Eight elephants

This wall, with bas-reliefs of truncated-tusked elephants, is an enduring image of the Theosophical Society's headquarters at Adyar. The elephant seems to be a recurring theme with the TS, at least of late. In their newsletter of December 2015, the TS takes inspiration from the elephant to be "strong and patient at the same time", for the elephant is thoughtful and relies on its patience to accomplish what it needs. That the elephant is long-lived, and a herd animal is a bonus, probably meant to invoke the legacy of the Theosophists. 

It is interesting that when the TS decided to launch its fund-raising drive, for the renovation of the buildings within the headquarters, they named the main renovation site "The Elephants". If you would like to contribute to the cause, you need to head over here!

A path ends

The grounds of the Theosophical Society - Adyar, spread over 250 acres, have very few named roads. Actually there are very few proper roads inside the grounds, for that matter; they are named after the founders or early presidents of the TS-A. So that takes care of the nomenclature for six of the paths, the ones that show up on Google Maps. Getting around the TS-A involves many other paths, the ones that are not paved, the ones that do not show up on the maps.

Here is one such path, running west-east, parallel to the Adyar river, along its southern bank. I am guessing it was called the "River Path" much earlier, and that the addition of "Radha Burnier" was as a tribute to her memory, after she passed away in 2013. She was the seventh President of the Theosophical Society, holding that office for 33 years. Doing so, she edged out the Society's first president, Henry Steel Olcott, who was in office for 32 years between 1875 and 1907. 

In the 141 years it has been around, the TS has had only 8 presidents - the current one, Tim Boyd, began his term in 2014. He is just 53 now, and has a good chance of beating Radha Burnier's record. At this rate, it will be few centuries before all the paths and byways of the TS get their names!

A thought was born

That block of flats along the western border of the Kapaleeshwarar temple tank occupies the space where, in the late 19th century, Diwan Bahadur Raghunatha Rao's house, Krishna Vilasam, had stood. Sometime in Aug-Sep of 1884, seventeen prominent men of south India had met at this house and resolved that a "national movement for political ends" be formed. One of the members present was Alan Octavian Hume, a member of the Theosophical Society. Hume followed up on this resolution at the annual convention of the Theosophical Society in December 1884 and his suggestion of all-India organization to present the cause of Indians found acceptance with Annie Besant, Womesh Chandra Bannerjee and Surendranath Bannerjee. 

December 28-30 of the following year saw the first session of the Indian National Congress, in Bombay. With just 72 delegates, it didn't seem to be big deal. But Hume had covered extensive ground. He had travelled to England and had the proposal of forming the INC cleared by Lord Ripon, then Viceroy of India, and other influential persons. Without those efforts, the organization might have remained one more of the many which had petered out after the initial enthusiasm. 

The first resolution of the INC was moved by G Subrahmania Aiyar, who was then the editor of The Hindu, a delegate from Madras. In the years to follow, other delegates from Madras continued to play important roles in the Congress. In the 1960s, however, the Congress lost ground in Tamil Nadu and has been struggling to regain it here since. This year, the party has slipped across the country; its annual session this year a couple of days ago was a low-key affair.  An idea that was sparked at a Mylapore meeting charted the course of this country for over a century - and will hopefully regain its lustre in the years ahead!

Universal wish

As soon as you get inside the Theosophical Society's grounds, you get to see this sign. Can't help wondering if Earth has to fade away for peace to prevail!

Door to the guru

Like the Buddhist temple of a few weeks ago, I had assumed that there was only one Sikh gurdwara in Chennai. Maybe that is still true, but just as with the Buddhist temple, there is a second gurdwara in the city, hidden inside the Huddleston Gardens of the Theosophical Society in Adyar. 

It doesn't seem to have been used often. But it is there and it did not look like anyone is going to challenge you if you choose to use this as a house of prayer. The Theosophical Society has such buildings around, representing the larger religions that the Society tries to replace, or at least subsume into itself.

However, I sense a problem. A gurdwara is just about any place where the Guru Granth Sahib has been installed and is taken care of very reverentially. Forget the latter, I don't even think the former has happened in this building!

River and sea

That's another view of the Adyar river going out into the Bay of Bengal. You can see the green expanse of the Theosophical Society on the south bank, and with a bit of imagination, the 'broken bridge' across the mouth of the river.

That spit of land in the middle of the estuary has a few office buildings, a hotel, an apartment complex, and a building that starred in Mission Impossible:4. Can you spot it?

No prizes for guessing where I am! 

Upside down world

One of Chennai's wondrous sights is actually a pretty commonplace activity. If you stand on the Thiru-Vi-Ka bridge at dusk, you will be treated to a sight of bats - a few thousand of them - setting off on their nightly forage. Not many people see it, because it is peak hour for humans also, rushing across the bridge at the end of the workday. The bats, of course are just starting their 'day', and they fan out in all directions but east. 

More properly, they are the Indian Flying Foxes (Pteropus giganteus), also known as the Fruit Bat. Almost all of them come out of the grounds of the Theosophical Society, which is at the southern end of the bridge. Inside the grounds, the ficus, tamarind and other trees provide plenty of roosting space for these bats. They hang upside down, in large colonies and fill the air around the trees with their incessant chattering. 

So the next time you go walking inside the Theosophical Society's gardens, do not assume the sound you hear is of running water. Look up. Check out all those black patches on the trees. And of an evening, watch those black patches take flight. It is certainly a spectacular sight!

Hooded snake cannonball

This is the flower of the Cannonball tree (Couroupita guianensis), with the stamen stem curving over itself to resemble a serpent's hood. The curve also protects the fertile stamens (at the base) while showing off the fodder staminodes to their best advantage. That's how it attracts the pollinators - mainly carpenter bees.  

The fruit - which gives the tree its name - is a large, round, woody ball. It takes anything from 12 to 18 months for the fruit to be fully ripe. In that time, it makes for a wonderful sight, with several of the cannonballs hanging to the main trunk. The ripe fruit falls off and bursts open, releasing 300 seeds on the average. Small animals take over the task of dispersing them. 

The shape of the flower gives it the local name nagalingam, the snake flower. it is not a tree that is common in private gardens. Most of the specimens are found in public gardens or in temple courtyards. This one is a little bit of both - the gardens of the Theosophical Society!

Small beginning

Kalakshetra was founded in 1936, in part as an extension of the founders' belief that Theosophy should be extended through an academy for training students in traditional arts. With all the founders belonging to the Theosophical Society at Adyar, it was the easiest thing for them to have the academy function out of the Society's premises. One of the members of the academy, Pandit Subramania Sastri, suggested the name "Kalakshetra", meaning "Holy place of the Arts". 

The academy grew. Rukmini Devi Arundale, the prime mover behind the academy, had personally trained many of the initial batches of students and continued to drive the courses at the academy for many years. In 1951, the academy began developing its own premises at Thiruvanmiyur, a short distance away from the Theosophical Society. Fittingly, the development started with the planting of a sapling from the great banyan of the Theosophical Society in the newly acquired land.

The land expanded to nearly 100 acres. The sapling has grown into a large tree. The academy has grown to become the Kalakshetra Foundation, bringing into its fold five distinct institutions - the College of Fine Arts, the Craft Education and Research Centre, the Besant Arundale Theosophical Senior Secondary and High Schools and the Besant Cultural Centre Hostel. In 1993, the Foundation was taken over by the Government of India and declared an institution of National Importance. Here's to the institution growing further and spreading wide, like the sapling seems to be doing!

Ocean view

It does seem I am spending too much time behind bars these days. Of the wrong kind. Must do something about that!

One, or many?

Spread over about 1.5 acres, this specimen of Ficus benghalensis is one of the largest in the country and maybe the oldest one as well. The Great Banyan of Kolkata and the Thimmamma Marrimanu at Anantapur cover a much greater area than this one, but it is very likely that this tree is much older than either of them. The Adyar aalamaram (Adyar banyan), as it is called, is supposedly over 450 years old, which if true would make it about 200 years older than the other giants. 

This tree is part of Huddleston Gardens, the seat of the Theosophical Society in Chennai. If it was to have a street address, it would be listed as Schwarz Avenue. That is because the avenue runs along the southern border of the tree's extent. On the other sides, there are no roads, just more vegetation. A fence marks the boundary; the banyan of course does not respect such confines and its branches have already arched over the road and put down aerial roots.

The main trunk of the tree was brought down by storm winds during a cyclone in 1989. Some effort was made to revive the trunk, but it was futile. The main trunk is gone, but the tree continues to live on. But that has prompted some to opine that the Adyar aalamaram cannot be considered a tree anymore, but should be a 'tree system'. Clearly, they are missing the woods for a tree!

The prince, a monk

Here is the plaque, as I had promised yesterday. The name 'Bodhidharman' would be familiar to movie fans, through the movie "7ஆம் அறிவு" (Seventh Sense).  The stories about Bodhidharman are many and there is not enough place for them here. Suffice to say that one of the younger sons of a Pallava king, figuring that he wasn't excited by politics or palace intrigues, went away and became a Buddhist monk. His appearance was not that of a conventional bhikshu, for he is described as being bearded, ill-tempered and widely wild-eyed. 

The last, some say, was because Bodhidharman, in a bid to ensure that he did not doze off while meditating, sliced his eyelids away. At the spot where those lids fell grew a bush, and that was the first tea bush, according to legend. Other legends have it that it was this dhyana - that does sound like zen - master who brought the practice of Zen Buddhism, established the Shaolin Temple and in general did so much that practically anything can be traced back to him.

it was quite an unusual choice of a monk that the Theosophical Society has made for its Buddhist temple. Out there, Bodhidharman is around, even if he is not in the main temple itself!

Zen feeling

Until a couple of weeks ago, if someone had asked me about Buddhist temples in Chennai, I would have told you that I had heard of one in Egmore, though I have never been there. But on a Saturday afternoon walk at Besant Nagar I found a second temple, with a small pond in front of it. Maybe it is not correct to call it a temple, for it does not appear to have any space for meditation inside. The Theosophical Society's grounds, where this is located, has a few such monuments: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian and of course, Buddhist.

The pond - a tank, actually - in front of this shrine is a cement bordered rectangle, topped off with granite slabs. It is surprisingly cool even in the afternoon, so no wonder that quite a few visitors had parked themselves on it. Not much of the water is to be seen, because the surface is tessellated with lotus leaves, with the flowers popping up between them. Behind the shrine is a large grove of coconut palms, planted in right regular fashion.

It would have been nice to just sit beside the tank until the sun went down. But a plaque at a corner of the grounds drew me to it. What did that say? Ah, well, you will have to wait until tomorrow's post for that!

Grand old man

Today, the political movement that he was one of the co-founders of is in abject misery after its performance in the recent national elections. But that is no reason to think any less of Subbaiyar Subramania Iyer, a man of many parts, who was the Vice President of the Theosophical Society during the period 1907-11. The reason to mention that part of his life first is because this statue can be found in the Theosophical Society's grounds at Adyar. There was a later falling out with the Society, to the extent that some of his followers went ahead with a Triplicane offshoot. But that cannot take away the work that Sir Mani Iyer did for the TS.

The 'Sir' was indeed a knighthood, granted for his public services, which began at his birthplace, Madurai, as a government clerk, going on to become the Vice Chairman of the Municipality. Mani Iyer moved to Madras in the 1880s, by which time he had become a lawyer and was soon appointed as Public Prosecutor - the first native to be offered the position. In the meantime, he also helped in founding the Indian National Congress in 1885. Keenly interested in the cause of education, he was also a Vice-Chancellor of the University of Madras; that institution chose him to be the first recipient of an honorary doctorate, when it bestowed the Doctor of Law degree on him in 1908. 

Mani Iyer probably followed the tradition of vanaprastham, going into retreat, for a picture showing him in 'later life' does not carry the turban or the flowing gowns. The statue depicts him at the peak of public life, as a lawyer, an educationist and a theosophist. Interestingly, the statue of Subramania Iyer in the Senate House of the University of Madras shows him in exactly the same manner, quill in one hand, a finger marking the page of a book and the left foot half-raised; the only difference is that it is in contrast to this one, being entirely black!

Theosophy in Triplicane

The words "Theosophical Society" immediately call to mind that lovely 250-acre campus of Huddleston Gardens, on the southern bank of the Adyar river. That is quite fitting, since that campus is indeed the international headquarters of the Theosophical Society. However, there is at least one other place that carries the name, even though it is today a forgotten footnote in the history of the Theosophist movement itself.

This building on Raja Hanumantha Street in Triplicane, is named the "Mani Ayyar Hall", after (Sir - he relinquished the knighthood later) Subramania Iyer, who was one of the Vice Presidents of the Society in the early twentieth century. 'Mani Ayyar' died in 1924, by which time he had had a rift with the Theosophical Society. Therefore, this building was in all likelihood constructed by his followers, who may have styled themselves The Triplicane Theosophical Society, for that is what it says on the facade of this building. 

It is difficult to imagine now, but this building once hosted the annual conference of the Music Academy. The first conference of the Music Academy was in the Senate House, in 1929 and the next year, the conference moved a little further inland, to the Mani Ayyar hall!