This page reports a legal position and takes no side in it. It exists because the position is repeatedly stated wrongly — sometimes as “the ban was struck down”, sometimes as “the ban was restored” — and both are wrong in the same way: they describe something as finished that is not.
What has happened, in order
The Sabarimala litigation, dated
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 28 September 2018 | A five-judge Supreme Court bench held, 4–1, that excluding women of menstruating age was unconstitutional. CJI Dipak Misra held that the selective ban was not an essential part of Hinduism but a form of “religious patriarchy”. |
| November 2019 | A five-judge bench hearing the review petitions referred the matter to a larger bench, framing seven broader questions about religious freedom that reach well beyond Sabarimala. |
| 7 April 2026 | A nine-judge constitution bench, headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant, began hearing the reference. |
| 14 May 2026 | After sixteen days of arguments the bench reserved judgment. |
| As at 21 August 2026 | Judgment remains reserved. The Chief Justice has indicated a verdict is likely in October. |
- Our banked notes recorded the 2019 referral as being “to a larger bench of seven judges”. That was wrong.
- It was a bench of FIVE judges that made the referral, and it framed SEVEN QUESTIONS. The larger bench is NINE.
- The seven attached to the questions, not to the judges. We are recording the error because it is exactly the kind that spreads.
What the case is actually about
Not only Sabarimala. The seven questions framed in 2019 concern the scope of Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution — the freedom of religion and the right of religious denominations to manage their own affairs — and how those interact with other fundamental rights. The reference has been heard alongside questions about the treatment of women at religious places across more than one faith. Whatever is decided will apply well beyond one hill in Pathanamthitta, which is why nine judges are sitting on it and why it has taken this long.
The bench, as reported, is headed by CJI Surya Kant and includes Justices B. V. Nagarathna, M. M. Sundresh, Ahsanuddin Amanullah, Aravind Kumar, Augustine George Masih, Prasanna B. Varale, R. Mahadevan and Joymalya Bagchi.
What this means on the ground, and what we will not say
The temple administration has continued to enforce the traditional restriction. The 2018 judgment has not been overruled and the reference has not been decided. Those two sentences sit uncomfortably together, and that discomfort is the actual situation rather than a failure to explain it.
We are not going to tell any reader what will happen if they travel to Sabarimala. We do not know, it depends on decisions that are not ours, and a travel page is the wrong place to be issuing predictions about a live constitutional matter that has produced protests and litigation. Anyone for whom this question is not abstract should be taking advice closer to the ground and closer to the date than anything written here.
Why we publish it at all
Because the alternative is to write about Sabarimala as though this were not happening, which is what most travel writing does, and which leaves a reader with an out-of-date impression formed from whichever headline they last saw — most likely one from 2018. A page that gives the dates in order, names the bench, and states plainly that judgment is reserved is doing the only useful thing available: telling you the state of play and where its own knowledge stops.
This page was last checked on 21 August 2026. If you are reading it after October 2026, check whether the judgment has been delivered — because when it is, everything above becomes history and the paragraph that matters will be a different one.