Five Ways Mainstream Arguments for Excluding Women from Sabarimala Fall Short

• This article examines a widely-viewed, articulate video defending the Sabarimala restriction and explains precisely why its arguments, however thoughtful, fall short on legal, philosophical, and feminist grounds.
• It walks through five specific claims made in defence of the exclusion, from the celibacy rationale and ritual impurity distinction to appeals to Hindu diversity, judicial non-interference, and women saints, and tests each one against historical evidence and constitutional logic.
• It concludes by asking a larger question: when the same patterns of exclusion repeat across centuries and regions, at what point does contextual tradition become structural oppression?

Few public debates in India become as emotionally charged as those involving religion. The Sabarimala temple issue is, by now, one of the most exhausting public debates in recent memory. I recently watched a video defending the traditional restriction on women entering Sabarimala.

Unlike much of social media discourse, it was not loud or abusive. The speaker was informed, articulate, and clearly familiar with Hindu ritual traditions. For over 120,000 plus viewers (and counting), especially those unfamiliar with the legal, philosophical, and feminist aspects of the issue, the argument might sound particularly tempting.

And precisely because the argument sounds thoughtful, it deserves a more nuanced examination.

Where the Celibacy Argument Fails

At the heart of the video lies the claim that the restrictions on women entering the Sabarimala temple are not rooted in misogyny, but in the unique nature of Lord Ayyappa as a naishtik brahmachari, an eternal celibate. The logic is since   the deity represents eternal celibacy, women of menstruating age must remain absent to preserve the sanctity.

The question this framing raises is why does the onus of preserving celibacy fall upon female bodies?

A celibate monk in the real world does not demand that women of reproductive age be disappeared from public life. More importantly, if celibacy alone were the concern, why are post-menopausal women allowed entry? That exception unintentionally reveals that the restriction is not about women, it is specifically about menstruating bodies.

And when we tally this idea alongside the lived realities of women in South Asia, where practices ranging from Nepal’s Chhaupadi system, menstrual seclusion in parts of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and restrictions surrounding ritual participation and temple entry in parts of India, it becomes difficult to continue viewing Sabarimala as a one-off case rooted in a uniquely specific context. Instead, it begins to resemble a deeply embedded regional structure in which menstruation repeatedly becomes grounds for restriction, separation, or exclusion.

“Ritual Impurity” vs. Real-World Consequences

The video also attempts to draw a distinction between “ritual impurity” (apavitrata) and “untouchability” (chhua-chhoot), which in itself is a casteist practice. It argues that restrictions around menstruation in Hindu ritual systems function like other temporary restrictions associated with bodily states, such as toilet use, sexual activity, or preparation for worship, rather than as a declaration of women’s inferiority.

Such a distinction matters enormously in the seminar room and almost nowhere else in the lived realities of Indian women. The expectation that women should feel comforted by being called “ritually impure” rather than socially inferior feels absurd. Regardless of whether the restriction is framed as “ritual” rather than “social,” the practical consequence remains the same. More importantly, the fact that a religious tradition can internally justify a practice through theology does not settle the larger question: can exclusions rooted in the menstruating body still claim legitimacy in a modern society?

The Diversity Argument Cuts Both Ways

The video notes that every Hindu temple has unique forms, traditions, and rules, which is true. But this is actually an argument against the restriction, not for it.

If Hindu traditions vary widely; if the Kamakhya Temple celebrates menstruation as the goddess’s sacred power; if countless Shakti shrines across India prove that we worship women in her diverse forms, then the Sabarimala restriction cannot claim to represent Hindu religious thought as a whole.

The diversity argument proves there is no theological necessity for the exclusion. The Supreme Court’s application of the “essential religious practices” test, asking whether an exclusion is essential to the core of the religion, flows naturally from this logic. A practice that contradicts traditions elsewhere in the same religion cannot meet the threshold of being constitutionally protected as essential.

Another key argument in the video is that religious practices should be interpreted by spiritual practitioners, and that secular courts should not have jurisdiction to decide what constitutes an essential religious practice.

The framers of the Constitution, including Dr. B.R. Ambedkar was acutely aware that religion had historically been used to justify caste oppression and gender exclusion. Asking courts to stay out is asking the Constitution to exempt religion from its core equality commitments that were written precisely because such exemptions had caused centuries of harm.

Misreading the Lives of Women Saints

The video also points to historical women saints like Mirabai and Akka Mahadevi as evidence that Hinduism has long accepted women as spiritual practitioners, and therefore this issue is case-specific rather than systemic.

However, Mirabai was ostracised by her in-laws for her unconventional devotion. Akka Mahadevi rejected social convention entirely. Invoking these women as proof that the tradition is welcoming to women is to fundamentally misread their lives. The women asking to enter Sabarimala today stand in that same lineage. They are not importing a foreign, secular, or western framework into Hindu practice. Instead, they are doing what Mirabai and Akka Mahadevi did. If anything, the legacies of these saints are arguments for the proposition that women’s spiritual authority has always had to fight against institutional, patriarchal gatekeeping.

Never Systemic. Always Contextual. And Yet, Always the Same Pattern.

One theme that cuts through all these arguments is that the issue is not systemic, and we should focus on context instead. My question, then, is this: why do the patterns of controlling, excluding, and oppressing women remain strikingly consistent across regions and generations?

For thousands of years, across the length and breadth of this subcontinent, women have navigated restrictions, ritual prohibitions, and spatial confinements all defended through religious sanction and ritual logic.

That is precisely why the Sabarimala debate cannot be viewed in isolation. The question is not whether one particular temple has a unique tradition. The question is: when does a long history of individually justified exclusions begin to reveal a larger structural reality?