[జాయ్స్ ఫ్లూకిగర్ (Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger) అట్లాంటా లోని ఎమరీ యూనివర్సిటీ, మతధర్మశాస్త్ర విభాగంలో ఆచార్యులుగా పనిచేస్తున్నారు. బాల్యం అంతా ఇండియాలో గడిపిన ఫ్లూకిగర్, 18వ యేట అమెరికాకు తిరిగి వచ్చి, విస్కాన్సిన్ యూనివర్సిటీ నుండి దక్షిణ భారత ప్రాంత అధ్యయనంలో పిహెచ్.డీ పొందారు. మౌఖిక సాహిత్యం మీద, సమాజంలో స్త్రీల పాత్ర, జాతరలలో ప్రదర్శించే కళల పుట్టుపూర్వోత్తరాలు, తదితర అంశాల మీద పరిశోధనలు చేసి పుస్తకాలు వ్రాశారు. 2013లో ప్రచురించబడబోయే వీరి పుస్తకం When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddessలో గంగమ్మ జాతర గురించి వ్రాసిన అధ్యాయం నుంచి ఈమాట ప్రత్యేక సంచికలో ప్రచురణకై ఈ వ్యాసం పంపించారు.]

V. Narayana Rao first introduced me to Tirupati in 1992, when he invited me to attend the annual jātara of the downhill grāmadevata Gangamma with him, David Shulman, and Don Handelman. I later returned several times for long- and short-term fieldwork with Gangamma and her devotees. Narayana Rao frequently suggested to me that there was a left-hand caste ethos that crossed the seemingly disparate worlds of the goddess and her sisters downhill and that of the god uphill. This essay explores some images of these connections between uphill and down.

Panoramic Tirupati mountain

The south Indian pilgrimage town of Tirupati is best-known for the wealthy temple (said to be the wealthiest religious institution in the world) and pilgrimage site of the God of the Seven Hills, Venkatesvara. His temple is nestled at the far end of a series of koṇḍas–often translated as ‘hills,’ but which visually, from the plains below, is a mountain with a dramatic rock face overlooking the town. The god draws up to 750,000 pilgrims a day[1]. Locally, the Tirumala temple complex on the mountain is most often referred to in English as ‘uphill,’ a designation that implies a relationship with ‘downhill’, the plains below (Telugu: koṇḍa mīda and koṇḍa kinda.) During the year I conducted research there, Tirupati residents often asked me if I’d gone uphill on a particular day, not “did you go to Tirumala” or “did you take darśan of the god,” or some other direct reference to the god or his temple[2].

Venkatesvara’s wife Padmavati–locally known as Alamelumanga–does not reside with him at the mountaintop, but in a temple on the plains—which the god visits every night. And so, too, Venkatesvara’s brother, Govinda Raja Swamy—his temple with its large gopuram anchors the center of the bustling pilgrimage town downhill, near the railway and bus stations. Venkatesvara is also said to be the brother of the plains-residing village goddess (grāmadevata) Gangamma, to whom he sends an auspicious gift for her annual festival. There is lots of coming and going—literal and imaginative, narratively and ritually–between mountain and plains—the most tangible of which is the footpath up the mountain that many pilgrims walk up instead of taking the more recently available buses and taxis.

Tāllapāka Gangamma

In this essay, I focus on the literal space and movement between uphill and down–as well as some of the ritual and narrative traditions that tie the two together–rather than the journey from home places that pilgrims may take[3][4]. I am also referring to a specific geographic site and the deity who takes up residence uphill in Tirumala, not the multiple temples in which Venkatesvara also resides, including in the diaspora—which is a different form of movement. (It is significant that not all deities have this kind of mobility within or outside of India, such as grāmadevatas who don’t cross the seven seas, so to speak, or even regional boundaries within India; and thus the character of the God of the Seven Hills shifts, when he is removed from the local Tirupati landscape and its constellation of deities.)

This essay draws an imaginaire of spatial, ritual, kinship, and narrative relationships between mountain and plains and their respective divine and human inhabitants—particularly for local residents who live under the shadow of the mountain. I ask what is created imaginatively and performatively by this movement between hills and plains—and what it implies about the nature of the god. That the God of the Seven Hills and his grāmadevata sister inhabit an overlapping imaginaire for Tirupati residents belies the ways in which puranic deities and grāmadevatas have often been analyzed in academic circles as discrete, bounded traditions.

The mountain as anchor

Let’s begin with the physical mountain itself. Coming into Tirupati by train or bus from the east, the land begins to swell from the paddy fields, and travelers know they’re close to the town that is anchored by the mountain range on which the great god lives. The mountain range is called Saptagiri—literally, Seven Hills–which reaches to a height of 1104 meters; god lives on the seventh range, Venkatagiri[5]. The train a pilgrim to Tirupati is riding may be one that is named after one of the ranges–Narayanadri or Venkatadri—and the mountain may have already entered his/her imagination when boarding the train in Hyderabad.

Rising dramatically from the plains, the front range of the Saptagiri anchors and gives identity to Tirupati’s physical and imaginative landscape. Its sheer rock face catches the shifting light throughout the day in a kaleidoscope of colors and shadows; the rock face changes with the seasons when it becomes a resting stop for monsoon clouds or reflects the sizzling hot season heat back onto the town. Although the god actually lives in the interior of the mountain ranges, when Tirupati residents and pilgrims look up at the rock face towering above the town, they see god—the mountain and god are synonymous. And thus the common expression to refer to Venkatesvara’s temple complex of Tirumala: uphill.

Tāllapāka Gangamma

I’ve proposed in my forthcoming book[6] on the plains grāmadevata goddess Gangamma that the mountain and its deity quite literally anchor her in place, too. She and her sisters (the Seven Sisters associated with hot season poxes and rashes) are characterized in both narrative and ritual as moving/fluid goddesses. They traditionally live on village boundaries; and even as villages and towns have expanded and grown up around them, many of these Sisters have not permitted temples to be built over them[7]. There are numerous oral accounts of efforts of worshipers of particular grāmadevatas trying to build permanent shrines that would cover their heads, and the constructions continually falling down or illnesses striking the community until efforts to enclose them were suspended. The goddesses want to be free to move. However, in Tirupati, there are several permanent temples to these Sisters (particularly the Tattāyagunta and Tāllapāka temples); perhaps the sisters permit these anchoring enclosures, in part, because of their relationship to the god on the mountain who is their brother. Conceptually, this stability has opened up devotional relationships with Gangamma that are not characteristic of her worship in surrounding villages—she’s now stable enough, in one place long enough, to permit this kind of personal relationship with her.