A thousand years of building someone to believe in
6 min read
Everyone sees a God whose eyes are half covered. A God with the imprint of a foot on his chest. A God with a temple studded with gold, and millions of devotees walking up to him every year.
But how many of us know the actual story behind the divinity?
Is it history, or is it mythology? I will leave that to you and your judgement. My job is to bring you the story from different sources, so you can form your own opinion.
There is plenty to say about the temple itself. The kings who built it, the gold, the inscriptions on those walls. All of that can wait. Before we talk about what was built around him, I think we should know the man standing inside it.
So where does our story begin?
Not with the hill. It begins on the banks of the Ganges, with a group of sages, the Trimurthis, and a test.
The Kick That Started Everything
Our sages decide to perform a sacrifice. A confusion arises between them. Which of the Trimurthi should receive the offering?
So they send Maharishi Bhrigu to find out.
Brahma ignores him. Shiva ignores him. He arrives at Vaikuntha, and Lord Vishnu is there with Lakshmi Devi, absorbed enough that he does not notice the sage standing in front of him either.
And here our Maharishi does something that no version of this story ever quite prepares you for.
He kicks Vishnu on the chest.
Not the shoulder. Not the feet. The chest. Which happens to be where Lakshmi herself resides.
Vishnu does not retaliate. He takes the sage’s foot into his hands and begins to press it, asking whether the Maharishi has hurt himself. In many tellings he quietly crushes the extra eye on the sole of that foot, the eye that had been carrying all of Bhrigu’s arrogance.
The test is answered. Vishnu receives the offering. The sages get what they came for.
But there was someone else in that room.
Lakshmi Devi watched her Lord apologise to the man who struck him. She watched him bend before arrogance. And she left. Not in anger, I think, but in humiliation, which is a heavier thing to carry. She walked out of Vaikuntha and settled at Karavirapura, the place we call Kolhapur today, where her temple still stands.
One detail is worth pausing on here. In the Bhagavata Purana, this same test is told and Lakshmi never leaves at all. Her walking out belongs only to our Tirupati tradition. Somewhere along the way, somebody needed her to go.
Because if she stays, there is no hill.
The God Who Lived in an Anthill
Vishnu comes down after her and arrives at the Venkata hill. And the very first thing he has to do there is ask permission.
The hill was not his. It belonged to Adi Varaha, his own boar avatar, the one who had lifted Bhudevi out of the waters. So Vishnu asks him for a piece of land to live on, and Varaha gives it to him.
In return, Vishnu makes a rule that stands even today. The first bath in the Pushkarini, the first darshan, the first worship, the first offering, all of it goes to Varaha Swamy. Not to him. TTD’s own pages will tell you this. Almost nobody does it.
Then he goes into an anthill under a tamarind tree and begins his penance.
Think about what that means. He is no longer being a God. He is a man sitting in the dark inside a mound of earth, waiting for his wife to come back.
Brahma and Shiva, watching him waste away, take the form of a cow and a calf. Lakshmi, disguised as a cowherdess, sells them to the Chola king who rules that land. And every single day that cow climbs the hill, empties her milk into the anthill, and walks back down to the palace with nothing.
The queen gets no milk. She scolds the cowherd. So the cowherd follows the cow.
He finds her standing over an anthill with all her milk running into the ground, and he raises his axe.
Vishnu comes up out of that mound and takes the blow on his head.
The cowherd dies of shock. The king comes running, and for what his servant did he receives a curse, softened only by a promise. He will be born again as Akasa Raja, and the curse will lift on the day the Lord is crowned at his daughter’s wedding.
And so the Lord is left standing on that hill with a wound on his head.
This is where Neela Devi comes in. She pulls hair from her own head and lays it over the wound so it cannot be seen. He is moved enough to make her a promise, and that promise is the reason 99 lakh people shaved their heads at Tirumala in one year alone.
Every one of those heads is repaying a favour from a woman who once covered a wound.
The Wedding He Could Not Afford
Down in the valley, Akasa Raja and his queen Dharani Devi have no children. One day, while ploughing a field, they find a baby girl lying inside a lotus. They name her Padmavati.
Vishnu is living as Srinivasa by now, raised on the hill by an old ascetic woman called Vakula Devi. He goes hunting one day and chases a wild elephant into a garden where Padmavati and her friends are picking flowers.
They fall in love the way people in these stories always do. Immediately, and without a single doubt.
And then he walks towards her, and her maids throw stones at him.
Picture that for a moment. The preserver of the universe, dressed like nobody of any importance, being driven out of a garden by a group of girls who think he is a stranger who came too close.
He goes home to his mother, lovesick.
Padmavati falls sick with the same thing. So Srinivasa puts on the clothes of a woman, walks into the palace as a fortune teller, and tells the girl exactly who she is going to marry.
Then he does what any of us would have done. He sends his mother to speak to the girl’s family.
The king agrees. Brihaspati fixes the muhurtam. And then comes the bride price.
Srinivasa cannot pay it.
So he goes to Kubera, the treasurer of the Gods, and he borrows. Brahma and Shiva stand as witnesses to the loan. Tradition puts the amount at one crore and fourteen lakh gold coins, though you will find other figures in other tellings, which is usually a sign that the number itself was never the point.
The terms are what stay with you.
Repayment across the whole of the Kali Yuga. With interest.
The wedding takes place at Narayanavanam. Akasa Raja crowns him, the curse finally lifts, and the old king attains salvation not long after.
And the two women in this story turn themselves to stone so that neither of them ever has to leave him. Lakshmi on the left of his chest. Padmavati on the right.
Except that in the world we actually live in, Padmavati’s temple is at Tiruchanur, down in the valley, kilometres away from him. Her own shrine, her own queue, her own priests. And the tradition tells you to go and see her first, before you climb up to him.
After everything, they are still not living in the same house.
Look at What We Actually Built
Step back for a moment and look at what this God’s own devotees say about him.
· He was kicked in the chest by a man he had done nothing to.
· His wife walked out.
· He had to ask an older God for permission to live on a hill.
· He lived inside an anthill and survived on milk from a cow that was not his.
· He took an axe to the head, and needed a woman to cover the wound for him.
· He needed his mother to go and speak to the girl’s family.
· He could not afford the bride price.
· He borrowed, with two Gods standing as guarantors, and he is repaying it still.
· His two wives could not live under one roof.
And he waits. That is his whole posture on that hill. A man standing perfectly still, waiting out an entire age.
No other God in this country carries a story this domestic. This is not a story about power. It is a story about a man going through a very difficult few decades.
The Echo
We never asked for a God who could not be touched.
We asked for one who knew what it costs.
And then we climbed a hill, stood in front of him, and quietly said: you too?
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