The Poor, India's Freedom, and the Range of HIS Knowledge

The Poor, the Suffering and the Overlooked

HIS own words first, because they leave no room for interpretation:

“A man can be fortunate in many ways. But there is nothing that makes him more fortunate than the opportunity he has of serving others.”

“We must regard any day on which we fail to do any service to others as a day of impurity.”

“With education we purify our intelligence; with meditation we cleanse our mind; with sloka or poetry we clarify our speech. How do we purify our body? By exerting ourselves in the service of others.”

“More important than the water welling up in the pond is the love welling up from our hearts.”

“No outward show is needed in social service. We must not make an exhibition of our work.”

And the pidi arisi scheme, in HIS own instruction: “Every morning a handful of rice — uncooked — must be set apart for the poor. All the families must do this without fail every day.”

Near the end of HIS life HE said something that only a man who had spent eighty-seven years being petitioned by the desperate could have said:

“Lending ear to the prayers and petitions of all kinds of people, round the clock, year upon year, I have come to know — as none other perhaps — the endless afflictions of humanity.”

What HE built

From the Peetham's authorised biography, of HIS 1921 tour of Tanjavur district:

“HE saw about two hundred Harijans waiting for HIS darśana, after having bathed, putting on clean clothes and wearing vibhūti on their foreheads. The Āchārya spent some time with them, made kind enquiries about their welfare, and gave them new clothes. Similar events have occurred very often during the Āchārya's journeys. HIS concern for the poor is great and unlimited, and HE never fails to exhort the better-placed sections of society to go to their succour, and asks the Maṭha to set an example in this direction.”

Three mechanisms HE created:

The Mudradhikari organisation (1939), whose stated purposes included “to bring together all classes of people” in shared works — the digging of tanks and wells, the drawing of the temple car on festival days.

The rice-gift scheme — a handful of rice and a paisa from each household every day, cooked as naivedya, and then sold to the poor at ten paise a packet. Note the design. The poor bought their food. They were not given it. Dignity was built into the mechanism.

The Hindu-mata Jivatma-kainkarya Sangha, to perform the last rites of destitute people who had passed away in hospitals, in prisons, or on the streets. Nobody thanks anyone for this work. It is done entirely for people who cannot know that it was done.

And one small administrative act, from about 1929, which may be the most human thing in the entire record. A cowherd of Tandalam had impoverished himself by selling his land in order to make an offering to the Math. Maha Periyavaa went, through the local Tahsildar, and had poramboke land allotted to him. A man had ruined himself out of devotion — and the object of that devotion quietly went to the revenue authorities to get him a field.

Incidents remembered by devotees

The following are preserved in the recollections of HIS disciple-biographer Ra. Ganapathi and in devotee chronicles. They are treasured across generations, and are offered here as remembered tradition.

Adi 1924, at Tiruvaiyaru, during the Kaveri floods. HE diverted the provisions assembled for the Vyasa Puja and had cooked food distributed for fifteen days to thousands of stranded people, most of them Harijans — the distribution managed by Congress workers under the lawyer Sarangapani Iyengar.
In the forests of Srisailam, about 1934. The Chenchu forest tribals appointed themselves HIS escort. HE had them fed.
At Keonjhar, about 1936. More than 150 tribal families given three days' dry rations.
November 1940, at Tiruchettankudi. A hailstorm left over five hundred Harijans stranded. Food was sent out to them upon the Math's elephant — said to be the only occasion in the Math's history that the elephant was used so.
At Tirukklambur. HE sat down among the paraiyas of the village, ordered a dhoti or a sari for every one of them, and had sambar rice cooked under the trees. When the manager fretted that the puja was being delayed, HE said: “This is also a puja.”
In Thanjavur district. Learning that certain kurava families would, by their own kula dharma, eat only food already offered, HE had surplus laddus deliberately dropped onto leaves so that they might eat them, and said: “Don't they have the same mouth and stomach as we?”
1964, at Rameswaram. Against HIS manager's protest HE insisted on stockpiling rice from early in the year. Two hundred and fifty bags stood ready when the Dhanushkodi cyclone struck on 22–23 December 1964.

India's Freedom

Maha Periyavaa was not a politician and never claimed to be. What the record shows is something subtler, and in its own way braver: a religious head who blessed the freedom movement at moments when blessing it carried real institutional risk.

1918. HE adopted khadi, and disposed of HIS foreign cloth by immersing it in water rather than burning it.
1921, at Pattisvaram. HE blessed Khilafat and Congress volunteers, and told the revolutionary Subrahmanya Siva that the objective of liberating the Motherland from foreign rule “would be fulfilled.”
23 April 1923, Tiruchirappalli. The great reception organised out of Non-Cooperation machinery by a Congress municipal chairman, recorded by The Hindu.
15 October 1927. HE met Mahatma Gandhi at Nellisery, near Palghat, in the course of Gandhiji's Kerala tour. What is recorded of the impression HE made is this: what struck Gandhiji was the khadi — that this Shankaracharya had been wearing hand-spun cloth since 1918, before it became a national symbol.
1926–1928. HE received C. R. Das with Satyamurti and Rangaswami Aiyangar; C. Rajagopalachari with Jamnalal Bajaj; and Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, blessing the All Parties' Conference.
1931, at Arani. At the height of Civil Disobedience HE hosted some two hundred Congress volunteers — over the objections of HIS own officials, who feared British reprisal against the Math.
1935, Patna. The Search-light of 28 April 1935: “Bihar accords a cordial and respectful welcome to Jagadguru Swami Sankaracharya of Kamakotipitam… what he has to say is the result of study and Tapas.”
27 October 1935, Midnapore. Political detenus — men from the spearhead of the revolutionary nationalist movement, held under curfew — obtained permission from the prison authorities to prostrate before HIM and “prayed to HIM for HIS blessings for the gaining of independence for the country.”
1942. As the war reached India HE instructed temples and religious charities to recite the Sri Rudram and the Vishnu Sahasranama, and had Ati-Rudra-yagas performed “for the purpose of securing the welfare of all people.”

On 15 August 1947 HE issued this message:

“At this moment when our Bharata Varsha has gained freedom, all the people of this ancient land should with one mind and heart pray to the Lord… For a long time our country has striven for freedom; by the Grace of God, by the blessings of sages and by the unparalleled sacrifices of the people, freedom has come to us. Let us pray… that our country will become prosperous, being freed from famine-conditions, and the people will live unitedly and amicably without any communal strife.”

The Peetham's own biography frames the achievement of 1947 as having come “under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.” And HIS considered assessment of Gandhiji, printed in HIS own book, was generous in an unexpected direction. HE called him one of the “greatest redeemers of Hinduism”, and explained why:

“Almost all the features of Hinduism that were discarded as weeds by the previous reform movements were clearly explained by Gandhiji as being of indispensable utility.”

And characteristically, HE would not permit HIS own side to over-claim. Asked whether ahimsa had won India her freedom, HE said:

“Some feel that ahimsa brought India her independence. This is not actually the case. The English had their own reasons for setting India free, whether or not we had been practising ahimsa.”

A man capable of saying that about the very moment HIS country was most sentimental about is a man whose other statements can be trusted entirely.

The Great and the Ordinary, Received Alike

The Peetham's chronicle of HIS last decade records:

“Presidents and Prime Ministers of our country… judges of the Supreme Court… heads of political parties and so on came over to Kanchi, had darsan of HIS Holiness, sought HIS advice on their public or private problems, and left after attaining HIS blessings.”

Among those named are R. Venkataraman, Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma, Rajiv Gandhi, Chandra Shekhar, P. V. Narasimha Rao, L. K. Advani, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, C. Subramaniam and S. B. Chavan, along with several state Governors. King Birendra of Nepal and his Queen came on 10 May 1993.

What is equally documented is how HE behaved when politics came to HIS door: HE turned it away. In 1986, when a politician came to HIM about the Ayodhya question, HIS counsel was, in substance, to stay out of it. In 1992 HE rebuked the same man for having donated to a project solicited in the Math's own name. HE was not available for mobilisation — not even by HIS own institution.

And set against the Presidents and the Prime Ministers and the King, place these: the cowherd of Tandalam. The two hundred Muslim youths of Patteeswaram. The Chenchu tribals of the Srisailam forest. The paraiya families of Tirukklambur, who each received a new cloth while the puja waited. And the palanquin-bearers whose aching shoulders HE noticed for forty years.

The claim that HE treated the great and the obscure exactly alike is not a devotional flourish. It is the plainest reading of HIS own daily record.

The Range of HIS Knowledge

The boy who taught HIMSELF photography, mathematics and astronomy in a Kaveri village never stopped learning. Scholars who came to Kanchipuram expecting a brief and formal darshan routinely left having been thoroughly interrogated.

Paul Brunton, the English author whose A Search in Secret India had brought Sri Ramana Maharshi to the notice of the world, wrote in a preface dated Rome, February 1967:

“Two of these sages have made the most profound impression on me: one is the Maharishee of Arunachala, who has crossed the threshold of death; the other is Shri Shankara Acharya of Kanchi, who is the spiritual leader of South India. HE is widely respected by all those whom I consider competent to evaluate the spiritual attainment of a man, and HE is, of all of India's living holy men, by far the most enlightened.”

Brunton's son came in August 1985, when Maha Periyavaa was ninety-one. “I told HIM I was the son of Paul Brunton. HE replied briefly. The interpreter informed me: ‘HE knows!’… ‘HE has been waiting for you! HE has been expecting you.’… I held out a copy of this book and showed HIM HIS photograph, taken when HE was thirty-eight. ‘I know!’ was HIS comment.”

A visitor from the Paul Brunton Foundation in August 1987 recorded the reply that tells you exactly what kind of teacher HE was:

“Yes, I can answer your questions — but no, I am not going to answer your questions. You have to meditate on them; then they will be meaningful.”

Milton Singer, the University of Chicago anthropologist, came in the winter of 1954–55 and wrote: “the Swami showed a most unusually clear and candid mind. From HIM I believe I learned more about the essential foundations of orthodox Hinduism than I had learned from a two-years' previous study of the subject.” Singer preserved one of HIS lines, which is a small masterpiece of reasoning:

“We do not stop eating because we believe in the atomic theory of matter.”

Dr Raja Ramanna, the nuclear physicist and former Director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, had written a paper titled “Physical Reality — Is There Any Other?” Maha Periyavaa read it and sent him questions upon it. In the conversation that followed, HE asked the physicist to study Nagarjuna, asked him to send Hiriyanna's book, and enquired after the physicist K. S. Krishnan. Ramanna's conclusion:

“I must have been in direct contact with the Swamiji for less than half an hour, but in regions outside material time I must have been with HIM always. Here at last I knew I had been in the presence of a learned man and an inspired man.”

Dr V. K. R. V. Rao, the economist and former Union Education Minister, dated his visit precisely — “the morning of January 29, 1975” — and wrote simply: “I saw an embodiment of purity.”

HE is recorded as having conversed in English, French and Swedish, besides a dozen Indian languages. HE addressed the devotees of Palghat in Malayalam in 1927, and gave discourses at Tirupati in chaste Telugu in 1932.

In January 1991, at ninety-six, HE held and blessed the architectural plans of the Iraivan Temple then being built in Kauai, Hawaii — a temple half a world away, raised by devotees who had never met HIM.