In March 1919, on the Sivaratri Amavasya day, Maha Periyavaa set out from Kumbakonam. HE returned to Kumbakonam on 29 June 1939.
Twenty-one years.
This was not a tour or a season of pilgrimage. It was the movement of an entire institution across the subcontinent — on foot and by bullock cart, halting for the four months of each Chaturmasya, stopping wherever there was a temple to consecrate, a Veda pathasala to rescue, or a gathering of people who had never in their lives seen a Jagadguru. In the early years the caravan numbered some two hundred people and twenty bullock carts, with elephants, camels and horses.
Some of the milestones of those twenty-one years:
| Date | Place and event |
|---|---|
| March 1919 | Departs Kumbakonam; first Chaturmasya of the yatra at Vappattur, five miles east |
| 1919 – c. 1922 | The whole of Thanjavur district, “even remote and out-of-the-way villages” |
| 1922 | First yatra to Rameswaram |
| 1923 | At Tiruvanaikoil, the tatanka repair — a rite last performed by a Kanchi Acharya in 1846. A renovated Math and Veda pathasala opened there |
| 23 April 1923 | The great reception at Tiruchirappalli |
| April – May 1927 | Coimbatore, then Palghat, where HE addressed devotees in Malayalam |
| 15 October 1927 | Meets Mahatma Gandhi at Nellisery, near Palghat |
| December 1930 | At Tirukkalukkunram, a welcome address from the All-India Sadhu Mahasangham |
| 25 January 1931 | HIS first ceremonial entry into Kanchipuram as Acharya |
| March 1932 | At Kalahasti for Maha Sivaratri, HE walks some thirty miles around the Kailasa hill through difficult forest terrain; then Tirupati, where HE gives discourses in chaste Telugu |
| 14 June 1932 | At Nagari, news reaches HIM of HIS mother's passing |
| Sept 1932 – Jan 1933 | Four months at the Madras Sanskrit College; Navaratri observed with fasting and silence on all nine days |
| From Sept 1933 | Marching some twenty miles a day |
| 29 January 1934 | Srisailam — eleven miles uphill |
| 6 October 1934 | Enters Kashi, after eighty miles on foot from Prayaga. “About a lakh of people participated in the procession that day.” HIS restoration work at Banaras and Allahabad earns the esteem of Madan Mohan Malaviya |
| 27 October 1935 | At Midnapore, political detenus under curfew obtain permission from the prison authorities to prostrate before HIM |
| April 1936 | At Puri, told of the honours shown to HIM, HE replies that HE regards the honour as belonging to Adi Shankara |
| 17 May 1936 | Twenty-five miles a day through the Chilka Lake country to Chatrapur |
| 1937 | At Puri, HE forms the resolve to revive the Atharva Paippalada recension |
| 10 June 1939 | The great abhisheka at Rameswaram closes the yatra |
| 11 June 1939 | HE begins a silence that lasts more than six months |
| 29 June 1939 | Returns to Kumbakonam |
Two entries in that table deserve to be read twice.
25 January 1931. HE had been the Shankaracharya of Kanchi for twenty-four years before HE first entered Kanchipuram in that office. The Peetham's chronicler notes it plainly: “This was HIS first visit after HE had assumed the headship of the Pitha.” The Acharya whose name is now inseparable from Kanchi came to it late, and HE came to it on foot.
14 June 1932. At Nagari, word reached HIM that HIS mother had attained her end. HE did not weep before the assembly and HE did not halt the camp. HE turned instead to the scholars around HIM and asked a single question:
HE had been given to sannyasa at thirteen without being consulted. Twenty-five years later, at the one moment when that renunciation cost HIM something no one else could see, HE did the only thing HE had ever been taught to do. HE asked what the sastras required — and then HE did that.
When Maha Periyavaa entered Tiruchirappalli on 23 April 1923, the reception was organised by F. G. Natesa Iyer — the Congress municipal chairman and a leading Non-Cooperation activist — who turned the movement's own street machinery over to welcoming a Shankaracharya. The Hindu's editorial of 10 May 1923 recorded the scene:
Natesa Iyer's own account preserves the detail that matters most. The crowds chanting “Jaya Jaya Shankara, Hara Hara Shankara” lined the roads “irrespective of their religion, caste or creed.”
In all, across HIS pontificate, Maha Periyavaa observed eighty-seven Chaturmasya vratas — one for every year that HE held the Peetham.
At three o'clock in the morning on 15 April 1978, the day after the Tamil New Year, Maha Periyavaa left Sivasthanam without announcement. The diary of the devotee who accompanied HIM records only: “15.4.78. – Sat.: H.H. suddenly left Sivasthanam at 3.00 a.m.”
HE was eighty-four years old.
What followed is stated plainly in the Peetham's own chronicle: a yatra “covering a distance of about 3,860 kms, on foot in four States, in about a thousand days… who was 84 years old when starting from Kanchi and about a month less than ninety on HIS return.”
This time there were no bullock carts. No elephants, no camels, no horses. The party was a handful of attendants. A young engineer cycled ahead each morning to find the day's route, and kept the diary. The only wheeled thing in the whole company was a hand-drawn fibreglass cycle-rickshaw, delivered in September 1978, which HE used to lean upon, not to ride in.
That diary is the most honest document in the entire record, because it sets down what this cost HIM:
An eighty-six-year-old Jagadguru, sleeping in cowsheds and beneath a roadside banyan tree, walking ten kilometres a day on blistered feet — and choosing to spend one of those nights in a Harijan settlement.
The furthest point of that journey was the hill of Sajjangad, on 24 June 1980 — an eleven-kilometre climb, on an Ekadasi, in heavy rain, at the end of 150 kilometres covered in eleven days. The next day's entry closes it: “25.6.80… Because of fever, dropped the idea of going to Nasik for Chaturmasyam.”
HE then remained at Satara for 335 days. The camps of those years read like a record of endurance: Hagari 68 days · Sandur 23 · Hampi 172 · Ugar Khurd 82 · Satara 335 · Pandharpur 162 · Mahagaon 256. HE returned to Kanchipuram on 13 April 1984 — Tamil New Year's Day, six years to the day from HIS departure.
And one earlier walk deserves its own line. On 6 April 1976, at the age of eighty-one, HE walked from Kalavai to Kanchipuram and back in the same night — a round journey of some forty miles.
Through the great yatra and for decades afterwards, Maha Periyavaa travelled, as the Acharyas of the Peetham had always travelled, in the palanquin. In HIS later years HE set it aside altogether and went only on foot.
The reason was given by Acharya Vinoba Bhave, in words the Peetham itself publishes:
Vinoba's own editor added the line that says everything: “Like him, our Jagadguru is a pedestrian by conviction.”
An ahimsa of an absolute kind. Not a gesture, not a discipline undertaken for effect — a settled conviction that a walking man treads on fewer creatures than a carried one. It is the same reasoning the Math gives for the Chaturmasya itself, that a sannyasi remains in one place through the rains “so that no harm may be caused to insects and other creatures by treading on them.”
Devotees also remember two things about HIS years in the palanquin, and both are worth preserving.
The day it rained. On the road towards Srisailam, in heavy rain, the bearers begged HIM to sit inside and be sheltered. HE would not:
And the bearer's own son. A man named Kannayan, whose father was one of the bogis who carried HIM, left a first-person account of those years. He remembered Maha Periyavaa saying of the bearers, “paavam… pogikkellam thol valikkum” — “poor things, the bhogis' shoulders will ache.” HE ordered hot water for their baths. HE gave them two days' rest. HE had vadai and payasam sent to them. HE asked a wealthy devotee, plainly: “Do some help for the bogis.”
That is the measure of the man. Not a single thunderclap of renunciation, but forty years of noticing whose shoulders were hurting.
And having given up the palanquin, HE would enter no vehicle at all. A devotee who observed HIM closely recorded simply: “HIS Holiness never used a quilt or fan or car.” The consequence, in HIS last years, was stark. Dr A. C. Muthiah records: “Since Paramacharya would not travel by any vehicle, HE could not be taken to Madras or any other place where scanning equipment was available.” In HIS nineties, Maha Periyavaa declined a medical scan rather than sit in a motor car.
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