[జాయ్స్ ఫ్లూకిగర్ (Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger) అట్లాంటా లోని ఎమరీ యూనివర్సిటీ, మతధర్మశాస్త్ర విభాగంలో ఆచార్యులుగా పనిచేస్తున్నారు. బాల్యం అంతా ఇండియాలో గడిపిన ఫ్లూకిగర్, 18వ యేట అమెరికాకు తిరిగి వచ్చి, విస్కాన్సిన్ యూనివర్సిటీ నుండి దక్షిణ భారత ప్రాంత అధ్యయనంలో పిహెచ్.డీ పొందారు. మౌఖిక సాహిత్యం మీద, సమాజంలో స్త్రీల పాత్ర, జాతరలలో ప్రదర్శించే కళల పుట్టుపూర్వోత్తరాలు, తదితర అంశాల మీద పరిశోధనలు చేసి పుస్తకాలు వ్రాశారు. 2013లో ప్రచురించబడబోయే వీరి పుస్తకం When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddessలో గంగమ్మ జాతర గురించి వ్రాసిన అధ్యాయం నుంచి ఈమాట ప్రత్యేక సంచికలో ప్రచురణకై ఈ వ్యాసం పంపించారు.]
V. Narayana Rao first introduced me to Tirupati in 1992, when he invited me to attend the annual jātara of the downhill grāmadevata Gangamma with him, David Shulman, and Don Handelman. I later returned several times for long- and short-term fieldwork with Gangamma and her devotees. Narayana Rao frequently suggested to me that there was a left-hand caste ethos that crossed the seemingly disparate worlds of the goddess and her sisters downhill and that of the god uphill. This essay explores some images of these connections between uphill and down.
Panoramic Tirupati mountain
The south Indian pilgrimage town of Tirupati is best-known for the
wealthy temple (said to be the wealthiest religious institution in the
world) and pilgrimage site of the God of the Seven Hills, Venkatesvara.
His temple is nestled at the far end of a series of koṇḍas–often
translated as ‘hills,’ but which visually, from the plains below, is a
mountain with a dramatic rock face overlooking the town. The god draws
up to 750,000 pilgrims a day[1].
Locally, the Tirumala temple complex on the mountain is most often
referred to in English as ‘uphill,’ a designation that implies a
relationship with ‘downhill’, the plains below (Telugu: koṇḍa mīda and
koṇḍa kinda.) During the year I conducted research there, Tirupati
residents often asked me if I’d gone uphill on a particular day, not
“did you go to Tirumala” or “did you take darśan of the god,” or some
other direct reference to the god or his temple[2].
Venkatesvara’s wife Padmavati–locally known as Alamelumanga–does not reside with him at the mountaintop, but in a temple on the plains—which the god visits every night. And so, too, Venkatesvara’s brother, Govinda Raja Swamy—his temple with its large gopuram anchors the center of the bustling pilgrimage town downhill, near the railway and bus stations. Venkatesvara is also said to be the brother of the plains-residing village goddess (grāmadevata) Gangamma, to whom he sends an auspicious gift for her annual festival. There is lots of coming and going—literal and imaginative, narratively and ritually–between mountain and plains—the most tangible of which is the footpath up the mountain that many pilgrims walk up instead of taking the more recently available buses and taxis.
Tāllapāka Gangamma
In this essay, I focus on the literal space and movement between
uphill and down–as well as some of the ritual and narrative traditions
that tie the two together–rather than the journey from home places that
pilgrims may take[3][4].
I am also referring to a specific geographic site and the deity who
takes up residence uphill in Tirumala, not the multiple temples in which
Venkatesvara also resides, including in the diaspora—which is a
different form of movement. (It is significant that not all deities have
this kind of mobility within or outside of India, such as grāmadevatas
who don’t cross the seven seas, so to speak, or even regional boundaries
within India; and thus the character of the God of the Seven Hills
shifts, when he is removed from the local Tirupati landscape and its
constellation of deities.)
This essay draws an imaginaire of spatial, ritual, kinship, and narrative relationships between mountain and plains and their respective divine and human inhabitants—particularly for local residents who live under the shadow of the mountain. I ask what is created imaginatively and performatively by this movement between hills and plains—and what it implies about the nature of the god. That the God of the Seven Hills and his grāmadevata sister inhabit an overlapping imaginaire for Tirupati residents belies the ways in which puranic deities and grāmadevatas have often been analyzed in academic circles as discrete, bounded traditions.
Rising dramatically from the plains, the front range of the Saptagiri anchors and gives identity to Tirupati’s physical and imaginative landscape. Its sheer rock face catches the shifting light throughout the day in a kaleidoscope of colors and shadows; the rock face changes with the seasons when it becomes a resting stop for monsoon clouds or reflects the sizzling hot season heat back onto the town. Although the god actually lives in the interior of the mountain ranges, when Tirupati residents and pilgrims look up at the rock face towering above the town, they see god—the mountain and god are synonymous. And thus the common expression to refer to Venkatesvara’s temple complex of Tirumala: uphill.
Tāllapāka Gangamma
I’ve proposed in my forthcoming book[6]
on the plains grāmadevata goddess Gangamma that the mountain and its
deity quite literally anchor her in place, too. She and her sisters (the
Seven Sisters associated with hot season poxes and rashes) are
characterized in both narrative and ritual as moving/fluid goddesses.
They traditionally live on village boundaries; and even as villages and
towns have expanded and grown up around them, many of these Sisters have
not permitted temples to be built over them[7].
There are numerous oral accounts of efforts of worshipers of
particular grāmadevatas trying to build permanent shrines that would
cover their heads, and the constructions continually falling down or
illnesses striking the community until efforts to enclose them were
suspended. The goddesses want to be free to move. However, in Tirupati,
there are several permanent temples to these Sisters (particularly the
Tattāyagunta and Tāllapāka temples); perhaps the sisters permit these
anchoring enclosures, in part, because of their relationship to the god
on the mountain who is their brother. Conceptually, this stability has
opened up devotional relationships with Gangamma that are not
characteristic of her worship in surrounding villages—she’s now stable
enough, in one place long enough, to permit this kind of personal
relationship with her.
Venkatesvara is said to walk downhill every night to visit his wife Alamelumanga. She lives independently of her husband, in a temple downhill in Tiruchanur, four kilometers outside of Tirupati—a living situation that is an extremely rare, if not unique, phenomenon for consort-goddess temples[8]. (Of course, as is typical of Hindu traditions, imaginatively she is multiple: she simultaneously resides downhill and on her husband’s stone chest of his temple form, for example; so what I am talking about here is specifically her independent temple.) I heard several different explanations for this separate living arrangement[9], including Alamelumanga’s jealousy over the god letting Lakshmi (a goddess both distinct from and identified with Alamelumanga) reside along with her on his chest. Another story tells of Alamelumanga’s jealousy over Venkatesvara’s relationship with a Muslim concubine named Bibi Nanchari (said to be a reincarnation of Bhu Devi), and this is why, it is said, she refuses to live uphill with her husband. Still another oral tradition recounts Venkatesvara’s impatience with his wife after their wedding, when she kept forgetting one thing or another as he waited for her to walk with him to his residence on top of the mountain. In exasperation, he told her that he was going to spit on the ground and that she should return before the spit dried up. Insulted by this ultimatum, Alamelumanga told her husband that she was going to stay downhill, and that if he wanted to meet her, he would have to come to her[10].
Feet of the God
Whatever the reason for separate residences, it is said that it
incumbent on Venkatesvara to come down to visit his wife every night,
rather than her going uphill; and all the walking up and down wears out
his sandals, which have to be replaced daily. At the bottom of the
footpath going uphill is a temple whose main image is the feet of the
god. Pilgrims here place a pair of brass sandals on their heads as they
circumambulate the god’s feet, showing humility towards the god as well
as embodying a reminder of the distance covered nightly by the god, as
he visits his wife.
The god also has other relatives who live on the plains. Most important of these is his brother Govinda Raja Swamy, whose temple gopuram dominates the skyline of the town below. The story is told that when Venkatesvara wanted to get married, he needed to borrow money for his wedding from his brother Govinda Raja Swamy. He is still paying interest on that loan even today, and pilgrims’ gifts placed in the temple huṇḍī (cash box) are said to be applied towards interest on that loan[11]. Huṇḍī cash contents are conspicuously counted in public at the end of every day, visible to pilgrims on their way out of the temple complex after having taken darśan of the indebted god. On his part, Govinda Raja Swamy downhill is a reclining image that rests its head on a vessel he has used to measure the cash interest he’s been paid by Venkatesvara; he’s tired out from expending so much energy on this task. In contrast to his moving brother, Govinda Raja Swamy seems rather sedentary and doesn’t leave his temple.
Venkatesvara’s mother, Vakulamatha, also lives downhill (and then again up), atop a small hill facing Tirupati in Perurbanda village, 15 kilometers from Tirupati. When a devotee proposed in 2007 to fund renovation of what had become a rather dilapidated temple—and illegal quarrying was posing a threat to Vakulamata Devi Temple–the Devasthanam responsible for Tirumala (TTD) decided to build the temple closer to Tirumala, with the intention to help support building temples for Vakulamata at all sites where there is a Venkatesvara temple. Significantly, their proposal was not to build the Tirupati Vakulamatha temple uphill, but at the base of the hill, at Alipiri, where the footpath up the mountain begins. However, this proposed juxtaposition of mother to son raised problems. Tirumala priests and BJP leaders opposed this site “on the grounds that it would go against the Hindu dharma to place the mother at the feet of her son and the idea was dropped.”[12] Several Tirupati residents told me that “in the old days,” pilgrims used to (and still should) visit all Venkatesvara’s family members downhill (wife, brother, sister, and mother), even though their primary purpose is to take darśan of the God of the Seven Hills—an injunction that is being lost on many contemporary pilgrims who are rushing up and downhill under the pressures of modern-day schedules.
Gangamma in one of her jātara forms,
a coconut head (center), and Venkatesvara
in a Gangamma devotee household shrine
Locally, Venkatesvara is known to be a brother of the grāmadevata
Gangamma, and he sends bride’s gifts of a sari and pasupu-kumkuma
(turmeric-vermilion) to his sister downhill on the first day of her
annual festival (jātara)—delivered downhill atop an elephant (protected
by a large parasol) to her Tattayagunta temple. While the god himself
does not attend the jātara, his gifting is another means of enacting the
important links between uphill and down. The association is also
performed on the domestic pūjā shelves–where both Venkatesvara and
Gangamma have been installed and are worshiped daily–of the families who
are key ritual actors in Gangamma’s jātara. One of these families, the
Kaikalas, has the mirāsi (rights and responsibilities) to both take the
perambulating veṣams (forms) of Gangamma during her jātara and to unlock
the temple of Venkatesvara’s brother, Govinda Raja Swamy, every
morning. The Kaikalas perform their mirāsi tasks for both Gangamma and
Venkatesvara’s brother as integrated ritual systems.
Dicing scene on hillside outside
Hathi Ramji Matham uphill
We return now to other circumstances under which the god moves–when he leaves his temple to visit or give darśan to his devotees. We have two starkly contrasting examples.The first is the story of the god visiting his devotee Hathi Ramji, a north Indian devotee who built a maṭham facing the Tirumala temple. Because of Hathi Ramji’s great devotion, Venkatesvara is said to have visited the former’s maṭham to play dice with him every evening. This story is part of the dominant mythology of the temple, and an image of the two playing dice is engraved on the silver door to the garbhagṛham (inner shrine room) of Venkatesvara’s Tirumala temple. A larger-than-life-size plaster image of the two dicing friends has been built on the hillside of the maṭham that faces the temple’s outer courtyard, visible to all pilgrims standing in darśan lines (the pushing and shoving at the doorway to the garbhagṛham is such that they may well miss the image on the silver door of the garbhagṛham).
Image of prostrating devotee
A second example of the god willingly leaving his temple for the sake
of his devotees is less talked about, for reasons that will become
clear. In this case, the god is said to walk downhill to the base of the
mountain, which, in earlier days, was the closest one of his
untouchable devotees was allowed to come. (Some say this is the cobbler
who daily made a new pair of sandals for the god.) Since the devotee was
not allowed uphill, god himself walked down daily to give him his
darśan. A poignant image has been created in cement at the base of the
footpath (the image is likely much newer than the narrative)—the male
devotee lying prostrate towards the mountain, covered in turmeric and
vermillion. Smaller images to his right are identified as his wife and
children. Many pilgrims prostrate next to this figure before they begin
their journey up the footpath; those whom I asked did not know the story
or identity of the prostrate figure, but thought that the image was a
sign of humility that they should emulate.
A prostrating devotee
The mobile god Venkatesvara and his independently residing wife
Alamelumanga provide us with traces of the cultural ethos of the rising
15th century cash economy of the region and the left-hand caste
Vijayanagara kings who began the transformation of Venkatesvara’s temple
into the center of ritual and economic power that it has become today[13].
Left-hand caste communities are associated with cash and mobility:
traders, herders, artisans, and leather workers. Women of these castes
have traditionally had more mobility and independence than women of the
right-hand castes associated with the land, who are (ideally) protected
by males and their mobility restricted, like the land itself[14][15][16].
Another trace of the left-hand-caste associations with the Tirumala
temple is also indicated in the practice of first morning darśan of the
god being given to representatives of a Golla (left-hand, herding-caste)
family.
Footpath to Tirumala
Before the car road was constructed and hundreds of buses and taxis
began to transport pilgrims, they walked uphill. And today hundreds of
pilgrims continue to do so, believing that to walk up the mountain
brings more merit than riding a motorized conveyance[17]. The footpath begins at the base of the Seven Hills at a place called Alipiri[18].
The path is 9-11 kilometers long; I’ve walked the path several times,
but had no way to mark the distance and have found conflicting
information on exactly how long it is. These days a series of cement
steps numbering 3350 are built into the path, having been constructed by
the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD); much of the path is covered by
galvanized-tin roofing to provide shade and cover from rains. Depending
on their health and the rituals they perform on the way, most pilgrims
reach the top of the hill in three to four hours.
Pilgrims with Sandals
The start of the path is indicated by a white-washed gopuram—the
first in a series that mark for the foot-travelers the beginning of each
of the seven mountain ranges, all the way up to the highest
Venkatagiri. Immediately in front of the first gopuram, towards the
plains side, is the previously mentioned temple dedicated to
Venkatesvara’s feet, the Pādāla temple. Here the story of Venkatesvara
wearing out his sandals going uphill and down is visually performed when
pilgrims circumambulate the feet of god three times while carrying a
set of brass sandals on their heads (these sandals are available for use
with a Rs. 5 donation to the temple). Wealthy devotees may bring with
them an offering to the god of new brass or silver sandals. When, in
2005, a devotee presented a pair of gold sandals weighing 32 grams, it
was an event marked by a ritual abhiṣekam (anointing of the feet) with
100 litres of milk and widely reported in local newspapers[19].
Pasupu-kumkuma vow ritual
on footpath going uphill
Each of the 3350 cement steps on the footpath is covered with ritual
applications of turmeric and vermillion (pasupu-kumkuma), the result of
individual back-breaking vows by female pilgrims[20].
The visual contrast of looking at the steps going up or going down is
dramatic—the vertical portion of each step brightly colored on the way
up and the horizontal portion of the steps visible on the way down a
somber gray.
Cradles tied for fertility
I spoke with several women about the kinds of vows they were taking
or fulfilling—and they were happy to take a break from their rigorous
task to talk with me. One young woman was accompanied by her brother,
who rather sheepishly looked on as his sister explained that she’d taken
a vow that if he were accepted into engineering school, she would
fulfill the vow of marking every step on the footpath with
pasupu-kumkuma. Another woman was performing the ritual-marking vow
prior to its fulfillment, asking the god for fertility. The
pasupu-kumkuma-marking ritual is the most visible, common ritual along
the path, but a spectrum of other vow-making rituals adhere to the path,
as well—including stacking small rocks and tying ‘cradles’ (for
fertility) on low-hanging tree branches. The footpath rituals provide
opportunity for fulfillment of individual vows and other rituals without
dependence on any intermediaries, characteristic of rituals performed
in the temple precincts uphill.
Seven Sister shrine on
Tirumala footpath
The TTD has recently built along the path 10-foot images of each of
the ten avatāras of Visnu; and pilgrims also pass numerous more
traditional shrines, including one to the Seven Sisters in a cave on the
side of the mountain where the footpath and car road intersect. There
is a wildlife park fenced off along one part of the path. And of course,
the periodic, welcomed tea stall, where merchants have also set up
small stalls of both religious and non-religious trinkets. But finally,
very few on the footpath choose to walk for the entertainment of it all
or as a trek (as has become a tradition at several Himalayan pilgrimage
sites); walking up the footpath is itself powerful ritual, giving
devotees bodily knowledge of and intimate access to the mountain on
which the god dwells.
For several years prior, I had been saying, in talks I had given on Gangamma jātara, that Brahmins do not participate in the jātara except indirectly (perhaps sending pŏṅgal or bali to the goddess through the hands of a non-Brahmin servant). But now, here was a Brahmin who had participated in the jātara for 35 years by taking stri veṣam; and he spoke of this ritual as something quite ordinary, not exceptional for him as a Brahmin. Srinivasan explained that he had been sickly as a child and that his mother had made a vow (mŏkku) to Gangamma that if he regained full strength and health, he would take stri veṣam. At the urging of his grandmother, however, he said he had kept up the tradition for many years following fulfillment of the initial mŏkku. His grandmother had told him (again, reported in English), “Taking veṣam, just once a year, you can get a corner on women’s śakti.” He lives both in the worlds of the God uphill and the closely associated maṭham and the grāmadevata sister downhill with seemingly no sense of disjuncture.
The second vignette draws upon my encounter with an elderly Mudaliar-caste widow who had entered a ritual relationship with Gangamma by exchanging wedding pendants (tālis) with the goddess. She wore a large, dark-red pasupu bŏṭṭu and had matted hair that, she explained, was a sign of the presence of the goddess. Gangamma and devotee had, she reported, argued back and forth when the woman tried to shave off the matted hair and it continued to grow back. Once, she reported, the matted hair took the form of a snake’s hood, and she asked the goddess why this shape. Gangamma replied, “This is Venkatesvara’s jaḍa [braid; matted hair].” The presence of the grāmadevata goddess was revealed through a form of the god uphill. The kinship and ritual associations between the god on the mountain and Gangamma downhill remind us of the integrated worldview in which Tirupati residents live, incorporating both puranic and village deities, narratives, and rituals.
A View of the Tirumala Peak
In the local Tirupati imagination, the mountain and the plains
below–and the deities that inhabit them—are part of a singular landscape
with relationships and rituals that intersect and connect uphill and
down. While the mountain anchors the landscape and stabilizes the
traditionally moving, fluid Seven Sister goddesses, the god on the
mountain–whose stability is performed as he gives darśan to thousands of
pilgrims daily–also moves.
There are, of course, other deities who move out of their temples or other dwellings: for example, the river goddess Ganga Devi as she moves from her site of origin up in the high Himalayas (Gangotri) through the north Indian plains (Rishikesh, Varanasi, Allahabad) to the Bay of Bengal; Siva in Kedarnath as he descends in a dramatic procession from his Himalayan mountaintop to take up residence in the valley below for the winter season[21]; and much shorter temple processions of utsava murtis (festival, moveable images) for which the god leaves his temple during annual festivals, such as Jagannath’s Rath Yatra in Orissa, London, and Atlanta. What these movements signify and create varies with the specific contexts of each moving deity. Here in Tirupati, I suggest the god’s movement both reflects and creates a left-hand caste ethos; his movement also sustains/embodies his relationship with both the goddess on the plains and his devotees who live under the shadow of his dramatic mountain.
Interestingly, while the mountain looms large over the imaginative and physical landscape of Tirupati, the great 15th century poet Annamaya who sang daily to the god uphill for many decades (composing up to 13,000 padams) rarely mentions the mountain landscape in which Venkatesvara lives, except in the poet’s choice of name of address to the god—God on the hill[22]. Most of his padams are intimate love songs that look inward, not to the external physical landscape that may invoke in other contexts stirrings of passion. But I close with one padam that is particularly evocative of the “space in-between” that is traversed to create relationship between god and lover/devotee—here imaged by distant rivers reaching the sea; we could imagine a similar padam being composed around the image of the footpath between Tirupati’s mountaintop and plain below:
Distant Rivers Reach the Sea*
Tell him this one thing.
Distant rivers always reach the sea.
Being far is just like being near.
Would I think of him if I were far?
The sun in the sky is very far from the lotus.
From a distance, friendship is intense.
Distant rivers reach the sea.
The moment he looks at me, I look back at him
My face is turned only toward him.
Clouds are in the sky, the peacock in the forest.
Longing is in the look that connects.
Distant rivers reach the sea.
To speak of desire is as good as coming close.
Haven’t I come close to him?
The god on the hill is on the hill,
And where am I?
Look, we made love.
Miracles do happen.
Distant rivers reach the sea.
*(Translated by V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman[13])
God on the Hill, Goddess on the Plain, and the Space In-Between: Tirupati, South India
[జాయ్స్ ఫ్లూకిగర్ (Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger) అట్లాంటా లోని ఎమరీ యూనివర్సిటీ, మతధర్మశాస్త్ర విభాగంలో ఆచార్యులుగా పనిచేస్తున్నారు. బాల్యం అంతా ఇండియాలో గడిపిన ఫ్లూకిగర్, 18వ యేట అమెరికాకు తిరిగి వచ్చి, విస్కాన్సిన్ యూనివర్సిటీ నుండి దక్షిణ భారత ప్రాంత అధ్యయనంలో పిహెచ్.డీ పొందారు. మౌఖిక సాహిత్యం మీద, సమాజంలో స్త్రీల పాత్ర, జాతరలలో ప్రదర్శించే కళల పుట్టుపూర్వోత్తరాలు, తదితర అంశాల మీద పరిశోధనలు చేసి పుస్తకాలు వ్రాశారు. 2013లో ప్రచురించబడబోయే వీరి పుస్తకం When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddessలో గంగమ్మ జాతర గురించి వ్రాసిన అధ్యాయం నుంచి ఈమాట ప్రత్యేక సంచికలో ప్రచురణకై ఈ వ్యాసం పంపించారు.]
V. Narayana Rao first introduced me to Tirupati in 1992, when he invited me to attend the annual jātara of the downhill grāmadevata Gangamma with him, David Shulman, and Don Handelman. I later returned several times for long- and short-term fieldwork with Gangamma and her devotees. Narayana Rao frequently suggested to me that there was a left-hand caste ethos that crossed the seemingly disparate worlds of the goddess and her sisters downhill and that of the god uphill. This essay explores some images of these connections between uphill and down.
Panoramic Tirupati mountain
Venkatesvara’s wife Padmavati–locally known as Alamelumanga–does not reside with him at the mountaintop, but in a temple on the plains—which the god visits every night. And so, too, Venkatesvara’s brother, Govinda Raja Swamy—his temple with its large gopuram anchors the center of the bustling pilgrimage town downhill, near the railway and bus stations. Venkatesvara is also said to be the brother of the plains-residing village goddess (grāmadevata) Gangamma, to whom he sends an auspicious gift for her annual festival. There is lots of coming and going—literal and imaginative, narratively and ritually–between mountain and plains—the most tangible of which is the footpath up the mountain that many pilgrims walk up instead of taking the more recently available buses and taxis.
Tāllapāka Gangamma
This essay draws an imaginaire of spatial, ritual, kinship, and narrative relationships between mountain and plains and their respective divine and human inhabitants—particularly for local residents who live under the shadow of the mountain. I ask what is created imaginatively and performatively by this movement between hills and plains—and what it implies about the nature of the god. That the God of the Seven Hills and his grāmadevata sister inhabit an overlapping imaginaire for Tirupati residents belies the ways in which puranic deities and grāmadevatas have often been analyzed in academic circles as discrete, bounded traditions.
The mountain as anchor
Let’s begin with the physical mountain itself. Coming into Tirupati by train or bus from the east, the land begins to swell from the paddy fields, and travelers know they’re close to the town that is anchored by the mountain range on which the great god lives. The mountain range is called Saptagiri—literally, Seven Hills–which reaches to a height of 1104 meters; god lives on the seventh range, Venkatagiri[5]. The train a pilgrim to Tirupati is riding may be one that is named after one of the ranges–Narayanadri or Venkatadri—and the mountain may have already entered his/her imagination when boarding the train in Hyderabad.Rising dramatically from the plains, the front range of the Saptagiri anchors and gives identity to Tirupati’s physical and imaginative landscape. Its sheer rock face catches the shifting light throughout the day in a kaleidoscope of colors and shadows; the rock face changes with the seasons when it becomes a resting stop for monsoon clouds or reflects the sizzling hot season heat back onto the town. Although the god actually lives in the interior of the mountain ranges, when Tirupati residents and pilgrims look up at the rock face towering above the town, they see god—the mountain and god are synonymous. And thus the common expression to refer to Venkatesvara’s temple complex of Tirumala: uphill.
Tāllapāka Gangamma
The mobile god, between mountain and plains
In contrast to the moving/fluid goddess Gangamma, who I suggest is stabilized in Tirupati by the mountain and its god, the presumably stable god himself also moves, outside of his temple complex and up and down between the mountain on which he lives and the plains below.Venkatesvara is said to walk downhill every night to visit his wife Alamelumanga. She lives independently of her husband, in a temple downhill in Tiruchanur, four kilometers outside of Tirupati—a living situation that is an extremely rare, if not unique, phenomenon for consort-goddess temples[8]. (Of course, as is typical of Hindu traditions, imaginatively she is multiple: she simultaneously resides downhill and on her husband’s stone chest of his temple form, for example; so what I am talking about here is specifically her independent temple.) I heard several different explanations for this separate living arrangement[9], including Alamelumanga’s jealousy over the god letting Lakshmi (a goddess both distinct from and identified with Alamelumanga) reside along with her on his chest. Another story tells of Alamelumanga’s jealousy over Venkatesvara’s relationship with a Muslim concubine named Bibi Nanchari (said to be a reincarnation of Bhu Devi), and this is why, it is said, she refuses to live uphill with her husband. Still another oral tradition recounts Venkatesvara’s impatience with his wife after their wedding, when she kept forgetting one thing or another as he waited for her to walk with him to his residence on top of the mountain. In exasperation, he told her that he was going to spit on the ground and that she should return before the spit dried up. Insulted by this ultimatum, Alamelumanga told her husband that she was going to stay downhill, and that if he wanted to meet her, he would have to come to her[10].
Feet of the God
The god also has other relatives who live on the plains. Most important of these is his brother Govinda Raja Swamy, whose temple gopuram dominates the skyline of the town below. The story is told that when Venkatesvara wanted to get married, he needed to borrow money for his wedding from his brother Govinda Raja Swamy. He is still paying interest on that loan even today, and pilgrims’ gifts placed in the temple huṇḍī (cash box) are said to be applied towards interest on that loan[11]. Huṇḍī cash contents are conspicuously counted in public at the end of every day, visible to pilgrims on their way out of the temple complex after having taken darśan of the indebted god. On his part, Govinda Raja Swamy downhill is a reclining image that rests its head on a vessel he has used to measure the cash interest he’s been paid by Venkatesvara; he’s tired out from expending so much energy on this task. In contrast to his moving brother, Govinda Raja Swamy seems rather sedentary and doesn’t leave his temple.
Venkatesvara’s mother, Vakulamatha, also lives downhill (and then again up), atop a small hill facing Tirupati in Perurbanda village, 15 kilometers from Tirupati. When a devotee proposed in 2007 to fund renovation of what had become a rather dilapidated temple—and illegal quarrying was posing a threat to Vakulamata Devi Temple–the Devasthanam responsible for Tirumala (TTD) decided to build the temple closer to Tirumala, with the intention to help support building temples for Vakulamata at all sites where there is a Venkatesvara temple. Significantly, their proposal was not to build the Tirupati Vakulamatha temple uphill, but at the base of the hill, at Alipiri, where the footpath up the mountain begins. However, this proposed juxtaposition of mother to son raised problems. Tirumala priests and BJP leaders opposed this site “on the grounds that it would go against the Hindu dharma to place the mother at the feet of her son and the idea was dropped.”[12] Several Tirupati residents told me that “in the old days,” pilgrims used to (and still should) visit all Venkatesvara’s family members downhill (wife, brother, sister, and mother), even though their primary purpose is to take darśan of the God of the Seven Hills—an injunction that is being lost on many contemporary pilgrims who are rushing up and downhill under the pressures of modern-day schedules.
Gangamma in one of her jātara forms,
a coconut head (center), and Venkatesvara
in a Gangamma devotee household shrine
Dicing scene on hillside outside
Hathi Ramji Matham uphill
We return now to other circumstances under which the god moves–when he leaves his temple to visit or give darśan to his devotees. We have two starkly contrasting examples.The first is the story of the god visiting his devotee Hathi Ramji, a north Indian devotee who built a maṭham facing the Tirumala temple. Because of Hathi Ramji’s great devotion, Venkatesvara is said to have visited the former’s maṭham to play dice with him every evening. This story is part of the dominant mythology of the temple, and an image of the two playing dice is engraved on the silver door to the garbhagṛham (inner shrine room) of Venkatesvara’s Tirumala temple. A larger-than-life-size plaster image of the two dicing friends has been built on the hillside of the maṭham that faces the temple’s outer courtyard, visible to all pilgrims standing in darśan lines (the pushing and shoving at the doorway to the garbhagṛham is such that they may well miss the image on the silver door of the garbhagṛham).
Image of prostrating devotee
A prostrating devotee
Footpath: the space between
Footpath to Tirumala
Pilgrims with Sandals
Pasupu-kumkuma vow ritual
on footpath going uphill
Cradles tied for fertility
Seven Sister shrine on
Tirumala footpath
Vignettes of intersecting worlds
Two vignettes illustrate other kinds of fluid ritual associations between the God of the Seven Hills and the plains goddess Gangamma. My fieldwork associate and I had stopped at Hathi Ramji Matham (site of the north Indian religious order of Hathi Ramji, which had earlier administered the Venkatesvara temple uphill) to ask why the maṭham was one of the three sites where, during her jātara perambulations, the tongue of Gangamma (in her form of a veṣam taken on by a Kaikala-caste male) was pierced with a tiny silver trident. Having been directed by a sadhu sitting on the maṭham verandah into a large office, we were warmly greeted by a Brahmin man whom we came to know as Srinivasan, a ’superintendent’ at the maṭham who works with legal affairs and land registration. He answered our questions about the tongue-piercing rather cryptically, and then surprised us by saying (speaking in English): “Madam, you would be interested to know that I’ve taken stri veṣam [female guise] every year for 35 years.” He was referring to the jātara ritual of male participants taking on stri veṣam (saris, braids, breasts) in fulfillment of vows they (or their mothers on their behalf) have made to the goddess.For several years prior, I had been saying, in talks I had given on Gangamma jātara, that Brahmins do not participate in the jātara except indirectly (perhaps sending pŏṅgal or bali to the goddess through the hands of a non-Brahmin servant). But now, here was a Brahmin who had participated in the jātara for 35 years by taking stri veṣam; and he spoke of this ritual as something quite ordinary, not exceptional for him as a Brahmin. Srinivasan explained that he had been sickly as a child and that his mother had made a vow (mŏkku) to Gangamma that if he regained full strength and health, he would take stri veṣam. At the urging of his grandmother, however, he said he had kept up the tradition for many years following fulfillment of the initial mŏkku. His grandmother had told him (again, reported in English), “Taking veṣam, just once a year, you can get a corner on women’s śakti.” He lives both in the worlds of the God uphill and the closely associated maṭham and the grāmadevata sister downhill with seemingly no sense of disjuncture.
The second vignette draws upon my encounter with an elderly Mudaliar-caste widow who had entered a ritual relationship with Gangamma by exchanging wedding pendants (tālis) with the goddess. She wore a large, dark-red pasupu bŏṭṭu and had matted hair that, she explained, was a sign of the presence of the goddess. Gangamma and devotee had, she reported, argued back and forth when the woman tried to shave off the matted hair and it continued to grow back. Once, she reported, the matted hair took the form of a snake’s hood, and she asked the goddess why this shape. Gangamma replied, “This is Venkatesvara’s jaḍa [braid; matted hair].” The presence of the grāmadevata goddess was revealed through a form of the god uphill. The kinship and ritual associations between the god on the mountain and Gangamma downhill remind us of the integrated worldview in which Tirupati residents live, incorporating both puranic and village deities, narratives, and rituals.
Conclusion
A View of the Tirumala Peak
There are, of course, other deities who move out of their temples or other dwellings: for example, the river goddess Ganga Devi as she moves from her site of origin up in the high Himalayas (Gangotri) through the north Indian plains (Rishikesh, Varanasi, Allahabad) to the Bay of Bengal; Siva in Kedarnath as he descends in a dramatic procession from his Himalayan mountaintop to take up residence in the valley below for the winter season[21]; and much shorter temple processions of utsava murtis (festival, moveable images) for which the god leaves his temple during annual festivals, such as Jagannath’s Rath Yatra in Orissa, London, and Atlanta. What these movements signify and create varies with the specific contexts of each moving deity. Here in Tirupati, I suggest the god’s movement both reflects and creates a left-hand caste ethos; his movement also sustains/embodies his relationship with both the goddess on the plains and his devotees who live under the shadow of his dramatic mountain.
Interestingly, while the mountain looms large over the imaginative and physical landscape of Tirupati, the great 15th century poet Annamaya who sang daily to the god uphill for many decades (composing up to 13,000 padams) rarely mentions the mountain landscape in which Venkatesvara lives, except in the poet’s choice of name of address to the god—God on the hill[22]. Most of his padams are intimate love songs that look inward, not to the external physical landscape that may invoke in other contexts stirrings of passion. But I close with one padam that is particularly evocative of the “space in-between” that is traversed to create relationship between god and lover/devotee—here imaged by distant rivers reaching the sea; we could imagine a similar padam being composed around the image of the footpath between Tirupati’s mountaintop and plain below:
Distant Rivers Reach the Sea*
Tell him this one thing.
Distant rivers always reach the sea.
Being far is just like being near.
Would I think of him if I were far?
The sun in the sky is very far from the lotus.
From a distance, friendship is intense.
Distant rivers reach the sea.
The moment he looks at me, I look back at him
My face is turned only toward him.
Clouds are in the sky, the peacock in the forest.
Longing is in the look that connects.
Distant rivers reach the sea.
To speak of desire is as good as coming close.
Haven’t I come close to him?
The god on the hill is on the hill,
And where am I?
Look, we made love.
Miracles do happen.
Distant rivers reach the sea.
*(Translated by V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman[13])
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