Matters of faith

A friend in Delhi pinged early morning, wanting to hear my comments on a Facebook post by a Keralite woman who was against the new Supreme Court verdict on women's entry into the Sabarimala temple.
The woman in question argued her case well and said Keralite women found it a means to detox, both for the pilgrim men and the women who stayed at home. And how dare the court change status quo when the women didnt want to go?
When the ruling came, I thought so too - why tamper with an age-old practice? If Lord Ayyappa, a celibate God, doesn't want menstruating women pilgrims around, why try to change that? Women also have the choice of not making the pilgrimage even if the court has said they can, and I think most Kerala Hindu women might choose to do so for a while. But then there are  a couple of non- Malayalee women who have declared  that they'll be going and the State and police better make it safe for them. So it's going to be tricky for the State govt under the Communist Party whose reverence towards the popular pilgrim destination doesn't extend beyond it being a money-spinner for the State.
Then came bureaucrat and writer NS Madhavan's tweet that women's entry to Sabarimala was banned only in 1972; that even as late as 1986 the temple Board took money from a Tamil film crew for a shooting which had young actresses dancing on the famed 18 steps. Bureaucrat TKA Nair reminisced how his parents had together gone to fulfill a vow made at his birth and his first "chorunu/ rice feeding" as a baby was at the sanctum. So here is a ban that came in the last 50 years but human memory is short and Hindu women of Kerala in general think granting entry is sacrilegious and they don't need this gesture of gender equality.
If women chose to stay away in olden times, it could've been because the trek to Sabarimala through unfriendly forest terrain was not easy for them to make over so many days. But now there are proper roads upto the Pampa river. Only issue is that the volume of the milling male devotees the temple gets during pilgrimage season (November to January) may not be comfortable for women, or there should be a separate exclusive time period for them.
Since it's got so ingrained into Kerala women that Sabarimala is a male domain, they are not likely to go. But who knows in another 30-40 years, women may think differently and will see the practice as regressive. Though I'm getting the feeling that Indians are getting more religious and more regressive in their faiths _ each sees it as a way of being pious and warding off the Other.
p.s. I've personally found Ayyappa male pilgrims the safest company in train! But the ones I've met have only been from Tamil Nadu/ some Andhra on "No. 20 Madras- Trivandrum Mail", and they have been extremely courteous (even offering me some packed breakfast of roti and curry once when the train was stranded). My only grouse had been about them going barefoot everywhere including the dirty train toilets and using the blankets (which I think are not washed after each user in Indian trains) in the AC compartment.
I just hope this issue doesn't cause a major disruption in Kerala, and the protest at Pandalam and Tvm day before doesnt augur well. As a law ensuring gender equality, the judgement is good but I guess it's best to leave matters of faith untampered.