I think it’s sad how we fail to understand the whole concept of Hinduism.
And I would have said that it’s just NRIs who don’t get it (Case example: me, a (now) former GCC NRI), when it’s actually a good deal of Indians in general. A lot of us don’t exactly get the very fact that sets our religion apart from others like Christianity and Islam.
The very concept of God in Hinduism is that God is within you. There is no specific Devil or Angels in Hinduism because both the good and the evil resides within you. The concept of prayer is to look within yourself and question yourself; God is more of a tool for you to use in order to go through that questioning process.
Hinduism at its core is one of the most liberal religions because there is no compulsion to pray. You wish to pray? Fantastic. You don’t wish to pray? You’re still taking care of yourself, which is just another way of attending to God. And going to the temple isn’t the only way to pray to God because God is everywhere. The personal shrines, the idols of the same gods in different temples… screw it, anything can be classified as god, be it rocks or plants or rivers. It’s not the idol we worship; it’s the essence of the god we believe in that we worship.
And that brings us to the absurdity of the Sabarimala situation. If you haven’t noticed, the only ones who aren’t protesting for the removal of the ban were and are the women devotees. Because they get what others do not: it’s the same god.
Ayyappan in the Punkunnam temple is the same as Ayyappan in the Sabarimala temple. The two are different aspects of the same god. When the ban was placed in 1991, the women devotees merely migrated to the temples with the sanctum of the Sastha, where he as a householder holds no restrictions for any of his devotees and were fine with it. Because fasting for 41 days, having your hair and nails grow without checking it, maintaining celibacy during the period and then making the journey solely on foot (and it’s a hilly region with a rough terrain) to pray to the same god, who they could pray to at the closest temple to them without all these rules or any ban restricting them was something they were already trying to avoid. That’s what landed the ban in the first place.
The only people actively protesting it are the non hindus and politicians, the latter of the two making it significantly worse with their visits and actions and the former dragging the mess out as much as they can. You can bet it’s going to last for at least a year.
(Even speaking from a feminist’s point of view: Garbharakshambika is a temple in Tamil Nadu catering exclusively for women (Garbha literally means womb). And yet nobody is protesting over this with the same energy they use for the Sabarimala issue?)
If you haven’t noticed, the only ones who aren’t protesting for the removal of the ban were and are the women devotees. Because they get what others do not: it’s the same god.
The only people actively protesting are non Hindus and political activists
This is exactly why Shabarimala is a non-issue, or manufactured controversy to distract the people from actual pressing issues in India right now.
Hindu women DO NOT CARE. The only ones who even see this as a problem either do not know about Hinduism or are the ones trying to stir up controversy.
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