ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the unfolding of a Judicious succession dispute in a contemporary religious movement in India. In India, the secularism debate has been framed around "circumscribing" the role of religion in the matters of the modern state or alternately the impossibility of such separation in the South Asian context. The Svadhyaya movement was founded by Pandurang Shastri Athavale, a Maharashtrian Brahman who believed that Hinduism needed to be reformed. The structure of the Svadhyaya trusts is such that the Tatvajnana Vidyapith trust, which, in 1956, was the first trust to be set up in the Svadhyaya movement as an educational trust, controls all other trusts. In the case of the Svadhyaya movement, the court cases began with the closure of Bhavnirjhar, one of the most important Svadhyaya temples. The complex nature of the enactment of the modern Hindu law of religious and charitable endowment has repeatedly been noted by scholars studying temple disputes.
