Perhaps I looked unconvinced, because Padmanabhan pressed his remote control once again. Padmanabhan opened the book to a chapter on the temple, and read aloud a sentence that he had underlined: “A cellar underneath the shrine secures the temple jewels.”
The clerk squeezed between the back of Padmanabhan’s chair and a bookcase, removed a large volume, handed it over, and vanished. Padmanabhan uttered a command in Malayalam, the regional language. “It is all here.” He pressed the remote control again, and the clerk reappeared. “These are all historical books,” he said, gesturing at his library. I asked Padmanabhan what had made him so confident that there was treasure. A clerk soon arrived, carrying a tray with two glasses of tea. When I said yes, he picked up a remote control with a single button and pressed it. He sat behind a large desk and asked me if I wanted tea. Padmanabhan took me back to his office, which is filled with books and has two swords on display. The temple’s executive, Sasidharan Nair, denied the charges of mismanagement and said, in a sworn statement, that “the allegation that there is a treasure-hoard kept in some kallaras is false” there was nothing beneath the temple except a few unused rooms “covered with cobwebs and dust.” The plaintiffs, Nair said, were spreading “old wives’ tales and gossipy rumors.” Nobody challenged the arrangement until 2007, when Padmanabhan brought a lawsuit against the temple administration, on behalf of two devotees. For centuries, the royal family’s management of the temple received little scrutiny: there were no complete or easily accessible records of what the deity owned, or how the maharaja used this wealth to maintain the temple. Although it ceased to exist in 1947, when India became independent, the maharajas have continued to preside over the temple, both as spiritual leaders and as custodians of the deity’s wealth. Travancore was a kingdom that once encompassed much of southern India. At the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, the Maharaja of Travancore has this role. I am just a mosquito before him.”ĭeities can actually own property in India, though the law treats them as minors and they must be represented by an official guardian. So if he says, ‘Dance,’ we dance, and if he says, ‘Sit,’ we sit. He explained, “In Lord Krishna’s Bhagavad Gita, he says we are only small things before the great lord. Padmanabhan told me that it had become his driving purpose in life to serve Vishnu and, in so doing, protect the deity’s hoard. Whatever wealth accumulates belongs to the deity. Worshippers come to make offerings of flowers, incense, silver, and gold. The idol, he told me, “is like an incarnation of God, so it is as if God himself is coming out of the temple.” Like many observant Hindus, Padmanabhan believes that a temple’s deity-in this case, the supreme god Vishnu-resides within its walls. There was a festival that day, and the temple’s custodians had removed an idol from the sanctum sanctorum and were parading it around a courtyard. Eventually, a clerk from his office brought him an umbrella, which he took without turning his head.Īfter several minutes, Padmanabhan looked at me, smiled, and explained that he had been praying. I tried to get his attention, but couldn’t. He was staring at the temple, as if in a trance. On the day that I had arranged to meet Padmanabhan, in mid-October, I found him in the middle of the street, barefoot, in a downpour. His home and his law office are on historic Brahmin Street, just outside the gates of the temple, which has a monumental seven-story tower whose pale granite façade is a tapestry of stone, etched with ornate images of gods, nymphs, sprites, and demons. Padmanabhan, who is thirty-nine, has spent his life in Trivandrum, which is at the southwestern tip of India, in the state of Kerala. Padmanabhan believed that these riches were still hidden in the basement, uncounted and unguarded. According to legend, treasure was sealed in the temple vaults, and Padmanabhan, who was passionate about history, knew that in centuries past maharajas had performed a ceremony in which they weighed local princes approaching adulthood, then donated to the temple an equivalent weight in gold. But a lawyer named Ananda Padmanabhan had a hunch. Nobody knew for certain what was hidden beneath the ancient Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, in Trivandrum, India. The Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, in Trivandrum, has been amassing gold for centuries.
0 kommentar(er)
