God’s wealth, legal frames, and the question of material and immaterial heritage: the case of Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple in Kerala, India

ABSTRACT

Analyzing the battle over Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple’s enormous treasure, the paper documents the litigious journey of the concept of sacred possession and heritage. It shows how the evolving and complex logic of secular governance in India provides the legal categories that animate this contestation over the deity’s wealth. While the enormous treasure trove housed in the six chambers of the temple’s basement ‘belongs’ to the idol (murthi) Lord Sree Padmanabhaswamy, the royal family of Travancore has held the right for over the last two hundred and seventy years to control the wealth as the Lord’s servants (dasa). Though the dispute over what is arguably the world’s largest temple gold and valuables collection began in 2007, it gained widespread media attention in 2009 when a public interest litigation (PIL) was filed. Since then, the royal family, temple management, and other stakeholders have been embroiled in the struggle for possession and control of the temple’s wealth. The paper explores how legal frames of Anglo-Hindu law in their postcolonial avatars, material patrimony (gold and land), and notions of immaterial heritage (shebaitship) animated and framed this contestation. To this end, the paper maps the legal trajectory of the dispute and the public debates over the ownership and control of the astounding wealth of Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple. Further, it decodes the legal reasoning behind the courts’ arguments and delves into ontological questions surrounding religious freedom and secularity. The discussion illustrates how notions of immaterial heritage anchored in ideas of kingship as well as kinship emerged as clinching evidence in the management and access to this sacred wealth. Finally, the analyses offer insights into the governance of sacred materiality through religio-legal categories in a postcolonial nation-state.

KEYWORDS:

• Immaterial heritage
• legal personhood
• Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple
• shebaitship
• secularity
• temple economy

Competing interests

Authors have no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The discourses on heritage in different national contexts are enmeshed with religion, identity, ethnicity, and citizenship, and the Indian case is no exception. For instance, based in the sacred city of Varanasi, Kanungo’s study (2022) focuses on the entangled histories of Hindus and Muslims who share rich material and cultural heritage. It reveals the politics of erasure and neglect that seeks to construct the narrative of an exclusive Hindu past via the obliteration of the heritage of other communities, such as Muslims and Christians. This paper contributes to the heritage discourse by offering insights into the governance of sacred materiality through religio-legal categories in an intra-religious dispute.

2 During colonial times, a plethora of disputes involving claims related to ownership of Hindu religious endowments were brought before courts. Colonial judges were called upon to ascertain the legal attributes of Hindu idols in such cases. Since there was a gap in the existing Indian and English laws, the judges recognized the concept of the Hindu idol's legal personality to examine and adjudicate such matters. The following is a brief account of Indian jurisprudence on the recognition of Hindu idols as juristic persons. In Maharanee Shibessouree Debia v Mothooranath Acharjo (1869–70), arguably one of the earliest instances discussing the subject, the Privy Council held that the deity’s manager, the shebait, possessed no personal ownership rights. They are only authorized to act as trustees on the deity's behalf. Further, in Prosunno Kumari Debya v Golab Chand Baboo (1874–75), the Privy Council stated that a shebait’s authority is akin to that of an infant heir’s manager. In 1887, Manohar Ganesh Tambekar v Lakshmiram Govindram & Ors. (1888) (widely known as the Dakor Temple case), the Bombay High Court expressly declared the Hindu idol as ‘a juridical person, the ideal embodiment of a pious or benevolent idea’. In 1925, the Bombay High Court delivered a historic verdict in the Pramatha Nath Mullick v Pradyumna Kumar Mullick (1925) case, declaring that the household idol could not be deemed as ‘a mere chattel’ and ‘the will of the idol in regard to location must be respected’. We cover numerous details about this specific case in the paper because it provides significant insights into how colonial courts interpreted this issue.

3 William Seton Gordon (1925) offers a detailed analysis of the Pramatha Nath Mullick v Pradyumna Kumar Mullick (1925) case.

4 In the landmark judgment on the Ayodhya dispute, the judges observed that legal personality is conferred upon an idol the physical embodiment of the divinity—and not on the divinity or God itself. (M Siddiq (D) Thr Lrs v Mahant Suresh Das & Ors., AIRONLINE 2019 SC 1420).

Additional information

Funding

The first author was financially supported by the India Gold Policy Centre, Indian Institute Management Ahmedabad under project titled ‘God's Wealth, Monetized Gold, and Cultural Policy: A Sociological Investigation into the Question of Temple Gold in India’.