The explosion of emotional and political energy over the sacred Tirupati laddu cannot be reduced to any one of the experiences that constitute the reality that is Hindu fury today.
Like Garuda’s wings unfurling from underneath the weight of onerous shackles, smashing them to shards and bits of contemptible redundancy, Hindu feelings are rising to the skies. Manifesting them, beyond the rallies and the politics, is a grand gallery of gestures. The lifting of two arms to meet the palms together in a namaskaram over a sea of bobbing heads making their way in the dark night to the distant golden glowing gates of Tirumala. The roar of a million mouths in pangs of existential hunger pouring out their lives’ pains and their journeys’ struggles in one ceaseless tsunami of sound, “Govinda! Goooovinda!”
One wonders what came first in the long drama of the cosmos. Was it the sacred rocks of Tirumala, intuited by the ancients to be the form of the cosmic serpent Adi Sesha himself? Or the sacred sounds of the name on which we hang our burdens and fears in this yuga of declining righteousness, dwindling decency, all-devouring horror?
Oh Govinda, Oh Lord of the Seven Hills, Oh Venkata Ramana, oh name of god in our time, oh name of our fathers, brothers, sons, ancestors, and descendants to come, where is your sudarshana chakra? When is Garuda’s piercing talon coming to free us from this pain of witnessing all we have pretended not to see so far?
Our movies may play on the prophecies of your white-horsed swordsman avatar to come. Our politicians may ride on the promises of new and better days to come. But nothing compares to you. Nothing can compare to you. Because you are the god who refused to fall. Even when the gods of so many faraway lands fell, or perhaps just went into hiding, waiting for you to raise your conch and declare the imminence of their return to their own temples on the hills, from Athinai to Tenochtitlan, and of course, from Sharada peetha to Hampi Vithala.
Forgotten temples, fallen temples, fully operational and yet far from true to the faithful temples, the whole roar of history is now at the door of the real tyranny of organised religion of our time; the dynasts and despots who hide behind the names of The People and The Book to plunder and devour your lands, forests, traditions, and most of all, the hearts of your devotees too.
Like Garuda’s wings unfurling, the energy is rising. But then, all we can see is but a feather here and there, for such is the partial nature of human perception, and our divided attention. Some of us see “desecration.” And some of us see just “food safety” issues. Some see hatred for the “heathen.” And some see corruption and opportunism. Whatever our minds perceive and our fingers type, the truth is that all of these and more have stood like torturers laughing in sadistic pleasure at our pain.
We cannot know anymore what is real and what is exaggerated.
Some images seem undeniably true: The photograph of the beheaded Venkateswara from Andhra Pradesh a few years ago; or the burning temple ratha; or the dozens of attacks on temples in a part of the country already troubled by an ideology of fanatical intolerance to the ways of the old gods born of the pathways of nature in this land and passed down from mothers to children for generations.
Birds of a feather flock together, fanned by hate and propaganda. Left Wing or Right Wing, no wing matters when the bird that lays the golden egg is dead, killed and eaten by the momentary greed of a stilting, limiting, apocalyptic culture — whether that apocalypse is the stuff of falling angel fairy tales or a “YOLO” bucket list of forced amnesia towards ancestors and their hopes for our descendants.
Dominion shall have no death to feed on any more.
Telos will not stop the surge of imagination, empathy and hope for our children to have their gods, temples, sacred ecologies, and traditions back — intact — anymore.
As Garuda turns to help us abandon our fears in the dust of gravity below, as Sudarshana sparks to light and life and clears our vision of ourselves in times past and to come, we see, we know.
Food is god. Tirumala is god. Venkateshwara is god.
And in god is our fury today. In god is the knowledge that we find about ourselves and what we must do now. In god is our blip of words and strange rituals with no god in them that we call modernity.
We have made a circus out of the balance between the sacred and the less sacred, the universal and the particular, the local and the global, the eternal and the ephemeral. We have foolishly sought to call modern experiments born under duress and distress the greatest goods known to man and therefore our own now.
We have called modern assemblies temples and modern contracts between contrived fictions of identity, holy books. We have called the wiles of the vainglorious who purport to rule us the will of the gods, aka The People.
And worst of all: We have broken the hands of those who had no inkling of freedom or pleasure for themselves other than what their fathers and forefathers had told them was the endless, rigorous, unerring, daily seva to the Lord himself. We have smeared our Brahmanas and the archakas and the sadhakas and sanyasis with lies born in medieval middle-eastern political skullduggery and rudely removed the one great joy and purpose of their existence from their selfless hands instead.
We have witnessed, like in the islands of the Pacific and the ruins of a hundred nations, the spectacle of the gods of the old being turned into consumer artefacts of the new colonisers, the merchants and merchandisers.
It is therefore time to state, suitably paraphrased, the imminent and inevitable: Render unto CM (or PM) what is CM’s (or PM’s), and render unto the gods which stood long before they or their offices came along, what has always been theirs.
The story of Tirupati and Sabarimala is not the story of London or Paris.
The story of Jerusalem is not the story of Jwalapuram.
The giant stone-disguised Nandi there, by the way, staring at Uma-Maheswara in the Yaganti temple, is growing restless, they say. He is disturbed, surely, by the greed which blasts the sacred rocks and cliffs all around.
Will he lead us away before his master’s tapas and mistress’s peace is disturbed?
Or will Shiva’s third eye be the last thing we will see before our arrogant anthropo-supremacy and the world we have built to institutionalise it turns to ashes?
The writer is professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco.
