Published : Aug 18, 2026 20:52 IST – 25 MINS READ
Manuraj Shunmugasundaram, lawyer and author of The People’s Sanctum, discusses the 100-year struggle to democratise temples in India, particularly temple entry, caste, social justice, and constitutional equality. Shunmugasundaram traces the story from the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924 to contemporary debates over temple administration, priesthood, and religious freedom. He discusses how temples became centres of social and political power in South India and how movements led by Periyar, B.R. Ambedkar, Gandhi, and others challenged caste-based exclusion.
As the saying goes, the best time to do anything was 20 years ago, but the second-best time is to do it now. I wrote this book because I found the story of the anti-caste movement told through the lens of temple entry fascinating. I don’t need to explain in great detail the devastating impact caste has had on Indian society, but the surge of an indigenous political movement in response to the caste hierarchical structure, and with it, the fight for equality which began at the gates of the temple—this was something I thought had to be told.
It also so happened that in 2024, the then Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu and Kerala—M.K. Stalin and Pinarayi Vijayan respectively—met at this wonderful little town called Vaikom [in Kerala] and inaugurated a museum, library, and a memorial to the 100th year of the Vaikom movement. We’ve all heard about it in passing references, but when I went to Vaikom and witnessed the amount of deep history, I found there possibly the very first people-led south Indian Satyagraha in the country. It began in 1923, led primarily by Kerala Congress leaders T.K. Madhavan, K.P. Kesava Menon, barrister George Joseph, and others, and it also gained nationwide attention. The story my book tells begins in Vaikom and traces the 100 years since.
In his book, Manuraj Shunmugasundaram traces 100 years of temple-democratisation movements, beginning with Vaikom, Kerala, in 1923.
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Kavya Pradeep M
Social justice through temple entry, or access to the paths around a temple is in the fringes of the entire caste and social justice dialogue itself. Is that one of the reasons you wanted to bring this to the centre, to say there’s a problem here too that needs to be looked at?
Temples provide a kind of unquestioned authority—and these are not my words, it’s the view of people like Periyar [E.V. Ramasamy], Sri Narayana Guru, and many other social reformers who found that religion sanctions caste. B.R. Ambedkar, to a point, lamented that without attacking religion, the caste hierarchical structure cannot be solved. The place where they got this unquestioned authority for caste structure was temples.
It was a very enriching experience for me to go to the heart of the place of the anti-caste movement. Temple entry also provides an interesting view because it involves not just social and political movements—led by Periyar, Ambedkar, Kesava Menon, Madhavan, and many others—but also interesting legislative insights. For example, the Justice Party [government in the then Madras State], in 1922, brought the very first ever Hindu Religious Endowments Bill, a law to give the government oversight over temples.
Over the years, we also saw a number of judicial battles—cases involving different communities being barred from entering a temple, or from becoming priests, and so on. So, I could weave together the judicial, legislative, and political developments. I found in it a composite story: though temple entry is often seen as only a socio-political movement, it has great resonance in the judiciary too.
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Let’s turn to the temple and the construct of it. You quote an associate professor, K. Mavali Rajan, who says that people in early medieval South India considered a place without a temple unfit for human habitation. Is that a rephrasing of Manuvada, or the principles of Manu, on caste and how hierarchical a society should be? Does it draw on that at all, or is it a separate idea—that without a temple, or without God, you don’t exist, or the habitation doesn’t exist?
I merely wanted to state the unimpeachable significance that temples have in our society—this goes back a thousand years. Essentially, The word koil [temple], the Madras University Lexicon tells us, is formed of two subwords: “ko”, meaning a great person, ruler, or king, and “il”, short for illam, which in the Dravidian languages means the place of being, or home. In a sense, temples were almost always in the presence of a palace or a kingdom.
Over the years, many historians and researchers—including Anirudh Kanisetti, Manu Pillai, and others—have studied the importance of temples. The Cholas patronised temples to a great extent, partly that was because they found that through temples, beyond religion, they were cultivating a group of people who would be extremely loyal to the king—almost restructuring the king as an avatar, or a form of the Almighty. You could also tell people they had to be loyal, obedient, and faithful to the king. That kind of intermingling was hard to unravel, and temples have become part of everyday life. But that shouldn’t provide anybody with an unquestioned authority to discriminate. Right?
The subtle difference I’ve tried to draw through this book is: you can still be religious if you choose to, without having to swallow everything religion says—especially discriminatory practices based on caste or gender.
The ties between temples and the state date all the way back to the Cholas. This image, the Chola temple at Gangaikonda Cholapuram, is representational.
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