Into Priesthood - on Training Dalits to become Priests

Does training Dalits to become priests break down caste hierarchy or create another layer of stratification?

Under normal circumstances, the training of 500 Dalit and tribal youth by a conservative religious institution such as the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), with the aim of helping them become priests in Hindu temples, would be hailed as a reformative and a revolutionary step, even in a region that has seen the worst of caste oppression symbolised by the violence against Dalits in Karamchedu and Tsunduru. For progressive Hindus, such a programme would represent long-overdue inclusive, perhaps disruptive, social engineering that could bring marginalised communities, previously barred from entering temples for fear of “impurity”, into the mainstream. Elevating a few from among these oppressed communities to priesthood, even in small neighbourhood temples of the TTD in far-flung areas of Andhra Pradesh, could serve as a reparation of sorts.

However, for status quoists, drenched as they tend to be in “pure” orthodoxy, this initiative to appoint Dalit and lower caste priests by the end of March is apparently being considered a breach of their exclusive privilege. The arguments made against the proposal appear to question whether those who eat non-vegetarian food, or have a variety of other such lifestyle habits that differ from those of the privileged class, could endure the rigours of maintaining “purity from outside and inside” and be able to chant mantras. What is conveniently forgotten is that the Supreme Court in 2015 held that caste and birth should not determine induction of priests in temples. Rather, domain knowledge, traditional codes of practice, and the Constitution’s guarantee of equality before law should be applied.

Imagine a non-Brahmin boy born to poor daily wagers, wearing the archetypal dhoti and entering the sanctum sanctorum of a local temple to render mantras with a flourish and perform pujas. This suggests that rigid, divisive caste hierarchy may be on the wane.

Despite these small steps forward, some activists describe it as “window dressing”. For Kancha Ilaiah, who is an academic and an activist, this mode of training and appointing Dalits in their neighbourhood temples would not change the basic structure of Hinduism and the “so-called tradition of following agamasastras,” or doctrine for temple rituals. “Unless Dalits, OBCs and Adivasis are trained in proper theological schools and appointed in main temples like Tirumala, Hinduism does not become a spiritual democratic system… its spiritual fascist system will continue,” he argues.

The other challenge for this initiative is to demonstrate why it is even a priority to train Dalits to become priests. Are we unwittingly creating another social layer or a “sanskritised class of purity” when what we should focus on is creating a contemporary era of scientific and rationale thinking? Didn’t even B.R. Ambedkar speak of the limitations of temple entry for Dalits? Wouldn’t the monies deployed be better spent on quality schools in Dalit and tribal habitations?