A thousand years of people leaving something behind on a hill
5 min read
When I was 12 years old, my mama and I climbed the Seven Hills on foot. I kept huffing and puffing, and my mama kept climbing, motivating me to keep going at the same time. At one point, halfway through the fourth hill, I was tired enough to sit down. While we were drinking Fanta, I looked up and saw a few carvings on the steps, and on the walls beside them. It was not like anything I had seen before. I did not understand the language or what they meant, but in hindsight, they might have been other travellers like me, leaving a mark of themselves on the mountain in the presence of God.
Part one was about the god. This one is about the people who kept coming to him, and what they left behind in stone.
The First Name We Can Date
In 966 CE, the first person we can put a date to is not a great king or a big donor, as we might think. It is a queen, Samavai of the Pallavas. She donated land and a lamp, and started a festival that was meant to last “as long as the moon and the sun endure.” And while many of us think the first god on this hill is Lord Venkateshwara, tradition says it is in fact Lord Varaha, which is why pilgrims are meant to visit him first. These two firsts surprise many people.
The Quiet Argument
Now this is the part where I have to be careful, and I want to be honest with you about why.
People who have studied the idol closely point out something most of us never notice. The conch and the discus in the Lord’s upper hands are not carved out of the stone. They are separate gold pieces fitted onto the hands. For most devotees that means nothing. For historians, it opened a question that has been going on for more than a hundred years: who was this idol first worshipped as?
Here is what the tradition says. When Ramanuja came to Tirumala in the twelfth century, there was a dispute between the followers of Shiva and the followers of Vishnu over whose god this was. So the emblems of both gods were placed in front of the idol, and the doors of the sanctum were closed for the night. When the doors were opened the next morning, the Lord was holding the conch and the discus. The matter was settled, and for devotees it has stayed settled ever since.
Now here is what historians point out. In 1881, a British officer named Arthur Cox, who wrote the district manual for North Arcot, looked at the idol and felt it was originally meant to be Shiva. His reasons were the hair, which is matted and tangled the way Shiva’s usually is, and the snakes carved on the body. He even suggested it might have been Skanda, Shiva’s son. Others after him have argued for Devi, and some for Harihara, a form that is half Shiva and half Vishnu.
Keep in mind, there is another side to this, and it is a strong one. Centuries before Ramanuja, the Alvars were already singing about Vishnu on this hill. Ten of the twelve Alvars wrote about Tiruvenkatam. The Silappadikaram describes a standing Vishnu here holding the conch and the discus. Historians like S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar argued that this shrine was Vaishnava from the very beginning.
So who is right? Honestly, I do not know, and I do not think anyone can say for certain. What I can tell you is that the stone itself does not settle it. The people who kept coming to it did.
Kings Who Wrote Everything Down
Over a thousand inscriptions are carved in and around this temple, and great scholars like Sadhu Subrahmanya Sastry spent decades decoding them. Even today, there is still so much left to understand. The great king of the Vijayanagara empire, Sri Krishna Deva Raya, visited the temple seven times, and on two of those visits he gave 30,000 gold coins each. On 2 January 1517, he had copper statues of himself and his two queens placed in the temple, and they are still standing there today with folded hands. And then there are some of the most melodious devotional songs that we will ever hear, the Annamacharya Keerthanas. They were written on copper plates and kept at the temple, and for about 400 years nobody knew they were there. In 1922, around 2,500 of these plates were found in a small stone room opposite the Hundi.
From Nawabs to a Queue of Millions
After the Vijayanagara empire fell, the temple passed through many hands: Golconda, the Nawab of Arcot, the Marathas, and then the East India Company, who collected revenue from the temple but left the daily rituals alone. In 1843, the Company handed the running of the temple to the Mahants of the Hathiramji Mutt, and they looked after it for six generations. Then in 1933, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, what we all know as TTD, took over, and it runs the temple to this day. Now coming to where it stands today. In 2024 alone, 2.55 crore people visited the temple, and the Hundi collected ₹1,365 crore.
What We Leave Behind
When I started reading about all of this, I kept going back to that day on the steps with my mama. The carvings I saw that day did not mean anything to me then. Now I think I understand them a little better.
A queen in 966 left a lamp and a festival. Kings left gold and copper. Annamacharya left songs that stayed hidden for 400 years. And ordinary people, whose names we will never know, left a few lines on a step on the way up. Nobody asked them to. They came, they gave what they could, and something of them stayed on the hill.
The 2.55 crore people who went up last year are doing the same thing. Most of them will not carve anything, but every one of them leaves something behind. A prayer, a vow, their hair, a little money in the Hundi.
I started this wanting to write the history of a temple. What I ended up reading was the history of the people who kept coming to it.
The Echo
Samavai asked for her gift to last as long as the moon and the sun endure. A thousand years later, we are still reading her name. What would you want the hill to remember about you?
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