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are fictional and given color by a novelist’s imagination, is still absorbing, for it has many related verifiable historical references.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.

Venugopalan's 'Thiruvarangan Ula': A walk back in time towards the medieval history of India - 1

It was a few weeks before when I came across an obituary of the Tamil writer Venugopaalan (AKA ‘Pushpa Thangadurai’), I heard his ‘Thiruvarangan Ula’ getting mentioned. It brought to my memory of reading it as a serial in a Tamil weekly magazine. I was a kid then and hence I only vaguely remembered it as a heroic story of a small group of Vaishnavites who go to the ends of the earth to save the deity of Sri Aranganatha of SriRangam from the clutches of the Sultanate rule that devastated South India in the entire first half of the fourteenth century.

Incidentally, I had read some history of Vijayanagar Empire a year or so before and that had kept alive my interest in the Hindu resistance and revival by the Sangama kings which saved the Southern part of the subcontinent from being ravaged and Islamized by the onslaught of the Turkish Sultanate who had established their kingdom in Delhi in the later twelfth century. Along with Robert Sewell’s excellent historical record of this great kingdom in his book, ‘Vijayanagara, the forgotten Empire’, I had also read Ganga Devi’s ‘Madhura Vijayam’, a 14thcentury Sanskrit classic available in fragments which describes the valor of King Kumara Kampana, a son of Bukka (the founder of Vijayanagara), and his conquest of Madurai which restored peace in the Southern peninsula by sealing the fate of the Sultanate rule in Madurai. I remembered the fact that Venugopalan’s ‘Thiruvarangan Ula’ was a fictional record of the turmoil in South India by the repeated conquests of the Delhi Sultanate and also of the weak resistance by the sundry and fragmented Hindu Kingdoms till Vijayanagara put an end to the tyranny. Here was fiction to add color to history, and hence I was more than happy when I got hold of an online version of a scanned copy of the entire four parts that someone had uploaded.

‘Thiruvarangan Ula’ is a historical novel, but with a difference from the fictional kind this genre mostly falls under. For, most of the events portrayed are verifiable though the major characters are fictional. The story line is fictional too but woven around verifiable events that happened in the early fourteenth century. The novel that opens with the conquest of SriRangam by Ulugh Khan (later known as Mohammed Bin Thuglaq) and the valor shown by the very few warriors inside the fort in defending it also portrays SriRangam as one of the biggest Temple complexes in the world with its five walls and a city itself inside them. Which is supplemented by a layout of the Temple City complex, as it existed then. This book was written in the early seventies and Venugopalan who also wrote titillating thrillers under another pen name (Pushpa Thangadurai) seems to have collected a lot of available historical material for his book with the intention of making it a substantial book based on reality than just producing some fiction to pass time. He engages in history when the flow in the story demands it –deftly, and not deliberately and frequently, that it hardly diverts the attention of a casual reader.

Life in India, in general, was one intertwined with various developments of Indic Spirituality till the Turkish Sultanate and the Moghuls later took over. The civic and social structure had its weaknesses but there was a life that had a common ground in the various Indic traditions that prevented any significant hardship for the general masses. There were indeed sectarian issues but the generality of life was smooth and peaceful since it was flexible in its necessary internal adjustments. From the early twelfth century there was a succession of raids from Persia that resulted in a kingdom of Turkish Sultanate at Delhi. The impact of an alien culture was tumultuous to the Indian mind and masses. Along with plundering there came a forced life-style change itself with a ferocity unknown to the masses as yet.

It is in this period of turmoil Venugopalan places his novel. Malik Kafur, the general of Alaudin Khilji, had already ravaged half the Southern peninsula and he had marched further South to plunder Madurai. He had looted mind-boggling wealth from the Temples all his way down South and laying them to ruins as well. As if one conquest were not enough to plunder the wealth of the Southern Temples and kingdoms, there were two more raids from the Delhi Sultanate. The novel is a fictional account of a very important event that did happen during the third raid by Ulugh Khan that also established a Sultanate rule in Madurai and resulted in a forty plus years of laying waste of all that makes mankind civilized and humane -- of which valid historical documents are available.

Venugopalan portrays well this chaotic period throughout his novel. Villages are burned and deserted, families are separated and displaced – not only where the wars are waged, but also in the near and far vicinity. Women are taken for harems. Most women of the families of the fallen kings used to immolate themselves than fall into a fateful life as that. The Temples that were lifelines of Life till then are forcefully abandoned, if not destructed after being looted. All festivities come to a standstill under the sultanate rule and Life itself stupefied into a state of decay.

It is a day before Ulugh Khan’s laying siege to SriRangam, the novel begins. The people are terrified since they are aware of the destruction and bloodshed that follow these conquests. The whole city that lives in the Temple complex within its five walls is asked to evacuate. The very small number of warriors remain along with those who because of their love and devotion to Sri Aranganatha, the presiding deity of SriRangam, refuse to leave the Temple premises. Venugopalan weaves a remarkable fictional account of the war in which the meagre forces hold on admirably before they eventually fall for the enemy who is much greater in number and might. What follows after the downfall is the massacre typical of the Sultanate conquests. There are historical records that make a note of the twelve thousand unarmed civilians who remained in the city were butchered and the great Temple ransacked and stripped off its wealth.

War between various Kingdoms was not new to India but war for mindless plunder, wanton destruction and lust for blood was entirely unknown till the Turkish sultanate descended into India. The common man who was left relatively untouched in his everyday life by any political upheavals was subjected to unimaginable cruelty. There have been large scale displacements of the masses all over India in this period because of such brutal conquests. We see Alauddin Khilji not just conquering the Hoysalas and plundering their wealth, but reducing to ruins the magnificent cultural achievements at Halabedu and countless other Temples. As if it were not enough, with every such conquest, we find large scale massacre and a forced change in life-style that shattered the very cultural framework and also resulted in the painful displacement of the masses.

There was much more than a political game of establishing power behind these conquests, for it seems to have been fuelled by a fanatical wish of trampling and subjugating a way of life that was alien to the marauding outsiders of the land. It was not just in the initial wave of conquest alone one finds it. History shows how the blood-shed and violence continued for more than three centuries. One only shudders to guess the fate of South India if Vijayanagara had not formed its mighty wall of resistance. It took a long while for the Hindu mind to realize that it was not only facing an enemy whose nature it never knew till then but also that it may go extinct at the enemy’s hands. In earlier instances of a threat to its spirit that needed a whiff of fresh air, it could readily breathe it in when brought in by the other Indic streams of spiritual development, assimilate them and hence even expand itself. Not so with the Turkish onslaught that only seemed to aim for its extinction. The realization and eventual resistance, painfully slow though, had to finally come through the Vijayanagara kings, the foundation of which was laid, as one finds, through many such events as the one portrayed by Venugopalan in this novel.

Every Hindu Temple has a main Deity, (Moolavar), made mostly in stone and is a non-movable and permanent part of the Temple; a smaller Deity (Utsavar) of the same Godhead made mostly in precious metal or a combination of metals who is taken all around the Temple and the city not only for blessing people but also be a part of general Life itself in the colorful and festivity-filled Hindu way of Life. It was a typical feature of those conquests that the Moolavar used to be desecrated and the Utsavar looted for its precious material. These Deities were not simply ‘idols’ for the Hindu mind, but an embodiment of a faith that had a long history of a Philosophic and Spiritual evolution behind it. Throughout the long novel in four parts, Venugopalan’s characters frequently mention what the Deity meant to them as the central source of a system of belief and faith that had sustained Life for them. They are hence passionate in saving the Deity even at the cost of their own lives. It is in moving details he portrays such facts as to the many number of such deities that had to be moved away from their original Temples and kept safe in the Temples which weren’t under the Sultanate regime. Even Godess Meenakshi Amman from Madurai had taken refuge in the Temples in Nagercoil.

(For part 2, click here)