God’s Own Land

ON SUNDAY MORNINGS, TIRUCHENDURAI is deserted, with many of its residents away in nearby Tiruchirappalli for errands and to meet family and friends. Along the Trichy-Karur highway on which the village is located, the Cauvery, to paraphrase Wordsworth, glides at its own sweet will. With few visitors expected today, the Chandrasekharaswamy temple in Tiruchendurai is shut for the most part. The archakar, 65-year-old Shanmugasundaram, shuffles in at 11AM to perform the morning puja—a brisk archanai with Parijatham flowers from the village, dhoopam and deepam—and locks up in a half-hour. “Mondays get busy. People come from far and wide to light nei deepam and pray to the Lord and to Mrigatarambika ambal for a speedy solution to problems like illness and childlessness. The swayambhu lingam was unearthed from the bottom of a jackfruit tree and it has trishul-like markings on it. This is also the only temple where the goddess is in the form of the ardhanaari, wield­ing Shiva’s weapons and his deer, and sporting his ornaments,” says Shanmugasundaram, whose family have been priests of the temple for several generations. The 10th-century Shiva temple, spread over five acres, with prakaras, mandapams and a garden, is one of the larger ones on the banks of the Cauvery in Trichy district. Of course, it is only a fraction of the size of Srirangam, the largest temple compound in India that lies about 15km south of here, but even the deity of Srirangam visits Tiruchendurai once a year in the Tamil month of Panguni– for his wedding ceremony and to partake of some curd rice. Legend has it that a girl and her grandmother, who were goatherds, were resting by the riverbank when Lord Ranganatha, who was feeling peckish, stole their packed lunch of curd rice and mango pickle and vowed to visit them year after year.

THE CHANDRASEKHARASWAMY TEMPLE was built in the 10th century by Boothi Aditya Pidari, daughter-in-law of Parantaka Chola, wife of Arinjaya Chola, and daughter of Tennavan Irukkavel, says R Kalaikkovan, director, Dr M Rajamanikkanar Centre for Historical Research, Trichy. The institute has published a book on the temple, based on studies of Chola and Krishnadevaraya inscriptions found here. Lord Chandrasekhara has always been considered the largest landowner in the village, the priest says. But two years ago, the ownership of the land on which the temple stands came under dis­pute as the Tamil Nadu Waqf Board, in a 241-page letter dated August 18, 2022, to sub-registrar offices across the state, staked claim to thousands of properties, including 389 acres in Tiruchendurai village. The com­muniqué, received by the 12 sub-registrar offices in Trichy district, quoted sections 51(1-A) and 104A of the Waqf Act, 1995, to warn that no property that was deemed to belong to the Waqf Board shall be registered “unless a sealed NOC is issued by the competent authority, the Chief Executive Officer, Tamil Nadu Waqf Board”. The matter came to light the following month when a certain Rajagopal, who owned 1.2 acres of land in the vil­lage, was executing a sale deed to fund his daughter’s wedding. “As word spread that all the land in the village now belonged to the Waqf, I got distress calls from relatives and friends and tweeted about it,” says JVC Sreeram, a Hyderabad-based political analyst and pse­phologist who hails from Tiruchendurai. State BJP president K Annamalai promptly called him to let him know that the Prime Minister’s Office had taken note of the matter and that there would be a solution soon. Party leader H Raja then visited the temple and assured locals that their lands were their own. “We were getting ready to file a civil suit with the Madurai bench. We had a lawyer ready to work for us pro bono, MR Venkatesh. But we soon understood that there could be a political solution. A year ago, the Central government entered into discussions with stakeholders on amending the Waqf Act and the rest is history,” says Sreeram. A peace meeting was held in Tiruchendurai with the participation of revenue and Waqf Board officials and land registrations have since been allowed.

Till recently, nothing ever happened in Tiruchendurai. today, it is at the centre of a raging debate on land ownership patterns after the Waqf board claim on the village. As for the locals, their past has been called into question and their future is at stake

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The Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024, introduced in the Lok Sabha on August 8, 2024, seeks to “effectively manage” Waqf property in India by keeping tabs on arbitrary claims to land made without verification, and on corruption by Board officials. It also proposes sweeping changes, including empowering dis­trict collectors to survey properties and resolve conflicts. When Minority Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju tabled the Bill, amid op­position from Congress, DMK, NCP, Trinamool Congress, and AIMIM, he made an example of Tiruchendurai. “The 1,500-year-old Chandrasekhara Swamy temple is located there. A man attempting to sell his property was informed that his village was Waqf property. Just imagine, the entire village has been declared Waqf property. Don’t see religion here,” Rijiju said. Speak­ing to Open, Tamil Nadu Waqf Board Chairman Abdul Rahman said this was not true. “The village extends to over 600 acres now but we only claimed the land that was under Waqf when it was surveyed by the Government Survey Com­missionerate in 1956. This is land that was dedicated in the name of God by Muslims over the years and we have records of this in the state archives going back 200 years,” he said. Rahman also added that he wasn’t sure if the Chola temple falls within Waqf land. “Even if it does, we have a policy to not claim any place of ritual of any religion,” he said. The communiqué issued to registrars was meant to stall “rampant sales of Waqf lands based on recent ownership documents,” he said.

The people of Tiruchendurai are far from convinced. If it’s re­ally about antiquity, then surely one cannot discount the fact that this was a Brahmin settlement hundreds of years ago, they say. “In Tiruchendurai temple, there are 21 inscriptions recording trans­actions concerning land in Isana­mangalam, a brahmadēya village. In the case of Isanamangalam, out of the 21 pieces of land, three were transacted by the sabhā (village as­sembly), four by a paruḍai (group of sabhā members), one by a kiḻavar (landholder in a brahmadēya), two by an individual and his follow­ers (uḷḷiṭṭār), and 13 by individual Brahmins,” wrote noted epig­raphist Noboru Karashima, in his study of two Tamil villages, showing a “strong relationship between land and individuals in Isanamangalam”. In the Tiruchen­durai agraharam spread over two long streets, this holds true even today. People speak in whispers about how the place has retained its character. “It is one of the last such Brahmin settlements in Tamil Nadu where there is an un­said rule to never sell or rent prop­erties to ‘outsiders’,” says a resident. Others point out that a dargah set up about two decades ago is the oldest Muslim house of worship in the village.

There are four other temples within the village besides the mandapam where Lord Ranganatha halts before touring the village once a year. Even if the Waqf doesn’t claim them, does this mean the gods of the village reside in borrowed land?

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SHANMUGASUNDARAM IS GUARDED in his com­ments on the politicisation of the issue. “I am a state gov­ernment employee. All I can say is that this temple may not be a padal petra sthalam (the 276 temples that are revered in the verses of Saivite Nayanar saints in the 6th-9th centuries), but it is certainly a site that attracts devotees from across the country. I hope there is no break in the rich history of this village,” he says. He retired from the postal service two years ago but the post office still functions out of one portion of the porch of his ancestral house. His grandfather and his two brothers served at the temple and so did their father, who built the house. Shanmugasundaram can only hope that one of his three sons can carry on the tradition. His eldest works for a software company in the US but the other two sons are priests—one in London and another who freelances locally.

Till recently, nothing ever happened in Tiruchendurai. Today, it is at the centre of a raging debate on land ownership patterns. As for the locals, their past has been called into question and their future is at stake. “The Waqf Board’s claims are deeply unset­tling. Our family has lived here for 12 generations. There were hardly any Muslims here—how does the Waqf claim to own all our land?” asks 89-year-old V Chandrasekhar, a former teacher, and JVC Sreeram’s father, seated in his 100-year-old house whose spiral stairway and first-floor corridors have been all but taken over by monkeys. “We felt sad and angry at first,” says Dr SS Raja, who runs a hospital in the village. “Several houses have been bought and sold in the last two years and after the Central govern­ment’s intervention, we are now convinced our lands are safe. But a Muslim institution claiming the temple’s land remains an emotion­al issue,” he says.

Back at the temple, above the doorstep of the sanctum, is an engraving of a tortoise and two swans, illustrating a Panchatantra story. As their lake dries up, the tor­toise begs the swans to take him to a place with plenty of water, and they agree to ferry him as he holds on to a stick with his mouth, but on the condition that he trusts them completely. Enroute, however, the tortoise begins to suspect their intentions and opens his mouth to ask how long it will take. He falls, but his friends pick him up and they continue the rest of the journey in silence, assailed by neither doubt nor fear. “When you believe in god, you must neither doubt that he will answer your prayers, nor fear that some other force can harm you,” says Shanmugasundaram.

There are, in fact, four other temples within the village lim­its—a perumal temple, a Ganesha shrine, a temple to the local guardian deity, and another small amman shrine—besides the mandapam by the Cauvery where Lord Ranganatha halts before touring the village in a grand procession once a year. Even if the Waqf doesn’t claim them, does this mean the gods of the village reside in borrowed land and must pay rent? And what of the conflict between two state bodies—the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, which administers the Chandrasekharaswamy temple and its lands, and the Tamil Nadu Waqf Board, which has now claimed a large parcel of land in the village? What about the ownership rights of the many families who have bought houses here in the past half-century? Many questions remain.

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