The Force That Can Bind Us

This week I would like to recall instances I have observed or heard of about how love and peace can be expressed through cultural gestures—love for God, for Nature, for each other as Earth's children.

- RENUKA NARAYANAN

One April, I got to witness the Brahmotsavam or 10-day annual festival of the grand temple in Mylapore, an ancient inland pocket of Chennai, in a heritage walk led by Carnatic historian Sriram V. Mylapore is an anglicised form of Mayurapuram, meaning 'the place of peacocks'.

Mylapore is built around the temple to Shiva-Parvati where they are worshipped as Kapalishwarar and Karpagambal. I'm told that Karpagambal refers to the celestial tree karpagam. Parvati is also known as 'Goddess of the wish-yielding tree' that grants everything sincerely asked for. There was a Kartikeya temple, it seems, on the present site.

The original Shiva-Parvati temple was by the ocean, but was destroyed in the early colonial period. It shifted to its present location thereafter, which, joked Sriram V, amounts to the parents moving into the son's house. The link with the old site is maintained even now, through an annual ritual by the sea.

An old Nawab of Arcot donated land to the present Kapalishwarar temple to build its temple tank. The sthala vriksham or sacred tree of the Kapalishwarar temple is the punnai, also known as nagchampa in Sanskrit, and 'Alexandrian laurel'. It is believed to be one of the oldest trees in Chennai. Legend says that Karpagambal worshipped Shiva under a punnai tree. In history, the punnai was used by ancient Chola ship-builders to make ships for their blue-water navy and is still used for boat-building.