Flavour of Faith

FOOD IS EPHEMERAL, AND prasadam even more so, for it is immediately consumed at the temple or distributed to friends and family as soon as one returns home. The Tirupati laddu is an outlier, a delightful confection that keeps for days and even weeks when refrigerated. Those who have made annual pilgrim­ages to Tirumala en famille would remember the sweet rush of raiding the fridge for a piece of laddu from a steel—later Tupper­ware—box. It had to be an itty-bitty piece, to stretch the prasadam until more was obtainable—God forbid, one ever ran out. For devout Hindus, the prasadam was a pick-me-up and a cure-all. To snap off—never bite—a piece of the crumbly laddu and pop it in one’s mouth was to be transported to Tirumala, with its snaking queues and the sight of the majestic Venkateshwara Swamy at the end of a long, sweaty wait. The golden ball of chewy, sugary good­ness one received with both palms after darshan was precious and one always wanted more—not only because it was delicious but also to be able to pass on the Lord’s blessings to one’s near and dear.

Ubiquitous yet scarce, the Tir­upati laddu is a study in flavour, faith and community. In Tamil Brahmin families, it is said, only half-jokingly, that the primary business of the devotee, especial­ly during festivals, is to liberally partake in divine delicacies. The one prasadam they are thrifty with, however, is the Tirupati laddu. As someone who grew up in a joint family that made two or three trips to Tirumala in a year, and participated in Kalyana Utsavams—which meant more and larger laddus—I could sense how, every time a guest came over, the conversation would skip a beat when one mentioned a trip to Tirumala, for this surely signalled an invitation to partake of the laddu prasadam. Elderly guests would gratefully wrap up the chunk of laddu offered to them and take it home, for it had to be shared with others—their day was made. The Tirupati laddu is sought-after because it feeds a hunger for something simple, yet rare: that lingering sense of being in the Lord’s presence long after one has lurched out of the temple, or even without having made the pilgrimage.

To be sure, the Tirupati laddu is an amalgam of tastes and tex­tures—the nuggets of cashew, the raisins that have more or less become one with the boondi, the rough-pounded cardamom still in its skin that cuts the sweetness, the shards of sugar crystal that evade you at first bite, the overall aroma suggestive of something holy and pure. Holding it all together like an invisible hand is ghee, the star ingredient at the heart of a controversy that has shaken Hindu society. A July 23 report from the National Dairy Development Board’s Centre for Analysis and Learning in Live­stock & Food lab, recently made public by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, points to the presence of adulter­ants in the ghee procured by Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD). The possibility of the ghee being contaminated with ani­mal fat is one that has left Hindus across the world outraged, and brought to the fore longstanding concerns about the decline in quality of temple prasadams in general. While the state govern­ment has conducted rituals to ‘purify’ the temple and directed the TTD Executive Officer J Syamala Rao to present a report on the matter, Rao has said that of all the ghee supplied to TTD, only the ghee from Tamil Nadu-based AR Dairy Foods was found to be adulterated. “This was the first time in the history of TTD that samples were sent to external labs for testing,” he told the media. Four tankers of ghee supplied by the company in July were in fact flagged and returned, the executive officer said, adding that the tainted product was never used by TTD. The private dairy has denied the allegations, saying that of the 10 tonnes of ghee used by TTD, it supplies a minuscule 0.1 per cent. It is unclear why TTD ordered the tests, and how, without an inhouse lab, it was monitoring the quality of ingredients before this incident. With anywhere between 60,000 and a lakh devotees visiting ev­ery day, the temple is, after all, the single largest buyer of ingredients like sugar, cardamom and vegeta­ble oil in India.

Nearly a thousand Srivaish­nava men toil in the temple kitch­en, known as potu, each making 15,000-20,000 laddus a day by hand, according to a source in the temple. “Only Srivaishnavas are allowed in the kitchen. Other employees can’t enter. Some are permanent staff while a few work on contractual basis,” he says. The boondi itself is made in a separate highly mechanised facility outside the kitchen. There is a machine for filtering out the impurities from the sugar syrup and another to keep it from crystallising. A heated steel drum keeps the ghee warm. Finally, a machine mixes the boondi with sugar syrup and dry fruits, after which potu workers manually shape them into spheres while still warm. They are then stored in large stainless steel trays with depressions—much like in an idli plate—where they firm up before being distributed to devotees.

According to a book on Tirupati prasadams by former head priest AV Ramana Dikshitulu, the dittam or recipe for a padi of 51 small laddus calls for the follow­ing: 1.8kg of besan or bengal gram flour, 1.65kg of ghee, 4kg of sugar, 300g cashew nuts, 160g raisins, 80g mishri or rock candy, and 40g of cardamom. What is not to like? However, while the laddu has be­come synonymous with Tirupati, it finds no mention in Pallava, Chola and Vijayanagara-era inscriptions documented from the temple. The provenance of the Tirupati laddu is in fact shrouded in mystery. While some attribute a certain Kalyanam Iyengar with introducing it as a popular prasadam in the 1940s, Madhusudhanan Kalaichelvan, an architect and temple histo­rian, says there is no record of his supposed contributions in the annals of the TTD, which is known for keeping meticulous re­cords. “It is likely that the laddu was introduced during the period when the temple was administered by the Hathiramji Mutt— that is, from the late-19th century to the early-20th century. That period saw a massive population moving to Tirumala. The temple then became an annual pilgrimage spot for devotees from across the country,” he says. Pilgrims from far and wide needed a prasadam that they could take back home and the laddu proved to be a winner. “The earliest mention of laddu as naivedyam in a Vaishnavite temple is perhaps by Periyazhwar in the Divyaprabandham, where he says that it is beloved of Lord Krishna. None of the saint-poets speak of the laddu in connection with the Lord of Tirumala, however,” Kalaichelvan points out.

It is worth noting that Vijayanagara inscriptions in Tirupati highlight the importance of naivedyam—in fact, a vast majority of them talk about dona­tions, made by rulers and holy men, of cows, money, ingredi­ents or entire villages to ensure the temple kitchen was always serving up one delicacy after another, not only for the Lord but also for his devotees. Varadajidevi, the queen of Vijayanagara king Achyutaraya, for instance, made an endowment, allowing the temple to collect revenue from six villages and to offer 20 portions of ven Pongal, one portion each of payasam, vadai, appam, adirasam, seedai and sukiyan/sukhiyam. Many of these were potentially safe for consumption days after they were prepared, including nei appam, a deep-fried cake made with rice and jaggery, vadai— the Tirumala vadai, though a rare find, is particularly lovely, made with black gram and pepper—seedai, crunchy savoury balls made of rice flour and adhirasam, a doughnut-like fried pancake. But they would have been labour-intensive and expensive to make at scale—and well-nigh impossible given the footfalls in Tirumala now.

SOURCING QUALITY GHEE at the rates the last tender was issued for—under ₹400 a litre—is just as impossible. According to a 1930 report by Sadhu Subramanya Sastry, the TTD archaeologist who is cred­ited with securing over 1,060 inscriptions in Tirupati and pub­lishing the epigraphs, “ghee alone was used for all lamps lit in the temple” and this practice continues to this day. While ghee was always hard to obtain, and endowments were made in the past to ensure a steady supply for the Lord, the decline in the quality of ghee available in the market has been under scrutiny for a while now. Last year, amid allegations by the Karnataka Milk Federation (KMF) that TTD was using sub­standard ghee, temple officials clarified that only supply trucks that passed quality tests were allowed to enter. They reportedly rejected 42 truckloads for failing to meet standards, which include temperature, moisture content, butyro refractometer reading, free fatty acids as a percentage of oleic acid, and Reichert Meissl and Polenske values. “According to the Agama shastras, only ghee from Indian cows, extracted by traditional methods, can be used for the Lord. But how can you source 15,000kg of it every day to make 4-6 lakh laddus? Most of these laddus end up with VIPs, and MLAs and ministers who order truckloads to be de­livered to their constituencies. The potu workers are incredibly stressed and overworked but they are unable to voice their prob­lems,” says K Siva Kumar, a former member of the TTD Board.

TTD will now reportedly source ghee purchased at higher prices from KMF, India’s second-largest milk cooperative, with the brand name Nandini. Meanwhile, recipes to recreate the Tirupati laddu at home have flooded the internet. Some call for edible camphor, others contend that the boondi must be fried in groundnut oil, not refined vegetable oil. So much for the geographical indication tag that the temple had acquired for the prasadam in 2014, standardising the small 175g laddu to prevent sweet shops from using the Lord’s name to sell their own version of it. But should temples even be allowed to sell prasadam instead of distributing a handful to all visiting devotees for free? “We have reduced the sanctity of temples and turned them into sweet shops. The sale of any kind of prasadam should come to an end to redeem the reputation of our temples,” says Kalaichelvan.

boondi ladduspotu workersTirumala laddu controversyTirumala temple