‘Perhaps I’ve begun to think of these sessions as a sacred rite,’ he mused. ‘And the words happen to be so apt for the story that I’m about to tell. Those young men and their successors in Delhi must have uttered these very words when they began to dream of the ambitious project of building a traditional temple in a strange, new city so far from home. But look at the underlying cultural unity of India. People in almost every region say these words when they ritually state their resolve to do something worthwhile—Sri Parameshvara prityartham.’
‘Saying so is our brave human defiance of the fact that life flings so much sorrow at us . . . “janma dukham, jara dukham, jaya dukham punah punah, samsara sagaram dukham, tasmat jagrata, jagrata”, like Adi Shankara said. “Birth is painful, old age is wretched; desire, never-endingly, is the source of misery and pain. This ocean of Samsara is full of grief. Therefore, wake up; wake up . . . to seek God.” Acharya said that in his Proclamation of Detachment, the Vairagya Dindima . . .’
‘Guruji,’ said the grandfather gently. ‘You’re miles away.’
The guru came back with a little start. ‘Sorry, I was thinking of Malai Mandir, and how it began with a song and a prayer.’
‘Some of my colleagues say that it’s better to give money in charity than to build or restore temples,’ said the mother hesitantly.
‘We’re capable of both. Charity is our human duty. Remember Prajapati’s watchword to us? Datta, give, be generous. Sometimes it may provide only temporary material relief, but it’s still worth doing if it makes someone’s life a little better. However, besides contributing to material charity, we are fully permitted to support the arts and to make a new temple or restore an old one—it is something more permanent for the emotional relief and cultural expression of many people, including ourselves,’ said the guru. ‘There’s a nice saying, “If you have but two coins left, with one, buy food to feed your body and with the other, buy flowers to feed your soul.”’
‘That handful of young men in their twenties began to celebrate the Skanda Shashti festival from the year 1944 in New Delhi, gathering in one another’s homes. Six years later, in 1950, as more and more people eagerly showed up for the puja, south Indians in Delhi who had formed a cultural society in 1949 called the Shanmukhananda Sangeeta Sabha, took over the celebration as a public event. The society was named after Kumar, for “Shanmukha” is another name for him, meaning “six faces” after the six little boys looked after by the Krittika star maidens.’
‘As word spread of these celebrations, a devotee who was an industrialist and philanthropist from Patna offered to pay for a metal icon of Kumar for worship and for the cost of taking it out in a procession each year at the end of the puja. But there was no proper place for daily puja to the icon.’
‘The devotees began to dream of building a temple to Kartikeya. They looked for a suitable hillock, for that was where his temples were usually made out south—at places like Swami Malai, Palani, Tirutani, Tirupurankunram—“kunram” means hill, like “malai”—and Pazha Mudhir Cholai. Only the great temple of Tiruchendur, marking the place where Kartikya defeated Surapadman, is on the seashore.’
‘Actually, there are many lovely temples all over south India to Kumar but these six make a special pilgrim circuit. Do you know that men and boys wear green dhotis when they go on this pilgrimage for Kumar? It’s like how women and girls wear red for the Parvati circuit. Many male devotees carry a kavadi for Kartikeya. This is similar to the kavad or bamboo pole carried by the kavadiya pilgrims of north India.’
‘These six temples mark the important events in Kartikeya’s story.’
‘He taught his father Shiva the meaning of the ultimate mantra, the Pranava or “Om” at Swami Malai.’
‘He took off as a hermit to Palani while very young because he once mistakenly thought that his parents loved Ganapati better.’
‘He defeated Surapadman at Tiruchendur.’
‘He was married to Indra’s daughter, Devasena, at Tirupurankunram, as an official reward for having won.’
‘He withdrew to Tirutani to cool down from the heat of battle and won over the mortals by wooing and marrying Valli, the pretty daughter of a local tribal chieftan, Nambi. He had found Valli on the ground as a baby, like Janaka found Sita.’
‘Kumar then appeared in glory with Valli and Devasena at Pazha Mudhir Cholai.’
‘The story goes that Devasena and Valli were two mortal sisters, Amudavalli and Sundaravalli, who loved Mahadev and Parvati so much that they longed to be part of their family forever. They prayed very hard to Vishnu to be never separated and to marry a son of Mahadev, and so they got their wish.’
‘Inspired by Parvati’s fast for Shiva, the elder sister prayed and fasted all day, every day, and was reborn as the celestial princess Devasena, daughter of Indra. The younger sister, a light-hearted, fun-loving girl, prayed only during puja time. She loved playing all day in the forests and by the rivers, and so she was given human rebirth as Valli, a child of the woods. Beautiful, docile Devasena was married to Kumar first. But Valli, whose name means “creeper”, though she was not a clinging, meek person at all, took some wooing! Kumar had to work hard to win her. Her story is one of the most ancient love stories in India.’
‘One day, Narada saw Valli guarding a field of ripening thinai or foxtail millet from wild birds, armed with a slingshot. She cried “Aalo -lam!” as she expertly and gracefully swung it. She looked so pretty, confident and bright that Narada went to Tirutani nearby, where Kumar was cooling off from battle, to tell him about her. “Just the right sort for a young warrior,” said Narada. Intrigued, Kumar went to see Valli in human disguise as a handsome hunter chasing a deer, and playfully tried to charm her. But she did not recognize him in human form. She wouldn’t even look at the stranger for her heart was firmly fixed on Kumar in his godly form.’
‘Kumar went away and reappeared as an old man to Valli’s father Nambi Raja, who told her to look after the guest. It was a beautiful day, so Valli thoughtfully took her father’s elderly guest out for a gentle walk in her beloved woods. She gave him wild honey and millet porridge to eat, and fetched him water in a wooden cup. She talked and laughed merrily and walked with a youthful spring in her step. Kumar was so smitten by this delightful girl that he forgot which disguise he was in and tried to hold her hand which she furiously knocked away in disgust. He had to telepathically ask big brother Ganapati to appear as a wild elephant and frighten Valli into his arms. She forgave him only when the truth came out, that Kumar was in fact the bridegroom that she herself wanted.’
‘At a deep level, philosophers and yogis think of these six temples as chakra points of kundalini energy.’
‘I’ll try to explain “kundalini” and “chakra” to you separately with a diagram another time,’ the guru broke off to say to the child. ‘These are terms from yoga philosophy about the spiritual energy that every person has inside them. Let’s follow the Kartikeya story for now.’
‘These six temples drew many saints and sages, who often composed hymns about them. So such temples are celebrated among the paadal petra sthalam, “places that inspired song”. See how faith is so deeply embedded in the geography of India? North to south, east to west, almost every square kilometre has the memory of a temple and the memory of those who came to it. The dust of millions of pilgrims’ feet is mingled in our soil.’
‘Well, in 1961, some devotees happened to notice a small hillock on the then outskirts of Delhi, in what later became the neighbourhood called Ramakrishnapuram. You must try to imagine it as the wild scrubland and jungle that it was in those days. Soon after spotting that hillock, one of the devotees had a strange dream. He dreamt that as he was going home from work, an old man suddenly appeared by the road and timidly stopped him.’
‘“Please will you walk me to my home? I feel dizzy and I’m afraid of falling down,” he said in a weak voice. The old man looked so frail and pathetic that the young man readily agreed to escort him home. The old man took hi
m to the foot of the very hillock that he and his friends had spotted at a distance a few days back and pointed to its summit. “Thank you so much. That’s my home up there,” he said in a suddenly strong voice and vanished from sight. The devotee woke up from the dream at this point.’
‘He told his core group of fellow-devotees about it the next day, and they agreed that it was a very good omen of divine will. As soon as they could, they rushed to inspect the hillock, scrambling up past rocks and thorn bushes, since there was no pathway. On the top, they found the scattered remains of an old stone structure. They asked a very senior friend in the archaeological survey office to check the old maps and he discovered that the hillock was marked “RP”, meaning “religious place”.’
‘The ruins had an interesting tale attached to them. Local legend had it that there had once been an ancient temple to Shiva there from the days of the Mahabharata. Over thousand years ago, a local chieftan called Surajmal wanted to build a hilltop rest house for himself on that very spot and had the first load of stones brought up for construction. But his father had a dream about the prior existence of the old shivala or temple on that hill, and persuaded his son to stop building, which he did. So a dream disallowed that building and a thousand years later, another dream endorsed the making of another building, but this time, a temple. This is how the gods play with us.’
‘“So Shiva is already there!” cried the astonished devotees when told of this history. “And after all these centuries, we seem directed to bring Kartikeya to that very spot. That sounds like Swami Malai, father and son together.” Something deeper than they could understand was going on. Some ancient pattern encoded in the soil seemed to be talking to them. What, next?’
‘The young men, who were somewhat older by now, boldly applied for the land which the authorities agreed to allot to them for Rs 25,000 if they formed a registered society. With the paperwork done, the devotees began the ardous task of fundraising.’
‘The south Indian community in Delhi shared a deep love for Kartikeya across the states. The Skanda Purana’s Sahyadri Kand says that Kartikeya killed the asura Taraka in the hills of south Karnataka, and dipped his bloodstained spear in the river Dhara to cleanse it. This is in present-day Dakshin Kannada district, and the river is now called Kumaradhara. I’ve driven through this lush, beautiful region, and I still remember how it radiated peace and holiness.’
‘It is here that we find the Kukke Subrahmanya temple that Sachin Tendulkar famously went to for Nagpuja. Adi Shankara had memorably stopped and prayed at the Kukke Subrahmanya temple during his great tour of India by foot.’
‘I’m told kukke means cave, from old Kannada kukshi which is guha in Sanskrit and gufa in Hindi. A legend goes that Vasuki, Lord Vishnu’s serpent, was once being chased by Garuda and sought refuge in Subrahmanya.’
‘So while he’s worshipped as a handsome young man in Tamil Nadu, many temples in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka personify Kartikeya as a serpent, while at Tirupati, he is supposed to be the “snake-hill” of Seshachalam itself.’
‘With so much history and feeling driving them, the south Indian community in Delhi, which was not rich in those days, saved and scraped and even sold off rings, chains and bangles, to somehow collect the money, and the land was bought.’
‘But how were they to build the temple, that too, a traditional one to Kartikeya? Those days, nobody in Delhi knew how to make an appropriately carved, old-style temple in hard black granite. Their fingers had forgotten how after so many centuries. The devotees were keen to showcase Kumar with all his history. They wanted to link the long continuity of his tradition to the site of the ancient Shiva temple on the hill. So it would have to be made in south India and assembled in Delhi.’
‘It was totally beyond the dreamers’ means, involving tonnes of granite, heavy transport costs from the far south, an army of traditional stone carvers or stapathi, building a proper pathway to the top of the hill and deciding on the precise nature of the idol, which only a gifted master craftsman could make.’
‘A proper temple also involved public facilities, with water and electricity bills, a roster of cleaning staff, basic accommodation and salaries for priests, money for musicians, singers and musical instruments, suppliers of flowers and samagri or ingredients for daily worship, puja items in silver, brass lamps and giant bells, a community hall and a kitchen to make the daily offering of neivedyam or consecrated food to share with devotees, prayer books, and a solid corpus fund for maintenance costs . . . it was overwhelming. Only kings and rich merchants could afford to build and endow such temples. How could modestly salaried, middle-class people dare to dream of such a grand project?’
‘The young men prayed to Shiva and Parvati for guidance by meditating on the powerful Tamil hymn Veyuru-tholi pangan composed by the seventh-century boy-saint Sambandar. If you put it in English, it goes:
Who is half of bamboo-shouldered (tender-limbed) Parvati,
Whose throat is dark from drinking poison,
Who plays a faultless lute and wears on His head the blemish-less moon and the Ganga,
Who has stolen into my heart,
Wherefore, without reserve, the Nine Planets always do good to us,
Who love the Lord.’
‘Then, the answer occurred to them all: Go to Kanchipuram.’
‘They coordinated their leave and went south by train on the cheapest berths. The only direct train from Delhi to Madras was the Grand Trunk Express (GT), introduced in 1929, which had the longest waiting list for any train in Indian Railways. In the 1960s and ’70s, the ‘GT’ took over forty-two hours one-way to cross 2,186 km across the long length of our land past mountain ranges and mighty rivers like the Krishna and Godavari.’
‘From Madras, or Chennai as it was later called, it was an hour’s journey by bus to the old temple town of Kanchipuram, whose presiding deity was Parvati as Kamakshi, the “love-eyed goddess”.’
‘Their mission: to find out what the 68th Shankaracharya, head of the ancient religious institution called the Kamakoti Matt, had to say.’
‘This was the luminous personality called Sri Chandrasekharendra Sarasvati, fondly known as “Paramacharya” and “Mahaperiyava”, great teacher and great elder. Born to a Kannada-speaking family that had settled in the Tamil region, he lived for a hundred years between 1894 and 1994.’
‘As a schoolboy, he won first prize for Bible studies and played the part of Prince Arthur in his school’s production of Shakespeare’s play, King John. Besides being fluent in English, he spoke many languages like Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi and Sanskrit. Nobody could figure out how he had acquired so many skills nor how he could converse so knowledgeably with visitors on any topic under the sun, even on aerodynamics, medicine and architecture, for he had been virtually kidnapped as a boy of thirteen and made into a sanyasi and head of the institution.’
‘He had been taken away for some years to Mahendra Mangalam, a remote rural hideout by the river Kaveri, where learned pundits taught him the Vedas and Shastras. So how did he know so much else? And how was he able to predict what would happen in such-and-such a case or know exactly who, in a vast crowd, had stolen something out of sight at the back? He remains one of the mysteries of our age, connecting the old and the new India.’
‘Gandhi met him in a cowshed in Pallaseni village in Palghat, Kerala, in 1929. Gandhi skipped his dinner, which he would not eat after 6 p.m., to carry on talking with the sage, who was much younger. The sage, in turn, wore only khadi after meeting Gandhi and discarded forever the old finery, like gold pendants, that he had been made to wear for big pujas as a religious head. In any case, the sage slept on bare ground and ate the most frugal food, while making sure to somehow feed thousands of people, particularly the poor, of any caste or creed.’
‘The Dalai Lama called him “the monk of the century” for such was the Kanchi seer’s spiritual power, knowledge and austerity. He also had an irresistible sense of humour and drew
the most unlikely admirers without doing a thing to attract them—Indira Gandhi, Queen Frederika and Princess Irene of Greece, savants and scholars from Japan, South-east Asia, Iran, Europe and America, and hordes of Indian people, from canteen boys to kings. Presidents of India, cabinet ministers and chief ministers of huge Indian states flocked to him as well. He went around India on foot like Adi Shankara, visiting holy places and drawing large crowds wherever he went. He had a keen, piercing gaze that powerfully affected many people.’
‘Everyone came to the humble cowshed or tree or riverside where this guru was frequently to be found camping. Quite often, they forgot what they had come to say for they were struck dumb by the kindness and lustre he radiated, and were content to stare. It was common for strangers to burst into tears when they saw him, for their masks fell off with just one look at that spiritual colossus. Many devotees declared that Sri Chandrasekharendra Sarasvati was Shiva himself, come amidst us to restore society’s better values, save old temples and temple arts, indeed, save religion and culture from being lost in the colonial and post-colonial confusion.’
‘The Kartikeya devotees in Delhi were familiar with the Kanchi seer’s reputation, and had not only heard him discourse in Chennai but also regularly read his views on religion as reported in newspapers and magazines. Even atheists and people of other creeds respected him, for while he worked unceasingly to serve his faith, he had absolutely no hatred for or quarrel with anyone but instead, preached a life code of cultural and religious harmony.’
The guru stopped to retrieve a printout that was tucked into a book in his cloth bag. ‘I found this on the internet. It’s a translation of the Kanchi seer’s summary in the 1960s of the stories that I have just told you about Parvati and Shiva,’ he said, and putting on his glasses, began to read from the printout:
‘Why did Kamakshi make Dakshinamurthi into a Kalyana Sundara (a handsome married man)? It was not just for the destruction of Tarakan and other asuras. Many dead people on earth had to take birth again to elevate themselves and go beyond the cycles of life and death. A supreme, compassionate Ishvara was needed to help them overcome their sorrow and ignorance.’
Mahadev Page 7