Ayyappa's shrine sits in a forest in the Western Ghats and receives one of the largest pilgrim flows on earth in its season, and the vow is unusually demanding: forty-one days of celibacy, abstinence, black or blue clothing, no footwear, no shaving, and the surrender of ordinary status — pilgrims call each other Swami and eat together regardless of caste, and Muslims and Christians make the climb too, with a mosque to Vavar, a companion figure, on the route. Against that egalitarian frame sits the exclusion of women between roughly ten and fifty, justified by the deity's status as a celibate. The Supreme Court struck the bar down in 2018 in a 4-1 judgment; Kerala erupted, women who entered were escorted by police and afterward ostracised, a review was admitted, and the questions were referred to a larger bench where they remain. In practice the shrine is as it was. It is the sharpest live collision in India between constitutional equality and a religious community's claim to run its own affairs, and Hindu opinion is genuinely and deeply split — including among women, many of whom campaigned to keep the bar.