Maha Periyavaa was born on 20 May 1894 at Villupuram, then in the South Arcot district of the Madras Presidency, under the star Anusham (Anuradha). To this day, devotees across the world observe the monthly Anusham in HIS remembrance.
The family were Smarta Brahmins of Kannada-speaking descent, long settled in the Tamil country. HIS father, Subramanya Sastri, entered the educational service as a teacher and rose to be a District Education Officer — a man of learning in a household of modest means. HIS mother, Mahalakshmi, came from the village of Eachangudi, near Tiruvaiyaru on the banks of the Kaveri. Maha Periyavaa was their second son, and HE was named Swaminathan after the family deity, Lord Swaminatha of Swamimalai.
One of HIS younger brothers would himself grow into a figure of quiet spiritual attainment, revered by a later generation of devotees as Sri Sivan SAR. It is not a small thing that one household gave the world two such lives.
HIS schooling was at the Arcot American Mission High School at Tindivanam, where HIS father was posted. HE stood first in every subject in every examination, and won prize after prize. Among them — and devotees have always treasured this detail — was a prize for proficiency in the recitation of the Holy Bible.
That single fact quietly explains a great deal about the man HE became. The boy who would spend HIS life as the guardian of the Vedas first learned that scripture is to be honoured, in a Christian mission school. HE never afterwards spoke of other faiths as a stranger speaks of them.
HIS upanayanam was performed at Tindivanam in 1905. In the two years that followed HE learned the Vedas and began to perform pujas. HE was, by every account, a bright, disciplined, entirely ordinary schoolboy — the son of a government officer, expected to take a degree and a post.
In 1906 the sixty-sixth Acharya of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham was observing His Chaturmasya at Perumukkal, a village near Tindivanam. In the first week of February 1907, a message came from the Math to Subramanya Sastri, asking him to come with his son Swaminathan. Sastri was away on duty at Tiruchi, and so relatives arranged for the boy to travel with his mother instead.
What the household did not know was that the sixty-sixth Acharya, stricken with smallpox and sensing that His time was short, had already resolved that this boy should succeed Him. He attained Siddhi at Kalavai, some thirty kilometres from Kanchipuram, before the boy could reach Him. Before departing, He had given upadesa to another disciple — Lakshminathan, Swaminathan's own maternal cousin — who was installed as the sixty-seventh Acharya.
So the family set out believing that a cousin had become a monk, and that a sister needed consoling. Swaminathan's mother was travelling to Kalavai to comfort her own sister.
Then the sixty-seventh Acharya took a fever that turned to delirium.
Maha Periyavaa HIMSELF set down what happened next, in an essay written when HE was nearing seventy. It is the most affecting passage in all of HIS writing:
A boy of twelve, lying face down in a moving bullock cart, saying the one prayer HE knows, because the men driving it have just told HIM HE will never go home again.
The sixty-seventh Acharya attained Siddhi soon after. On Wednesday, 13 February 1907 — the second day of Masi — Swaminathan was installed as the sixty-eighth head of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, received sannyasa at the age of thirteen, and was given the name Chandrasekharendra Saraswati. HIS formal Pattabhishekam was performed on 9 May 1907 at the Kumbakonam Math, in the presence of pandits, government officials and the representatives of the Maharaja of Thanjavur.
Tradition preserves one further moment from that fortnight, and it is the one devotees hold closest. HIS parents, who had doted on the child, hesitated. The Math's officials reminded them that they had three other sons, and should be proud to give one to the country. And then the boy HIMSELF came forward, made obeisance to HIS own father and mother, and said:
Later that same year HE visited Tindivanam. The teachers and pupils of the Arcot American Mission School, who had last seen HIM as a boy of twelve, came in a body to have HIS darshan. HE spoke with each of HIS old teachers individually and gave them mementoes.
HE was now a thirteen-year-old sannyasi at the head of an institution HE had never expected to enter, in an age when that institution was itself in decline. What followed was a decade of extraordinary discipline.
HE mastered the Vedas, the Puranas, the sastras and the classical literature. But HE also, in those village years, taught HIMSELF photography, mathematics and astronomy — the earliest sign of an intellectual appetite that would astonish visiting scientists sixty years later.
In 1918 HE adopted khadi, and wore hand-spun cloth for the remainder of HIS life. Even in this HE was characteristically gentle: the Peetham's own record notes that HE disposed of HIS foreign cloth by immersing it in water rather than burning it. Where others made bonfires, HE would not destroy what could simply be set aside.
And decades later, looking back on all of it, HE would not permit anyone to call it renunciation:
Next: The Great Yatra, and the Palanquin HE Set Aside — or return to the full table of contents.