6. AnnadAna Sivan
"The cooked rice (sAdam) would have been
gathered into a very huge heap, looking dazzling white like the Himalayas. Even
if an elephant drowns in the sAmbAr andA (huge vessel containing sAmbAr), you
wouldn't know. It is said that Himalachala Sivan created a huge pit of food for
the sake of Gundodaran during the Meenakshi Kalyanam (Shiva's celestial wedding
with Meenakshi at Madurai). In the same way, this poor brahmana Sivan did a
marvellous and mighty task."
Kanchi Paramacharya was reminiscing
about the annadhAnam festivities of Sri Ramaswamy Iyer of Tepperumal Nallur,
Tamilnadu, who was more popularly (and appropriately) known as 'Annadhana
Sivan'. These food festivities took place in Kumbakonam during the Mahamaham
festivals in the years 1921 and 1933 and fed several thousand people.
Since the middle of the eighteenth
century until the middle of the twentieth, Kumbakonam was the headquarters of
Kanchi Matam. Sivan virtually made the Matam his home from 1916 till his demise
in 1939.
Paramacharya continued his
reminiscences about the big event thus:
"It was during the 1933
Mahamaham annadhAnam. The wood brought for fuel was a hundred cartloads. For
pickles, ten cartloads of the amala fruit (phyllanthus emblica) were received.
He would just smell the vapours of the dishes being cooked and say correctly
what needed to be added to a dish. From the vapours of rasam, he would order
the amount of coriander yet to be ground and added. Not just a handful of
corianders. 'Ground a large pan of coriander and add to the rasam', he would
shout to a cook. If a large pan of coriander was to be added more than what has
already been done, imagine the quantity of rasam that would have been made. And
there were two cartloads of broomsticks (of the coconut tree) that were used to
clean the floor after a dining session.
"However much the number of
cooked rice vessels or however long the serial wood furnaces be, they couldn't
just meet the amount of rice required. So, what he would do is to first cook
ten or twenty bags of rice, spread the lots over long mats, cover the steaming,
cooked rice (anna pAvadai) with a thin, white cloth and spread bags of raw,
uncooked rice over the cloth with the cooked rice under. Then he would cover
this uncooked rice with long jute sacks and fold them tightly under the mat. In
the next half hour, when the sacks were removed, all the upper layer of
uncooked rice would have been cooked, soft like flowers! Such was his technique
to speed up the rice-making task.
"Where did he go for all the
milk required for curd to serve the multitudes of diners? Sivan had another
technique for this requirement. In those days when there were no refrigerators,
Sivan had invented his own! Weeks or even months before the samArAdhanA (food
festival), Sivan used to go about the task of collecting milk and making curds.
He would pack the curd in wooden barrels, seal them with wax and drown the
barrels in deep ponds. When the barrels were extracted and opened, the curd
would be just like it was formed yesterday! We should say, it was not just the
coolness of the pond, but the cool compassion of his mind also that made the
task possible."
Though Sivan conducted the
festivities on behalf of Kanchi Matam, the 1921 and 1933 Mahamaham samArAdhanAs
were eventful in the sense, Paramacharya was not there in Kumbakonam at that
time, as he had undertaken the ganga yAtrA (pilgrimage to the banks of Ganga)
in the year 1919, which lasted for twenty-one long years. During the Mahamaham
of 1933, Paramacharya had camped on the outskrits of Kumbakonam, in
Patteesvaram and Tiruvidai Marudhur, en route to Ramesvaram, from where he was
to proceed to Varanasi. Observing the tradition, he did not enter the Kumbakonam
matam until his yAtrA was completed. He would go to the Mahamaham pond to take
bath or to the temples of Kumbakonam from his camp and return. It was during
the year 1933 that the renovation work of the Matam was completed, under the
supervision of Sivan.
A speciality about Sivan's annadhAnam
festivities was that until the evening of the previous day there were no signs
at the place of dining of any activity of food preparation. The articles would
start arriving only in the night. In the 1933 festival, it was past midnight
and yet not a cartload of articles arrived! Even the fearless taskmaster Sivan
started worrying over the actual time left for arranging the things and start
cooking to feed a lakh of people on the next morning.
The news reached the camp where
Paramacharya was staying. In the next few minutes, the carts started arriving.
The carts that were usually exempted
from the traffic regulations during the Mahamaham festival were at that time
held up by the traffic police, who were not aware of the relaxation of rules
for Sivan's carts. The circle inspector suddenly had a flash at one-thirty at
night and proceeded to the scene of holdup. Thereafter, the carts that were
parked outside the city moved in, and Paramacharya's blessings saw to it that
everything went on well from that time.
A most notable thing about the
festivities was that neither the 'Walking Sivan', nor the 'Annadhana Sivan'
ever tasted a morsel of the food served! Paramacharya usually took the
flattened rice offered to Sri ChandraMauleesvara, even that when he was not on
fast. Annadhana Sivan would go a friend's house and take just curd rice, which
was his usual, favourite dish, which he took even on normal days after offering
it to his ishta devata (personal God) Sri Dakshinamurthi.
Paramacharya said later, that
contrary to the popular perception that Sivan did the annadhAnam on behalf of
the Kanchi Matam, it was his festivities that restored the financial status of
the Matam during those difficult days.
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