Guruvayur

Guruvayur's importance is out of proportion to its size, because the campaign fought there in the 1930s changed the law of temple entry in India, and its limits are visible in the rule that still governs the door.

The satyagraha

In the early 1930s the Guruvayur Satyagraha, led by K. Kelappan with A. K. Gopalan among the volunteers, demanded entry for the communities then classed as untouchable, who were excluded not only from the temple but from the roads around it.

A volunteer was beaten severely enough to make the campaign a national cause. Gandhi supported it and corresponded about it at length. Kelappan fasted.

The proclamation

The Temple Entry Proclamation of Travancore, issued on 12 November 1936, opened that state's temples to all Hindus regardless of caste. It was the first such measure anywhere in India, and Gandhi called it a modern miracle.

It did not cover Guruvayur, which lay in Malabar rather than Travancore, under direct British administration. Guruvayur was opened to all Hindus only on 2 June 1947, eleven years later and weeks before independence.

What the law did and did not do

The Constitution of India, and the temple-entry legislation that followed, abolished exclusion by caste from Hindu religious institutions. That was a genuine and hard-won change, and Guruvayur is one of the places it was won.

It left exclusion by religion exactly where it found it.

That is the line still drawn at Guruvayur's gate: any Hindu may enter regardless of caste, and no non-Hindu may enter at all. There is no declaration procedure of the kind Tirupati offers.

The bar rests on custom rather than on any enabling statute, and its legal basis has been questioned on precisely that ground, a restriction with no positive legal instrument behind it, operating inside a board that is itself a creature of statute and supervised by the Kerala government.

Cases have arisen involving people of Indian descent, people married into Hindu families, and public figures whose religion was disputed at the gate. They have not changed the rule.

The dress code

Also enforced, and also the board's: men uncover the upper body and wear a mundu; women wear a sari or equivalent. It is applied to everyone, and it is the restriction visitors most often encounter first.

Guruvayur's own name records a legend about how its main image supposedly got there, carried by two figures rather than built on site.

A name that tells the story

Tradition holds that the temple's four-armed image of Krishna was originally worshipped by Krishna's own father, Vasudeva, and was later rescued and brought to its present location by the sage Guru and the wind god Vayu, whose combined names, Guru and Vayu, gave the town and temple their name, a founding account built directly into the place's name rather than preserved only as separate legend.

An elephant with a reputation

The temple maintains a large sanctuary, Guruvayur Anakotta, housing dozens of elephants used in temple processions and ceremonies. One elephant, Guruvayur Keshavan, became especially renowned in the twentieth century for behaviour devotees interpreted as unusually devout and gentle, and is still remembered and commemorated by the temple community well after his death.

Entry opened, one line at a time

The temple was among the sites affected by Kerala's mid-twentieth century temple-entry reforms opening access to previously excluded lower-caste Hindus, a change that this entry's companion article addresses in more direct legal and social detail, distinct from the devotional and cultural material covered here.