Ayyapan

He struck a deal with her. A temple of his would come up soon where people would come to worship. Their pilgrimage would not be considered complete unless they also worshipped at a shrine to her. All his devotees would grant her the status and respect of a wife. If there ever was a year when a new devotee did not come to the temple at the Sabarimala hills, he would give up his vow of brahamcharya and marry her. She is going to have a long wait as the list of pilgrims only grows ever more unmanageable each year. One peculiar feature of worship of this patient goddess, known now as Mallikapuratha mata, is the liberal use of turmeric powder as an offering. I have seen this only in one other hill-shrine, Jejuri in Maharashtra. It represents a folk tradition of deities on a hill, who grant wishes that was once seemingly very common in India.

The gods who were relieved at the overthrow of Mahishi, were now seized with a fresh apprehension. Would the young man want overlordship of the universe on his own behalf? Who could stop him if such thoughts came to his head, he was after the ultimate and final power? Divining this thought of the gods, Manikanthan was filled with disgust for power. His mother tried to get him killed for it and the gods were turning ungrateful even before the tumult of battle had died away. He took the decision to remain in samadhi, constantly immersed in Brahman, as an example of transcending the petty concerns of the universe, as well as a subtle rebuke to the gods.

There was still the kingdom of Panthalam to deal with. The grateful gods turned themselves into a band of tigers and Manikanthan returned to his foster home riding on the largest tigress of them all. Faced with this outright manifestation of divine power, the queen and divan confessed their duplicity. He forgave his mother as she was motivated by understandable if inappropriate feelings, but the divan was banished as well as inflicted with a corrosive skin disease as a sort of suppurating brand, so that his sin would be visible to all. Like Robin Hood he let fly an arrow that landed on the peak on the Sabarimala hill in the forest, with the Pampa River at its foot. He gave his father instructions on the simple temple that he wised to be constructed for him there and disappeared from human gaze. The great Parashurama is supposed to have made the divine icon within the shrine and it is indeed very beautiful.

Since he is a meditating, reclusive god, he is formally a Swami and indeed is addressed as such by his devotees in the many songs dedicated to him. He is also known as Ayyapan, the commonest name by which he is referred to. Shastha is perhaps the name of the original hill-dwelling Yaksha deity that is still visible in all this tangle of myth, and that is another of his common names. The commonest cry heard during the pilgrimages to his shrine is "Swamiye sharanam Ayyappa!" It means, "Oh Swami, we take refuge in you." This remarkable similarity to the Buddhist profession of faith, combined with the fact that Kerala was once a Buddhist dominant state, has suggested a Buddhist influence for the temple and god too.

The temple opens on the first of every month of the Hindu calendar so that Ayyapan can grant darshan to his devotees. This too is an innovation brought about by the sheer pressure of numbers that crowd into a little temple on top of a hill during the grand forty-one day pilgrimage period. That used to be the only time the temple was open and it was still one of the most important shrines in Kerala. The pilgrimage was once possible only after an arduous discipline on the part of the devotee. The first pilgrim incidentally was the divan who was cured of his disease and forgiven his sin. He would forsake all pleasures, eat only vegetarian food, sleep on the ground, be celibate and in imitation of the renunciate god, neither cut his nails or his hair. During this period he was called Swami like the god he was emulating. Since the god is both a renouncer as well as a celibate, women in the menstrual years are not allowed into the temple. This is a traditional courtesy given to a swami, and does not represent any bias or prejudice against women.

The journey to the temple used to involve a difficult trek through a forest where you carried your provisions and offerings in a special bundle on your head. The last leg involves a ritual purificatory bath at the foot of the hill in the sacred waters of the Pampa River, and an exhilarating climb up a steep and slippery hill. So strong is faith that hardly anybody even slips, and accidents are almost unheard of. The final approach to the temple is through eighteen astonishingly steep steps - each step representing one of the generic errors the human soul is prone to. If you do eighteen pilgrimages, you are supposed to have cleansed yourself of all error. In token of the fault that you are leaving behind by approaching the Swami, you smash a coconut on the appropriate step. Some people do the pilgrimage every year till they achieve the magic number. Nowadays they have a stone slab near the steps to break coconuts on; the steps were being obliterated by the endless numbers of coconuts that came crashing down.

Indeed it is now a logistical nightmare, the pilgrimage. transport facilities have increased and only a few diehards do the traditional trek any more. The climb up and down the hill was remarkable for the patches of solitude and the abrupt view that you would get of thickly forested hills. Today it is one endless crawl with humans pressing on all sides of you, rather like a suburban train station. That is the price for popularity and faith and the undoubted power that radiates from the place. On Makara Sankranti, the holiest day of the pilgrimage season and usually falling on January 14th or 15th there is seen a divine light from a remote hill that directly faces the main shrine. This lasts for only a few moments and is supposed to represent the light of the lamps, as the gods worship the celibate Ayyapan on the most holy day of the year. Skeptics claim the light is manufactured by the temple administration to keep the faithful happy, but it does not prevent the tens of millions (no mistake in the number) from coming anyway.

There is no prejudice at all in Sabarimala. So inclusive is the ethos that there is even a myth which positions Manikanthan as having a preliminary skirmish with an Arab trader - bandit, Vavar, (Babar?) who had become a nuisance in the area. He serves as a back up to Manikanthan in his fight against Mahishi and he also has a shrine of his own called Vavar Swami Shrine. This myth is surely an imaginative attempt to accommodate the new reality of Islam that began to impact Kerala. Manikanthan's temple situation in the midst of hills and forests with a flowing river positions him in the free world that Durga traverses. The Mahishi link makes the Durga resonance even more obvious. The Shiva/Vishnu connection is interesting because it attempts to transcend them and produce something even greater. Parashurama is brought in to confer some of his unquestioned eminence and prestige in Kerala. And, of course, Ayyapan is the supreme statement of the value of samadhi and the yoga philosophy of life. Like Aurobindo, Ayyapan is meditating for the welfare of the world consciousness.

What is really remarkable about the Ayyapan cult however, is the acceptance of all religions and castes at the shrine. This is a bonafide miracle, for the existing temple is historically at least four hundred years old. (Temples in Kerala may be older than the actual structure as they were always made of wood and replaced as necessary. The temple may be a thousand years old.) During that time Kerala was riven with caste feeling so much so that the great Vivekananda commented that it was a lunatic asylum of caste rules! Yet this temple continued to operate and nobody ever challenged the slogan of the pilgrim swamis, Oru jati, oru matham, oru devam! (One caste, one religion, one god!). The rising tide of popularity for such a nonsectarian god may be the best thing that happened to India.