Where was Namperumal for forty-eight years?

In 1323, as Ulugh Khan’s army from Delhi closed in on Srirangam, a small group of devotees took Namperumal (நம்பெருமாள்), the utsavar of the Sri Ranganathaswamy temple, also known as Azhagiya Manavalan, and slipped away with him. He did not come back for forty-eight years. In that time he was carried south to the country around Madurai, down to the tip of the peninsula, up the Kerala coast to Kozhikode, across to Melkote, and then to Tirumala, where he stayed the longest. Only in 1371 did Gopana, a Vijayanagara general, bring him home to Srirangam through Gingee.

The news reached Srirangam in the middle of a festival.

An army had entered the northern Tamil country, and a group of soldiers was marching fast towards Samayapuram, previously known as Kannanur, just a few miles north of the Kollidam. The people gathered before the Lord and drew lots to decide whether to stay or leave. The lots said stay, so the festival carried on.

Once the soldiers had passed Samayapuram, there was no time left. The sanctum was bricked up, and other idols were hidden inside the temple’s huge compound. Namperumal was placed in a small palanquin and sent south with Pillai Lokacharya and a few brave followers.

They moved slowly, keeping to the jungle and away from the roads, through what is now Pudukkottai. Behind them, more than twelve thousand people were killed at Srirangam.

On the way, highwaymen attacked the group and took everything of value. But out of respect, they did not touch the idols, and the party reached Jyotishkudi with the Lord safe.

The party stayed at Jyotishkudi, near Madurai, for about a month. It was here that Pillai Lokacharya heard what had happened to the people of Srirangam. He fell ill soon after, and attained mukthi.

The others took the Lord on to Tirumalirunjolai, the temple at Azhagar Koil in the hills north of Madurai, where he was worshipped for about a year. Even that was not far enough. S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, retelling the temple’s chronicle, the Koil Olugu, in his book South India and her Muhammadan Invaders (1921), wrote:

Finding their position untenable even there, they marched down farther south.

Going along from temple to temple of the Vaishnava holy places on the west coast they reached at last Calicut.

Aiyangar

Namperumal spent about a year in Kozhikode. A temple there still says that its west-facing shrine was built to receive him and his consorts.

From Kozhikode he was taken by sea up the coast to the Mysore country, and then inland to the hill temple at Melkote, also known as Tirunarayanapuram, where they stayed for a long time.

From Melkote the party turned east, towards Tirumala. This was the longest stay of the whole exile. Namperumal was kept and worshipped on the hill for more than forty years, beside Venkateswara himself.

Forty years is a long time. A child who had watched him leave Srirangam would have grown old by then, and most of the men who carried him out would have been gone.

One more memory survives from those years. It is said that a father and his son hid the idol for nearly six months in a deep, narrow gorge near Chandragiri. It is the closest we can come to knowing what those years of hiding were like.

In 1371 Gopana, a general of Kumara Kampana of Vijayanagara, came to Tirumala to take the Lord home. He first took him to Gingee, where he was based, and kept him in the Ranganatha shrine on the hill at Singavaram, just outside the town. Srirangam itself was won back without much of a fight.

On the seventeenth day of Vaikasi, in the Saka year 1293, Gopana brought Namperumal back into Srirangam and consecrated him again, together with his two consorts. By the temple’s count he had been away for forty-eight years.

But after so long, how could anyone be sure it was the same idol? The answer came from an old washerman, blind and well past ninety. He knew the Lord by the smell of the water from his thirumanjanam, his holy bath.

Gopana had the homecoming carved in stone at the temple, in two Sanskrit verses on the east wall of the second prakaram. They begin with the year, and they name him as the man who brought the Lord back from Chenji, as Gingee was then known.

Today you could drive the whole route in a few days: Srirangam, Madurai, Kozhikode, Melkote, Tirumala, Gingee, and back again. For Namperumal it took forty-eight years.