Gendering the Sabarimala Conundrum

Historians have for long ignored the human body as a theme of inquiry. While there cannot be a history of the biological body, there is tremendous scope for enquiring into the religious, social and cultural attitudes towards this body. Recently, the female body impinged on our collective consciousness in the context of the Sabarimala temple entry controversy. The debate which this issue generated gives me an entry point to examine the gendered nature of social institutions, their normative injunctions, and their cultural symbolism within the wider Sanskritic / Brahmanic traditions, since it was precisely the bias of this tradition that labelled the presence of females of a particular age group as not only polluting but also presenting a threat to the seclusion of a brahmachari deity who presided over this temple complex. By analyzing a wide corpus of Sanskrit textual tradition, I seek to argue that female and male bodily secretions are represented asymmetrically and sought to degrade woman by representing her as a site of revulsion

Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Epistemology · Human sexuality · Literature · Normative · Sanskrit · Seclusion · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Study and Philosophy of Religion