You too did defile the Tulsi plant in your post...an imaginary situation still leaves cerebral imprints. -- Doctor Renuka, Veteran
Madam Doctor -- No imaginary situation at all. But God's own living truth.
Dalits: You might not know that even now there are no modern toilets in most of village India. Both Dalits and pious folks like your fellow-Veteran's deceased great-grandmother who "lived in Burma and was very orthodox" were sometimes compelled to perform their toilets in the countryside. Dalits, having no modern toilets, regularly urinated in or outside their own their compounds.
You might also not know that my own family once owned coconut and tamarind plantations, paddy fields and vegetable farms, and employed and housed workers ranging from Dalits descended from leather-workers to Fourth Varna members. When I accompanied my aged grandfather to visit these properties, I have seen Dalits urinating on plants and grasses, not caring whether their urine fell on Tulsi plants or on arukamppillu (sacred to Lord Vinaayakar).
Madam Doctor -- I'm afraid that it might be your own imagination that runs wild, seeing defilement by me when none exists.
E V R N's followers: You have no means of knowing that my Chittappa (father's younger brother), Brahmashri Gopalaier, was a learned, well-read and orthodox priest in a Maanaamadurai temple in Tamil Naadu. He lived very frugally a bare hand-to-mouth existence with his Brahmin wife and two sons in a little temporary clay-floored lean-to he had built above flood-prone land with his own two hands from scrap materials rejected by the NB well-to-do.
Before dawn one fine morning, there appeared in the distance a shouting mob waving black flags, dressed in the red-and-black attire of E V R N's followers, and armed with shoulder-high stout rods. They warned the village inhabitants to stay indoors if they did not want to be bashed up, as the mob had come to vandalise the temple by daubing in black paint six-foot-high letters "PAAPPAAN OZHIGA!" in Tamil on its red-and-white striped walls.
Before the wild mob could do any damage, a large crowd of aroused villagers (my Chittappa's eldest son G Venkatasubramanian included) appeared, men and women united, armed with aruvaal, machetes, long knives, pitchforks, heated branding irons, lighted torches, eetti, manvetti, kodari, kaikkaththi, sharpened bamboos, long poles with curved serrated knives attached for cutting down coconut bunches, and miscellaneous array of defensive weapons.
The defenders surrounded their revered sacred temple and threatened to wipe out every member of the godless mob of outsiders should they persist in their evil designs. The timely confrontation was successful in saving the temple from the vaunted vandalism.
But some frustrated mobsters entered the adjoining kadamba-vanam (temple's flower-garden) and relieved themselves on the Tulsi plants and other cultivated flowering plants whose blossoms were used in daily puja by my Chittappa.
How do I know? Because eye-witnesses who had no reason to lie, i.e. my Chittappa and my elder cousin-brother told me the horror story when with my parents I made our next annual visit to India. My Chittappa is long dead, but my elder cousin-brother, I beleve, still works as priest at a temple in the hill resort of Kodaikkanal in Tamil Naadu. He is known there simply as Iyer-saami and koil-Iyer.
Brahmin-bashers: -- Unlike the fantasies of some, this is also based on a true incident. A prosperous Dalit businessman, who owned several shops including one stocking Tamil books and periodicals attacking Brahmins and who also lectured on the greatness of revolutionaries Bharathidasan and Annadurai, told me not to step into his shops.
When I asked why, he said all paappaans from Kashmir to Kanyakumari should be "nasukked" like "moottappoochi". Their temples should also be defiled. When walking around at night, if he himself felt the urge to urinate, he went to the nearby Seenivaasa Perumaal Temple where banana clumps and hedges of Tulsi were grown, and emptied his bladder on the latter, imagining them to be the heads of kudumi-paappaans.
S Narayanaswamy Iyer
