The past few days have had moments when I found myself — as an Unknown Sri Vaishnava — intensely absorbed in avidly following and pouring over current, trending news doing the rounds in both press and social media in the State of Tamil Nadu and it is all regarding public interest litigation over upkeep and maintenance of Hindu Temples as Heritage Sites.
Firstly, I was thrilled to read the much awaited Order of the Madras High Court that finally after 18+ months of hearings that came out on 7 June 2021…
MADRAS HIGH COURT ORDER 7 JUNE 2021 on the working of the Hindu Religious & Charitable Endowments Commission of the Tamil Nadu State Government
Then I also watched the following Video-clips related to the same subject and that one can find uploaded onto YouTube by two very well-known public activists who have been prime-movers in more cases than one of class-interest PILs (Public Interest Litigations) lodged against the State’s HR&CE Dept. complaining and seeking redressal of gross mismanagement, corruption and malfeasance in administering Hindu temples in the State, of undue interference into purely religious affairs of such Temples and of negligence and utter dereliction of duty in setting right such lapses.
Then to get further ahead and gain a grasp of the genesis and antecedents of all the above complaints which eventually became PILs in the Courts, and a basic understanding as well of how and why the matters became sub-judice, I watched an excellent presentation on the subject by the young and notable Supreme Court of India constitutional lawyer, Sri Sai Deepak ….
Since I am a Sri Vaishnavite from Tamil Nadu, like all other Sri Vaishnava laity, I too am a devotee of the great and ancient Temple of Sri Ranganatha Swami at Sri Rangam, Tiruchi. For many years now, I was off and on following the “activist” activities of a native of that temple-town, Sri Rangarajan Narasimhan, whose background and antecedents I thought were very interesting since it seemed to be not dissimilar to my own in some minor respects. He is well educated from a good university in a modern discipline, worked abroad (in the USA?) for corporates for some years and then returned home to his native Sri Rangam and became deeply involved with the temple affairs. Over the years what he witnessed as goings-on inside and outside of the temple turned him into a committed and indomitable activist fighting for the cause of sweeping reforms and improvements in the administration of the temple. Very soon, Sri Rangarajan’s activism began to clash with various vested interest-groups not only in Sri Rangam but also elsewhere in the State wherever competing religious, business, political and sectarian group-interests got affected in direct and indirect ways. He had to then face several formidable adversaries on several fronts, legal, inter-communal and political fronts. The cause, his activism and his adversaries thus became the casus belli for his taking his battle to the highest court of the State via PILs. After a long-drawn battle over several years, at last, his voice got to be heard by the higher echelons of the judiciary . The result finally was out on 7 June 2021 in the form of a 224-page Order of the Hon’ble High Court of Madras… an Order which I find it very difficult to exactly describe as anything other than a comprehensive White Paper on the Pathos of Hindu Temple Heritage Administration in Tamil Nadu – 20th and early 21st century CE.
Anyone who reads through the 224 pages of the Court’s Order is bound to be appalled by the “rotten state of Denmark” (to use a famous Shakespearean metaphor) that has been caused to descend upon and afflict Hindu temples in Tamil Nadu over the last half of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st. It is a pathetic saga of governmental inaction, bureaucratic inefficiency and negligence, of political power-games, petty and rampant venality and last but not the least, the sheer apathy of the average Hindu temple-goer who throughout the said period remained mute and watched with nothing but indifference the grim pathos of the condition of his Deities and their Temples all across the length and breath of the State — a total of about 38,000 of which more than 400 are magnificent and could easily have qualified to be regarded as UNESCO World Heritage Centers if only their antiquity, originality and sanctity had all been preserved, venerated and cherished in the manner in which they deserved to be but sadly were not….
I am a very small and nondescript member of the Sri Vaishnava community in Chennai (as I said, I’m only an Unknown Sri Vaishnava...). All the great issues of Constitutional law, politics, administration etc. actually interest and concern me only in so far as I see them impacting in some way the larger matter of preserving and protection of the eternal cultural heritage and values of greater India. On such weighty and pan-India matters, therefore, I shall not venture to give any opinion or share any thoughts of mine especially when I know I lack the requisite competence to do so.
But there is however one matter of great importance on which I feel even an undistinguished Unknown Sri Vaishnava like me does possess sufficient locus-standi within the community to go public with my feelings, thoughts and views. That matter is what I am indeed very happy to see, in the two YouTube videos below , Sri Rangarajan taking pains to highlight. It is the matter of the Apathy of the Hindu Temple-goer.
IN his videos below, Sri Rangarajan speaks in Tamizh, and therefore for the benefit of those who don’t understand the spoken language very well, I paraphrase briefly below the three main themes he covers in his presentations:
(1) the State Police Dept. failing in duty to even register common public complaints (FIR or CSR) made against temple administrations for any alleged irregularities, delinquencies and offences, whether cognizable or non-cognizable by law.
(2) Laxity and inefficiency in the HR&CE officialdom to address and redress such complaints and failure to coordinate with the Police Dept. i..e to investigate such complaints and redress them appropriately within the time laid down under law.
(3) Unwillingness, timidity and/or sheer apathy on the part of Hindu laity and temple-goers to come forward and volunteer, not necessarily pro-bono, to serve as Trustees of the Board which the HR&CE Dept. is bound to duly constitute under the law and which in turn must oversee, govern and supervise the respective Hindu temples in their respective localities, villages, towns and neighborhoods.
Of the above 3 issues highlighted by Sri Rangarajan, there is little left for anyone like me to add by way of comment to the first two.
But on the third issue he has underscored viz. the apathy and lack of any robust volunteerism spirit amongst temple-goer communities across Tamil Nadu, much indeed can be said even by me since I am as much witness to their Apathy as I am guilty of it as every other Sri Vaishnavite I know personally.
One of the reasons that has been adduced for how and why Hindu temple administration came to be so pathetic as it is today is the institutional failure of the temple Board of Trustees to do its job.
Why?
Because in many temples no Board of Trustees exists.
Why?
Because the HR&CE is unable to appoint proper persons to the Board of Trustees.
Why?
Under law, members of the Hindu community and/or laity of the temple are required to apply voluntarily to HR&CE Dept. expressing their ability, willingness and readiness to offer their services to act as temple Board Trustees. It is then up to the HR&CE to scrutinize such applications from such persons and upon due diligence assessment of the fitness of such applicants for Trusteeship, proceed to appoint them in the position under relevant terms and conditions of appointment service-rules. Unfortunately however, no such voluntary applications in sufficient numbers are ever received from members of the laity or community at large. Hence no Trusteeship appointments are ever possible to be made by the HR&CE.
Under the circumstances, and as per the Act, the HR&CE Commission in most cases has no other alternative but to go ahead and unilaterally appoint what are designated as “Fit Persons” in lieu of a Board of Trustees to assume responsibility for and to perform all the functions related to temple administration which otherwise is the responsibility of a duly constituted Trusteeship.
But then, as matters turn out to be in most cases, such “Fit Persons” who normally are supposed to act in office only as and under “temporary, stop-gap or interim administrative arrangement“, continue merrily to occupy the position in perpetuity. They invariably then turn out to be wholly “unfit persons” to occupy such position since they have neither competence nor the trustworthiness required for the job.
The High Court Order observes that it is in fact such unfit “Fit Persons” who, having been given unfettered powers of Trusteeship by default — and with the HR&CE Department either turning a blind eye to their working or being in connivance with them — it is they who have been found in many instances to have committed all manner of both sins of commission and omission while in office in the the temple.
Here is where finally, thus, lies the root cause, the “Gangotri”, of the entire problem: the Apathy of the Hindu temple-goer.
The questions that I as an Unknown Sri Vaishnava ask myself now are these:
- Why are members of the Hindu community — or more specifically, members of the respective intra-community denomination in whose geographic location the temple happens to be situated — so hesitant, reluctant or outright unwilling to volunteer for Trusteeship in temples of the State?
- Has anyone within our own Hindu community and sectarian groupings ever taken serious efforts to conduct an objective, grass-roots, statistically verifiable field-survey into this question?
- If not, is it not worth undertaking such an effort for and on behalf of the entire Hindu community?
- Will not any State University Department of Sociological studies find it a fit subject-matter of academic importance to sponsor such a survey project?
- Or else, if a University cannot undertake such an academic effort, would it not be possible for any of the Saiva, Vaishnava and Saaktha Mutts and or other religious foundations of the Hindus of Tamil Nadu come forward to jointly sponsor such a survey?
I ask myself the above questions only because without hard data available with us, how can we in the Hindu community today merely speculate on the real reasons for our abject Apathy as temple-goers in volunteering for trusteeship of temples? Are we to simply believe the glib and convenient reasons often adduced and given by ourselves in the living-room discussions in our homes for our own private consumption and satisfaction?
Let me now however, even in the absence of hard, verifiable data and information, try to speculate on the matter as I see it by drawing lessons from the conversations I have had with many people within the Hindu circle of my own family, relatives, friends and fellow-members of the laity at large.
The reasons often cited by ordinary members of the laity as a reason for their apathy are principally the following:
1.Temples administration is a very complex subject. A trustee must possess knowledge and training in aspects of managing religious places of worship and that can range from knowing Agama scripture, practices and ‘saastra‘, some aspects of iconography, architecture, epigraphy, temple history, then in-depth acquaintance with rituals, customs and traditions, together with reasonable familiarity with secular laws of the State relating to temple-governance, financial control and HR best practices. Now, this is a rather tall order. It is simply not possible to find easily members inside our Hindu community possessing such a broad-range of knowledge and skill-sets who will also be willing to volunteer to place it at the disposal of temple-administration as trustees. If ever anywhere such persons are to be found at all, it would be very rare indeed to expect them to serve pro bono either full-time or part time in trusteeship positions.
2. Time for individuals goes at a very high premium these days. People have jobs, careers, professional priorities to deal with besides having to bear the burden of family commitments, parenting children, caring for old parents and a hundred other nameless little tasks and errands of life to attend to which leaves them little time to offer for voluntary services in temples. Such members of the community — especially the younger generations of highly-educated, professionally-occupied upwardly-mobile Hindus –are ready and willing to support temples through periodically voluntary pecuniary donations but that is about all that they can afford. The inability to give off their precious time is perhaps the most compelling reason most Hindu temple-goers might cite as the cause for their general Apathetic attitude toward volunteerism for a social cause such as temple-administration.
3. Temple Administration is fraught with politician and governmental interference. Ordinary members of the community and laity are, by and large, very simple-minded, honest-to-God and gentle-mannered people. In their perception (or misperception?) trusteeship of a temple is fraught with risks of having to engage and deal with authority, officialdom and the interference of the State. And that in itself is seen as a daunting if not intimidating prospect. “Sir, we do not want to be having to deal with the might and officiousness of State-appointed or otherwise self-appointed commissars during the course of we going about quietly doing our business as trustees of the temple“, is a very familiar refrain that I have heard these simple folks of the Hindu community voice.
4. Intra-community and inter-sectarian tensions. In Tamil Nadu, the Hindu community over several decades has been vivisected if not polarized by the politics and polemics of identity arising from propagation of specious, downright scurrilous ideologies of the basest forms of sub-nationalism and plain hate that can be imagined. Let me be very clear here about what I mean: I mean the divisive nature of the differential equations and complex calculus of internecine societal relationships that have been built up based on language, crass regionalism and narrow provincialism, conceived, promoted and normalized by the political classes for many decades now. “Sir, if I offer myself as Trustee in a temple that does not belong to my “sampradaayam”, will I be allowed to function freely and fearlessly or will my motives and actions always be suspect? If there is no trust in me, how can I function as trustee?” is a question that many good-hearted Sri Vaishnavas have asked me. Similarly, and more pointedly and candidly, I have been asked this too: “Sir, doesn’t my caste-identity either serve as credential or the lack of it, for trusteeship positions in temples? Why would I, in such a toxic environment, wish to involve myself with temple administration?”
Everyone of the 4 reasons I have speculated upon above as probable causes for the Apathy of the Hindu temple-goer in Tamil Nadu seems valid and undeniable.
So, the question therefore I ask myself is: What do we do? Do we all as Hindu Community of Tamil Nadu just throw in the towel and let the status quo remain to continue as usual with only some marginal and cosmetic changes made here and there to it in the name of temple reformation? Will Apathy continue to rule us?
It is here exactly at this point in my submissions that I must confess that I have to let my own personal dreams begin to start taking over the discourse while, temporarily, I must let my sense of reality go on snooze-mode a bit.
In some rather poor imitation of Martin Luther King Jr. , the American Black American civil rights leader, who once made a famous speech which even today the world remembers as the “I have a dream” speech, let me also try and give voice to my own dreams in this situation with regard to this matter of Hindu Volunteerism Vs Hindu Apathy:
I have a dream that our present-day Heads of ALL Hindu religious institutions (Saiva, Vaishnava, Saktha, Vedantic, New Age etc.) will join forces to conceive a unique and historic educational institution — unaffiliated with any governmental or non-governmental authority or entity — solely for the purpose of building a generation of men and women into an all-India cadre called “Hindu Temple Administrative Services”... known by the acronym “HTAS”.
You may ask what is this HTAS? My answer is this:
- Think of it as if were a non-governmental service-cadre of trained Hindu temple administrators who possess all the necessary all-purpose, generalist “religio-secular-scientific” knowledge and training that would be required to preserve, protect, maintain, administer, strengthen, galvanize and catalyze Hindu temples across the length and breadth of India, of any size, any location, belonging to any sect or denomination or any particular theological “darsana“.
2. In other words, think of the HTAS as a sort of IAS, IRS or IPS….! What does, after all, the IAS officer or the Indian Railway Officer really do? At the very core of his services is the mission to protect and operate the country’s assets to sub-serve national purpose. Now, if the vast number of temples in India, with all their vast belongings of assets aggregated were to be valued at current market prices, would they not in sheer financial terms almost equal if not exceed that of, say, the Indian Railways today?
3. So, if the government of this country can and has indeed for decades instituted an all-India IRS cadre to run and maintain a national asset such as the Railways, why can it not be possible for the vast numbers of Hindus in India join hands to conceive, blueprint and create a similar educational establishment that will produce capable men and women of the HTAS that will in professional and upright manner run and maintain an asset-base of the nation that perhaps is no less if not more valuable than the Railways … viz. the Hindu Temple with all its vast financial, rich cultural and non-cultural assets?
4. In my dream, I see that the Hindus of India, and more specifically of Tamil Nadu, failed miserably to administer their temples properly simply because they failed to appreciate that with the advance of time the importance of what in the language of business is called “scaling up” can never be overemphasized. Let me explain this below.
5. All the great temples of our land were built in the last millennia or in the first half the the second millennia. The size and geographical density of Hindu populations today is vastly different from what they were 1000 years ago. And the very nature, character and scale of the social purposes that temples once served in the times of Maharajas, Sultans and Viceroys of India’s history have undergone seismic and paradigmatic change because of the sheer and massive increase in the temple-going, temple-revering Hindu population… In simpler words, our population has grown by a factor of 10X whereas the cultural and non-cultural infrastructure of the Hindu temple to cope with such exponential growth has not kept pace with such such social change… Or, to put it differently, generations of Hindus in India did little to anticipate the challenges that “scaling up” would throw up as time advances and therefore were caught napping and thus today, are woefully incapable of protecting, preserving and keeping their temples intact as vibrant institutions of both social conservatism and social change which they once undeniably used to be across several centuries.
6. In Tamil Nadu itself there are about 38,000 temples today each with its own asset-holdings and local HR& CE administrative set-up. However, not all of these temples command the same what one might call “star rating” in terms of popularity, numbers of pilgrims, architectural grandeur, epigraphical value, size and sustainability of income-streams etc. Not more than a score amongst these temples in Tamil Nadu would be rated truly as “5 Star“. About 60% of the others would fall probably in the category of only “3 or 2 Star” temples in terms of pilgrim patronage and income. And the remaining c.30%-35% of the temples would fall in the sorry, “starless” category of “languishing” temples that are either on their way to decay and ruin if not already left to dilapidate on their own.
7. So, one can easily imagine how greatly different is indeed the nature and gravity of problems, challenges and hardships that each “Star-category” of temples might be faced with. It is not as if the problems and challenges faced by the Sri Ranganatha Swamy Temple at SriRangam are the same as those faced by the Sri Ranganatha Swamy Temple, at Tirumayyam. Each temple administration therefore has indeed to deal with the peculiarity of wide-ranging “scaling up” issues in a different manner depending on its very own set of circumstances. Each temple therefore demands Administration that is deeply sensitive to its condition, both historical and that which presently obtains.
8. What demands that Temple Administration makes on Hindu society today is indeed vastly different from that which was made of our societies in the times of, say, the Gupta, Chola, Pandya, Chalukya, Hoysala or Vijayanagara kings. The pathos of the Hindu temple today therefore is that the Hindu temple-goer failed miserably in “scaling up” appropriately, adequately and smartly and keeping pace with the march of time and History.
9. It is this context of “scaling up” that, in my vivid dreams, I see the Acharyas of ALL Hindu religious institutions — the “mattaadhipathis”, the gurus and acharyas, the new-age Hindu spiritualists and their Foundations — all getting together on their own collective behalf and using a mere fraction of their combined all-India resources, wealth and income, and with the least possible dependence on governments, setting up an outstanding institute of excellence that will produce for generations to come numberless HTAS cadres of men and women (with no considerations given whatsoever to caste , sectarianism or regionalism) who would serve the nation’s temples anywhere and everywhere as top-class Temple Administrators.
In my dream again, I look at the matter from this one other angle too:
10. We have today specialized Institutes that train young men and women as Catering Technologists, Fashion Designers and Cinematographers! Why not a pan-India religious institute be created, blessed and accredited by a body of ALL-India Hindu Religious Heads? Won’t such an institute … if properly and wisely conceived and instituted … be able to train and produce hundreds of young, competent and able Administrators of Temples and Temple Trusteeships? And also, who in good time will be able to effectively relieve and replace State Governments (including Tamil Nadu) from shouldering responsibility for the upkeep of temple assets and cultural heritage in India?
As a mere Unknown Sri Vaishnavan I must say I have temerity to dream … and dream as big perhaps as Martin Luther King Jr. himself! The dreams that Martin Luther King had for his people in his country however, to this very day, very sadly remain unrealized and unfulfilled to a great extent…
I have to admit that right now I do wonder if my dreams for my sacred temples in Tamil Nadu, India, might suffer the same fate…
Sudarshan Madabushi