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])

 

Foot Notes and References

1. Tirumala.org/darshan; June 1, 2011.
2. I lived in Tirupati for nine months between in 1999-2000 (with support from the American Institute of Indian Studies) conducting research on the grāmadevata Gangamma and have made multiple shorter return trips thereafter.
3. Gold, Ann Grodzins. 2000 [1988]. Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
4. Haberman, David. 1994. Journey Through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna. New York: Oxford University Press.
5. The mountain itself—like many Indian sacred mountains–is said to be part of Mt. Meru brought from Vaikuntam (Vishnu’s heaven) by Garuda.
6. Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter. Forthcoming; 2013. When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
7. In this sense, local goddess Gangamma shares not only the name, but also characteristics of fluidity and shakti of the pan-Indian river goddess Ganga.
8. Parvati, of course, often lived separately from her husband Shiva when he left home for long periods of time to practice asceticism; but this is a narrative separation not one that is replicated in their temple residences.
9. I heard these oral narratives multiple times during the year I spent in Tirupati in 1999-2000 and subsequent visits.
10. Velcheru Narayana Rao. oral communication, 2011.
11. At the temple uphill, the huṇḍīis not a box, but rather a large open metal container with a long cloth covering over its mouth, so that no one can see what any other pilgrim has deposited in the huṇḍī. There are many stories of magnificent jewels and crores of rupees having been deposited in the huṇḍī by anonymous pilgrims.
12. savettd.blogspot.com/2010/12.
13. Velcheru, Narayana Rao and David Shulman. 2005. God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati, Annamayya. (esp. pp 118-122) New York: Oxford University Press.
14. Velcheru Narayana Rao. 1986. Epics and Ideologies: Six Telugu Folk Epics. In Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India, ed. Stuart H. Blackburn and A. K. Ramanujan, 131-164. Berkeley: University of California Press.
15. Velcheru Narayana Rao. 1989. Tricking the Goddess: Cowherd Katamaraju and Goddess Ganga in the Telugu Folk Epic. In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel, 105-121. Albany: State University of New York Press.
16. Beck, Brenda. 1972. Peasant Society in Koṅku: A Study of Right and Left Subcastes in South India. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. [Brenda Beck in this paper distinguishes between right- and left-hand Tamil castes. In Telugu, while caste distinctions are not so named, they follow similar characterizations.
17. One of my Emory Indian-American students was visibly disconcerted when he learned in a discussion of religious pilgrimage that often the difficult journey was part of the merit accrued through pilgrimage; he asked if he’d gotten any benefit, then, from having ridden up to Tirumala in an air-conditioned car.
18. Today, the roundabout at Alipiri is marked by a 20-foot white-painted cement Garuda, the vāhana of Venkatesvara.
19. The Hindu, August 20, 2005.
20. This ritual itself must be relatively new, since the cement steps themselves are relatively new. I have no knowledge of whether or how this vow-ritual was performed before the steps were built.
21. See Luke Whitmore, “In Pursuit of Maheshvara: Understanding Kedarnath as Place and as Tirtha,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University, 2010.
22. This generalization is drawn from the translations available in the Annamayya collection found in God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati — Annamayya, translated by V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman (Oxford University Press, 2005).