Instagram reel lands temple trustee in trouble; Madras High Court orders action

The Madras High Court on Thursday (October 17, 2024) directed the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Commissioner and Executive Officer of Devi Karumari Amman Temple at Tiruverkadu near Chennai to initiate action against a temple trustee and a few women employees, who had reportedly recorded videos inside the temple by dancing to film songs and miming to movie dialogues to create a comic Instagram reel.

The Madras High Court on Thursday (October 17, 2024) directed the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Commissioner and Executive Officer of Devi Karumari Amman Temple at Tiruverkadu near Chennai to initiate action against a temple trustee and a few women employees, who had reportedly recorded videos inside the temple by dancing to film songs and miming to movie dialogues to create a comic Instagram reel.

Justice M. Dhandapani took a serious note of the temple trustee, Valarmathi, for having joined the group of women employees to record the videos on the temple premises, on Tamil New Year day, in front of the portrait of the presiding deity. He asked Special Government Pleader (HR&CE) N.R.R. Arun Natarajan to ensure that appropriate action is initiated against all of them and called for an action-taken report by October 29.

The orders were passed on a writ petition filed by K. Jayaraprakash of Nagapattinam, seeking a direction to the Commissioner as well as the Executive Officer to initiate action against the temple trustee on the basis of a representation made by him on August 13 this year. The petitioner’s counsel played the videos recorded by the trustee and the women employees on her mobile phone and showed them to the judge.

Wondering how a trustee herself could engage in such actions inside a temple thronged by hundreds of devotees, Justice Dhandapani said: “People visit temples with a lot of devotion. How can a trustee and the temple employees themselves make a mockery by shooting comic videos, that too right in front of the deity’s portrait? The presiding deity will lose respect if such kind of things are allowed to happen.”

On finding that the trustee and the employees had mimed to actor Vadivelu’s comic cinema dialogue, in which he resigns the post of temple priest on securing a government job, the judge said that all the employees who had participated in the recording of the video inside the temple, as well as the trustee, should be taken to task. “This is not the way in which a Dharmakartha (trustee) and temple employees must behave,” he said.