Chennai:
Even though he retired back in 2001 as a supervisor in the library of
the Indian Institute of Technology here, 66-year-old N. Srinivasan is a
busy man these days.
His days are spent hanging out at
various temples in Velachery, his neighbourhood in the southwestern
part of this city. Srinivasan isn’t looking for spiritual comforting in
his post-retirement life. He has become a professional chanter. With
little fanfare, but a lot of enthusiasm, Srinivasan has become part of
a growing community of professional chanters of mantras, or Vedic
hymns, which provide the backdrop for prayers at Hindu temples and
weddings.
“It gives a sense of pride and satisfaction to
perform in the temple and to be recognized,” said Srinivasan, who
doesn’t get paid for singing in temples but is often given some amounts
for private functions.
Priest R. Lakshmi Narasimhan with students at the institute
Chennai’s
many temples are increasingly turning to the likes of Srinivasan to add
the human element to the din of cymbals, drums and chants even as they
try to deal with a growing shortage of priests.
Meanwhile, a
plan by the state government to do away with a centuries-old caste
system restricting priesthood and chanting to Brahmins has been hanging
fire because of court proceedings against the move.
In a city
long known for its traditions and considered by some as the most
traditional of India’s big metros, Chennai is also in the throes of a
socio-economic churn as auto, telecom and information technology
companies set up large operations and draw large numbers of
non-Tamilians.
Asked what could explain the interest in Hindu
scriptures among retirees, Raman Mahadevan, a city-based social
scientist, says, “The Vedic revivalism could be explained as a reaction
to unleashing of modern things. It might be due to a feeling that they
might lose their culture and tradition in Chennai forever.”
Tamil
Nadu recently introduced a certificate programme for priests as well,
under which people can enrol to learn the basics of rituals and obtain
a certificate of priesthood.
Srinivasan isn’t part of the
government initiative. He got his lessons from R. Lakshmi Narasimhan, a
former research department employee at auto components maker Lucas-TVS
Ltd. Narasimhan in turn learnt Vedic hymns from his grandfather, a
Vedic scholar.
After spending 33 years at Lucas, Narasimhan
took voluntary retirement and started his first centre in Velachery in
2002 after noticing that a lot of retired people seemed keen to learn
Vedas and chants. He doesn’t have set fees and takes whatever his
students give.
“I saw a great hunger in retired people to
learn Vedas and there was no one willing to teach them,” says
Narasimhan. Around 90% of his students are retired people. “It takes
three times longer for old people to learn, compared with young people.
Also, pronunciation is key. It requires a lot of patience to teach the
elders.”
Most of his students tend to have a less reliable memory and have a lower recall than younger students.
To
overcome that, Narasimhan has customized the Vedas for them, selecting
only those bits that are commonly used in religious functions and those
that they want to chant every day as part of their own meditation. And
for those who cannot read the original transcription in Sanskrit, he
has developed a Tamil version.
“We missed the bus in our
youth,’’ says M. Alagarswamy, 56, a practising company secretary and
cost accountant. “The class has given us an opportunity to learn.”
In
the Velachery centre, where about 20 students were present, some 90%
claimed that their forefathers were either Vedic scholars or have
advanced knowledge of the same.
T.E. Raghava Simhan, who is
the primary patron of a temple near Chennai for which he gets some of
Narasimhan’s chanters, has another theory. “These are people who
rebelled in their youth...took alternative employment opportunities,”
he says. “After retirement, they are reviving interest in what their
forefathers were doing.”
It isn’t just retirees who are
learning Vedas. There is another emerging group, typically of young,
unemployed people from the community with little educational
qualifications, who are taking up Vedic learning. Many of them learn
only the basics of what is needed to perform at marriages or other
occasions.
“It is the economic compulsion that is making the youth from the community to learn Vedas,” says Simhan.
But
others in this group have gone on to find more serious vocations.
“There are three young unemployed people who learned from my dad and
now are working as purohits (those who conduct religious
functions outside the temple) and performing religious ceremonies,”
says L. Ramprasad, Narasimhan’s son, who works in a local research
institution. Ramprasad himself knows some basic chants and is also part
of Narisimhan’s class.
Traditionally, those who wanted to master the Vedas would be sent to pathshalas
at the age of seven. There they’d have to learn the basics of the Vedas
for seven years to be able to chant, and enrol for an advanced course
for another seven to eight years, which would help them become Vedic
teachers or scholars.
But the number of those willing to go to pathshalas
for such a long tenure has dwindled. Some prefer to go to modern
schools, but often drop out or fail to move on to vocational courses.
Still,
there is money to be made, even for the dropouts who learn the basic
chanting. Many traditional Hindu households in this city perform
“filial” rituals every month, which involve 10 minutes of chanting. A
typical purohit has 15-20 families as clients and he visits all
the houses in under three hours, earning between Rs750 and Rs1,000 in
that time, says Simhan. For weddings, a purohit can command as much as Rs10,000 for the chants.