Venugopalan's 'Thiruvarangan Ula': A walk back in time towards the medieval history of India - 2

The first two parts of the book are a portrayal of the long and arduous route taken by the small number of Vaishnavites from SriRangam fleeing not only away from Ulugh Khan’s siege but in keeping safe the deity from their clutches. After the city and the Temple are ransacked there is a constant look out for the deity by the Turkish militia. Venugopalan describes in heroic terms the hardships endured by the procession of those people on whose hands lay the task of saving the deity. Their number dwindles day by day as they constantly keep relocating for danger of being found. The narration, though the characters are fictional and given color by a novelist’s imagination, is still absorbing, for it has many related verifiable historical references. Quite a few places the Deity sojourns on its way are actual places with Historical records. Venugopalan also deftly brings in real-life personalities along with the fictional. We see the great SriVaishnava philosopher, Vedanta Desikar, and quite a few real-life luminous personalities in the midst of this turmoil and go through what they did in real life. Desikar had to hide among the corpses at SriRangam to save himself and two little kids he was in charge of -- many such details are deftly woven along with the imaginary narrative.

Ulugh Khan’s conquest set up a permanent sultanate at Madurai that held one of the cruelest regimes in Indian History and lasted for around forty years. It was as if Life had been stultified in the Tamil speaking regions in this period. There are Travel records made by a traveler named Ibn Batuta, who visited India and who also married one of the daughters of the Sultan himself but was horrified at the wanton cruelty and bloodshed. Even among themselves the various Sultans who rapidly succeeded each other for the throne were lusty for fellow blood as well – it was a regime of treachery. Venugopalan portrays well the dismal environment as the story develops and spans into a large period of forty plus years. He also portrays well the two unsuccessful attempts made against the Madurai Sultanate, one by the Pandyas and the other, in detail, by Veera Ballala, the last of the Hoysala Kings who had survived only by his allegiance to the Delhi Sultanate, and who on the verge of success was defeated by deceit. The fate of the entire Tamil country was hopeless in that period and the story of SriAranganatha’s deity is woven well around it.

The third and fourth parts of the novel were initially published under a different name, ‘Madhura Vijayam’. The title was based on Ganga Devi’s Sanskrit poem. Venugopalan, in his novel also names the Pandya princess as Madhura and weaves a fictional account of the incidents that happened thirty seven years after the conquest. And as in the first two parts, it is based on quite a few historical events that happened in that period. The Deity had been moved out of Melkote where it had earlier sojourned with a handful of people who eventually get reduced to only one remaining and who is also lost in the jungles of Sathyamangalam along with the Deity. No one knows anymore the fate of Sri Aranganatha, for The Tamil country had lost its color and charm in these thirty seven years hoping against hope for a miracle to rescue itself – which finally arrives through the interference of Vijayanagara.

The origins of Vijayanagara are not very clear but its progress shows a clear direction – to revive, preserve and sustain the Hindu past that was under the threat of extinction. There were sundry kingdoms in the South at that period none of which were powerful enough not only to withstand the Turkish onslaught but also with any sense of unity among themselves for any unified resistance.  If the Northern part of India was already under the Turkish Sultanate rule, the Bahmanis, a sub-sect of the Turkish Sultanate at Delhi, had formed an independent empire that threatened to control the entire South off Deccan. It was at this crucial period, the founder brothers of Vijayanagara, Harihara and BukkaRaya, two petty chieftains, guided by the wisdom of Vidhyaranya, a Brahmana hermit, laid the foundation stones of an empire in the 1330s (a few years after the SriRangam conquest) with a vision that was born not only of an aspiration but also of a fine sense of polity, warfare and history. Their early vision was to consolidate power among the fragmented kingdoms of the South, which was possible only through force and which they did. By the time of the second part of this novel they weren’t yet the empire but had slowly grown into a formidable force to resist the advance of the Bahmani Sultanate.

Venugopalan weaves more of a semi-historic fictional account, in the third and fourth parts, with all his characters centered around the deity of SriAranganatha and their ultimate aim to restore him back in glory at his abode in Sri Rangam, for which a military conquest was necessary. The Deity that is believed to be lost is found in the jungles of Sathyamangalam after a great effort and moved to the relative safety of Thirupathi where it sojourns for a long period of time. Venugopalan weaves the story in such a manner that the Deity becomes the chief reason leading to the initial conquest of the Sambuvarayars of Kanchipuram by Kumara Kampana that has all the elements of popular fiction. These Samburayars had maintained independence by their agreement to be a vassal of the Madurai Sultanate and were in a bad shape, but wouldn’t side along with Vijayanagar. They had to be annexed by Kumara Kampana for military reasons and the conquest becomes essential. But it takes ten years, in the novel, after the initial conquest of Kanchipuram, for the Vijayanagara forces to consolidate themselves further to go in arms against the Madurai Sultanate. Historically too, Kampana had a sojourn after conquering Kanchipuram though it is not clearly known how long it was. It is understandable, since most of the focus of Vijayanagara at that time was on defending themselves against the Bahmani Sultans, in their north-west.

The novel also brings in, through its fictional account, most of the details Ganga Devi expressed in her poem, ‘Madhura Vijayam’. The poem, delightful to read as it is in the earlier parts, makes one’s heart heavy in the description of those regions under the ‘Turukshas’ regime. One has to remember that it was a contemporary account (as much as it was by Ibn Batuta, the traveller) and not anything of the kind the ‘sectarian’ mind makes up. The dagger that Goddess Meenakshi herself presents Kampana as portrayed in the poem comes from the hands of a woman character in the novel, which is not only just probable, but should have been so, and only given a poetic color in the Sanskrit work.

The final war with the Madurai Sultanate is narrated with pomp and color in the novel. Gopanna, a Brahmana admiral under Kampana, took a major part in the capture of Kannanore just before the conquest at Madurai and restoring the SriAranganatha Deity at SriRangam. Venugopalan also weaves a long and interesting narrative around this real-life personality, just as he does with many others.

Though it was a military conquest, this particular war had quite a few motives apart from recovering a lost region. It was a war waged for a long evolved spiritual belief system in what elevates man and its sustenance. All the incidents and characters of the novel relate to it. It was an important event not only for the recovery of the Indic way of Life from an alien element, but became an inspiration for defending it and preserving it as a vital element for the welfare of entire humanity. The Vijayanagara empire grew in strength and stood as a mighty wall of defense for the next two hundred and fifty years. And it became a time when the Indic way of life began flourishing again in every region under its protection.

It should have been an intense experience for Venugopalan to gather so many fine details of those turbulent hopeless years and put them all together in a nicely readable fictional account. One should be destined for great deeds and it was perhaps his Karma, one feels, that he wrote a book as that.