Today's Hindu features an inspiring interview with the surviving king of Travancore, who calls himself Padmanabha Dasa. He explains that being a king, like Henry VIII, confers enormous acquisitive powers and one can excuse greed by adducing the title to himself as the Defender of the Faith. The other extreme attitude, which goes even beyond trusteeship, is to call oneself the servant of God. Even Gandhi was impressed with the utter simplicity of Travancore kings, and their temple was the first to allow all castes to enter its precincts.
These days we read only about two things. The greedy thieves who become our politicians, and how rich are our temples and god-men. For a yoga guru to own an inland off Scottish shores and declare a mere Rs.1100 crores ($2B and change) as his assets seems passé. After all, we have always called God Ishwara (possessor or riches) or Sri Devi (the goddess of wealth).
But juxtapose this with our idea of sannyasa, the stories of Buddha, Ashoka, and Gandhi, and even this story of Padmanabha Dasa, and we arrive at a conundrum. Indians worship poverty, and yet show immense greed. Perhaps the two go together, as fasting and feasting are both endemic to our culture!
But all this discovered temple wealth (the recently catalogued wealth of Rs.100,000 crores and more in Padmanabhaswamy Temple vaults) and hoary fables of Vijayanagara where precious stones were weighed in scales like common commodities raise one key question. It does seem that India had immense wealth once. Like in Somnath temple looted and ravaged by Ghazni; and the Kohinoor diamond and the Peacock throne, which invited invasions and pillage. It is well documented how the East India Company methodically stole the jewels from our crown, as it were. Now, can we relate the three together, our historic wealth, our historic spirit of worshipping self-abnegation, and our recent symptoms of untrammelled greed?
My theory is this. In a land of plenty, man starts to aspire to higher things. Hence wealth becomes a mere means to an end. Sacrificing lower wealth to aspire to higher ends (witness the Story of Puran Bhagat as narrated by Kipling). But when Indians have lost our higher moorings and also been bitten by the fear of losing all to invaders and thieves, we become victims of lobha. That is the Sanskrit word for greed.
And perhaps in the past we worshipped God as not a symbol of lucre, but a higher value of bliss or Ananda. So we went to Badrinath and Padmanabhaswamy temples, not known for their wealth.
But having lost bliss, we now settle for $$$$. So the greatness of a god-man and the popularity of a temple are to be a function of their wealth, measured in tons of gold and dollars in billions.
