Women priests: TN’s bold move

Welcoming women to the sanctum sanctorum, Tamil Nadu’s minister in charge of temples, P.K. Sekar Babu, recently heralded the breaking of another glass ceiling on the distaff side. Knowledge of Agama Sastra alone will be the qualifier to be a priest and not gender, he declared, opening a Pandora’s Box. Out came the naysayers with their own objections based on custom, least considering the fact that women priests are already there in substantial numbers in the country.

Apart from performing priestly duties in small temples in the state, women have also been solemnising weddings for celebrities in big cities. Very recently, Bollywood actor Dia Mirza’s wedding to Vaibhav Rekhi in Mumbai was conducted by a woman priest. Earlier on, actor Aparna Sen’s daughter was united in wedlock by a woman priest. Closer home, a woman who stepped into the shoes of her deceased father and took over as priest of an Amman temple near Madurai in 2006 got her right to succession ratified by the Madras high court. When the presiding deity is an Amman with the form of a woman, why should a woman not perform pujas, the judge had asked.

Yet minister Sekar Babu’s idea is facing opposition. Even if he has made it clear that women priests would be given leave on the five days of their menstruation, their storming Agama temples is not that easy. Even the locus standi of a secular government in taking such a decision has been questioned. But in the land of Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, a woman inside the sanctum sanctorum might just become a reality.