Abstract: The recent controversy surrounding the alleged theft of gold at the Sabarimala temple has largely been discussed as an instance of administrative failure or criminal misconduct. This essay approaches the controversy differently. Rather than investigating the alleged theft itself, it uses the episode as a contemporary point of departure to examine the longer historical processes through which Sabarimala has been shaped by religious, cultural and institutional appropriation. Drawing on folklore, oral traditions, colonial ethnography, and scholarship on Buddhism and indigenous worship in Kerala, the essay argues that the shrine emerged from multiple overlapping religious traditions, including Chathan worship, kaavu traditions, Mala Araya cosmologies, Buddhist influences, and regional guardian-deity practices. These traditions were subsequently reinterpreted, institutionalised and incorporated within a dominant Brahmanical framework. Read in this broader historical context, the contemporary controversy is not simply an isolated event but an opportunity to reconsider enduring processes of ritual transformation, institutional control and material accumulation. The essay therefore invites a sociological reading of Sabarimala as a contested cultural landscape whose history reflects continuing negotiations over religious authority, memory and ownership.
Introduction: The recent controversy surrounding the alleged theft of gold at the Sabarimala temple has largely been interpreted as an episode of administrative failure, corruption or criminal misconduct. While these concerns remain significant, this essay approaches the controversy from a different perspective. It does not seek to establish the circumstances surrounding the alleged theft. Rather, it argues that the controversy provides a useful lens for examining the longer historical processes that have shaped Sabarimala. Read in this way, the debate over gold is less about a single contemporary incident than about enduring questions of religious authority, cultural memory and institutional control.
The essay argues that appropriation at Sabarimala should be understood not merely as the transfer of material resources but as a broader historical process involving the reorganisation of ritual authority, sacred landscapes and systems of religious legitimacy. The accumulation and control of sacred wealth are inseparable from earlier transformations through which indigenous traditions, local ritual practices and alternative religious histories were gradually absorbed, reinterpreted and institutionalised within a dominant Brahmanical framework. The alleged gold theft therefore becomes significant not because it explains this history, but because it draws renewed attention to it.
Rather than proposing a single alternative origin for Sabarimala, this essay situates the shrine within multiple overlapping religious traditions that coexisted and evolved over centuries. These include Chathan and kaavu traditions, Mala Araya cosmologies, Buddhist influences and regional guardian-deity worship. Drawing on folklore, oral traditions, colonial ethnography and interdisciplinary scholarship on religion, caste and Kerala’s cultural history, this essay adopts a historical-sociological reading of Sabarimala as a layered religious landscape. It examines how these traditions were selectively appropriated, sanitised and reconfigured through processes of institutionalisation and religious transformation. Seen in this broader historical context, the contemporary controversy becomes an opportunity to reconsider the historical making of Sabarimala and the continuing negotiations over culture, authority and ownership that define the shrine today.
Conceptualising Appropriation: This essay understands appropriation as a sociological process through which dominant institutions absorb, reinterpret and legitimise existing cultural and religious traditions while simultaneously reshaping their meanings, authority and ownership. Appropriation therefore extends beyond the acquisition of material resources to encompass the reorganisation of ritual practices, sacred spaces and collective memory. As Bourdieu (1991) argues, symbolic power operates through the ability to define what is recognised as legitimate culture and authority, while Gramsci’s (1971) notion of cultural hegemony highlights how dominant groups secure consent by incorporating and transforming subordinate cultural traditions. Rather …