A Shudra productive community like Nair community joining hands with RSS Brahminism has caused historical damage to the Shudra values of India that were nurtured as egalitarian values from the days of Harappa.
The Nair Service Society (NSS) is supporting the most destructive anti-women anti-Shudra Manuvad in the name of Sabarimala temple’s sanctity. The Nair men for centuries surrendered the Nair women’s self-respect to the Brahmin males in the worst Manuvadi system called Sambandam. The Brahmin men exploited the Nair women worse than the slave masters exploited the African American women for centuries. The Brahmin men procreated children in Sambandam and left them to their own fate.
The Nairs are considered to be Savarna in the Kerala society but they do not have any spiritual rights within the temple system. They are the fourth Varna called Shudra, who were slaves for a long time in history, right from the days of Rigveda. They cannot become priests and they cannot interpret the Hindu scriptures called Vedas and Bhagavad Gita. There are no Hindu theological schools, colleges that allow Nairs to study theology, leave alone the lower Shudras (who consider themselves as Avarnas in the Kerala context). Yet Nairs, particularly Nair men, after establishing the Nair Service Society (NSS), remain so backward that they almost live at the feet of Brahmins as spiritual slaves. Such a tendency of the Shudras has done great damage to the Shudra social and spiritual culture of equality.
This spiritual slavery of the NSS has come out very clearly on the event of the Ayyappa temple entry for women.
Ayyappa is a Shudra God like Beerappa of two Telugu states. Both Ayyappa and Beerappa have the Indo-African roots and they are the descendants of the famous Harappa in whose name the first city of the world was built at the Indus basin. After the Aryan migrants of the Brahmin ancestry invaded India and destroyed that civilization, several of Harappa’s descendants migrated to the South. Ayyappa, Beerappa (the shepherd Gods of Telugu region) and many others who bear such names like Veerappa, Mallappa and so on, must have migrated to the South and done great service to society. Hence, they became Godheads.
Thus, Ayyappa in his black dress represents the Shudra-Dravidian culture which has its roots in the Indo-African heritage against the Indo-Aryan Brahminic Vedic saffron dress code. There is no saffron dress code there. Ayyappa like Shirdi Sai Baba has become a secular Shudra God who is mostly visited by Shudra-Dalit devotees in black dresses.
The anti-women code of this Ayyappa God was imposed by the Namboothiri Brahmins only in the recent years when they took over the temple priesthood, as it was mobilizing huge finances. The Nair men are involved only in the temple management committee. The real pooja work is done by the Brahmin priests and they are the ones who wrote this code that women between 10 and 50 should not enter the temple. In fact, the Brahmin priest should be expelled from there and only the Shudras should perform the priestly functions.
No Shudra temple in the country has a norm where women’s entry is barred. In fact, many Shudra goddesses like Pochamma, Kali, Durga don’t follow man-woman segregation. All kinds of people visit these temples and Brahmins were never poojaris in those temples.
After the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) got strengthened, as it is a Brahmin headed organization, they started imposing Brahmin priests by displacing the Shudra priests in many Shudra temples. The Ayyappa temple is a classic example, how Brahmins took over this temple and women were denied of the right to enter, imposing the theory that menstruation blood is pollution. They do not consider male sexual discharge as pollution. This is mainly a Brahmin theory. This was never a Shudra theory.
The Shudra culture of India, which is the culture of majority people, does not believe in this theory of sexual discharge of female or male being spiritually pollutant. All productive communities world over never believed this kind of anti-production and procreational theories.
The Shudra belief is that female and male sexual discharges are sources of human birth. They are never the source of human death. Thus, woman’s menstrual blood is seen as sacred and source of human regeneration.
The Aryan Brahminism, which never involved in production believed that all production work is pollution. They never realized that ‘without mud, there cannot be food’. Food is produced only out of the mud. Hence mud is not anti-God as God himself or herself gets involved in all forms of production.
Today Mohan Bhagwat, the head priest from Nagpur, declared a war on the Supreme Court judgment of man-woman equality at Hindu temples. They actually want restrictions on women’s entry at all temples.
A Shudra productive community like Nair community joining hands with RSS Brahminism has caused historical damage to the Shudra values of India that were nurtured as egalitarian values from the days of Harappa. The equality battle at Ayyappa temple is going to be a battle between Shudraism and Brahminism.
The Shudras of India including Kammas, Reddys, Patels, Jats, Gujjars, Yadavs, Marathas, Kumbhis, Kurmis (of Bihar), Lingayats, Vakkalingas, Modaliyars, Nayakars and so on along with other OBCs must oppose the Brahmin conspiracy of taking back our women to pre-Independence status. All the OBCs in the reserved category must understand the conspiracy of these Brahmin-Bania forces from Delhi to Galli. They want to create conditions against equality which slowly will lead to taking away reservations.
Mohan Bhagwat is driving the country to see that all the Shudras/OBCs/Dalits/Adivasis do not even think about equality in the future.
The progressive Nairs, wherever they are, must force the leadership of the NSS to get out of this Brahmin trap. Otherwise, the poor agrarian productive Nairs will suffer hugely in the future. Particularly the Nair women must be saved from the danger of getting destroyed. The Army of Mohan Bhagwat will drive them to suicide once they start believing that their own bodies are full of pollution.
I call upon the progressive Nair women to save the great community women for whom I have great respect as they suffered more than any other Shudra women in Indian history.
Prof. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is Chairman T-MASS and political theorist. He is the Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.