Controversies over crowd management have marred the annual pilgrimage to Sabarimala this season. Hiran Unnikrishnan treks up the hill shrine along the Vandiperiyar route to take stock of the situation.
The road lined with trees opens from Vandiperiyar, a sleepy hill station in Kerala’s Idukki district, and meanders across an intricate network of tea plantations. A 12-km journey takes you down a village track that opens to a valley.
‘Sathram’, reads a destination board a few metres from the entry point. The crowd of men in black attires is unmindful of the intermittent drizzle that makes the December evening chill harsher. They wait patiently in front of a rusty cabin from which a few policemen are taking down their names and personal details in a register. Those who have given their names are moving around parked vehicles and a temple nearby while some head towards the makeshift shops that have come up just outside the ground.
“Come in swamis, have some tea,’’ Thilakan, a tea vendor, is beckoning the pilgrims heading for Sree Dharma Sastha Temple at Sabarimala as they walk by in motely groups. The ongoing pilgrimage season at Sabarimala has been quite productive for the 44-year-old, a native of Sathram. “More and more devotees are flowing in probably to avoid the long queues along the trekking path from the Pampa,” he says.
The Pampa route, which opens whenever the temple opens, is the most crowded, while two more routes -- one requiring an arduous day-night trek along a forest trail from Erumely and another taking about six hours of trek across a few forested hills from Vandiperiyar -- are opened during the annual pilgrim season in December-January.
Royal family’s route
Sathram village, which derives its name from a wayside lodging facility that existed here during the royal era, serves as the last stop-over point on the Vandiperiyar route that meanders through deep forests and rolling grasslands part of the Periyar Tiger Reserve (PTR) to reach Sabarimala. It was the preferred route of the royal family of erstwhile Travancore.
“The buzz around this old route is surely escalating as evident from the numbers. As many as 45,223 people have taken this route till December 20 since it was opened on November 26,” explains Jyotish J Ozhakkal, Range Forest Officer, Azhutha.
A settlement of just over 300 families, Sathram comes to life with Sabarimala devotees during the annual pilgrimage season in November each year. The majority of the local residents here are the second-generation Sri Lankan Tamils who settled down here as plantation workers in the 1960s. The village goes off-grid immediately as the season ends in mid-January.
As soon as the sunlight broke in through the thick mist, the milling crowd quickly turns into a queue in front of a wooden bridge, from where the forest trail begins. After inspecting their baggage for plastic, the devotees are let in by 7.30 a.m. Over the next six hours, they trudge along a 12-km route covering steep slopes and tricky curves to enter the Sabarimala hillock.
“It’s beautifully slow and connects with our tradition. On the way, you lose all that luxuries you strive so hard for in our lives,’’ says K. Siva Kumar, a native of Dindigul. The 42-year-old had done the Sabarimala pilgrimage for nine consecutive seasons till the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, with little-to-no advance planning. But the days when people like him could just join in are over; now they must apply for a spot through the virtual queue system run by the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) – which runs the Sabarimala temple.
This forest route takes the pilgrims straight to the Sannidhanam – the temple premises, where they merge with the crowd waiting in long lines at the queue complexes. The entry to the temple is through 18 holy steps.
This season has witnessed a heavy rush of devotees. The inflow which began on a moderate note at the start of the season progressed and hit a crescendo after the first week of December. The crowd management system was thrown into complete disarray as people got stuck in long queues that lasted sometimes up to 14 hours. Traffic on the roads which lead to the hillock slowed down to a point that the tailbacks extended for several kilometres and the devotees were made to spend hours in their vehicles without access to food and water. The chaos, that lasted almost a week, also set the stage for a political debate with the Opposition parties accusing the TDB as well as the State government of a lack of preparedness.
Tough measures
Just as the situation seemed to spiral out of control, the State government chipped in with some tough measures. From easing the dense crowd on the hillock to regulating the inflow of pilgrims into different clusters and clearing the overflow of vehicles to the parking grounds at Nilackal (for the pilgrims taking the Pampa route), an entirely new crowd management plan was enforced. Normalcy could be restored in the next couple of days and the clean-up works soon regained lost momentum.
At his modest office outside the Sannidhanam, Sudarshanan K.S., Special Officer of Police, is busy analysing the different patterns of pilgrim inflows and outflows. The key to managing the rush, according to him, lies in ensuring the smooth movement of people from downhill to the top and back to the foothills in one cycle. “Given the current speed, it takes a person some two and a half hours to climb up the hillock from Pampa and perform darshan. An average of 65 to 70 persons are now ascending the 18 holy steps each minute,’’ says the official, who presides over a posse of 1,250 police officers.
While stepping onto these 18 gold-plated stairs constitutes a critical part of the pilgrimage, the authorities regard this steep climb as the biggest bottleneck in streamlining the crowd movement. The pace of the pilgrim movement is severely affected by the presence of many old and differently abled devotees in the crowd. As per official estimates, over 30% of the devotees who visited the temple this season comprised either aged women or young children.
To help the devotees negotiate the flight of holy steps, 14 policemen in two separate batches are deployed on the stairs, besides six officers at the landing. “Since this duty demands high physical labour, the policemen on the steps get replaced every 20 minutes so as to maintain the pace,” says Sudarshanan. Official sources, meanwhile, attribute the slow pace of crowd movement to the stone pillars installed on either side of the stairs which hinder the positioning of the cops.
While the rush continues, crowd problem seems to have been resolved for now. But the TDB keeps augmenting the facilities for devotees in anticipation of higher pilgrim turnout. It, at the same time, also insists that the recent controversy over crowding and the hardships of devotees who waited for hours to perform the pilgrimage was simply blown out of proportion owing to political reasons.
“For a place like Sabarimala, where so many people converge in such a short span of time, this can happen anytime. Such incidents were reported from here in the previous seasons too. The difference, this time, however, is that it’s an election year,’’ says P.S. Prasanth, president, Travancore Devaswom Board.
Minister’s presence
Acting on the instruction of the government, Prasanth has camped at Sabarimala for days on end to ensure effective implementation of pilgrim services. Despite being busy with the government’s Navakerala outreach mission, Devaswom Minister K. Radhakrishnan too has been making his presence felt at the pilgrimage zone here, on and off.
Meanwhile, data point to a drop in pilgrim footfall compared to the previous season. In the first 28 days of the season, the temple saw 18.16 lakh devotees coming in as against 18.88 lakh last time during the same period. The income too saw a corresponding drop from ₹154.77 crore to ₹134.44 crore. The TDB, however, is confident about the inflow to pick up in the second phase of the pilgrimage season, which takes off on December 30. The climactic day of the pilgrimage, which falls on January 15 next year, will bring the biggest ever crowd of the season.
The temple at Sabarimala was in the eye of a storm in 2018 following a Supreme Court order which allowed women of all age groups to enter the temple. While the protests in this connection eventually faded away, the temple has remained at the core of various communal and misinformation campaigns ever since.
Nousharuddin Musaliyar, who heads the proceedings at Vavarunada, a Muslim shrine located just a few metres from the Ayyappa temple, can attest to the growing impact of such campaigns on the Sabarimala pilgrimage. Of the close to a lakh devotees that the temple has received daily this season, not more than a few hundreds have had darshan at the shrine. It was a norm earlier to complete the Ayyppa darshan with a visit to Vavarunada.
“This was supposed to be an epitome of religious harmony but things have changed. I strongly believe that the hate campaigns have a role in this,” rues the 61-year-old Musaliyar, believed to a descendent of Vavar, the Muslim friend of Lord Ayyappa going by the legend.
Kandararu Mahesh Mohanaru, the temple Tantri (chief priest), however, likes to see things in a different way. “The pilgrimage to Sabarimala is a pursuit to foster unity and equality. The 41-day penance observed before trekking up the hill makes each devotee equal and offers an unmatched spiritual experience to all,” he says.
To a query whether he noticed the communally charged campaigns over Sabarimala, the Tantri says he would rather stay ignorant of such developments. “My focus remains on the spiritual experience that this pilgrimage offers and I am happy that more and more people are coming up to embrace it,” he adds.
But not all are convinced that this increase in footfall points to the pilgrimage’s success. Environmentalists, for instance, have flagged their concerns about the carrying capacity of the fragile hills. The Forest department has from time to time conveyed its objections to the frenzied construction boom at the Sannidhanam instead of developing facilities at the 250 acres of land at Nilackal. This, according to the officials, goes against the basic vision of the Sabarimala master plan, which is to open up the Sannidhanam by dismantling the structures, points out a retired forest official.
“What we are witnessing at Sabarimala is a reckless violation of environmental protocol,” argues Rajan Gurukkal, eminent historian and former member, National Tiger Conservation Authority. Having conducted extensive studies on the ecological impact of Sabarimala pilgrimage, he accuses the TDB of shedding its responsibility of maintaining the ecological balance and mitigating the impact of water contamination in the Pampa.
“The actual turnout to the temple has exceeded the optimum carrying capacity to reach fearful levels. It is high time the TDB came to terms with the reality and paid some attention to the essential ecological repair of the fragile environment that surrounds the temple,” adds Gurukkal.
As the inflow of pilgrims to Sabarimala keeps increasing year after year, what is less clear is the cause of this gradual rise in religiously motivated travel to the hillock. Most who are asked include the word “spiritual” in their answer. The more sceptical, however, partly attribute the trend to intense marketing efforts taken out in the previous decades and also during the post-pandemic period.
