Starting Fires at Thirupparankundram

THE THIRD DAY of December at Thirupparankundram was expected to crackle. The neighbourhood, on the outskirts of Madurai, houses the first of the six holy abodes of the ancient deity Murugan and swells with visitors every Karthigai Deepam—the three days following the first full-moon day of the Tamil month of Karthigai. Among deities, Murugan has the largest subscriber base across Tamil Nadu and the wider Tamil diaspora. Thousands flock to circumambulate hills associated with his temples and light up deepams—oil lamps for the home and large braziers at the temples—on the festival. Typically, age-old slogans of “Vetrivel Murugarukku Arogara”—Hail Vetrivel Murugan—echo through the town. But this year, there was an entirely different energy. The city that recently sent a communist to parliament, and has voted for ostensibly Periyarist, and irreverently Delhi-skeptic Dravidians in every assembly election since 1967, echoed with slogans of “Bharat Mata ki Jai”—Victory to Mother India.

On the festival’s first day, stalls were packed tight with all varieties of flower necklaces, pickle jars and sundry ceremonial trinkets on sale. Crowds gathered to see the chariot of the Arulmiga Subramaniya Swamy temple, which was out to make its annual pilgrimage around the suburb’s monolithic hill—called the Samanar Kundru by the Tamil Jains, Kandhar Malai by Hindus, or Sikandar Malai by Muslims. All three consider it a holy site. N Thiagarajan, a worker of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who runs a small ad agency in town, printing flyers for local shops, estimated that about thirty thousand devotees from other parts of the state had arrived at the temple—nearly doubling the suburb’s population.

T Siddharthan, a third-year engineering student from the town, told me that though there was a rush, it seemed civil enough through the day. His home is along a path leading up the hill, towards the Uchchipillaiyar temple—where the brazier has been lit every Karthigai Deepam for the past century. The path then winds its way up the rock, rising nearly a thousand feet up, through a small grove of gooseberry trees called the Nellithope, past the Sikander dargah—the final resting place of the Sufi saint Hazrath Sultan Sikandar Badshah Aulia. By it is a stone survey pillar that was made by the British to balance theodolites, a precision instrument used in creating their first trigonometric maps of the region. Sangh Parivar groups over the past few months have claimed the survey pillar is a “Deepathoon”—an ancient pillar where lamps were lit.