(as told by some local residents)

Kumbhakonam gets its name from an elaborate mythology. According to lore, this town is the place where kumbha (pot) with amritam (the nectar of immortality) disintegrated and fell. As the story goes, in the churning of the milky ocean between the asuras and devas, amritam emerged which had to be carefully guarded and preserved, only to be used by the choicest devas. However in the end of the Pralaya yuga, a great flood engulfed the whole world. Lord Shiva, aware of the coming of the flood preserved the nectar in a large kumbha high up in Mount Meru. This kumbha was brought out in the next yuga and worshipped filled with raw rice, with a coconut upon its lips and mango leaves around its rim. But in a great battle this pot was destroyed and its various pieces disintegrated on the land of Kumbhakonam marking its landscapes with great temples. All the temples in this town, and there are atleast 10 major ones, each represent one of the broken bits of the kumbha that was worshipped; some the coconut, some the leaves, some the shards of the pot’s rim.  The pots’ shard mainly fell in the area of Kumbeshwaran Kovil (Kumbha (pot) Ishwara(god) Kovil ( temple)). This temple, home the oldest Bommai Golu ceremony, contains two predominant shrines – one of the Linga representative of Lord Shiva and another of the Mantradevi or Goddess covered in Mantras. Mantradevi has a story of her own. The consort of Shiva, Mantradevi is originally Dakshinayani. Like the story of the Kumbha, Dakshinayani is also familiar from Hindu mythology. The daughter of King Daksha who disapproved of her marriage to Shiva (as a wandering mendicant who dwelt in cremation grounds), Dakshinayani and her husband were not invited to her father’s shashtapurti (the 60^th birthday celebrations is an auspicious ceremony for Hindus). Shiva, usually the person who gets mad, didn’t, and quietly accepted his father-in-law’s rejection of their relationship. Instead Dakshinayani was enraged and entered the fire to prove her dissatisfaction with her father’s act, which she considered an embarrassment. Daksha saves her body but only too late and holds the charred body of his daughter regretting his actions. However Shiva comes to hear of his wife’s sacrifice and is completely enraged. He grabs her body and with the fiery anger, only capable by Shiva, he dances with her body spinning it in circles. Her body splits into various parts and falls in chunks demarcating the popular Devi temples across India. In Kumbeshwaran temple, Mantradevi is said to be where Dakshinayani’s many nerves fell. The entire idol is supposed to be covered in mantras emanating supreme sacred power to all those who visit her. Home to two very powerful images, one from a shard of a sacred pot and another of the nerves of the goddess herself, Kumbeshwaran Kovil is an interesting choice for hosting Bommai Golu celebrations. My dissertation work will illuminate further on this unique relationship.

The second temple whose story I am going to tell you is the Sarangapani Kovil, adjacent to Kumbeshwaran Kovil but of a different god, Lord Vishnu or Perumal as he is called in Tamilnadu. The legend here goes that Perumal had an ardent devotee who was an orphan boy. From his youth he had always worshipped Perumal. The orphan grew into a young man and without fail came to visit, pray, and sit with Perumal every day, un-attending to even his own needs. One day in his adult life, Perumal appeared before him and asked him, “Hey devotee, why do you care so much about me? You always come to see me and you tend to no one else! Don’t you have people to care about, you keep coming to god?” Blissfully happy with his life, the devotee responded, “Oh Lord, I only have you and no one else. Who else matters but you?  I have nobody being an orphan and so you are my father and you are my son!”

Several years later the devotee dies of a heart attack and there was no one to perform his last rites as he had no son or father. However the night before his cremation, Perumal appeared in the dream of the Brahmin priest of the temple and told him that the Lord himself would perform the last rites for his devotee as after all, “I am his son,” he proclaimed. The last rites were performed by an anonymous visitor the next morning and everything was prepared for by the Brahmin priest. Even today this story is enacted during the procession of the Perumal of Sarangapani Kovil. The utsavar  murti  is taken on its usual rounds to visit the neighborhood and on its way back to the temple, the anonymous last rites are reenacted by the deity in procession and only then Perumal returns home.