The Supreme Court of India is no stranger to unusual arguments. When an institution has the final say on everything from property disputes to a basic right to privacy for Indians, you can be assured of a range of often quite unusual arguments.

But few judges of the Court will have heard quite such a range as the five on the Constitutional Bench that has been hearing three high profile cases: on the criminalisation of homosexuality, on women seeking entry to Sabarimalai temple and on the criminalisation of adultery.

The first and the last cases had arguments citing morality and society, but it was with the second that the arguments became both cosmic and constitutional. As when advocate J.Sai Deepak, arguing for one of the parties opposing temple entry, argued that the temple deity, Lord Ayyappa, was a legal person and as such was entitled to the same fundamental rights of the Constitution as any other Indian person.

Specifically, Deepak argued that the Lord was entitled to the rights allowed by Article 21 (Protection of life and personal liberty), Article 25 (Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion) and Article 26 (Freedom to manage religious affairs). “He suggested that Lord Ayyappa’s right to maintain his ‘perpetual celibate’ status was covered under the right to privacy under Article 21,” reported one legal website.

The verdict will show if these arguments worked, but at the least they marked an interesting addition to an already quite extensive and unique thread in Indian legal thought: the case of Hindu deities being “juristic persons”, who defend or demand their rights in court. It may seem a peculiarly Indian paradox that presumably all-powerful gods can also appear quite human and in need of legal help.

This attitude may be ancient. Indian gods have often seemed to resemble those who revere them, with similar passions and practices in everything from love to food, so why not also in our notorious passion for litigation? This is after all the country where a court case started in 1836 over the property of Raja Rajkrishna Deb in Kolkata was still being fought in the 21st century.

Another example, pointed out by mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik, is of Odisha’s Sakshigopala Temple. The temple’s legend tells of Lord Gopala who agreed to appear to testify as a witness on behalf of a devotee. His only condition was that the devotee should lead the way to court without looking back – but he did, and the god became a statue. This was still enough to help him win, and he then built a temple in honour of the Lord who was willing to come to court. Sakshi is Sanskrit for witness.

These roots might lie in Indian tradition, but it was the British who gave them explicit legal form in the 19th century. In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla’s fascinating account of how British laws and financial practices were adapted to India, she puts this development in the wider context of the evolution of the trust in Victorian Britain.

The idea of donating wealth on behalf of beneficiaries, but administered by third party trustees, had been developed by landed aristocrats in the 18th century but “it was in the next century that it came to be appropriated by the burgeoning middle class, especially the commercially astute and upwardly mobile business and professional sectors,” writes Birla.

The Industrial Revolution had given these sectors new wealth, and charitable donations, often with a religious angle, were one way to deploy the wealth to gain status. Trusts were the mechanism for this, so it was natural enough that the British sought to replicate the same pattern in India, especially as native entrepreneurs started making money and also sought to increase their status.

But Birla notes that there were long-standing Indian practices of giving donations, which existed within a web of community and religious associations, and these didn’t always sit easily with British models. With temples in particular, the links were complex, involving nuances of caste and community and also the practice of many merchants of treating temples as unofficial treasuries, where money could be kept, but also withdrawn when needed, even if it angered the priests who depended on that money.

When these complexities met British laws it usually ended up in Court. And as British judges dealt with increasing disputes over temple property, they hit on the idea of treating the deity as a legal person in whom ownership could rest. At one stroke this avoided having to sift through all the claims of tradition, while also neatly appearing to respect Indian sentiments by treating the idols as living persons.

In 1869 the Privy Council, the judges who made up the highest court of appeal in the British Empire decided the case of Maharani Shibessouree v. Mothooranath Acharjo by declaring that the shebait, the manager of the deity, could only act as a trustee on behalf of the deity. In 1875, in another case, the Privy Council articulated that the shebait had to act “as the manager of an infant heir.”

And in 1887, in what is called the Dakor Temple case, the Bombay High Court finally stated explicitly that the “Hindu idol is a juridical subject and the pious idea that it embodies is given the status of a legal person.” As Birla notes, the time was ripe, since this was just a year after the Indian Income Tax Act was passed which allowed exemptions for religious or public charitable purposes.

By 1925 this principle was established enough for the Privy Council in London to sum it all up by ruling, in the case of Pramatha Nath Mullick vs. Pradyumna Kumar Mullick that “the Hindu idol is, according to long established authority, founded upon the religious customs of the Hindus, and the recognition thereof by the Courts of Law, a ‘juristic entity’.” And it repeated the comparison with the trustee for an infant heir; the idols were, in law, infants who would never grow up.

Perhaps in response to this, the following years were to see an explosion of cases where deities went to court. In 1934 the Times of India (ToI) reported on how the deity at the Badrinath temple had won a claim of Rs54,000 (a huge sum at that time) against the trust of Rani Gomti Bibi of Allahabad, which had not delivered on promised donations.

In 1934 ToI reported on how Shri Thakoreji (Krishna), installed as an idol in several temples of the Vallabhacharya Vaishnav sect in Bombay had won an injunction against the sale of property donated by family whose patriarch had died, leaving an heir who was alleged to be “wasting and mismanaging the properties”. The heir argued that the properties were his, but the court sided with the Lord.

Deities didn’t always win. In 1937 a lady named Anandibai Vamanrao Barve in Dahanu near Bombay filed a case against Lord Maruti, alleging his devotees were performing religious ceremonies on land she had inherited, and were objecting to her building a wall on it; two years later ToI reported that she had won her case, and the Lord and his devotees had to withdraw.

Deities could also fight against each other. In 1938 ToI reported on a suit where “rival claims have been made on behalf of the deities Shri Ranchodji and Shri Gopalji, to the ownership of a house in which the latter is worshipped.” Shri Ranchodji alleged that he had allowed Shri Gopalji to install his idol in his own house after Shri Gopalji’s temple was washed away in a flood, and now he was trying to usurp it.

The post-Independence period saw further developments in the concept, not always to the benefit of deities. In 1969, for example, the Supreme Court upheld a decision first made by an income tax tribunal in Calcutta, which had decided that if deities were individuals then they could pay income tax. And in 1999 the Supreme Court again upheld the principle that deities could own property, even going to the extent of specifying how the deity could be consecrated.

Most famous of all, was the case of the Pathur Nataraja statue, which had been stolen from a temple in Tamil Nadu, and sold abroad to the Bumper Development Corporation. The company had sent it to the British Museum for restoration, from where it was seized by Scotland Yard in 1991. When a case was filed by the Indian government for restitution of the idol, Lord Shiva was cited as one of the plaintiffs.

According to a report in ToI the company took issue with this: “Bumper’s plea was that the courts of Britain ought not to allow a Hindu god to sue here. They claimed that the sovereign (the Queen) was the highest power in the UK, and that this was, anyway, a Christian kingdom.” Rather magnificently, the court replied that Hinduism was practiced in the UK too, and so Lord Shiva could remain as a plaintiff.

Yet this period has also seen deities as persons appearing in more controversial contexts, most notably in the Ayodhya Ram Mandir case. And well before such painful controversies developed, doubts had been expressed about this concept. As far back as 1931 S.C.Bagchi, the principal of University Law College, Calcutta had delivered a series of lectures, later collected into a book titled Juristic Personality of Hindu Deities, where he detailed his scepticism with the idea.

Bagchi first establishes what is meant by a ‘juristic person’ and then cites a number of Sanskrit texts to help understand the idea of the deity in Hindu scripture: “There is so much anthropomorphism, mixed up with mysticism, in the Vedic conception of the deities that an entity of the type contemplated in the Vedas is not of any use in the jural world.”

Bagchi considers the convenience of the argument of vesting the property with the idol, but then suggests a more progressive option: “One may naturally ask whether the community itself, for whose spiritual benefit the institution was founded and endowed, may not more appropriately be regarded as a corporate body, forming the juristic person in whom the properties of the institution are vested.”

Bagchi’s argument seems to expose to 19th century creation of idols as juristic personalities as a legal fudge, devised by British jurists as a way of getting out of the tedious process of sorting out the claims of various Indian parties, with their complexities of caste and community practices. It is convenient and flattering to devotees, but it remains a fudge, with problems that will only show up with time.

What is happening now might seem to support his case. A legal concept that was devised in a fairly narrow context of property rights and trusts, is now extending into areas like privacy and fundamental rights, which simply expose further problems.

If deities pay tax, can they claim the right to vote, and if so, then could they run for political office? How can they claim to be celibate when, as perpetual legal minors, the issue of sex should not arise at all? And at what point does this entanglement of Hindu gods with such material issues start seeming like an offence to their spiritual role? Deities as juristic people might seem like a quaint part of Indian jurisprudence, but its consequences may not be quite as pleasant.