Chief priest steps out of Hanuman Garhi, visits Ram temple in ‘Shahi Juloos'
: A nearly 300-year-old tradition was broken at Ayodhya's famous Hanuman Garhi temple for the first time in nearly 300 years when the chief priest (Gaddi Nasheen) Mahant Prem Das stepped out of the premises on the occasion of Akshaya Tritiya on Wednesday and visited the Ram temple in a procession after taking a ritual bath in the Saryu river.
According to the centuries' old tradition of the Hanuman Garhi temple, it is mandatory for the presiding Mahant (chief priest) to never leave the premises, which is defined as an area of 52 bighas, for the rest of his life after being ordained to the position of Gaddi Nasheen.
But on Wednesday, riding on elephants, horses and camels, hundreds of Naga sadhus took part in the 'Shahi Juloos' (procession) led by Mahant Prem Das with the Nirvani Akhara's 'Nishaan' (insignia) to the accompaniment of music and dances by local performers who followed.
The departure from tradition came after the Panch (members) of Nirvani Akhara, which manages the Hanuman Garhi temple, were moved by the desire of the chief priest to visit the Ram temple and they unanimously granted him permission to do so.
Mahant Sanjay Das, a senior mahant (priest) of Hanuman Garhi temple, said: 'The tradition (of the chief priest not stepping out of the premises) has been going on for 288 years (since 1737). This is because the head priest is dedicated solely to serving Lord Hanuman. The constitution of Hanuman Garhi was documented in 1925, where the traditions that had been followed since the beginning were formally recognised by the Naga Sadhus. After assuming the position, the head priest resides within the Hanuman Garhi complex. They serve Lord Hanuman there, and their only their body can leave the premises (after death).'
Sanjay Das, a senior mahant (priest) of Hanuman Garhi said, 'The civil court also respects this rule of Hanuman Garhi. In any civil lawsuit, the representative of the Akhara appears in court instead of the presiding Mahant. If necessary, the court itself comes to Hanuman Garhi to record the statement of the presiding Mahant.'
Though the distance between Hanuman Garhi temple and Ram temple is just about 1 km, the entire Wednesday's event lasted about seven hours with the procession covering a distance of about 6 km.
The procession first reached the banks of the Saryu River (2 km from Hanuman Garhi). Thereafter, the chief priest and Naga Sadhus took a ritual bath in the river. Next, the procession moved towards the Ram temple, said Mahant Ramkumar Das, the chief of Nirvani Akhara. The procession returned to Hanuman Garhi from Ram Temple at around 1 pm.
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Observation is not the act of seeing; it is the act of remembering what has already been seen. Only when I stopped thinking in Tamil did I begin to actually see Chennai. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that the one word we will not find in the Quran is 'camel'. His implication was that ancient Arabs had no reason to mention what was very common in almost every frame of their existence, but an outsider sees what is too ordinary for the insider. (Borges was wrong; the Quran does mention 'camel'. But I accept what he implies.) As a child, I made no special effort to learn to read and write in Tamil or Malayalam. I used them only to think and speak. I could write only in English and Hindi, both foreign to me, Hindi more than English. Then, in 1987, a film called Nayakan by Mani Ratnam was released. I was thirteen and I thought it was the greatest film on Earth. I still believe it is one of the greatest. I decided that apart from being a journalist, I would also become a Tamil filmmaker. I began to write scripts for many Tamil films that I hoped would find takers, but all of them in English. When I was 16, I thought the best way to enter the movie business was as a low-level actor. So when I heard that a film audition was underway for some extras, I went. The queue was long and the men looked impoverished and depressing, and the line had not moved after two hours, so I left, abandoning the idea of acting. I wrote more stories. I co-wrote one with the milkman. Nothing ever came out of them. The Tamil sphere of creativity offered me no prospects. So I let myself be colonised by the English language, by which I also mean a strange condition. Compared to Indian languages, English has names for so many abstract things, labels, even lies, that they can be misunderstood as truths, like hypnosis, secularism, sexism, liberty, human rights, and plain nonsense like 'quality time' and 'multitasking'. All these ideas might seem innocuous, even sensible. Some people might think these words capture innate human nature. They don't. They are a way of thinking. And not long ago in India, people who thought like this were not merely artists and writers. They were the people who ran the country – they were prime ministers, ministers, judges, bureaucrats, editors, all of them shaping the nation at a time when a few influential people could run the country. Yes, most of them liked their samosas and some of them sang in their mother tongue, but the West was inside their heads. The West gave them their aesthetic, intellectual, and moral direction. They had this perception that the West was the pinnacle of the human race. This class and this way of thinking has been properly killed in India. I think the West is being killed even in the West. The death of this class has resulted in the unification of classes. The richest Indian, Mukesh Ambani, in how he perceives wealth, marriage, and family values, his religious piety, his surrender to the mystical, is very similar to a poor or lower-middle-class Indian in the way a Tata was not. The poor can pretty much identify with all their major public figures. The depth of this belonging is best understood from the orphanhood of the other Indian, the amateur Indian. To ruin the chances of sleeping with them, rasp, 'Is the science of climate change beyond dispute?' They say things like 'asparagus' and 'edamame' and eat them, too. They used to love Aung San Suu Kyi, but not any more. They read very long articles in English that are called longform. They despise the word 'infrastructure' when uttered by a provincial man. 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