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Preserving the Tradition!

From the Bhakti List Archives

eyetex • September 30, 2000 


Dear Bhagavathas,
Many of you would have read thro' the posting 'Emberumanar Darsanam' in these columns. These points arose out of a meeting held at Chennai on the 20th August,were grouped under different headings and circulated with a copy to Adiyen.A further meeting was held to get a consensus on a plan of action.Sri Velukkudi Krishnan and Sri K.Sampath Kumaran are convening and coordinating these laudable efforts which deserve the support of all right thinking SriVaishnavas.

Adiyen would stress on two points here for the benefit of the mostly overseas members of this list.

Firstly the support for the upkeep of such Divya Desams as are in dire straits and need financial assistance for the Bhattacharyas,Madappalli Kainkaryaparas,Security&(last but not the least)Thaligai.As mentioned earlier in these postings adiyen is willing to coordinate your contributions thro' proper Trusts already functioning in this regard.Now is the time for action for those who have time and again expressed their anguish (in these columns or elsewhere )about the derelict state of many of our Divya Desams to come forward and do something concrete.Adiyen is waiting!!( am planning to adopt one Divya Desam on my own)

The second is a point already referred to in my postings i.e., the need to integrate all SriVaishnavas without any discrimination.Now they are classified as 'Srivaishnavas' and 'Bhagavathas '.This will no doubt arouse very serious and stubborn and maybe violent resistance from many quarters but this is , in my humble opinion, the single most important and revolutonary step to be taken and taken now apart from relaxing the dress code.

All talk of preserving the SriVaishnavaite Tradition or Heritage is absolutely meaningless if we don't understand that SriVaishnavism has to be preserved in the Villages first and for this we need to accept that there are no Bhagavathas and that there are only SriVaishnavas - all of them without any distinction.There are small towns in TN where small children recite the entire Thiruppavai with proper swaram as in a Goshti and these are not Brahmin children i am talking about.Yet these classes are not to recite Thiruppallandu in even such temples where no 'SriVaishnavas' are there to do this Kainkrayam.There are 525 Vaishnava Sabhas spread all over Tamil Nadu in villages and these are integrated into a Vaishnava Peravai and 90% of these are Bhagavathas( if you like to call them).

In adiyen's opinion these Bhakthas have done as much if not more to preserve our heritage as anyone else and that includes all our Institutions and the time has come for to acknowledge this and to integrate them in the mainstream as otherwise all our efforts in this regard will be infructuous.We are facing extinction in maybe 50 years' time unless we act now.I have so far dealt with only the internal issues so far and there are external ones which can be tackled only if the entire SriVaishnavaite community acts as one.

I will leave you with these thoughts for now.

Regards.

RR.

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