MOHAN GURUSWAMY:
The late Jayendra Saraswathy, the self styled Shankaracharya was accused of having a former acolyte, Sankararaman, murdered and was sensationally arrested by the Tamil Nadu Police in a midnight operation when he was visiting Mahbubnagar, then in AP. The arrest of this "prince of Brahmins" sent shock waves through the powerful TamBram establishment in Tamil Nadu.
How this came to pass is at the most obvious level a tale of hubris. When Henry II wanted to be rid of Thomas Beckett, the Archbishop of Canterbury all he had to do was to loudly exclaim: “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” He had hardly uttered these words when four knights led by Reginald Fitz Urse set of for Canterbury to do the dastardly deed. Henry II Plantagenet was in Winston Churchill’s opinion “the very greatest King England ever knew” but history knows him mostly as the man who murdered Beckett. Likewise Jayendra Saraswathy will be remembered, rightly or wrongly, as the man who on September 3, 2004 had murdered Sankararaman, the former Manager of Kanchipuram’s Varadaraja Perumal temple who turned troublesome. This will be so whether he did send the killers, as the State is suggesting or whether the killers set off on their own to rid the loved priest of his troublesome former employee.
No one disputes that Sankararaman was murdered because he picked a dispute with the self styled Prince of the Tamil Brahmins. Jayendra Saraswathy was arrested by the Andhra Pradesh police in Mahabubnagar on November 4, 2004 and released on bail after tow months. The long cash and carry tenure of the DMK had ensured that this big case went about the normal course. Witnesses recanted, turned hostile, and evidence poisoned. Even the victim Sankararaman’s family had turned hostile in the witness box. He was finally acquitted, as the stream of evidence dried up.
I got my first intimation of the importance of the Kanchi Shankaracharya when I went to meet a senior BJP/RSS leader who also became an important minister for a time in the Vajpayee government. The worthy appeared particularly cheerful and told me the reason for it was that the Shankaracharya had rid him of a serious doubt that was gnawing him for a while. Well not directly but through the columns of a magazine popular with New Delhi’s political elite – Astrology Today. It seems that the big man was unsure if a puja performed with reconstituted Mother Dairy milk was of valid sanctity or whether it required fresh cows milk to pass religious muster? Jayendra Saraswathy had apparently resolved the last of the great unanswered questions of Hindu liturgy by coming down strongly on the side of fresh unsterilized cows milk! More than telling me much about the foolish and trivial questions that keep the nations high and mighty pre-occupied, it told me more about the power and influence of the Shankaracharya of Kanchi.
I later on had a more direct experience of the Shankaracharya’s power when I was “invited” to call on him at Secunderabad’s Skandagiri Temple, where has was staying then. When I informed my boss, the then Finance Minister of this and sought his advice, he ordered me to proceed right away. The then Home Minister also instructed me to make haste.
At the Skandagiri Temple’s temporary quarters of the Shankaracharya I was asked to sit down on the cold marble floor of a small room. I insisted on more comfort, and was very reluctantly provided with a cushion. A plaque announced that the room was built due to the generosity of Ramesh Gelli, the former Chairman of the former Global Trust Bank. Soon the two Shankaracharya’s entered and even as I was struggling to rise they were comfortably seated on, but for the fact that it was inside a Hindu temple, what seemed Muslim prayer mats. I was treated to a quick tour of the senior pontiff’s worldview, while the younger one, Vijendra Saraswathy, the present head of the mutt, disconcertingly twitched his brow. It was the kind of twaddle that the RSS Sarsanghchalak dishes out on Vijayadashmi – that the Christian world is lost and seeking answers, and the Islamic reaction was one last eruption before the golden age of Hinduism once again was upon us. So far so good.
God’s work done the seer got down to God’s business. He pulled up a tattered briefcase close and got out a bunch of folders and called out a list of very temporal matters he wanted attended to in a certain specified manner by the Ministry of Finance. First among them was the matter of the Global Trust Bank which had come under the RBI’s scanner even as way back as 1998. The next one pertained to the control of the Tamil Nadu Mercantile Bank, where the influential Nadar community had united to deny the Sterling Group’s Sivasankaran of control despite his having bought a majority of its shares. In this matter S.Gurumurthy, the RSS’s man for all seasons and reasons, was quite rightly rooting for Sivasankaran, but his Shankaracharya was tilting towards the wealthy Nadar community. The beauty of this was that Gurumurthy was apparently given to understand by Jayendra Saraswathy that he favored Sivasankaran. The Shankaracharya while doing so enjoined me not to reveal this to Gurumurthy. Quite clearly this Shankaracharya knew the ways of the world!
Other matters were more mundane and included forestalling the Debt Recovery Tribunal’s action against a certain failing Bihar industry and action against a certain Central Excise Commissioner suspended for corruption. The Shankaracharya then told me that in these right actions were benefits for Hindutva, BJP and myself. (“Hindutva ka bhalayi, BJP ka bhalayi aur aap ka bhi bhalayi”) When I returned to the capital, I reported this in detail to the then Home Minister and emphasized the social cost and economic benefits spelled out and wondered aloud as to whether it constituted an offence under the Prevention of Corruption Act? LK Advani just chuckled and wryly commented that they are all the same. This knowledge implied in this comment stands in stark contrast to his public posture vis-à-vis the Shankaracharya. Gurumurthy too has been quite faithful to his Shankaracharya despite his not having been entirely honest in his dealings with him.
Religion and big business have gone hand in hand from time immemorial. The Buddha had his initial converts mainly among the Vaishya community of northern India. The Vatican’s shenanigans have been well portrayed in Francis Coppola’s Godfather III. It closely mirrored real life events such as the sudden and inexplicable death of Pope John Paul I thirty-three days after he took over, and the mysterious hanging under London’s Blackfriars Bridge of Roberto Calvi head of the Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican’s bank and the man once known as God’s banker! In 1997 Rome prosecutors have re-opened this case and investigating the involvement of the Italian Mafia in the killing. The questions about the death of John Paul I have never been satisfactorily answered.
Few will deny that organized religion is an enterprise oiled by huge injections of cash. Apparently, as in politics, there is no good money or bad money when it comes to serving mankind? The Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham has been no exception to this. But this apparently was not Sankararaman’s grouse. God’s business can often be very big business, and as is often in the case of big businesses, the distinction gets very blurred between institutional wealth and personal wealth. It would seem that men of the cloth are no exceptions and this was what Sankararaman seemed to be threatening to expose. He obviously did not seem to be buying the argument that God too has to work in mysterious ways!
But just as mysterious is the origins of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham. Its genealogy is akin to Chatrapati Shivaji’s genealogy cooked up by Pandit Gagabhat in Banaras when Pune’s Chitpawan priesthood refused to anoint Shivaji as the Chatrapati, taking the specious plea that he was not born a Kshatriya. The obliging Gagabhat pocketed a lakh of rupees to give Shivaji an extravagant genealogy that he was descended from the Chauhan kings of Kannauj. Closer to our times the late Captain Satish Sharma had ascribed the expensive swimming pool tiles in his Mehrauli farmhouse to his super rich grandfather. The Kanchi Peetham's genealogy too apparently was constructed with the same regard to veracity. Like the tea seller at Vadnagar station, when there was no railway station.
According to the Kanchi Mutt it was founded in 482 BC or 2486 years ago by Adi Shankaracharya who spent his last years there and thereby established the fifth Peetham. This flies against known history. First of all Adi Shankaracharya lived in 8-9 century AD. Then it is widely accepted that he had established four Peetham’s or seats of learning one for each Veda. These four Peetham’s are at Sringeri, Puri, Dwarka and Badrinath. Not being satisfied with rewriting history by extending it by over a millennium and a half, the Kanchi Mutt also arrogates to itself a supremacy over the four original Peetham’s. It also seeks to rewrite a more important aspect of Adi Shankaracharya’s life by insisting that he died at Kanchi and not in Kashmir. For some time the Kanchi mutt even tried to pass off quite obviously a recently constructed mandapam as the “Shankaracharya Samadhi”. When this was pointed out to them they quickly renamed it the “Shankaracharya Sannadhi” By jettisoning the “m” for a pair of n’s the Mutt then turned a putative tomb into a sanctum. Thus a tomb without a body was turned into a sanctum without any sanctity.
The previous Shankaracharya, the venerated Chandrasekharendra Saraswathy was the first of the big league Kanchi Shankaracharya’s, who took over a decrepit Mutt in Kumbakonam and turned it into a religious powerhouse. The Kumbakonam Mutt was established in 1821 by the Maratha king of Tanjore, Pratap Singh Tuljaji, as a branch of the Sringeri Mutt. It became a separate institution when Tanjore and the Wodeyars of Mysore went to war against each other. It is on record that in 1839 the Kumbakonam Mutt applied for permission to the English Collector of Arcot to perform the kumbhabhishekham of the Kamakshi temple in Kanchipuram. In 1842 the East India Company appointed the head of the Mutt as the sole trustee of the Kamakshi temple. The protests of the traditional priests of the Kamakshi temple are well documented and preserved. Thus the Kanchi Mutt can at best claim its origin to be in 1842.
My own ancestral village is a few miles from Kanchipuram. I remember my father telling me that his father was a young man when the Kanchi Shankaracharya set up shop in Kanchipuram at the turn of the last century. He also said that his father always referred, and as did others in the area, to this new Shankaracharya as the Kumbakonam Shankaracharya. This is a nice play on the word Kumbakonam for in colloquial Tamil it is also used to refer to a shady deal, which is better expressed in Hindi as a “gol mal”. My friend Suneet Aiyar, Mani Shankar Aiyar's better half, once owned a shop in New Delhi selling South Indian artifacts and called it “Kumbakonam Arts”. She being a sardarni didn’t probably understand the implicit irony of running a business called Kumbakonam. But then neither would Mani who’s Tamil might at best be as good as Gurumurthy’s Hindi!
Another well-known Aiyar and a more serious one at that, the late Sir C.P.Ramaswamy Aiyar who headed a Central Commission on Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments categorically stated, “There is no such thing as the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham.” Even the Supreme Court has judged that there are only four Peetham’s established by the Adi Shankaracharya and the claims of a fifth one in existence are without any basis. Apparently even that was not enough for even the highest in the land to continue believing the Kumbakonam Shankaracharya to be the primus inter pares amongst Shankaracharya’s. Such is the stuff belief is made up of.
Mohan Guruswamy
mohanguru@gmail.com
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