Pillaiyarpuram village, Tirunelveli district,: Tamil Nadu

Select Language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bulgarian Bengali Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Khmer Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Marathi Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish

This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. You can help by converting these articles into an encyclopaedia-style entry, deleting portions of the kind normally not used in encyclopaedia entries. Please also fill in missing details; put categories, headings and sub-headings; and combine this with other articles on exactly the same subject. Readers will be able to edit existing articles and post new articles directly on their online archival encyclopædia only after its formal launch. See examples and a tutorial.

At TN temple, caste is history

The Times of India

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Madurai: Three years after deep caste divisions stopped them from celebrating a temple festival together, on Friday dalits beat the drums as per tradition and Thevars led the procession to an ancient temple. The rare show of caste amity took place in Pillaiyarpuram village, in caste-sensitive Tirunelveli district in Tamil Nadu, where the villagers worshipped together at the Vadabathira Kaliamman temple.

Tirunelveli SP Asra Garg led a posse of 600 policemen to provide security backup in the village. He said the festival was held after marathon talks were held on Friday to convince the Thevars to allow the dalits to take part in the ritualistic tradition of drumbeating after which they were allowed to offer prayers at the temple. The village dalit leader, S Gurusamy, told TOI: ‘‘We will be happy if this continues.’’ The silk clothes offered by the dalits were used to adorn the deity.

Though the non-dalits from eight villages enjoyed the rights of conducting ceremonies in this temple during the annual festival during March every year, the dalits also participated in it and were the drumbeaters. There was harmony until 2007 when a minor dispute led to a clash and strains developed between the two groups — a case is pending in this regard in the Madras HC. The revenue department and police held a peace meeting and it was decided that the festival would be held on March 5 and 6. The non-dalits were allowed to enter the temple and perform the ceremonies, while the dalits entered the temple and offered prayers.