In Kerala, a battle is brewing over sacred threads and bare chests

medium117019094In Kerala, where political battles are often fought with characteristic intensity, few would have expected shirtlessness to become a flashpoint. Yet, in a land where the male midriff tends to evoke more mirth than admiration, welcome to the battle of the bulge — moobs have suddenly become the newest frontier in the culture wars.The spark that lit the fire was a recent comment by Swami Satchidananda, the head of Sivagiri Mutt. The saffron-clad seer declared that the age-old requirement for men to remove upper garments before entering temples should be scrapped. His reason? The practice originally started, he claimed, as a way to identify and honour Brahmins who wore the sacred thread.Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan promptly seconded the Swami’s view, setting off a furious fracas. Hindu groups decried it as an assault on tradition. The opposition Congress and BJP accused Vijayan’s communist government of minority appeasement, challenging him to comment on dress codes in other religions. Social media warriors waded into the wardrobe war with mocking memes about male modesty.If all this seems like much ado about (lack of) clothing, well, it is and it isn’t. On one level, the bareness brouhaha exposes the breathtaking ability of India’s politicians to make a mountain out of a molehill in their endless pursuit of votes. The local polls later this year are seen as a dress rehearsal for state elections next year, and no party wants to cede even an inch of ideological or electoral ground.But peel back the political posturing, and the controversy offers a glimpse into the complex web of caste and community politics that underlies Kerala’s social fabric. The state’s powerful community organisations, from the Nair Service Society of Nairs to the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam of Ezhavas to various religious groups, are flexing their muscles, aligning with or distancing from political parties based on their own agendas. medium117019153For the Sivagiri Mutt, which holds sway over the Ezhava community, the Swami’s statement was a way of asserting its role in shaping religious matters. It was also a calculated move to align with Pinarayi Vijayan’s Left politics and its social reform platform. Interestingly, Vijayan’s swift endorsement of the Swami’s view, delivered through a carefully worded written speech, suggests that this was a coordinated strategy rather than an off-the-cuff response.The reaction from other community organisations was swift. Just two days after Swami Satchidananda’s comments, NSS general secretary G Sukumaran Nair hit back, portraying the proposal as an assault on Hindu traditions, a line of argument that echoed the heated rhetoric of the Sabarimala protests.The NSS also strategically featured Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala as a speaker, a move that could boost his prospects of becoming the party’s chief ministerial face in the next elections. Though the invite was planned in advance, Chennithala’s presence at the event took on added significance in light of the brewing temple row.For the Left, the controversy presents both an opportunity and a challenge. By siding with the Swami, Vijayan is trying to woo back the Ezhavas, a major voting bloc that has drifted towards the BJP in recent years. At the same time, he is aiming to prevent the Sangh Parivar from claiming the mantle of Hindu cultural protector.However, he risks ceding ground to the Sangh Parivar in the battle for the Hindu cultural space. If the Sabarimala agitations were any indicator, ultimately, the Left will have to strike a balance between its progressive credentials and the need to appeal to religious sentiments in an increasingly competitive political landscape.While the political battle rages on, the male torso has a more complex history than the current debate might suggest. As historian Manu S Pillai has repeatedly pointed out in his writings, the upper-garment restriction was never about sacred threads per se.Even upper-caste men and royals, who never wore sacred threads, would disrobe above the waist when entering temples in the past as a sign of obeisance and humility before the deity. The torso was simply not seen as a zone of shame to be covered up until the advent of Victorian morality in the colonial era. medium nocaptionThe selective nature of this moral transformation with the advent of the colonial powers is a fascinating study in gender politics. While men’s torsos remained remarkably uncontroversial, women’s bodies became the new frontier of social reform during the British era. In one of his columns, Pillai has written about young men in colonial colleges, stung by their classmates’ remarks about their “topless mothers”, returning home as zealous reformers.These newly minted modernisers, along with women increasingly exposed to Western ideals, ushered in an era where female modesty became paramount. Perhaps it’s only fitting that Kerala, having educated almost all of its women and battled poverty, now finds itself prosperous and progressive enough to turn its attention to men’s sartorial freedoms in temples.None of this context, of course, matters in the heat of the political moment. With elections on the horizon, ancient traditions are fair game for fishing in electoral waters. The ruling Left parties, the opposition front led by the Congress, and the BJP are attempting to project themselves as protectors of the Hindu faith, albeit of different shades. It’s a delicate dance between reformist credentials and soft Hindutva.And so men will continue to bare their chests (potbellies and all) at temple doors as furious debates swirl around them — unless government-run Devaswom Boards or independent temple administrators like Sivagiri Mutt decide to break with tradition and permit covered chests.In Kerala’s never-a-dull-moment politics, perhaps it’s progress that headlines have moved from scandals about what lies below men’s waists to what lies above them. It might eventually climb all the way up to what lies above the neck. One lives in hope.The writer is a Kerala-based journalist