Hereditary and/or traditional rights of control over temple wealth and administration
The story of how in 50 year after Independence the State in Tamil Nadu “established a system of legal plunder…. known as the “drain of wealth”… and “mercilessly imposed” it upon temples and temple-centric Brahmin communities is indeed a very long one.
The story starts with States like Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh (undivided) enacting laws that abolished the rights of “archakas” — temple priests, curators and servitors —- and their hereditary and/or traditional rights, commonly known as “miraasi“, to control over temple wealth and administration. The story is not only long but is also extremely complex and complicated to recount in a very brief or summary fashion.
The complexity in the story arises out of the long legacy of British Colonial-rule in India and how the nefarious, new-fangled administrative practices it imposed upon Hindu temples across the country and came to be later adopted as “reformation”. It was imitated and even perfected by the States after India gained Independence and laid it down as best religious practice in a democratic, republican and secular society.
The complications in the story arise out of several vexatious conflicts, contentions and legalistic issues that resulted from the many different and inconsistent ways in which the Courts of the new nation went about interpreting and ruling on how the Fundamental Articles of the Constitution of India apply to Hindu temples.
The rulings of the Courts delivered all over the country in both federal and state jurisdictions — especially in cases relating to “Right to Equality” and to “Control and Administration” of temples — number today in the scores of hundreds! A humungous body of legal literature on case-law and precedent has accumulated and is available in the archives of the Honorable Courts. They all provide any ambulance-chasing lawyer practicing law pertaining to Hindu temples — viz. ownership, ownership-succession, property and asset-management and even to its rituals, religious customs, traditions and practices — plentiful opportunities to build a lucrative career for himself or herself. For the common Hindu, the pious and humble temple worshipper, all of it however seems nothing but an endless, sad and mind-numbing saga of litigation that confounds both his or her religion and reason.
The story although too complex and complicated to recount, has to be nevertheless told here even if only rather sketchily since it goes a long way in helping one’s understanding of how the “system of legal plunder” impacted the “ubaya-vedaantins” of Sri Rangam and Kanchipuram too, and as much as it certainly did, across the board, the entire Brahmin priesthood and Hindu community at large in the Tamil State.
****************************
Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, was often heard saying that the “soul of India is in its villages”. His observation holds good even today.
There are around 649,481 villages in India, according to Census 2011. Nearly 70 percent of India’s population still lives in villages. Rural and semi-urban India’s combined share in India’s GDP is about 50 percent. While agriculture contributes about 20 percent to India’s economy, it provides employment to nearly 50 percent of the working population. Due to rural India’s contribution to agriculture, the Indian food and grocery market is the sixth largest in the world. India has been the largest producer of milk in the world for over two decades because of a flourishing dairy sector in rural India. India is the second largest fruit producer in the world. These are the real indicators indeed of the extent of wealth and the market-size of the villages of India.
Now, if there are 649, 481 villages in India, there are also an equal number of Hindu temples all across the country too! See the chart below:
As per the infographic chart above, in average per-capita terms there is at least one Hindu temple in almost every village! The per-capita temple-to-village ratio perhaps is what explains why it is the “village economy or marketplace-size” in our country that significantly constitutes to the “temple economy“. A few snapshot facts amply illustrates the point about the ‘Economics of temples‘: https://hindustannewshub.com/india-news/what-is-the-economics-of-faith-in-india-know-how-the-temple-turns-the-wheels-of-the-countrys-economy/#:~:text=The%20contribution%20of%20religious%20visits%20to%20India%E2%80%99s%20GDP,number%20of%20tourists%20in%20India%20go%20to%20pilgrimages.:
The estimated size of the Temple economy is Rs. 3.02 lakh crore (c. US $38 billion):
- 55% of Hindus undertake religious pilgrimages
- Most tourists go on pilgrimages to temples in all parts of India
The monetized contribution of religious pilgrimage-trips to India’s GDP is 2.32 percent which includes the sale of flowers, fruits, food, transportation, religious merchandise, rentals, goods and services, utilities and trading of a host of other items commercially related to worship. According to published statistics, 55 percent of Hindus undertake religious pilgrimages and the largest number of domestic and foreign tourists in India, in fact, go on pilgrimage tours.
For hundreds of centuries past, there is no doubt, the “temple economy” has always been a thriving beehive of Indian economic activity that sustained the villages of India.
*******************************
As per a report made in 1820s from the data collected by the collectors of all districts in Madras Presidency alone, there was a total of c.100,000 Hindu Temples, Chatarams and Mutts in the twenty districts of the Presidency. About 300 to 400 major temples were reported to have existed in almost every district. Similarly in 1833, a report of the British Government at Madras mentions that 7,600 temples, the most wealthy ones in the State, were directly under its control then. It is not difficult to imagine the extent of revenue and wealth from “village and temple economy” of Tamil country that got drained out and spirited away by the British Administration over two centuries.
Until the British came to India, temples were managed by local village-based trustees or regional resident communities. In time the Hindu temple also grew into centers of learning, music, dance and arts, while remaining the heartbeat of a massive and decentralized rural trade-network, according to the well-known author and India historian, Sanjeev Sanyal. Every temple had abundant charitable endowments, including property given to it, for the larger benefit of the community. The benefits included Dharmashaalas (rest houses), paatashalas (Vedic schools), gaushalas (dairy farms), pushkarinis (public ponds) and other charitable institutions that advanced basic education (vidya daanam) and feeding of the poor (anna daanam).
The agenda of colonization of India that British Rule was pursuing — and which was also greatly enabled by Christian missionary evangelism — made the governors realize that it would not succeed unless the very institution of the Hindu temple was undermined and weakened at its very roots. So, the temples in south India — especially the wealthiest ones in Tamil Nadu belonging to Sri Vaishnavas such as the ones at Sri Rangam, Tirupati, Kanchipuram, for example — were all quickly brought under government control. Because there were not too many temples in the north possessing property or wealth comparable in size, the exploitation was certainly more widespread in the south.
In the period of British Colonial Rule in India during the 18th to 20th century, and quite early in their imperial reign, governments (as already described in Parts 31 through 33) recognized the fact (perhaps long before Mahatma Gandhi did!) that the treasury vaults holding much of the wealth of India, as much as its soul, lay in its village-cum-temple economies. The British East India Company and later the British Government, without much moral compunction… with complete impunity, in fact… helped themselves generously to the wealth of the village-temples through “an established system of legal plunder” designed to “drain” away much of it, slowly but surely. The mission was accomplished partly through oppressive measures of taxing the village populations and partly through covert expropriation if not outright extortion of temple wealth. The mission, of course, was also legitimate since it was implemented and enforced under laws and statute written up by the British themselves as it was they that wielded sovereign power from London.
For centuries hitherto before the advent of British Colonial Rule, the management, maintenance, custody and curating of the temples of India had been in the hands of the local village communitarian trustees. Brahmins had enjoyed the backing of age-old tradition and the general assent of the rest of the community too to conduct the affairs of their temples in accordance with ancient codes of “sastra“, “agama” or “smritis“.
The British were quick to recognize that it was indeed tradition and long history that had vested the Brahmin priesthood with such great power of influence over society and that it was quite out of proportion to their relatively small numerical strength. Wielding power to levy punitive taxes on villages — or to expropriate revenues and wealth from temples — they rightly surmised might pose formidable challenge by vested interests, the Brahmin “miraasidaars” who could be a real thorn in the flesh. The Brahmin priesthood’s position of leadership was socially pivotal; it was the epicenter of the whole temple ecosystem; and hence the British had to formulate an effective strategy to denude, degrade and diminish the community before it became possible to subordinate the Hindu temple into submission to the will of the government and to its command and control. By denigrating through all means the Brahmins, the British believed, the gateways to great wealth, great power and great social influence in India would open by themselves.
The British were, of course, right. To achieve their ends, they enacted legislation that effectively delegitimized the Brahmin’s traditional position within village-societies and religious status within the temples of India. The infamous The Madras Regulation VII of 1817 was one such legislation, passed easily and endorsed without too much public resistance or outcry given the groundswell of caste-bigotry and hate which too by that time, had been fomented (“divide and rule“) by them among several non-Brahmin castes — “forward” and “backward“. The “anti-Brahmin” campaign had already begun spewing Dravidian Native hate against the Aryan Alien! The Brahmin very soon came to be stereotyped thus as the very root of all evil and social ills in Tamil country.
In a very well-researched Policy Working Paper (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3694415) titled “Governance and Management of Temples: A Framework” (2020), G Ramesh, Professor, Centre of Public Policy, in the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, describes the so-called “reformation” of the Hindu temple as it happened under British Rule in Tamil Nadu as follows :
QUOTE: “There was a marked shift in the kinds of powers and functions that the state began to exercise over temples, during the colonial era – with the adoption of a more interventionist approach with increasing oversight of temple administration and temple affairs. A number of legislative enactments touching upon the administration and management of temples came into being during this period. This period essentially institutionalized the practice of state interference in temple affairs through the legal framework.
“The first instances of this form of State involvement came in the form of three regulations, one for each of the Presidency regions of Bengal, Madras and Bombay, between 1810-1817 by the British Government. These regulations allowed the British government to assert their sovereign authority through the East India Company’s Board of Revenue, with the claim that income from endowments was being misspent and misappropriated by the persons in charge, and thus active supervision was needed to be statutorily asserted.
“The Government of India Act of 1919 created a new paradigm by enabling the provincial governments to legislate on matters of endowments, and thus, the Madras legislature enacted the Madras Hindu Religious Endowments Act of 1925 which was the first enactment that related purely to Hindu religious endowments. This legislation and its many subsequent amendments provided for oversight of the management of temples through a board of commissioners with enormous powers, and in some cases the board could altogether take over the management of a temple”. UNQUOTE
**********************************
In Tamil Nadu (as already explained in Part-37) the pre-Independence law known as The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act 1925 was passed. Through this Act, the British went all out to cut open and let bleed the jugular vein of the temple system that had been the traditional domain and mainstay of the Tamil Brahmin… belonging to all sects, Saivite, Smaarta, Vaishnava and Madhwa.
The Act dismantled the system of “hereditary rights” ( the “miraasi” system) of the Brahmin to carry on performing many of the most essential and important religious functions and duties within a temple. Traditionally, these functions were distinct from those such as the roles that traditionally were carried by other non-Brahmin communities: tailors, pipers, temple dancers, farmers, sculptors, goldsmiths, bell-metal workers, washermen, potters, boatmen and musicians who were all stakeholders in the larger village-temple ecosphere.
The hereditary right of archaka, kainkaryapaara, mirasidaar, jeeyar, ekaangi, acharya-purusha, sthalathaar, sthanathaar, srikaaryam, purohit, madapalli cooks etc. (all Brahmin functionaries in the temples’ ecclesiastical orders) began to be portrayed by the British as the single most significant cause for large-scale temple maladministration, corruption, nepotism and malfeasance. How did such portrayal succeed? It was through a campaign of sustained calumny that held that hereditary rights gave the Brahmin community unique access to privileges which began with birth- or tradition- ordained claims to a share in the vast treasury of endowments, entitlements and material subsidies that belonged to a temple. Such claims enjoyed by the Brahmin ‘archaka“, “dharma-karta” or “miraasidaar“, unduly elevated his social status and esteem. The Brahmin priesthood in time got painted — by both the British rulers and the rising Dravidian non-Brahmin castes alike — to be a parasitical, rent-seeking social elite of Tamil society. It was time therefore to put the Brahmin in his place..
Successive British rulers and governors in their time therefore brought in quite a number of statutes and ordinances (which were in fact successors to the famous Bruce’s Code in the Tirumala Temple that in the 19th century CE, as it was claimed, was as prime and authoritative a manual of temple administration as the “Kovil Ozhugu” or “Nithya” of Sri Ramanjucharya had hitherto been). In the name of ushering in “sweeping temple reformation and systemic overhaul” of Hindu temples, such laws effectively or radically curtailed or deprived the Brahmins of their old tradition-honored system of claims to “miraasi“, and to their hereditary functioning as temple custodians and curators.
********************************
The statutes and laws were ushered in to degrade the Brahmin “archaka” or “miraasi” two principal ways:
Firstly, it was revealed that income from the endowments of temples was being misspent and misappropriated by the persons in charge, and thus active supervision was needed to be statutorily asserted. The narrative here was that those “persons in charge” were predominantly Brahmins.
Secondly, the duties and functions of Brahmins inside the sphere of temples were severely limited and reduced to performing temple rituals, sacraments, observances and festivities. The “miraasis” were stripped of all other administrative and higher supervisory functions relating to the general affairs of the temple — i.e. control over revenues, assets, accounting, audit, and facilities-management etc. The stripped out functions were then reorganized, reconfigured and delegated to specially designated intermediaries and agencies who were handpicked from out of the general public — via “open, democratic and transparent process” — and charged with responsibilities to carry out all so-called non-priestly, non-religious (secular), “purely” executive affairs of the temple.
Thus did emerge a brand new corps of temple government-appointed functionaries in the Presidency — e.g. mahants, parupatyadars, dharma-kartas, devasthanams, executive officers, tahsildars and talukdars, revenue collectors, parakamanis, clerks, peons and gumaasthas, darogas, gadekars, storekeepers, contract-vendors and suppliers and very many other subordinate staff. It was a carefully assembled corps of officers, functionaries and cadre of minions. The rules and procedures of appointing this new cadre of intermediaries or agents of the government precluded the Brahmin. In this new organizational structure of temple administration, the new cadres were expected to toe the line of their masters, the British government, and remain faithful and accountable as employees should be to their principal employer…. ready and willing to do his bidding always. A new order of “varna-ashrama” seemed to be replacing the traditional one inside the temple-precinct wherein the Brahmin was to be reduced, sooner or later, to a sort of “pariah” status.
It was thus that the British succeeded eventually in first breaking and then scattering the rank and file of the traditional organizational structure of the temple in what was ostensibly a process of “reform” but which in actuality was naked colonialism. Thus did they succeed realizing their principal goal viz. to exploit a great part of the revenues, wealth and the asset-base of temples to serve the interests of the government and the larger imperial purpose. In the Asiatic Journal of May-August 1831 CE, a British District Collector wrote this prophetic line: “The oppressive hand of the brahmin was removed from the neck of the people, and the influence they once had will never again be felt to a similar extent”.
The final commentary of Prof.G. Ramesh (of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, in his Policy working paper (ibid)) on the above complex events of history is however not so unkind to the system of Brahmin “miraasi/archaka” system. He writes QUOTE: “Historically, there was nothing to suggest that the temples were badly managed, excepting probably a few temples. In fact, there were many leading temples which were thriving before the takeover happened, and had Trustees and Patrons who were committed and contributed their own might to temple welfare”.
******************************
(to be continued)
Sudarshan Madabushi