When Gandhi was denied entry to Bhagavathi Amman temple  Premium

Gandhi was denied entry to Bhagavathi Amman temple; he did not resist the ancient custom and offered worship to the deity from the pedestal of the flagstaff and left

When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi decided to go to England to study law, the Sheth, the headman of his community, told him, “Our religion forbids voyages abroad.” The Sheth declared him an outcaste after a determined Gandhi maintained that caste should not interfere in the matter. In his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi says, “The order had no effect on me, and I took leave of the Sheth.” Gandhi, however, would have felt its effect years later when he was denied entry to the Bhagavathi Amman temple in Kanniyakumari in March 1925.

Never mind, right at that very time there was a protest going on at Vaikom, demanding entry for the backward communities and ‘untouchables’ to the temple streets, and Gandhi himself was guiding the movement. Leaders, including T.K. Madhavan, K.P. Kesava Menon, George Joseph, Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, and Dr. Emperumal Naidu of Kanniyakumari, were at the forefront of the struggle, which lasted 603 days, from March 30, 1924 to November 23, 1925. But Gandhi, being Gandhi, was in no mood to resist the ancient custom and left without entering the temple in Kanniyakumari, where the three seas confluence.

“As he stood watching, a huge wave drenched him to the skin and he smilingly observed that the Goddess of the sea gave him a very wet reception. He then walked round to the temple, and reaching the gateway, was quietly marching into the high courtyard of the sacred edifice, but when it was pointed out to him that the entry into the temple was forbidden to England-returned persons, he said that he would not budge an inch beyond the spot placed out of bounds for a foreign-travelled man. He worshipped the deity from the pedestal of flagstaff,” reports The Hindu on March 16, 1925.

Gandhi subsequently visited Kanniyakumari on October 8, 1927 and January 22, 1934. A.K. Perumal, the author of Thenkumariyin Kathai (The history of Kanniyakumari), has detailed the visit of Gandhi, who had addressed public meetings organised by Dr. Emperumal Naidu, advocate A. Sankara Pillai, G. Ramachandran and others. He seemed to have avoided visiting temples. There was no reference to his visiting temples in Mr. Perumal’s book and in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi during these visits.

Mr. Perumal remarks that the Gandhi-cult had become all pervasive in Kanniyakumari district even before his first visit. “It gathered momentum after his visits in 1925 and 1927 and his followers wanted to carry a photo of Gandhi too ceremonially, along with the temple idol, during a car festival of the Thanumalayaswamy temple in Suchindram.” A correspondent brought it to Gandhi’s knowledge, and he disapproved of the idea in Young India on April 4, 1931, under the title, “Save me from my admirers”. Pointing out that “this excessive hero worship borders on questionable idolatry and is calculated to wound susceptibilities of the orthodox people”, he said, “If they have any regard for my feelings, let the organisers of the car festival who would put my portrait in the car desist from their activity. There are many other ways of giving expressions to and promoting patriotic sentiment,” he advised.

It was a different experience for Gandhi in January, 1937, when he came next: the doors of temples had been thrown open to all communities after the temple entry proclamation on November 12, 1936. He writes about his experience in Harijan on January 23, 1937: “And this morning I visited the famous temple at the Cape, dedicated to the Virgin. Accompanied by a large party of Harijans who were singing bhajans, we passed through the street leading to the temple. The street, like the temple, was forbidden to the untouchables. But now, without any opposition from anywhere, we walked through it and then into the temple as if we had never been prohibited. It is a dream realised in a manner and in a place where the realisation seemed almost unthinkable before it was realised elsewhere.”

He also worshipped at the Nagaraja temple in Nagercoil. “It was a brilliant spectacle. After worship at the shrine, Gandhiji and the small band of Harijans who followed him were given ‘prasadams’ by the chief priest who explained to Gandhiji the Puranic importance of the temple,” reports The Hindu on January 15, 1937.