP Yogam, supplied much of the movement's membership.

The state also had reasons of its own. Conversion to Christianity and to Islam among excluded communities was substantial and was noticed. Sir C. P. Ramaswami Iyer, the Dewan, is generally credited with persuading the palace that the proclamation was the safer course.