Sabarimala: Gold lust and the battle for the hill

Before dawn every pilgrimage season, this picturesque mountain exhales prayer. In the faint blue light before sunrise, a black and blue tide of men coils upward through the Pathanamthitta forest in south Kerala. Barefoot and bare-chested, each carries on his head the twin cloth bundle of the irumudikettu, the worldly offering to a celibate god who lives atop a forested hill surrounded by the biodiversity-rich wilderness of the Periyar Tiger Reserve.

The air tastes of camphor, sweat and wet earth. From somewhere down the slope, a conch wails, and thousands of voices rise in unison to a crescendo that rolls across the green canopy: ‘Swamiye saranam Ayyappa’.

For 41 days, these men have practised austerities — no meat, no alcohol, no intimacy. Their climb is the final act of surrender, a physical and spiritual journey to a god who embodies renunciation. The forest path is both pilgrimage and penance. But over time, the mountain has changed and so has the nature of devotion.

What was once a hard trek through dense jungle has become a grand spectacle. LED screens beam rituals to packed crowds. Helicopters hum overhead. Plastic bottles crunch underfoot. The god of austerity now witnesses one of the world’s largest annual congregations of faith amid a protected forest groaning under the footfalls of the faithful.

For millions across South India, Sabarimala is not merely a temple — it’s a calling. From Chennai and Hyderabad to Gulbarga and Visakhapatnam, devotees risk long, difficult journeys to reach their hermit god. For the people of Kerala, though, the sacred ground also holds a mirror to the contradictions of a society that prides itself on its rationality yet bows to ritual.

The Dwarapalaka idols Kerala forms SIT to probe lower weight of gold plating on Sabarimala idols

The god of paradox

As per legend, Ayyappa was born of Shiva and Mohini, Vishnu’s female form. He represents a divine paradox, half masculine and half feminine. Adopted by the royal family of Pandalam in southern Kerala, he renounced kingship after fulfilling his divine mission of slaying the demoness Mahishi and restoring order. Having accomplished this, he withdrew into the forests of the Western Ghats to meditate in celibate solitude.

His friendship with a Muslim warrior named Vavar still defines the pilgrimage. Pilgrims stop at Erumely in the foothills to bow before Vavar’s mosque before proceeding to the hilltop shrine. Muslim caretakers distribute water to Hindu devotees, an interfaith tradition that predates modern secularism.

“It reminds us that faith in Kerala was never exclusionary,” says historian Rajan Gurukkal, former vice-chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University in Athirampuzha near Kottayam. “Before secularism was a word, this land practised it in spirit.”

That spirit of inclusivity moulded Sabarimala’s identity for centuries. The pilgrimage blurred caste and class, the forest road was a refuge from hierarchy. No longer, though — today the pilgrimage is a commercialised attraction that draws devotees from northern India as well.

Until the mid-20th century, Sabarimala was reached after days of trekking. Today, nearly 50 million devotees visit every season, and the valley below becomes a sprawling, temporary city of makeshift bridges, sewage plants and markets spread across land that once held only bamboo and leeches. “The irony hits hard,” observes historian T.S. Syamkumar, an authority on Sabarimala. “Ayyappa renounced kingship for solitude. He now presides over a lust for gold in his name.”

The gold that vanished

The latest controversy, the disappearance of gold from the temple’s Dwarapalaka idols, has shaken Kerala’s political establishment and stripped bare the rational pretensions of the ruling LDF (Left Democratic Front) government of chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

Sabarimala gold scam: UDF demands Devaswom minister’s resignation for 3rd day running

In 1999, liquor baron Vijay Mallya, who later faced charges of defrauding banks of thousands of crores and fleeing the country, donated gold to cover the entire sanctum sanctorum and the Dwarapalaka idols guarding it. Two decades later, in 2019, the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB), a government-controlled body managing Sabarimala and all major temples in southern Kerala, sent the same idols to Chennai for gold-cladding.

Unnikrishnan Potti, a private individual, took on the task. When the idols returned, they were lighter by more than four kilograms. Investigators eventually found one missing pedestal in the home of a relative of Potti’s in Chennai.

For years, the TDB’s vigilance wing sat on reports and files that went nowhere. Then, in 2025, the Kerala High Court stepped in. A bench consisting of Justices Raja Vijayaraghavan V. and K.V. Jayakumar ordered a Special Investigation Team under crime branch officer S. Sasidharan and appointed retired judge K.T. Sankaran to oversee a full inventory of the temple’s wealth.

The court berated the “administrative darkness” surrounding the temple’s assets and demanded accountability from the state. The initial findings were scathing: records made no mention of the expensive gold cladding of idols, stating instead that these were made of copper with some gold plating that had worn off over the years.

The political fallout was immediate. The Kerala Assembly turned into a theatre of outrage. Congress MLA and Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan demanded the resignations of Kerala’s Devaswom minister V.N. Vasavan and TDB president P.S. Prasanth besides a CBI probe. He also asked why the discredited Potti had been entrusted with the task.

The BJP jumped in, accusing the Left government of desecration and insisting that it hand over temple management to ‘devotees’.

The state government’s response has been a mix of defensiveness and deflection. Vasavan promised transparency but also accused the Opposition of politicising faith, while Pinarayi Vijayan has maintained a studied silence in the midst of daily uproar in the state Assembly.

The controversy has laid bare the contradictions of the Travancore Devaswom Board, a body born of princely-era compromises but now controlled by political nominees. “The CPI(M) can’t renounce faith without losing votes, and it can’t embrace it without losing its soul,” Syamkumar says.

The court observed that the alleged theft of Ayyappa’s gold would not have been possible without collusion between the TDB staff and the political leadership. Investigators suggest that those who transported the Dwarapalaka idols to Chennai, claiming they had gone for repairs, sold the gold-clad originals and substituted them with gold-plated bronze replicas.

The court also expressed the hope that no one had stolen the original Ayyappa idol and installed a substitute in its place.

The Sabarimala management represents a strange paradox: a powerful religious institution being governed by avowed atheists. The TDB is legally autonomous but politically captive. Its chairperson is a nominee of the ruling party, and appointments are often rewards for loyalty, not piety. Audits are irregular. Records are opaque.

Despite its Marxist ideology, the LDF has learned that renouncing faith in Kerala means losing votes. “The party’s secularism has adapted to the compulsions of governance,” admits M.V. Govindan, state secretary of the CPI(M). “We don’t worship the deity, but we must manage the temple.”

That management has turned Sabarimala into an empire of contradictions, both a pilgrimage and an industry, a sanctuary and a spectacle. For many observers, the gold scandal is not an aberration — the conspicuous wealth of the shrine is a resource the state won’t let go of easily.

The battle for the hill

The BJP and RSS see Sabarimala not just as a temple but as a strategic opportunity, an emotive corridor into Kerala’s resistant electorate. In 2018, the Sangh had initially welcomed the Supreme Court verdict allowing women’s entry, calling it reformist. But when it registered the anger among devotees, it reversed its position, recasting itself as the defender of tradition and the Left as the destroyer of faith.

The BJP’s strategy now includes a sustained effort to court Kerala’s powerful community organisations, the Nair Service Society representing upper caste Nairs and the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam representing OBC Ezhavas. Both oppose women’s entry into Sabarimala but have long kept their distance from the BJP. Now, they are being courted aggressively by both sides.

Union minister Suresh Gopi recently declared that the BJP and RSS aim to bring Sabarimala under Union government control, claiming that only such a move can “do justice to devotees”. For the Sangh, this is part of a broader campaign to bring prominent temples, from Ayodhya to Guruvayur, into a nationalised Hindu fold.

“The BJP isn’t just fighting to control Sabarimala,” says Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee general-secretary M. Liju. “It is attempting to hijack Kerala’s spiritual narrative, and the fight against it requires largescale resistance.”