The ancient hill-town of Sholingur continues to uphold its sanctity as one of the 108 Divyadeshams and is home to the exquisite Yoga Narasimha Swamy Temple atop its rocky summit. As you ascend the steep steps, you’re confronted with the ubiquitous monkeys, whose population perhaps rivals the human inhabitants of the town. Their greedy attention is devotedly focused on the offerings of fruit and coconuts that the Bhaktas take with them and if your attention weans for even a fraction, it instantly becomes their property. The term “pressure tactics” acquires a wholly new dimension on those steps.
And so it happened. Right in front of me.
A local lady was mobbed by five or six of these avaricious Anjaneyas who climbed all over her and even after they took her bag away, they refused to clamber back to their places. They didn’t scratch or hurt her in any manner. On her part, she spoke to them, addressing them as “Narasimha! Give back my bag. The temple will close,” as she kept climbing. At one bend, three or four monkeys ran up behind her and flung her bag in front of her. Its fruity contents had been emptied out and all that remained were some flowers and a garland. She picked it up, rearranged the flowers, and scolded them in mock anger, “Narasimha, if you do this again, I’ll beat you, Narasimha!” Then she paused, looked at them, did a small Namaskaram and carried on.
I’m sure you’ve seen something similar in your own lives.
The fact that the site of this fairly recent occurrence is in Tamil Nadu should ideally count as a sign of hope and optimism. Its significance lies in the fact that it is yet another, observable proof of an innate, innocent, unqualified and deeply trusting Bhakti in the Tamil people. If this sounds naïve, let’s look at the negative evidence that proves this reality.
Tamil Nadu is a survivor of two cultural holocausts, both intertwined. The first germinated the second and has since fed off and fattened on the second. The first quite obviously is the cult of ghost-worshippers known in polite language as Christianity, which for hundreds of years is still trying to acquire the pretensions of a valid religion.
Although the Church as a political lobby wields enormous clout today, we must place it in the historical context. Despite more than three centuries of unremitting effort, the success of the Church in Christianizing all of Tamil Nadu is truly laughable. Almost from its inception, the Church has relied on deception to gain converts. As a cult, it could never convince the followers of non-Abrahamic paths that Christianity was a valid spiritual path on the strength of its own independent merit. Fast forward to the recent widespread phenomena which has justly angered Hindus: Jesus Sahasranama, Jesus Gayatri Mantra and building Dhwajasthambhas before churches mimicking Hindu temples. What do these things show? The same: the perfidy at the core of the Christist doctrine, which was hidden till now, is being brazened out. That the Church has long ago accepted spiritual and civilisational defeat at the hands of Sanatana Dharma, and because it has now acquired political and financial clout, has declared open war.
This spurious facet of the patented Christist perfidy also has a fairly long history in Tamil Nadu. In the early years, the Church could gain a fair number of converts because of the selfsame innocent Bhakti. When the arch-charlatan De Nobili with his spurious cloak as a “Roman Brahmin” was quickly defrocked, the hydra-headed Church quickly abandoned the project of a top-down, MLM conversion scheme and began scouting for ways to convert the proverbial lower castes en masse. That was when it discovered that the Bhakti DNA in the Tamil people could be altered and used as a weapon for conversions. Then, the nefarious Caldwell “Appa’s” Satanic grammar came eminently in handy. Thus, you had the Tamil linguistic chauvinism working in tandem with a Dravidian separatist political ideology working hand in hand. These, with the intrinsic strength of the Bhakti feeling among the masses also helped craft a phony narrative that equated Jesus with Hindu Deities. Undeniably, this led to considerable success.
One of the best methods and living proofs to verify firsthand the Christist deception is to read the Bible in Indian languages. The religious verbiage used is directly lifted off from Sanatana texts: for example, there is no Christian equivalent for terms such as “Paramatma,” “Deva Putra” (i.e. Jesus), etc. Equally, these Bibles and similar Christist literature are used to first lure and then heighten the devotion of Hindu converts to Christianity. But this is a discussion for another day.
It is precisely this preexisting tradition of deep-rooted, unqualified Bhakti that the Church continues to use as seed capital. However, in a post globalization India, the Church has shed even the veneer of Christian “piety,” (a polite term for fanaticism) and has emerged naked as a global religious multinational corporation. Think about it. The phenomenon of someone like the unvarnished Christian bigot Paul Dhinakaran has become normalized. His net worth estimated at seven hundred million dollars far exceeds that of several top-ranking businessmen in the US. All of this “earned” by hawking the cult of ghost-worship. Needless, there are scores of Paul Dhinkarans at various levels in the Church food chain across India. Kerala especially represents the starkest case with pastors and bishops and archbishops owning entire hills, and has faithfully Xeroxed the holiest Church traditions of pedophilia and rapes and murders of nuns.
Comparatively speaking, the Church so far has not made this sort of fenestrating inroads in Tamil Nadu. For the selfsame reason: the latent existence of the Bhakti tradition. What is that picture that has been calculatedly buried by the media and wholly, deliberately absent in public discourse about Tamil Nadu?
A recent and representative answer is something that occurred last year, which became global headlines. The grand, gorgeous celebration of Atti Varadar in Kanchipuram, an event comparable to the Kumbh Mela, an event that needed no marketing and PR blitz that the Church invests so heavily in with such ridiculous ROI.
A real-life fact that no media outlet has reported is this: scores of both DMK and AIADMK MLAs, leaders, party functionaries, their families…the whole Dravidian ecosystem visited Kanchipuram to have the Darshan of Atti Varadar. These are the latter-day ideological and political offspring of Periyar, the first political goon of Tamil Nadu whose anti-Hinduism sputtered to death exactly in the same Kanchipuram which hosts his bust right opposite the Kanchi Shankara Matha with these wordings: “He who created god is a fool, he who propagates god is a scoundrel, and he who worships god is a barbarian.”
The same Periyar had proudly boasted, “It does not take much time for a Hindu to stand a mortar stone in the house and convert it into a great god by smearing red and yellow powders on it…I have...broken the idols of Pillayar and burnt pictures of Rama.” What Periyar like Ala-ud-din Khalji, Babur, Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan could not break was the eternal impulse that manifested as Pillayar or Rama or Krishna or Shiva or Devi. Or Atti Varadar.
Which by itself reveals a story which has been kept so carefully hidden that it is no longer a secret. As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
To be continued
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