Thirupparankundram
A photo of a hill, with 1858 as the dateline, is pasted on a desk at a shop selling calendars. This is the same picture being shared widely on Tamil social media these days. “This is the Thirupparankundram hill,” says Ramesh Kumar Murugesan from behind the desk. “It belongs to the Hindus.”
The 38-year-old, wearing an orange shirt and a black dhoti, is fasting for a visit to Sabarimala. “Everything is fine now. Only when many outsiders came and staged a protest, there was chaos,” he says.
Thirupparankundram has become a flashpoint in recent times. The monolithic rock on the outskirts of Madurai houses the Subramaniyaswamy temple, the Ucchi Pillayar temple, the Kasi Viswanathar temple, the Palani Andavar temple, some Jain caves and the Sikandar dargah at the hilltop.
Importantly, all these coexisted peacefully for centuries. That is, till unrest began last February. Hindutva groups alleged that some Muslims wanted to change the name of the hill to ‘Sikandar Malai’. There was also a demand that animal sacrifice be banned and meat distribution be stopped around the dargah.
The issue was taken to the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court, which, in an October verdict, barred animal sacrifice at the dargah. There had earlier been a split verdict.
“For centuries, we have been offering goat sacrifice near the dargah, making biryani and serving our devotees. Even Hindus used to come to our place and offer prayers,” said M. Arif Khan, secretary of the Hazrat Sultan Sikandar Badshah Dargah trust. Just before I spoke with him, he had turned down a request from a young couple to sacrifice a goat at the dargah.
The meat issue was over, but then came another. Rama Ravikumar, a Hindu activist, moved the High Court—he wanted the government to make arrangements to light a lamp on the deepathoon, a sacred pillar at the hilltop, during the Karthigai Deepam festival. This lamp had for years been lit at the Ucchi Pillayar temple. Notably, the deepathoon is close to the dargah.
In December, a single-judge bench permitted the lighting of the lamp at the deepathoon, which led the district administration to impose curfew-like measures to prevent large gatherings at the hilltop. There was fear of a communal flare-up. Multiple parties—including state officials, the police and the Hindu religious and charitable endowments department—filed appeals against the single-bench order. But, on January 6, a division bench upheld it. “Lighting of the Karthigai Deepam is an essential religious practice of the temple,” it said. “It is hard to believe the fear of the mighty state that allowing representatives of devasthanam to light a lamp at the stone pillar on a particular day in a year will cause disturbance to public peace.”
The state government is expected to approach the Supreme Court. “Why should the court ask us to change the usual practice that we have been following for years?” says S. Regupathy, state law minister, to THE WEEK. He added that there was nothing in the scriptures to prove that the lamp has to be lit on the deepathoon. “The BJP has completely fabricated this. It is trying to reap benefits by disturbing the peace in the state,” he says.
The BJP has rejected such claims. “The state government is anti-Hindu,” said Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal at a news conference in Chennai. “The [M.K.] Stalin-led DMK government is against the beliefs of the Hindus.”
C. Santhalingam, a former state archaeology department officer who has spent decades studying ancient sites in Tamil Nadu, says the hill has never belonged to one community. “For 2,000 years, the hill was a major Jain centre and is still home to rock beds and inscriptions in the ancient Tamil-Brahmi script,” he says. He added that the hill was constructed as a pluralistic complex designed for the simultaneous worship of different deities. “This mountain belongs to everyone—Shaivites, Jains, Vaishnavites and Muslims. To claim it for one narrative is to erase a thousand years of shared history,” he says.
The series of events has soured the air on the hill. Pasupathi Alagappan, who has a shop selling puja items, says that outsiders creating unnecessary disputes would only affect the livelihood of the locals. “I am a staunch Hindu and my livelihood depends on this temple. What have the Hindus lost here? I haven’t lost anything, except for the one festival day when someone from outside came here to protest. Because you are creating an unnecessary issue, innocent people are being affected.”
Police restriction on the hill has increased over the days, particularly on the way to the dargah. There are more than 1,000 small shops in the area, mostly selling flowers and puja items. Apparently, on the day of Karthigai Deepam, some shops were forced to close.
“[We are not] disturbing the harmony here. We are only fighting for the majority Hindu rights,” says Arun Swaminathan, Ravikumar’s lawyer. “The lamp (Karthigai Deepam) is now being lit at the Ucchi Pillayar temple, where usually the moksha deepam or the light for those who died is lit. My client’s question is simple: why are you lighting the lamp on a festive day on a pillar that is used to light lamps for the dead?”
The hindutva groups essentially want the Karthigai Deepam to be separated from the moksha deepam.
Lawyer S. Vanchinathan, who was part of the case, claims that the court ignored judicial discipline, historical revenue records, and established procedures by misidentifying a survey stone as a religious pillar without sufficient evidence.
He also says that the term ‘deepathoon’ was absent from nearly 20 judgments about the hill spanning decades, appearing for the first time only in the most recent ruling.
Vignesh Karthik K.R., a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, has an interesting take. He says that the fight is not merely about religion, but about twisting traditional identity. “It is an extension of how local deities are force-fitted into the larger Hindu pantheon,” he argues. While names like Subramanian and Murugan refer to the same god, the former is used by dominant-caste Hindus, while the latter is used by the others. In Tamil Nadu, Murugan has human qualities—for instance, there are conversations between him and regular people in Tamil literature. While hindutva forces are trying to convert Murugan into Subramanian, says Vignesh, the dravidian forces want to retain him as he is.
There is also an attempt to widen the gap between dravidian religion and dravidian movements, claims Ramu Manivannan, a scholar and social activist. The dravidian religion traces its roots to the Bhakti Movement, but the dravidian political movement has largely ignored faith.
The BJP in the state has, in the past few years, held several events dedicated to Murugan, be it the vel yatra before the 2021 state elections or its leaders going on a padayatra to Palani.
“In a way, the BJP has launched its strategy of hindutva politics in Tamil Nadu by its make-believe devotion and celebration of the Tamil god Murugan,” says Manivannan.
He adds that Thirupparankundram is only a short-term strategy before the assembly elections to keep the state government on the back foot. The issue came in handy only because there was a dargah at a multi-faith site, he says.
Even if the current unrest dies down after the court verdict, the hindutva outfits could continue raking up other issues in the state. Members of a few of these groups THE WEEK spoke to said “majority rights” was the priority.