Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: October 14, 2008
A 24-feet-tall Hanuman statue, installed at
Sunset Point, Kanyakumari, on September 21, 2008, was surreptitiously removed
by the Tamil Nadu administration in the wee hours of September 30 after alleged
complaints from local fishermen.
The task was directed by Kanyakumari district
collector Jyothi Nirmala, who claimed, "The trust which installed the
statue had only obtained the permission of the panchayat and this was insufficient."
The panchayat had permitted Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Nama Bhiksha Kendra to create
a 'Hanuman Park,' but, said vice-president S Pushparaj, "My wife Felicity,
elected head of the panchayat, did not understand the difference between a
simple park and the installation of a large statue in a public place, and
allowed the installation. She wrote to the collector and withdrew her permission."
There cannot be a greater example of religious
intolerance than this peremptory removal of an image of India's most popular
deity. The incident is also indicative of the extent to which the country's
sensitive coastline has been turned anti-Hindu through evangelisation. This
raises the question: Why are monotheistic traditions unable to live in peace
in pluralist societies?
It is precisely this kind of de-nationalisation
that tribals are doggedly contesting in the remote jungles of Orissa, where
Christian missionaries are trying to tell them that they (tribals) are not
Hindus! Orissa is a State whose spiritual-cultural landscape explicitly reveals
the deep symbiotic relationship between tribals and non-tribals from ancient
times. Tribal gods have always dominated the Hindu pantheon and in Orissa
this has coalesced into a regional tradition centred around Jagannath, one
of the foremost deities of the all-India Hindu pantheon.
Jagannath was first worshipped by the Sabara
(Savara, Saora) tribe, and 'miraculously' appeared in Puri much later. Till
today, Daita (Daitya) priests, descendants of the original tribal worshippers,
alone have the right to dress the god, move him, and regularly renovate his
wooden image. Similarly at the Lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar, tribal Badu
priests alone are allowed to bathe and adorn the deity.
Orissa is equally famous for the legend of
Narasimha, the Vishnu avatar who burst out of a pillar to kill the asur Hiranyakasipu.
The pillar is a uniconical image worshipped in tribal areas and to this day
Orissa abounds with Narasimha images on wooden pillars symbolising Khambheshvari
(Goddess of the Pillar). Narasimha is believed to derive his power from the
shakti residing in the pillar. The pillar motif became so popular in Hindu
tradition that Shiv as Bhairav was said to have emerged from a pillar.
The girija or hill-born aspect of Narasimha
reinforces the tribal roots of Hindu dharma. An aboriginal god in the form
of the head of a lion or tiger was worshipped in the caves and mountains of
Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. Orissa has instances of Narasimha being worshipped
as a saligram stone.
Jagannath, Vishnu as 'Lord of the World',
shows the metamorphosis of a tribal god into a pre-eminent deity of the classical
Hindu pantheon. The god's icon is even today carved out of wood (not stone
or metal), and the tribes whose rituals and traditions were woven into his
worship are still living as tribal and semi-tribal communities in the region.
This tribal god took a fairly circuitous route to his present pinnacle, via
absorption of local shakti traditions and merger with the growing popularity
of the Narasimha and Purushottam forms of Vishnu in the region in the medieval
era.
Queen Vasata in the eighth century built the
famous Lakshman temple in brick at Sripur. The temple plaque opens with a
salutation to Purushottam, also titled Narasimha, suggesting a trend in Vaishnav
tradition to stress the ugra aspect of Vishnu. This culminates in Puri where
Jagannath, widely revered as Purushottam until the end of the 13th century,
had close connections with Narasimha who became popular in Orissa in the post-Gupta
period.
But who exactly was this wooden god? After
the death of Anantavarman Chodagangadev, who reputedly commissioned the Puri
temple, his chief queen, Kasturikamodini, built a temple in his homeland in
Tekkali (present Andhra Pradesh), east of his first capital Kalinganagar,
in 1150 AD. The temple was dedicated to the god Dadhivaman, and the inscription
reveals that the image installed was of the 'Wooden God', and not the famous
Puri Trinity of Jagannath-Balabhadra-Subhadra. Scholars say this means that
Chodagangadev was a devotee of this god, and as the god's name is preserved
in Tekkali in this early period, it seems likely that Dadhivaman (or the tribal
form of this Sanskritised name) was the original name of the 'Wooden God'.
As the original 'Wooden God' was a unitary
figure, temples for the single deity continued to be built even after a Trinitarian
image emerged at Puri. Even today there are 344 Dadhivaman temples in Orissa,
which perpetuate the original state of the god. The Kondh continue to practice
a ritual renewal of wooden posts.
There is also something striking about the
figures comprising the Jagannath triad. Subhadra's image consists of only
a trunk and a head, but Jagannath and Balabhadra are larger, with a trunk,
over-dimensional head, and arm stumps. But while the heads of Subhadra and
Balabhadra are oval with almond-shaped eyes, Jagannath's head is curiously
flat on top and is dominated by enormous round eyes.
Scholars explain this in terms of Narasimha's
association with wooden posts representing tribal deities. In the Andhra village
Jambulapadu (Anantapur), Narasimhasvami is worshipped as a pillar to which
a sheet shaped in the form of a lion's head is attached. This lion-head explains
Jagannath's large round eyes, typical of Narasimha on account of his fury
(krodh). The head of the Jagannath image makes sense when perceived as a lion's
head, where the emphasis is on the jaws, rather than as a human head.
If, as missionaries allege, classical Hindu
tradition was different from the tribal, why would tribal deities rise to
become the dominant figures in the Hindu pantheon? As this has been a regular
pan-India phenomenon, it seems reasonable to deduce that tribals were never
culturally subordinate in their interaction with non-tribal (caste Hindu)
communities, but were rather the fountainhead of the Hindu cultural evolution.
