As you entered the picturesque village, you first saw a magnificent old peepul tree, around which many idols of snakes were placed. The women of the village perambulated around the sacred tree and lit oil lamps and incense sticks, and applied vermillion to the totems of snakes and other figurines that are symbols of fertility.
There were two or three neem trees adjacent to the peepul tree on the same platform, a common sight in all villages in the old Mysore province. Parents of unmarried women planted and nurtured the twin trees and carried out a marriage ceremony between them, a hoary ritual, that gave hope that the woman in the family would soon be betrothed. And as you walked past the peepul tree, at the entrance to the village you came upon a tiny temple with twin deities – a Hanuman facing West and a Maramma looking South (the predominant female goddess in rural southern parts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, believed to protect against disease and pestilence and be the harbinger of rains).
The village had three other very old temples. There was Yoga Narasimha at the edge of the village to the South on the bank of the Hemavathi river nestled in an ancient grove, a Shiva temple on the Northern periphery and another Para Vasudeva temple to the West abutting the Agrahara, the Brahmin quarters.
Along with Shiva and Vishnu avatar temples, every village had many female deities. All these temples and small abodes of worship were from antiquity.
While all villages had Shiva temples and Vishnu temples that were administered by upper castes, and the devotees of one did not frequent the other, the lives of tribals, Dalits and OBCs largely revolved around their family goddesses and spirits- of Maramma, Banadamma,( forest spirit) Kariamma, Chowdamma, Puradamma ( village goddess) and others. Rama, Krishna or Vishnu did not dominate their lives.
While people of the village and surrounding hamlets freely and frequently visited the Gorur Narasimha Swamy temple, the deity which was also the presiding deity for the annual wooden car festival which attracted tens of thousands of devotees of all castes and communities; during ordinary days, through out the year, the Dalits and backward castes, who constituted a larger number of the populace, worshipped the lesser-known female deities, made vows and offered animal sacrifices and feasted after the puja rituals. Shiva, Rama, Krishna and Vishnu, the main Gods of the Hindu pantheon, were not their deities in times of distress or calamity, or while taking vows for fulfilling their secret prayers.
The choice of a temple, a particular ‘God’ who is believed to be more powerful and propitiating than the other Gods with legends and lores, is oxymoronic – Thirupathi Balaji temple, a Vishnu temple managed by a government trust, the Dharmasthala Temple of Manjunatha, a private Shiva temple under the trusteeship of Jains, the hallowed temples of Kollur Mookambika temple, and Shirdi Saibaba temple worshipped by mainly Hindus but also Muslims, the Aiyappa temple in Shabarmalai, Siddhivinayaka temple in Mumbai, the Kashi Vishwanath temple and others – are largely a recent phenomenon of the middle class, the Hindu bourgeois and nouveau rich, film stars and politicians seeking security and rewards. Superstitions that are given currency between competing deities are commercialising, belittling and trivialising the gods, but are grist to the mill of the trusts which manage the temples. But the marginalised and the poor have a benign indifference to these celebrity temple deities in distant towns. They go about their lives stoically, and seek refuge, solace and strength in their local goddesses.
While poor Dalits, backward castes and tribals rarely visited the temples of Rama or Krishna, they nevertheless zestfully performed mythological dramas from Mahabharata and Ramayana in open-air theatres after the harvesting season, that went on all night. They trained under an itinerant drama master, well-versed in the epics and mythological Puranas who taught them by rote. There was no script. It was an oral and aural tradition passed down from generations. And therefore the practice went on for three to four months.
The actors, the poorest of the poor, who took part (and often vied with one another for heroic parts) had to pay to cover the cost of the drama teacher, and for the costumes and stage, lighting and sound system. The practice sessions started after the day’s labours, in the central court yard of the village, and lasted late into the night. The folk songs from the epics accompanied by the hum of a harmonium would waft across the fields to my cottage not far away and brought tears to my eyes and swelled my heart. It was not a religious act. It was a sublime act of love and worship to perpetuate a folk art the community instinctively clung on to.
As these images and thoughts from bygone times crowded my mind, I reflected – what will the new Ram temple, when thrown open to the public, signify to those millions who toil daily on the farms and fields, and on shop floors, factories and construction sites? The middle class and the rich will add Ayodhya to the pilgrim circuit and travel by cars, planes and trains – as they do now to Kashi, Haridwar, Badrinath, Kedarnath – and offer prayers to seek prosperity and success in their undertakings, gorge themselves on savouries and sweets, and pollute the earth, water and sky like the other pilgrim towns which are choking the rivers and streams with filth and garbage.
This will no doubt boost and benefit the economy of Ayodhya in particular and generate employment among many sections of society- taxis, rikshas, hotels and eateries, flower and fruit growers and their vendors, real estate and construction and not the least the temple ecosystem itself – priests and pandas and the hundreds of staff managing the temple who make a living off the temple offerings and donations. Which is good and welcome if garbage and sanitation can be managed without polluting the holy city.
Many of these temple circuits of modern India are more revelry than pilgrimage of piety. The rest of the two-thirds of the population, the amorphous Hindu with no allegiance to any particular god – the farmers, weavers, potters, fishermen, cow herds, shepherds, potters, stone cutters and earth diggers in their villages and the countless nameless labourers who are the invisible hands from across this vast land of myriad gods who provide for us and keep us warm, will continue to sing and dance around their lesser local gods and goddesses, and likely find deliverance through their work and worship.