When the Gods Defy the Commissars

A resurrected ritual on a riverbank in Malappuram reveals how Hindu self-assertion is quietly reshaping Communist Kerala

Kerala’s Communists like to present themselves as an exception to India’s unruly ideological weather. If Hindu assertion was remaking northern India, they argued that secular Kerala was immune to it.

But a sandy stretch of the Bharathapuzha river has begun to puncture that certainty. In Thirunavaya, a small town in Malappuram district often caricatured in polarised discourse as a ‘Mini Pakistan’ because of its Muslim majority, a spectacle unseen for more than two-and-a-half centuries recently unfolded.

On the riverbanks once associated with Mamankam, a medieval assembly of power and ritual, saffron-robed ascetics now swing multi-tiered brass lamps at dusk in a Kashi-style aarti. Sanskrit chants rise over the Nila river as Naga sadhus and Aghori babas mingle with families from across south India. Organisers call it Kerala’s ‘Kumbh Mela.’

Double Standards

Left-governed Thirunavaya was long cited as proof of Kerala’s post-religious sophistication. For Pinarayi Vijayan’s government, which has spent a decade lecturing the rest of India on secular virtue, the scene is awkward. But for Kerala’s Hindus, it is an overdue reclamation.

While Kerala was never irreligious, its Communist rulers always pretended otherwise. While Hindu festivals endured, it was always under a peculiar arrangement in which the Left-ruled state regulated Hindu institutions while leaving churches and mosques untouched.

For years, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) treated Hindu unease as a fiction manufactured by the Sangh Parivar and its affiliates. The comforting assumption was that ‘educated’ voters would not succumb to identity politics.

But the Thirunavaya spectacle suggests something else entirely. The Bharathapuzha (Nila to locals) is no ordinary river. Its banks once hosted Mamankam, a grand assembly held every twelve years from at least the 12th century. It was a ritual drenched in politics and blood, a medieval contest for sovereignty between Kerala’s rulers. From at least the 12th century, the Bharathapuzha here hosted Mamankam, a grand assembly held once every twelve years. It was not merely a religious festival but a theatre of sovereignty. Presided over initially by the Chera Perumals and later contested between the Valluvakonathiri of Valluvanadu and the Zamorin of Kozhikode, Mamankam was a ritualised struggle for political supremacy. The last Mamankam was held in 1755. The Mysorean invasion of Malabar by Hyder Ali a decade later ended it for good.

What followed was cultural amnesia. The Left, when it rose to power in the 20th century, had no use for Mamankam’s messy fusion of faith and power. It suited them to reduce religion to folklore than acknowledge it as a living force.

That erasure is now being challenged with the revival of the ‘Maha Magha Mahotsavam’ under the stewardship of the Sri Panch Dasnam Juna Akhara and Mata Amritanandamayi, Kerala’s most globally recognisable spiritual figure.

Cultural Revival

The revival draws on Thirunavaya’s older sacred geography. Three temples dedicated to Vishnu, Brahma and Siva stand in close proximity, forming what devotees call the ‘Trimurti Sangama,’ where the Ganga is believed to manifest during the Magha month. Poets from Thunchath Ezhuthachan onwards have treated the Nila as Kerala’s cultural memory made liquid.

It is this layered inheritance that the organisers of the present Maha Magha Mahotsavam claim to be reviving.

Traditionally, Kumbhs rotate between four north Indian sites - Prayagraj, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik - while Magh Melas are annual affairs. The Sri Panch Dasnam Juna Akhara, the oldest and most influential Shaivite monastic order associated with the Kumbh, now presides over Thirunavaya’s revival, alongside Mata Amritanandamayi, Kerala’s most globally recognisable spiritual figure.

Swami Anandavanam Bharati, who serves as sabhapati of the event, insists that the festival taps into a prehistoric spiritual continuum dating back to Parasurama, the mythological sage credited with creating Kerala itself.

That argument may not persuade academics, but the Hindu community could not care less about such cavils.

The present festival formally began on January 22, with Ganesh celebrations under the guidance of Swami Abhinav Balanand Bhairav. Daily Nila aartis and deepa pujas followed. A temporary bridge was thrown across the river to connect the Navamukunda temple with the sandbanks on the opposite shore. Pandits were flown in from Varanasi’s Dashashwamedh Ghat. By organisers’ estimates, tens of thousands of devotees have attended each evening.

That such numbers could gather, peacefully and with official permission, in a Muslim-majority district long governed by the Left has unsettled many of Kerala’s political certainties.

Predictably, the Vijayan government did not embrace the festival. Local objections were encouraged and bureaucratic hurdles multiplied for the organisers. Environmental and administrative anxieties were suddenly rediscovered. But when these failed in court, the Communist state quietly gave way by providing police and infrastructure.

One can ascribe this volte face less to any magnanimity on their part than to pure electoral arithmetic. The same government that once enforced the Sabarimala verdict with ideological fervour by dismissing Hindu protest as obscurantism, has now chosen caution. Perhaps alienating Hindu voters further was a risk even Pinarayi Vijayan, Kerala’s most combative Marxist since E.M.S. Namboodiripad, was unwilling to take.

Trapped by Dogma

The Left has struggled to respond to the Nila spectacle. While some leaders from the Left Democratic Front government have acknowledged missteps, particularly during the Sabarimala controversy, others have dismissed the current stirrings as manufactured or transient. Both streams of thought within Kerala’s Communist party underestimate the depth of feeling involved.

The irony has not been lost on observers. In a state where namaz in government offices has been tolerated in the name of inclusion, Hindu rituals have routinely been policed as ‘provocation.’

The Communist Party’s dilemma is self-inflicted. Having spent decades insisting that religion was a private eccentricity, it now lacks the language to engage with its public return. To oppose Hindu assertion outright risks confirming accusations of bias. To accommodate it undermines the party’s self-image as rationalist custodian of modernity.

Pinarayi Vijayan, whose politics thrives on confrontation, looks unusually constrained. His government’s authority rests on discipline and control.

Its concern has been the surge in the BJP vote share in Kerala, which has crossed 19 percent not because it has conquered the state, but because the Left has alienated sections of its natural constituency.

Yet it would be a mistake to see the Thirunavaya festival merely as a BJP project. Earlier revival attempts predate its recent gains. In 2016, a local journalist and history enthusiast, Thirur Dinesh, organised a modest Mahamagham with the backing of cultural groups and veteran BJP leader Kummanam Rajasekharan. Threats and lack of cooperation stalled the effort the following year. Only after spiritual institutions such as Advaithashramam and Mata Amritanandamayi’s network became involved did the revival acquire momentum.

What makes Kerala’s Hindu resurgence unsettling for the Left is its restraint. There has been no muscular mobilisation of the Hindi heartland as in the North. There have been no campaigns to rewrite medieval history or demands to displace existing places of worship. The idiom has been softer, drawing on Kerala’s own reformist Hindu traditions - from temple-entry movements to Sree Narayana Guru’s egalitarianism.

There have been no mosque-mandate movements or any revisionist Hindu crusades, which deprives the Communists of their favourite foil of the caricatured Hindu fanatic. What stands before them instead is a literate, middle-class, historically conscious Hindu electorate asking an inconvenient question as to why equality before the state stops at the temple gate.