[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.

The mobile god, between mountain and plains

In contrast to the moving/fluid goddess Gangamma, who I suggest is stabilized in Tirupati by the mountain and its god, the presumably stable god himself also moves, outside of his temple complex and up and down between the mountain on which he lives and the plains below.

Venkatesvara is said to walk downhill every night to visit his wife Alamelumanga. She lives independently of her husband, in a temple downhill in Tiruchanur, four kilometers outside of Tirupati—a living situation that is an extremely rare, if not unique, phenomenon for consort-goddess temples[8]. (Of course, as is typical of Hindu traditions, imaginatively she is multiple: she simultaneously resides downhill and on her husband’s stone chest of his temple form, for example; so what I am talking about here is specifically her independent temple.) I heard several different explanations for this separate living arrangement[9], including Alamelumanga’s jealousy over the god letting Lakshmi (a goddess both distinct from and identified with Alamelumanga) reside along with her on his chest. Another story tells of Alamelumanga’s jealousy over Venkatesvara’s relationship with a Muslim concubine named Bibi Nanchari (said to be a reincarnation of Bhu Devi), and this is why, it is said, she refuses to live uphill with her husband. Still another oral tradition recounts Venkatesvara’s impatience with his wife after their wedding, when she kept forgetting one thing or another as he waited for her to walk with him to his residence on top of the mountain. In exasperation, he told her that he was going to spit on the ground and that she should return before the spit dried up. Insulted by this ultimatum, Alamelumanga told her husband that she was going to stay downhill, and that if he wanted to meet her, he would have to come to her[10].

Feet of the God

Whatever the reason for separate residences, it is said that it incumbent on Venkatesvara to come down to visit his wife every night, rather than her going uphill; and all the walking up and down wears out his sandals, which have to be replaced daily. At the bottom of the footpath going uphill is a temple whose main image is the feet of the god. Pilgrims here place a pair of brass sandals on their heads as they circumambulate the god’s feet, showing humility towards the god as well as embodying a reminder of the distance covered nightly by the god, as he visits his wife.

The god also has other relatives who live on the plains. Most important of these is his brother Govinda Raja Swamy, whose temple gopuram dominates the skyline of the town below. The story is told that when Venkatesvara wanted to get married, he needed to borrow money for his wedding from his brother Govinda Raja Swamy. He is still paying interest on that loan even today, and pilgrims’ gifts placed in the temple huṇḍī (cash box) are said to be applied towards interest on that loan[11]. Huṇḍī cash contents are conspicuously counted in public at the end of every day, visible to pilgrims on their way out of the temple complex after having taken darśan of the indebted god. On his part, Govinda Raja Swamy downhill is a reclining image that rests its head on a vessel he has used to measure the cash interest he’s been paid by Venkatesvara; he’s tired out from expending so much energy on this task. In contrast to his moving brother, Govinda Raja Swamy seems rather sedentary and doesn’t leave his temple.

Venkatesvara’s mother, Vakulamatha, also lives downhill (and then again up), atop a small hill facing Tirupati in Perurbanda village, 15 kilometers from Tirupati. When a devotee proposed in 2007 to fund renovation of what had become a rather dilapidated temple—and illegal quarrying was posing a threat to Vakulamata Devi Temple–the Devasthanam responsible for Tirumala (TTD) decided to build the temple closer to Tirumala, with the intention to help support building temples for Vakulamata at all sites where there is a Venkatesvara temple. Significantly, their proposal was not to build the Tirupati Vakulamatha temple uphill, but at the base of the hill, at Alipiri, where the footpath up the mountain begins. However, this proposed juxtaposition of mother to son raised problems. Tirumala priests and BJP leaders opposed this site “on the grounds that it would go against the Hindu dharma to place the mother at the feet of her son and the idea was dropped.”[12] Several Tirupati residents told me that “in the old days,” pilgrims used to (and still should) visit all Venkatesvara’s family members downhill (wife, brother, sister, and mother), even though their primary purpose is to take darśan of the God of the Seven Hills—an injunction that is being lost on many contemporary pilgrims who are rushing up and downhill under the pressures of modern-day schedules.

Gangamma in one of her jātara forms,
a coconut head (center), and Venkatesvara
in a Gangamma devotee household shrine

Locally, Venkatesvara is known to be a brother of the grāmadevata Gangamma, and he sends bride’s gifts of a sari and pasupu-kumkuma (turmeric-vermilion) to his sister downhill on the first day of her annual festival (jātara)—delivered downhill atop an elephant (protected by a large parasol) to her Tattayagunta temple. While the god himself does not attend the jātara, his gifting is another means of enacting the important links between uphill and down. The association is also performed on the domestic pūjā shelves–where both Venkatesvara and Gangamma have been installed and are worshiped daily–of the families who are key ritual actors in Gangamma’s jātara. One of these families, the Kaikalas, has the mirāsi (rights and responsibilities) to both take the perambulating veṣams (forms) of Gangamma during her jātara and to unlock the temple of Venkatesvara’s brother, Govinda Raja Swamy, every morning. The Kaikalas perform their mirāsi tasks for both Gangamma and Venkatesvara’s brother as integrated ritual systems.

Dicing scene on hillside outside
Hathi Ramji Matham uphill

We return now to other circumstances under which the god moves–when he leaves his temple to visit or give darśan to his devotees. We have two starkly contrasting examples.The first is the story of the god visiting his devotee Hathi Ramji, a north Indian devotee who built a maṭham facing the Tirumala temple. Because of Hathi Ramji’s great devotion, Venkatesvara is said to have visited the former’s maṭham to play dice with him every evening. This story is part of the dominant mythology of the temple, and an image of the two playing dice is engraved on the silver door to the garbhagṛham (inner shrine room) of Venkatesvara’s Tirumala temple. A larger-than-life-size plaster image of the two dicing friends has been built on the hillside of the maṭham that faces the temple’s outer courtyard, visible to all pilgrims standing in darśan lines (the pushing and shoving at the doorway to the garbhagṛham is such that they may well miss the image on the silver door of the garbhagṛham).

Image of prostrating devotee

A second example of the god willingly leaving his temple for the sake of his devotees is less talked about, for reasons that will become clear. In this case, the god is said to walk downhill to the base of the mountain, which, in earlier days, was the closest one of his untouchable devotees was allowed to come. (Some say this is the cobbler who daily made a new pair of sandals for the god.) Since the devotee was not allowed uphill, god himself walked down daily to give him his darśan. A poignant image has been created in cement at the base of the footpath (the image is likely much newer than the narrative)—the male devotee lying prostrate towards the mountain, covered in turmeric and vermillion. Smaller images to his right are identified as his wife and children. Many pilgrims prostrate next to this figure before they begin their journey up the footpath; those whom I asked did not know the story or identity of the prostrate figure, but thought that the image was a sign of humility that they should emulate.

A prostrating devotee

The mobile god Venkatesvara and his independently residing wife Alamelumanga provide us with traces of the cultural ethos of the rising 15th century cash economy of the region and the left-hand caste Vijayanagara kings who began the transformation of Venkatesvara’s temple into the center of ritual and economic power that it has become today[13]. Left-hand caste communities are associated with cash and mobility: traders, herders, artisans, and leather workers. Women of these castes have traditionally had more mobility and independence than women of the right-hand castes associated with the land, who are (ideally) protected by males and their mobility restricted, like the land itself[14][15][16]. Another trace of the left-hand-caste associations with the Tirumala temple is also indicated in the practice of first morning darśan of the god being given to representatives of a Golla (left-hand, herding-caste) family.

Footpath: the space between

Footpath to Tirumala

Before the car road was constructed and hundreds of buses and taxis began to transport pilgrims, they walked uphill. And today hundreds of pilgrims continue to do so, believing that to walk up the mountain brings more merit than riding a motorized conveyance[17]. The footpath begins at the base of the Seven Hills at a place called Alipiri[18]. The path is 9-11 kilometers long; I’ve walked the path several times, but had no way to mark the distance and have found conflicting information on exactly how long it is. These days a series of cement steps numbering 3350 are built into the path, having been constructed by the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD); much of the path is covered by galvanized-tin roofing to provide shade and cover from rains. Depending on their health and the rituals they perform on the way, most pilgrims reach the top of the hill in three to four hours.

Pilgrims with Sandals

The start of the path is indicated by a white-washed gopuram—the first in a series that mark for the foot-travelers the beginning of each of the seven mountain ranges, all the way up to the highest Venkatagiri. Immediately in front of the first gopuram, towards the plains side, is the previously mentioned temple dedicated to Venkatesvara’s feet, the Pādāla temple. Here the story of Venkatesvara wearing out his sandals going uphill and down is visually performed when pilgrims circumambulate the feet of god three times while carrying a set of brass sandals on their heads (these sandals are available for use with a Rs. 5 donation to the temple). Wealthy devotees may bring with them an offering to the god of new brass or silver sandals. When, in 2005, a devotee presented a pair of gold sandals weighing 32 grams, it was an event marked by a ritual abhiṣekam (anointing of the feet) with 100 litres of milk and widely reported in local newspapers[19].

Pasupu-kumkuma vow ritual
on footpath going uphill

Each of the 3350 cement steps on the footpath is covered with ritual applications of turmeric and vermillion (pasupu-kumkuma), the result of individual back-breaking vows by female pilgrims[20]. The visual contrast of looking at the steps going up or going down is dramatic—the vertical portion of each step brightly colored on the way up and the horizontal portion of the steps visible on the way down a somber gray.

Cradles tied for fertility

I spoke with several women about the kinds of vows they were taking or fulfilling—and they were happy to take a break from their rigorous task to talk with me. One young woman was accompanied by her brother, who rather sheepishly looked on as his sister explained that she’d taken a vow that if he were accepted into engineering school, she would fulfill the vow of marking every step on the footpath with pasupu-kumkuma. Another woman was performing the ritual-marking vow prior to its fulfillment, asking the god for fertility. The pasupu-kumkuma-marking ritual is the most visible, common ritual along the path, but a spectrum of other vow-making rituals adhere to the path, as well—including stacking small rocks and tying ‘cradles’ (for fertility) on low-hanging tree branches. The footpath rituals provide opportunity for fulfillment of individual vows and other rituals without dependence on any intermediaries, characteristic of rituals performed in the temple precincts uphill.

Seven Sister shrine on
Tirumala footpath

The TTD has recently built along the path 10-foot images of each of the ten avatāras of Visnu; and pilgrims also pass numerous more traditional shrines, including one to the Seven Sisters in a cave on the side of the mountain where the footpath and car road intersect. There is a wildlife park fenced off along one part of the path. And of course, the periodic, welcomed tea stall, where merchants have also set up small stalls of both religious and non-religious trinkets. But finally, very few on the footpath choose to walk for the entertainment of it all or as a trek (as has become a tradition at several Himalayan pilgrimage sites); walking up the footpath is itself powerful ritual, giving devotees bodily knowledge of and intimate access to the mountain on which the god dwells.

Vignettes of intersecting worlds

Two vignettes illustrate other kinds of fluid ritual associations between the God of the Seven Hills and the plains goddess Gangamma. My fieldwork associate and I had stopped at Hathi Ramji Matham (site of the north Indian religious order of Hathi Ramji, which had earlier administered the Venkatesvara temple uphill) to ask why the maṭham was one of the three sites where, during her jātara perambulations, the tongue of Gangamma (in her form of a veṣam taken on by a Kaikala-caste male) was pierced with a tiny silver trident. Having been directed by a sadhu sitting on the maṭham verandah into a large office, we were warmly greeted by a Brahmin man whom we came to know as Srinivasan, a ‘superintendent’ at the maṭham who works with legal affairs and land registration. He answered our questions about the tongue-piercing rather cryptically, and then surprised us by saying (speaking in English): “Madam, you would be interested to know that I’ve taken stri veṣam [female guise] every year for 35 years.” He was referring to the jātara ritual of male participants taking on stri veṣam (saris, braids, breasts) in fulfillment of vows they (or their mothers on their behalf) have made to the goddess.

For several years prior, I had been saying, in talks I had given on Gangamma jātara, that Brahmins do not participate in the jātara except indirectly (perhaps sending pŏṅgal or bali to the goddess through the hands of a non-Brahmin servant). But now, here was a Brahmin who had participated in the jātara for 35 years by taking stri veṣam; and he spoke of this ritual as something quite ordinary, not exceptional for him as a Brahmin. Srinivasan explained that he had been sickly as a child and that his mother had made a vow (mŏkku) to Gangamma that if he regained full strength and health, he would take stri veṣam. At the urging of his grandmother, however, he said he had kept up the tradition for many years following fulfillment of the initial mŏkku. His grandmother had told him (again, reported in English), “Taking veṣam, just once a year, you can get a corner on women’s śakti.” He lives both in the worlds of the God uphill and the closely associated maṭham and the grāmadevata sister downhill with seemingly no sense of disjuncture.

The second vignette draws upon my encounter with an elderly Mudaliar-caste widow who had entered a ritual relationship with Gangamma by exchanging wedding pendants (tālis) with the goddess. She wore a large, dark-red pasupu bŏṭṭu and had matted hair that, she explained, was a sign of the presence of the goddess. Gangamma and devotee had, she reported, argued back and forth when the woman tried to shave off the matted hair and it continued to grow back. Once, she reported, the matted hair took the form of a snake’s hood, and she asked the goddess why this shape. Gangamma replied, “This is Venkatesvara’s jaḍa [braid; matted hair].” The presence of the grāmadevata goddess was revealed through a form of the god uphill. The kinship and ritual associations between the god on the mountain and Gangamma downhill remind us of the integrated worldview in which Tirupati residents live, incorporating both puranic and village deities, narratives, and rituals.

Conclusion

A View of the Tirumala Peak

In the local Tirupati imagination, the mountain and the plains below–and the deities that inhabit them—are part of a singular landscape with relationships and rituals that intersect and connect uphill and down. While the mountain anchors the landscape and stabilizes the traditionally moving, fluid Seven Sister goddesses, the god on the mountain–whose stability is performed as he gives darśan to thousands of pilgrims daily–also moves.

There are, of course, other deities who move out of their temples or other dwellings: for example, the river goddess Ganga Devi as she moves from her site of origin up in the high Himalayas (Gangotri) through the north Indian plains (Rishikesh, Varanasi, Allahabad) to the Bay of Bengal; Siva in Kedarnath as he descends in a dramatic procession from his Himalayan mountaintop to take up residence in the valley below for the winter season[21]; and much shorter temple processions of utsava murtis (festival, moveable images) for which the god leaves his temple during annual festivals, such as Jagannath’s Rath Yatra in Orissa, London, and Atlanta. What these movements signify and create varies with the specific contexts of each moving deity. Here in Tirupati, I suggest the god’s movement both reflects and creates a left-hand caste ethos; his movement also sustains/embodies his relationship with both the goddess on the plains and his devotees who live under the shadow of his dramatic mountain.

Interestingly, while the mountain looms large over the imaginative and physical landscape of Tirupati, the great 15th century poet Annamaya who sang daily to the god uphill for many decades (composing up to 13,000 padams) rarely mentions the mountain landscape in which Venkatesvara lives, except in the poet’s choice of name of address to the god—God on the hill[22]. Most of his padams are intimate love songs that look inward, not to the external physical landscape that may invoke in other contexts stirrings of passion. But I close with one padam that is particularly evocative of the “space in-between” that is traversed to create relationship between god and lover/devotee—here imaged by distant rivers reaching the sea; we could imagine a similar padam being composed around the image of the footpath between Tirupati’s mountaintop and plain below:

Distant Rivers Reach the Sea*

Tell him this one thing.
Distant rivers always reach the sea.

Being far is just like being near.
Would I think of him if I were far?
The sun in the sky is very far from the lotus.
From a distance, friendship is intense.

Distant rivers reach the sea.

The moment he looks at me, I look back at him
My face is turned only toward him.
Clouds are in the sky, the peacock in the forest.
Longing is in the look that connects.

Distant rivers reach the sea.

To speak of desire is as good as coming close.
Haven’t I come close to him?
The god on the hill is on the hill,
And where am I?
Look, we made love.
Miracles do happen.

Distant rivers reach the sea.

*(Translated by V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman[13])

 

Foot Notes and References

1. Tirumala.org/darshan; June 1, 2011.
2. I lived in Tirupati for nine months between in 1999-2000 (with support from the American Institute of Indian Studies) conducting research on the grāmadevata Gangamma and have made multiple shorter return trips thereafter.
3. Gold, Ann Grodzins. 2000 [1988]. Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
4. Haberman, David. 1994. Journey Through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna. New York: Oxford University Press.
5. The mountain itself—like many Indian sacred mountains–is said to be part of Mt. Meru brought from Vaikuntam (Vishnu’s heaven) by Garuda.
6. Flueckiger, Joyce Burkhalter. Forthcoming; 2013. When the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
7. In this sense, local goddess Gangamma shares not only the name, but also characteristics of fluidity and shakti of the pan-Indian river goddess Ganga.
8. Parvati, of course, often lived separately from her husband Shiva when he left home for long periods of time to practice asceticism; but this is a narrative separation not one that is replicated in their temple residences.
9. I heard these oral narratives multiple times during the year I spent in Tirupati in 1999-2000 and subsequent visits.
10. Velcheru Narayana Rao. oral communication, 2011.
11. At the temple uphill, the huṇḍīis not a box, but rather a large open metal container with a long cloth covering over its mouth, so that no one can see what any other pilgrim has deposited in the huṇḍī. There are many stories of magnificent jewels and crores of rupees having been deposited in the huṇḍī by anonymous pilgrims.
12. savettd.blogspot.com/2010/12.
13. Velcheru, Narayana Rao and David Shulman. 2005. God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati, Annamayya. (esp. pp 118-122) New York: Oxford University Press.
14. Velcheru Narayana Rao. 1986. Epics and Ideologies: Six Telugu Folk Epics. In Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India, ed. Stuart H. Blackburn and A. K. Ramanujan, 131-164. Berkeley: University of California Press.
15. Velcheru Narayana Rao. 1989. Tricking the Goddess: Cowherd Katamaraju and Goddess Ganga in the Telugu Folk Epic. In Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel, 105-121. Albany: State University of New York Press.
16. Beck, Brenda. 1972. Peasant Society in Koṅku: A Study of Right and Left Subcastes in South India. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. [Brenda Beck in this paper distinguishes between right- and left-hand Tamil castes. In Telugu, while caste distinctions are not so named, they follow similar characterizations.
17. One of my Emory Indian-American students was visibly disconcerted when he learned in a discussion of religious pilgrimage that often the difficult journey was part of the merit accrued through pilgrimage; he asked if he’d gotten any benefit, then, from having ridden up to Tirumala in an air-conditioned car.
18. Today, the roundabout at Alipiri is marked by a 20-foot white-painted cement Garuda, the vāhana of Venkatesvara.
19. The Hindu, August 20, 2005.
20. This ritual itself must be relatively new, since the cement steps themselves are relatively new. I have no knowledge of whether or how this vow-ritual was performed before the steps were built.
21. See Luke Whitmore, “In Pursuit of Maheshvara: Understanding Kedarnath as Place and as Tirtha,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University, 2010.
22. This generalization is drawn from the translations available in the Annamayya collection found in God on the Hill: Temple Poems from Tirupati — Annamayya, translated by V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman (Oxford University Press, 2005).