Memoirs of fifties Akividu or Akiveedu (ఆకివీడు), and neighbouring villages. Educational, geographical, historical, literary, philosophical,
religious and social postings included. Copyright Raju (PD). (bondadaa@gmail.com)
The actor and comedian recalls a bizarre recent encounter with the Iron
Lady, and how it prompted him to think about growing up under the most
unlikely matriarch-figure imaginable
Margaret
Thatcher, the year she became leader of the Conservatives, and the year
Russell Brand was born. Photograph: Keystone France
One
Sunday recently while staying in London, I took a stroll in the gardens
of Temple, the insular clod of quads and offices between the Strand and
the Embankment. It's kind of a luxury rent-controlled ghetto for
lawyers and barristers, and there is a beautiful tailors, a fine chapel,
established by the Knights Templar (from which the compound takes its
name), a twee cottage designed by Sir Christopher Wren and a rose
garden; which I never promised you.
My mate John and I were
wandering there together, he expertly proselytising on the architecture
and the history of the place, me pretending to be Rumpole of the Bailey
(quietly in my mind), when we spied in the distant garden a hunched and
frail figure, in a raincoat, scarf about her head, watering the roses
under the breezy supervision of a masticating copper. "What's going on
there, mate?" John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. "Maggie
Thatcher," he said. "Comes here every week to water them flowers." The
three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly
enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car
and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale
phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke
with vitriol and it wasn't until an hour later that I dreamt up an
Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from
the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her,
and finally give her back. This reverie only occurred when the car was
out of view. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur
astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon.
When
I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a
bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring – I could ignore the
content but the intent drilled its way in. She became leader of the
Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four.
She remained in power till I was 15. I am, it's safe to say, one of
Thatcher's children. How then do I feel on the day of this matriarchal
mourning?
I grew up in Essex with a single mum and a go-getter
Dagenham dad. I don't know if they ever voted for her, I don't know if
they liked her. My dad, I suspect, did. He had enough Del Boy about him
to admire her coiffured virility – but in a way Thatcher was so
omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was
redundant.
As I scan the statements of my memory bank for early
deposits (it'd be a kid's memory bank account at a neurological NatWest
where you're encouraged to become a greedy little capitalist with an
escalating family of porcelain pigs), I see her in her hairy helmet,
condescending on Nationwide, eviscerating eunuch MPs and baffled BBC
fuddy duddies with her General Zodd stare and coldly condemning the IRA.
And the miners. And the single mums. The dockers. The poll-tax rioters.
The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually.
Margaret Thatcher visiting British troops on the Falkland Islands in
1983: the war was a turning point in her premiership. Photograph: taken
from picture library Thinking about it now,
when I was a child she was just a strict woman telling everyone off and
selling everything off. I didn't know what to think of this fearsome
woman.
Perhaps my early apathy and indifference are a result of
what Thatcher deliberately engendered, the idea that "there is no such
thing as society", that we are alone on our journey through life,
solitary atoms of consciousness. Or perhaps it was just because I was a
little kid and more interested in them Weetabix skinheads, Roland Rat
and Knight Rider. Either way, I'm an adult now and none of those things
are on telly any more so there's no excuse for apathy.
When John
Lennon was told of Elvis Presley's death, he famously responded: "Elvis
died when he joined the army," meaning of course, that his combat
clothing and clipped hair signalled the demise of the thrusting,
Dionysian revolution of which he was the immaculate emblem.
When I
awoke today on LA time my phone was full of impertinent digital
eulogies. It'd be disingenuous to omit that there were a fair number of
ding-dong-style celebratory messages amidst the pensive reflections on
the end of an era. Interestingly, one mate of mine, a proper leftie, in
his heyday all Red Wedge and right-on punch-ups, was melancholy. "I
thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just … another one bites the
dust …" This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's
ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really
just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to
glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.
Perhaps,
though, Thatcher "the monster" didn't die yesterday from a stroke,
perhaps that Thatcher died as she sobbed self-pitying tears as she was
driven, defeated, from Downing Street, ousted by her own party. By then,
1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough
to regard her disdainfully. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to
know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere
for support. I was on my own. We are all on our own. Norman Tebbit, one
of Thatcher's acolytes and fellow "Munsters evacuee", said when the
National Union of Mineworkers eventually succumbed to the military
onslaught and starvation over which she presided: "We didn't just break
the strike, we broke the spell." The spell he was referring to is the
unseen bond that connects us all and prevents us from being subjugated
by tyranny. The spell of community.
Those strikes were confusing
to me as a child. All of the Tory edicts that bludgeoned our nation, as
my generation squirmed through ghoulish puberty, were confusing. When
all the public amenities were flogged, the adverts made it seem to my
childish eyes fun and positive, jaunty slogans and affable British
stereotypes jostling about in villages, selling people companies that
they'd already paid for through tax. I just now watched the British Gas
one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat
where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him.
The Orgreave miners' strike in 1984. Photograph: Alamy "The
News" was the pompous conduit through which we suckled at the barren
baroness through newscaster wet-nurses, naturally; not direct from the
steel teat. Jan Leeming, Sue Lawley, Moira Stuart – delivering doctrine
with sterile sexiness, like a butterscotch-scented beige vapour. To use a
less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were
junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them
"mum" by accident. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. For a
national matriarch she is oddly unmaternal. I always felt a bit sorry
for her biological children Mark and Carol, wondering from whom they
would get their cuddles. "Thatcher as mother" seemed, to my tiddly mind,
anathema. How could anyone who was so resolutely Margaret Thatcher be
anything else? In the Meryl Streep film,
The Iron Lady, it's the scenes of domesticity that appear most absurd.
Knocking up a flan for Denis or helping Carol with her algebra or Mark
with his gun-running, are jarring distractions from the main narrative;
woman as warrior queen.
It always struck me as peculiar, too,
when the Spice Girls briefly championed Thatcher as an early example of
girl power. I don't see that. She is an anomaly; a product of the
freak-onomy of her time. Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his
statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only
in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling
shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism.
I have
few recollections of Thatcher after the slowly chauffeured, weepy
Downing Street cortege. I'd become a delinquent, living on heroin and
benefit fraud.
There were sporadic resurrections. She would
appear in public to drape a hankie over a model BA plane tailfin because
she disliked the unpatriotic logo with which they'd replaced the union
flag (maybe don't privatise BA then), or to shuffle about some country
pile arm in arm with a doddery Pinochet and tell us all what a fine
fellow he was. It always irks when rightwing folk demonstrate in a
familial or exclusive setting the values that they deny in a broader
social context. They're happy to share big windfall bonuses with their
cronies, they'll stick up for deposed dictator chums when they're down
on their luck, they'll find opportunities in business for people they
care about. I hope I'm not being reductive but it seems Thatcher's time
in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had
least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own
indulgence in selfish behaviour that it's much easier to get what you
want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have
on others.
Is that what made her so formidable, her ability to
ignore the suffering of others? Given the nature of her legacy "survival
of the fittest" – a phrase that Darwin himself only used twice in On
the Origin of Species, compared to hundreds of references to altruism,
love and cooperation, it isn't surprising that there are parties tonight
in Liverpool, Glasgow and Brixton – from where are they to have learned
compassion and forgiveness?
The blunt, pathetic reality today is
that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to
water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's
no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad
for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got
richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are
pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi
and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear". What is more
troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends
and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under
Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's
pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering
is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the
clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and
haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial
funeral, are values that her government and policies sought
to annihilate.
I can't articulate with the skill of either of
"the Marks" – Steel or Thomas – why Thatcher and Thatcherism were so bad
for Britain but I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and
every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national
spirit and identity. Her refusal to stand against apartheid, her civil
war against the unions, her aggression towards our neighbours in Ireland
and a taxation system that was devised in the dark ages, the bombing of
a retreating ship – it's just not British.
I do not yet know
what effect Margaret Thatcher has had on me as an individual or on the
character of our country as we continue to evolve. As a child she
unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our
own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them.
On April 12, 1955, Jonas Salk, who had recently invented the polio
vaccine, appeared on the television news show “See It Now” to discuss
its impact on American society. Before the vaccine became available,
dread of polio was almost as widespread as the disease itself. Hundreds
of thousands fell ill, most of them children, many of whom died or were
permanently disabled.
The vaccine changed all that, and Edward R. Murrow, the show’s host,
asked Salk what seemed to be a reasonable question about such a valuable
commodity: “Who owns the patent on this vaccine?” Salk was taken aback.
“Well, the people,” he said. “There is no patent. Could you patent the
sun?”
The very idea, to Salk, seemed absurd. But
that was more than fifty years ago, before the race to mine the human
genome turned into the biological Klondike rush of the twenty-first
century. Between 1944, when scientists determined that DNA served as the
carrier of genetic information, and 1953, when Watson and Crick
described it as a double helix, the rate of discovery was rapid. Since
then, and particularly after 2003, when work on the genome revealed that
we are each built out of roughly twenty-five thousand genes, the
promise of genomics has grown exponentially.
The intellectual and commercial bounty from that research has
already been enormous, and it increases nearly every day, as we learn
ways in which specific genes are associated with diseases—or with
mechanisms that can prevent them. It took thousands of scientists and
technicians more than a decade to complete the Human Genome Project, and
cost well over a billion dollars. The same work can now be carried out
in a day or two, in a single laboratory, for a thousand dollars—and the
costs continue to plummet. As they do, we edge closer to one of modern
science’s central goals: an era of personalized medicine, in which an
individual’s treatment for scores of illnesses could be tailored to his
specific genetic composition. That, of course, assumes that we own our
own genes.
And yet, nearly twenty per cent of the genome—more than four thousand
genes—are already covered by at least one U.S. patent. These include
genes for Alzheimer’s disease, colon cancer, asthma, and two in
particular—BRCA1 and BRCA2—that are highly associated with breast
cancer. Myriad Genetics, a company that specializes in molecular
diagnostics, holds the rights to those two genes. Anyone conducting an
experiment on them without a license can be sued for infringement of
patent rights. This means that Myriad can decide what research is
carried out on those genes, who can do that research, and how much any
resulting therapy or diagnostic test will cost. The same holds true for
other genes and for any pharmaceutical company, scientist, or university
that holds patents similar to those held by Myriad.
In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation brought a lawsuit,
on behalf of more than twenty plaintiffs, against Myriad and the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office, challenging claims on Myriad’s patents and
on the right of any company to patent gene sequences. (The company’s
responding brief is here, and a collection of documents pertaining to the suit, assembled by the Genomics Law Report, can be found here.)
On April 15th, after several years of appeals and reversals, the
Supreme Court will hear arguments on the essential issue: Should human
genes be patented?
Traditionally, patents have applied solely to inventions, granted as a
reward for ingenuity and to encourage innovation. Naturally occurring
substances, like DNA, were exempt from such laws. Then, in 1980, Ananda
Mohan Chakrabarty, a scientist working for General Electric, filed an
application for a patent on a bacterium that he had modified genetically
so that it could consume oil. The Patent and Trademark Office rejected
Chakrabarty’s application on the ground that the bacterium was a product
of nature. Chakrabarty sued, arguing that, by altering the organism, it
was his ingenuity that made the bacterium valuable. The case ended up
before the Supreme Court, which, by a vote of five to four, ruled in
favor of the engineer. “The fact that micro-organisms are alive is
without legal significance for the purpose of patent law,” the Court
wrote. Chakrabarty’s creation became the first life-form to receive a
patent.
Since then, genes considered to have been “isolated from their
natural state and purified” have been eligible for patent protection.
The first such patents were issued for DNA that had been altered to
produce specific proteins, such as the insulin used daily by millions of
diabetics. Those patents were rarely controversial. Over the years,
however, patents have also been granted to people who have identified
genes with mutations that are likely to increase the risk of a disease.
Any scientist who wants to conduct research on such a gene—even on a
small sequence of its DNA—has to pay license fees. The practical effect
has been chilling. According to public-health officials and academic
leaders, it has stymied research into many types of disease.
“A patent on a product of Nature would authorize the patent holder
to exclude everyone from observing, characterizing or analyzing, by any means whatsoever,
the product of Nature,” Eric S. Lander wrote in an amicus brief. Lander
is the president and founding director of the Broad Institute of
Harvard and M.I.T. He is among the country’s most eminent scientists,
and helped run the Human Genome Project. “This barrier is inherently
insurmountable: one cannot study a product of Nature if one cannot
legally possess it.”
Moreover, when a company patents a gene, it also patents the rights
to what that gene (or any fragment of its DNA) might tell us about our
health, including our chances of living or dying. A woman who inherits a
harmful version of either of the genes that Myriad has under patent,
for example, is five times more likely to develop breast cancer than a
woman who does not. She is also at significantly greater risk of
developing ovarian cancer. Women who want to know whether they possess
those harmful mutations have just one way of finding out: by taking a
three-thousand-dollar blood test offered by Myriad Genetics. To seek a
second opinion on such a critical issue, their only option is to pay to
take the test again. This is because Myriad, as is its right under
patent law, has prevented laboratories from performing the test or
developing alternative versions. It is important to remember what is at
stake: breast cancer kills more women in the Western world than any
other kind of cancer. Even the best tests are sometimes wrong; second
opinions save lives.
“If these patents are enforced, our genomic liberty is lost,”
Christopher E. Mason, of Weill Cornell Medical College, said. He and
Jeffrey Rosenfeld, an assistant professor of medicine at the University
of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, published a study last week
in the journal Genome Medicine
demonstrating that, when one looks not just at entire genes but at DNA
sequences contained within them, nearly the entire human genome is
covered by patents. “Just as we enter the era of personalized medicine,
we are ironically living in the most restrictive age of genomics. You
have to ask, how is it possible that my doctor cannot look at my DNA
without being concerned about patent infringement?” The biotechnology
industry contends that if the patents aren’t upheld, entrepreneurs and
many businesses, particularly pharmaceutical and agricultural companies
that rely heavily on genetically-modified products, will have less
incentive to innovate.
In arguments before the appeals court, lawyers for Myriad compared
the use of the genes that the company has patented with efforts to
extract minerals from the ground. Without the man-made process of
extraction, the minerals are useless. When Judge William Bryson of the
United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit asked Myriad’s
attorney Greg Castanias if that meant that simply getting an element out
of the ground ought to be considered an invention—he used lithium as an
example, but he could have chosen anything from the periodic table of
elements—Myriad’s lawyer said yes.
Jonas Salk would not be amused, but if the Supreme Court buys
Myriad’s argument, the sun, along with the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen
contained within it, will indeed be up for grabs. And so will every gene
in our bodies, as well as all the DNA that scientists have mined, with
increasing success, in their efforts to overcome the diseases that
plague us all.
Blame it on the static nature of
Indian politics whose context remains unchanged for decades or attribute
it to father-son bonding. As he sets out to "transform" the system in
India, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi is drawing words, ideas,
beliefs and even phraseology from his late father Rajiv Gandhi's
speeches.
Even as Rajiv's famous 1985 US Congress address about the dreams
of a "young" and "impatient" India has been the leitmotif of Rahul's
political action plan, the latter's statement last week in the
Parliament Central Hall about his belief in Nishkama Karma of the Gita
echoed Rajiv's remarks in 1987 about how his late mother Indira Gandhi
"never hesitated to do what she thought was right in the spirit of
Nishkama Karma".
This was only the latest evidence of how the young scion of the
Nehru-Gandhi family continues to seek intellectual inspiration from his
father.
Interacting with students in Srinagar in 2008, Rahul had sought
to differentiate between the education systems of India and abroad
saying, "We don't ask people (students) to ask questions. When I was
studying at St Stephen's College, asking a question was not (perceived
to be) good in our class. You were looked down upon if you asked too
many questions."
While this had caused outrage at his alma mater, forcing him to
later visit the campus to clarify his remarks, it turns out that he was
only echoing his father's views on the issue. "In education, our school
system does not instill the inquiring spirit in the minds of our
children. A questioning mind is not developed. We are taught by rote. We
are taught that the teacher is always right and correct. We are taught
never to question the teacher," said Rajiv at the Indian Science
Congress in Bangalore in 1987.
After presenting the National Youth Awards 1985 in New Delhi,
Rajiv had said: "I know from travelling around the country that there is
a tremendous amount of excellence available in our people, but the
system does not allow it to rise to the top; it suffocates, it stifles,
and keeps mediocrity at the top." In another speech on responsive
administration a few months later, the then prime minister observed,
"Too often, I find that the bureaucracy is closed up into its own little
boxes."
In January 2013, in his address at the Congress session in
Jaipur, Rahul re-phrased this, observing how people's lives are decided
by "people behind closed doors". "It has become a system that robs
people of their voice. Every single day, I meet people who have
tremendous understanding, deep insight and no voice. They are kept
outside our systems. All our public systems are closed systems. Their
designs promote mediocrity and mediocrity dominates discussion," said
Rahul.
At the Congress centenary session in Mumbai in 1985, Rajiv had
lambasted the party system. "Corruption is not only tolerated but even
regarded as the hallmark of leadership. Flagrant contradiction between
what we say and what we do has become our way of life. At every step,
our aims and actions conflict," he had said.
Twenty-eight years later, Rahul echoed the same in Jaipur. "Every
single day we are faced with the hypocrisy of the system. People who
are corrupt stand up and talk about eradicating corruption and people
who disrespect women everyday talk about women's rights," he said.
Replying to the debate on the President's Address in the Lok
Sabha in 1987, Rajiv had stated: "Today, when India speaks, it is not
the India of 1979 where nobody even bothered to listen to us. Today,
when India speaks, India is listened to. It is heard, India counts."
At the Jaipur session, Rahul said: "Today India is not like it
was in 1984. We are no longer seen as worthless. Today the entire world
is courting us. Today we are the future."
After becoming party vice-president, Rahul has been lamenting the
absence of rules and discipline in the party, an issue forcefully
raised by Rajiv when he was Congress president. Like his father, Rahul
has also been talking about changes in electoral laws and political
funding.
Incidentally, Rajiv liked to recount his conversations with his
mother. He had told Congressmen during the Bombay session how his late
mother Indira Gandhi had borne with stoic fortitude the irreparable loss
of a son (Sanjay Gandhi). "She gave me no directions, no formulate, no
prescriptions. She just said, 'Understand the real India, its people',"
he said.
Decades later, newly-appointed Congress vice-president Rahul told
partymen about his mother's late night power-is-poison advice, bringing
tears to many eyes.
Congress leaders believe that repetition of Rajiv's ideas
reflects Rahul's determination to carry out what was left unfinished due
to his father's untimely death. "Every son looks up to his father for
inspiration. When Soniaji had become Congress president, she was also
taken through extracts of Nehru's and Indiraji's speeches," a senior
Congress leader told The Sunday Express.
In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale,
despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a
steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island,
home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship,
the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries,
dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only
imagined.
And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex,
the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820
incident that had inspired Melville’s novel. Captain George Pollard Jr.
was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers.
But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain
was marked as unlucky at sea—a “Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship
to him again. Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the
village night watchman.
Herman Melville drew inspiration for Moby-Dick from the 1820 whale attack on the Essex. Photo: Wikipedia
Melville had written about Pollard briefly in Moby-Dick, and
only with regard to the whale sinking his ship. During his visit,
Melville later wrote, the two merely “exchanged some words.” But
Melville knew Pollard’s ordeal at sea did not end with the sinking of
the Essex, and he was not about to evoke the horrific memories
that the captain surely carried with him. “To the islanders he was a
nobody,” Melville wrote, “to me, the most impressive man, tho’ wholly
unassuming, even humble—that I ever encountered.”
Pollard had told the full story to fellow captains over a dinner shortly after his rescue from the Essex
ordeal, and to a missionary named George Bennet. To Bennet, the tale
was like a confession. Certainly, it was grim: 92 days and sleepless
nights at sea in a leaking boat with no food, his surviving crew going
mad beneath the unforgiving sun, eventual cannibalism and the harrowing
fate of two teenage boys, including Pollard’s first cousin, Owen Coffin.
“But I can tell you no more—my head is on fire at the recollection,”
Pollard told the missionary. “I hardly know what I say.”
The trouble for Essex began, as Melville knew, on August 14,
1819, just two days after it left Nantucket on a whaling voyage that
was supposed to last two and a half years. The 87-foot-long ship was hit
by a squall that destroyed its topgallant sail and nearly sank it.
Still, Pollard continued, making it to Cape Horn five weeks later. But
the 20-man crew found the waters off South America nearly fished out, so
they decided to sail for distant whaling grounds in the South Pacific,
far from any shores.
To restock, the Essex anchored at Charles Island in the
Galapagos, where the crew collected sixty 100-pound tortoises. As a
prank, one of the crew set a fire, which, in the dry season, quickly
spread. Pollard’s men barely escaped, having to run through flames, and a
day after they set sail, they could still see smoke from the burning
island. Pollard was furious, and swore vengeance on whoever set the
fire. Many years later Charles Island was still a blackened wasteland,
and the fire was believed to have caused the extinction of both the
Floreana Tortoise and the Floreana Mockingbird.
Essex First Mate Owen Chase, later in life. Photo: Wikipedia
By November of 1820, after months of a prosperous voyage and a thousand miles from the nearest land, whaleboats from the Essex
had harpooned whales that dragged them out toward the horizon in what
the crew called “Nantucket sleigh rides.” Owen Chase, the 23-year-old
first mate, had stayed aboard the Essex to make repairs while
Pollard went whaling. It was Chase who spotted a very big whale—85 feet
in length, he estimated—lying quietly in the distance, its head facing
the ship. Then, after two or three spouts, the giant made straight for
the Essex, “coming down for us at great celerity,” Chase would
recall—at about three knots. The whale smashed head-on into the ship
with “such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on
our faces.”
The whale passed underneath the ship and began thrashing in the
water. “I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if
distracted with rage and fury,” Chase recalled. Then the whale
disappeared. The crew was addressing the hole in the ship and getting
the pumps working when one man cried out, “Here he is—he is making for
us again.” Chase spotted the whale, his head half out of water, bearing
down at great speed—this time at six knots, Chase thought. This time it
hit the bow directly under the cathead and disappeared for good.
The water rushed into the ship so fast, the only thing the crew could
do was lower the boats and try fill them with navigational instruments,
bread, water and supplies before the Essex turned over on its side.
Pollard saw his ship in distress from a distance, then returned to see the Essex in ruin. Dumbfounded, he asked, “My God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter?”
“We have been stove by a whale,” his first mate answered.
Another boat returned, and the men sat in silence, their captain
still pale and speechless. Some, Chase observed, “had no idea of the
extent of their deplorable situation.”
The men were unwilling to leave the doomed Essex as it
slowly foundered, and Pollard tried to come up with a plan. In all,
there were three boats and 20 men. They calculated that the closest land
was the Marquesas Islands and the Society Islands, and Pollard wanted
to set off for them—but in one of the most ironic decisions in nautical
history, Chase and the crew convinced him that those islands were
peopled with cannibals and that the crew’s best chance for survival
would be to sail south. The distance to land would be far greater, but
they might catch the trade winds or be spotted by another whaling ship.
Only Pollard seemed to understand the implications of steering clear of
the islands. (According to Nathaniel Philbrick, in his book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, although rumors of cannibalism persisted, traders had been visiting the islands without incident.)
Thus they left the Essex aboard their 20-foot boats. They
were challenged almost from the start. Saltwater saturated the bread,
and the men began to dehydrate as they ate their daily rations. The sun
was ravaging. Pollard’s boat was attacked by a killer whale. They
spotted land—Henderson Island—two weeks later, but it was barren. After
another week the men began to run out of supplies. Still, three of them
decided they’d rather take their chances on land than climb back into a
boat. No one could blame them. And besides, it would stretch the
provisions for the men in the boats.
The whaleship Essex, “stove by a whale” in 1821. Photo: Wikipedia
By mid-December, after weeks at sea, the boats began to take on
water, more whales menaced the men at night, and by January, the paltry
rations began to take their toll. On Chase’s boat, one man went mad,
stood up and demanded a dinner napkin and water, then fell into “most
horrid and frightful convulsions” before perishing the next morning.
“Humanity must shudder at the dreadful recital” of what came next, Chase
wrote. The crew “separated limbs from his body, and cut all the flesh
from the bones; after which, we opened the body, took out the heart, and
then closed it again—sewed it up as decently as we could, and committed
it to the sea.” They then roasted the man’s organs on a flat stone and
ate them.
Over the coming week, three more sailors died, and their bodies were
cooked and eaten. One boat disappeared, and then Chase’s and Pollard’s
boats lost sight of each other. The rations of human flesh did not last
long, and the more the survivors ate, the hungrier they felt. On both
boats the men became too weak to talk. The four men on Pollard’s boat
reasoned that without more food, they would die. On February 6,
1821—nine weeks after they’d bidden farewell to the Essex—Charles
Ramsdell, a teenager, proposed they draw lots to determine who would be
eaten next. It was the custom of the sea, dating back, at least in
recorded instance, to the first half of the 17th century. The men in
Pollard’s boat accepted Ramsdell’s suggestion, and the lot fell to young
Owen Coffin, the captain’s first cousin.
Pollard had promised the boy’s mother he’d look out for him. “My lad,
my lad!” the captain now shouted, “if you don’t like your lot, I’ll
shoot the first man that touches you.” Pollard even offered to step in
for the boy, but Coffin would have none of it. “I like it as well as any
other,” he said.
Ramsdell drew the lot that required him to shoot his friend. He
paused a long time. But then Coffin rested his head on the boat’s
gunwale and Ramsdell pulled the trigger.
“He was soon dispatched,” Pollard would say, “and nothing of him left.”
By February 18, after 89 days at sea, the last three men on Chase’s
boat spotted a sail in the distance. After a frantic chase, they managed
to catch the English ship Indian and were rescued.
Three hundred miles away, Pollard’s boat carried only its captain and
Charles Ramsdell. They had only the bones of the last crewmen to
perish, which they smashed on the bottom of the boat so that they could
eat the marrow. As the days passed the two men obsessed over the bones
scattered on the boat’s floor. Almost a week after Chase and his men had
been rescued, a crewman aboard the American ship Dauphin
spotted Pollard’s boat. Wretched and confused, Pollard and Ramsdell did
not rejoice at their rescue, but simply turned to the bottom of their
boat and stuffed bones into their pockets. Safely aboard the Dauphin, the two delirious men were seen “sucking the bones of their dead mess mates, which they were loath to part with.”
The five Essex survivors were reunited in Valparaiso, where
they recuperated before sailing back for Nantucket. As Philbrick
writes, Pollard had recovered enough to join several captains for
dinner, and he told them the entire story of the Essex wreck
and his three harrowing months at sea. One of the captains present
returned to his room and wrote everything down, calling Pollard’s
account “the most distressing narrative that ever came to my knowledge.”
Years later, the third boat was discovered on Ducie Island; three
skeletons were aboard. Miraculously, the three men who chose to stay on
Henderson Island survived for nearly four months, mostly on shellfish
and bird eggs, until an Australian ship rescued them.
Once they arrived in Nantucket, the surviving crewmen of the Essex
were welcomed, largely without judgment. Cannibalism in the most dire
of circumstances, it was reasoned, was a custom of the sea. (In similar
incidents, survivors declined to eat the flesh of the dead but used it
as bait for fish. But Philbrick notes that the men of the Essex were in waters largely devoid of marine life at the surface.)
Captain Pollard, however, was not as easily forgiven, because he had
eaten his cousin. (One scholar later referred to the act as “gastronomic
incest.”) Owen Coffin’s mother could not abide being in the captain’s
presence. Once his days at sea were over, Pollard spent the rest of his
life in Nantucket. Once a year, on the anniversary of the wreck of the Essex, he was said to have locked himself in his room and fasted in honor of his lost crewmen.
By 1852, Melville and Moby-Dick had begun their own slide
into obscurity. Despite the author’s hopes, his book sold but a few
thousand copies in his lifetime, and Melville, after a few more failed
attempts at novels, settled into a reclusive life and spent 19 years as a
customs inspector in New York City. He drank and suffered the death of
his two sons. Depressed, he abandoned novels for poetry. But George
Pollard’s fate was never far from his mind. In his poem Clarel he writes of
A night patrolman on the quay Watching the bales till morning hour Through fair and foul. Never he smiled; Call him, and he would come; not sour In spirit, but meek and reconciled: Patient he was, he none withstood; Oft on some secret thing would brood.
[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.
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
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.
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
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: the space between
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.
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
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])
Akkanna and Madanna were brothers and the sons of
Bhanoji Pant an official at Hanmakonda in Golconda kingdom in the bye
gone days ( 16 and 17 century). There is also a dispute that they were
not real brothers and also were not Telugus and had Maharashtrian
origin (1). Their lives were of importance as Madanna rose to become
the Hindu Prime minister of Golconda State during the reign of Last
ruler Abul Hassan Kutubshah ( tanasha .. meaning good king). Madanna
entered the service of Syed Muzaffar Army Chief of Golconda State and
by hard work rose to the rank of Mir Jumla with a title Surya Prakash
Rao. There are stories that he betrayed his master Mir jumla and these
can not be believed as most of historians were Hindu haters and Muslim
abettors.
There is also a story that sultan
Tanasha who was much impressed by Madanna and made him the Mir jumla.
As per the story, once the Sultan received a letter from Emperor
Aurangzeb and when it was opened nothing was found written on the scroll
and the King was much puzzled. No one could answer him. When the Sultan
declared that he would reward any one who could read some thing from
the letter, Madanna revealed the secret of the letter by using onion
juice that produces Ammonia gas. Under the effect of Juice, black
letters were found in the letter and it was read by Madanna. At
request of the Sultan, Madanna wrote a letter in similar way to the
emperor. The Sultan was greatly impressed and made Madanna the Mir
Jumla. The story is very interesting . However it is known that Syed
Muzaffar who was the Mir Jumla became arrogant and was showing
insubordination to the king. In fact Syed Muzaffar played key role along
with Madanna in the struggle for succession after the death of Abdullah
Kutubshah the 6 th king of Golconda. As a matter of fact the eldest
son in law Nizamuddin of Abdullah kutubshah made all plans to become
Sultan and Syed Muzaffar soon took over control of the palace and
important installations being the commander in Chief of Golconda Army
(2). He ensured that Abul Hasan became the Sultan after the death of
Abdullah Kutubsha. Syed Nizamuddin the eldest son in law of the late
king was put to death and queens of late king were put behind bars
who withered away soon. In gratitude king Abul Hasan made Syed Muzaffar
as Mir Jumla. But soon he became headstrong and this forced the Sultan
to ease him out of the top post and he made Madanna as Mir Jumla with
title Surya Prakash Rao. Akkanna his elder brother was made as army
commander (3).
Madanna proved himself as an
efficient administrator and Golconda state flourished under his
authority and this was very much resented by many Muslim nobles.
Aurangzeb at Delhi was a Suni Muslim and he hated Shiite Kutubshahi
kings and always looked for some reason to attack and annex the Deccani
kingdom. Shivaji the great Maratha king also visited Hyderabad during
the times of Madanna and stayed for a month as a royal guest. A treaty
for mutual support and help was drafted and was signed by both the
rulers and this was very much resented by the emperor. Madanna
developed strong Foreign Policy and stabilized the kingdom
(4).Kutubshahi kings and Adilshai kings of Bijapur realized the danger
from Mughals and signed treaties of cooperation and also this was
strengthened by matrimonial relations. These developments automatically
angered Mughals and they always planned to attack these kingdoms.
Madanna in 1677 proceeded with 20000 troops to help Bijapur sultan
against Mughal invasion. However he returned after he was persuaded by
Bahadurshah the Mughal commander. Madanna political adjustments and
policies made Golconda a prosperous state and this was the greatest eye
sore to Mughals. In Golconda too they has natural enemies who could not
digest rise of Hindu nobles. It was natural in those days of Muslim rule
and Hindu subjugation by the Muslims. There were pressing demands from
emperor Aurangzeb to remove Akkanna and Madanna as important officials
in the state and the king of Golconda was very reluctant as he knew
their worth. But palace conspiracies were growing.
Madanna knew about the impending attack on Golconda and advised
the Sultan to take shelter at a far off strong fort such as Konda palli
or Warangal. But the sultan with his queen s and others took refuge in
the Golconda fort and was soon to be trapped by the invading Mughal
troops. Certain queens of past king Abdulla Kutub shah were angry that
the troubles faced by the state from Mughals were the result of
presence of the brothers at the helm of affairs in the kingdom. They
planned for their elimination. There are also arguments that the king
had hand in their elimination, But this can not be believed. Some say
their elimination was with full knowledge of the Sultan. On March 16,
1686, Akkanna and Madanna were returning from the palace after seeing
the king and paying respects to the goddess in Golconda fort. They had
no clue that their death was waiting for them. Their guards and
escorts were already bribed and bought by the conspirators. At
appropriate moment the killers led by Habshi Ghulam attacked the
brothers while the escort and guards looked other way. Akkanna an
Madanna were dragged out of their palanquins and brutally done to
death. Their bodies were dragged on the streets of Golconda and their
heads were cut off and were sent to the Mughal prince who inurn sent
them to the emperor who was at Ahmednagar. He was much pleased and in
the presence of his troops the heads were crushed under elephant legs
(5). Thus ended the glorious power of the brothers who were the only
Hindu nobles who rose to such positions in a Muslim rule.( Raja kishan
Prashad was the prime minister to the Nizam 6 in 20 th century at a much
later date in Hyderabad state under Asifjahis rule ). Akkanna Madanna
perished in very sad manner because they did not build any military
support for themselves and did not have their own troops for support.
They were just helpless officials depending on the security provided by
the state. Their security was very easily breached by the conspirators.
Once the brothers were killed the attackers fell o the homes of Hindus
and killed Rustom Rao a brave commander and sister’s son of Madanna.
Scores of Hindu homes were looted and burnt to ashes. Their women were
carried away by attackers. Many women died jumping in wells. n hearing
the news it is believed that the Sultan became very much upset and
lost stability of mind for some time. Such narrations indicate that the
Sultan was never a co conspirator.
Soon
the Mughal forces invaded Golconda and encircled the fort. But the
administration well built by the brothers took charge of the fort and
could withstand for nearly a year. The defense of the fort was
impregnable and the emperor was getting impatient. Famine struck the
area and many troops died due to sickness and famine. Aurangzeb paid no
heed to his religious advisers who were very much against the
persecution of co Muslim rulers. He was very adamant. Military victory
over Golconda appeared remote to Mughals. His efforts to bribe Abdul
Razak Lari the Commander of Golconda forces were fruitless. But Mughals
succeeded in bribing a junior commander Abdulla Pani who opened a
small window in the walls of Golconda on night of 21 September 1686.
Some of the selected Mughal troops entered the fort at middle of night
and made their way to the main gate killing the resisting men. Soon the
main gate Fateh darwaza ( Victory gate) was opened and the Mughal troops
triumphatantly entered beating drums. Abdul Razak lari on hearing the
commotion along with few followers rushed on horse devoid of armor
and fought tooth and nail with Mughal troops. He received multiple
wounds and the horse carried him away to Nageena Bagh in the fort and
dropped him there before it fell dead. The unconscious hero was rescued
by the Mughals and was treated by the Mughal physicians to health. The
much pleased Emperor was highly impressed with Razak lari and offered
him service in his court that he politely refused and preferred to
live retire life. Some claim that he took service with the emperor for
some time and later retired. The sultan Abul Hasan was taken captive
by the Mughal commanders an was taken to the emperor with due honors.
The emperor welcomed him with respect and he was sent to Daulatabad
Fort in present Maharashtra where he was interned at a palace. The
captive Sultan stayed in captivity and died later on. Kutub Shahi
dynasty was thus extinguished. It was annexed to Mughal empire as a
province. Aurangzeb died after few years of his death and victor and
vanquished were buried close to each other. That is the ultimate truth.
Aurangzeb destroyed south Indian kingdoms but could not take a fistful
of the soil with him when he died. He died broken, worried, and with
humiliation at his inability to subdue Marathas in Deccan. His policies
destroyed Mughal dynasty and empire.
Akkanna and Madanna rose to the highest level by their sheer hard work
and efficiency. The courtiers who were mostly Afghans, Persians and
Turks could not tolerate their rise and a section of them abetted
their murders. Aurangzeb could not tolerate a Hindu noble to command the
position of a Prime Minister. He probably engineered their murder
through the palace at Golconda. The brothers although were wise could
not defend themselves became easy targets to the killers. The saddest
part is that the present government has not recognized their
contribution to the state and the memory of these brothers are left to
winds (6) (7). There is no monument for them. Not even a street has
been named after them in Hyderabad state. There are two villages Akkanna
Pet and Madanna Pet around Charminar that have become part of the city.
On Tank Bund scores of statues are erected. In the city on various
roads and in parks numerous statues of politicians stand to day
collecting dust. But there is no place for these brothers. What apathy
indeed! Is it because their origins as Telugus are doubted. Or is it
due to false allegations against tem by the shady and biased Muslim
historians. The main allegations leveled against madanna by the pseudo
Muslim historians are many. These are Corruption, Insulting army,
Killing of women of harem, persecution of employees, support to
Sambhaji, negligence of defense of state and betrayal of sultan etc.
these are false allegations and can not stand ground. On the whole
Andhrites are ungrateful to the memory of Akkanna and Madanna.
Members at the First Andhra Conference pose in front of the Town Hall.
Demand for separate Andhra state on linguistic basis was first raised at the meet
The historical town is in the cusp of another milestone as it is gearing
up to celebrate the centenary of the First Andhra Conference held in
1913. It was in this conference that the demand to create a separate
province for Telugu speaking people on linguistic basis was first
announced. The conference was held on the premises of Edward VII
Coronation Memorial Town on May 26, 1913.
The conference was attended by about 800 delegates and 3,000 visitors
from the Telugu speaking districts of Madras Presidency. Eminent leaders
including, Desabhakta Konda Venkatappaiah, Bogaraju Pattabhi
Seetharamaiah, Mutnuri Krishnarao and Pingali Venkaiah, were present at
the conference. B.N. Sarma, the then member of the Legislative Council
of Madras, took the lead in organising the conference, which saw a
vociferous appeal by the members to create a separate state for Telugu
speaking people. Leaders like Nyayapathi Subba Rao Pantulu, M.
Adinarayanaiah and Mocherla Ramachandra Rao wanted the conference to
tread cautiously on the issue, but Vemavarapu Ramadas Pantulu moved a
resolution at the open session in favour of a separate state.
Emotional speeches
The emotional speeches stirred up the feelings of the members to put up a united fight to achieve the goal.
They argued that though Telugu districts accounted for 40 per cent of
the people and 58 per cent of the Madras Presidency, Andhras had no
effective voice in the politics of the region and were treated as second
class citizens in the composite province. “With considerable effort and
after going through excerpts of the struggle in various books, we
managed to bring a book on the conference. We are also planning to
celebrate the centenary in a big way and release a commemorative stamp
to mark the occasion,’’ said convenor of Forum for Better Bapatla P.C
Saibabu.
It
is very probable that the Hindu philosophy had some influence on the
Stoic philosophy of the Greeks through the Alexandrians. There is some
suspicion of Pythagoras' being influenced by the Samkhya thought.
