The centenary celebrations of Nataraja Guru Narayana Gurukul began on August 20, 2023. The President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, inaugurated it.
On 23 December 2023, a function was held at the Varkala Narayana Gurukul to mark the end of the centenary celebrations of the Gurukul and the centenary of the Nitya Chaitanya Yati.
I also attended the inaugural ceremony of the festival along with Peter Moraes and Emma, students of Guru Nithya.
Text of my speech
Greetings to the Gurus sitting on the stage and the elders sitting before me.
A lot of discussions about Vedanta and self-realization have taken place on this platform. I am standing here as a fiction writer. As a literary person, I will only speak about what I have personally realized about Narayana Gurukulam and Guru Nithya Chaitanya Yathi. That is my limit. Any stage has four borders and limited space. Actually, that limit is its specialty, and it helps to create the form of the performance happening on it.
Nataraja Guru founded Narayana Gurukulam in 1923 with the goal of establishing a model Gurukula system in the Fernhill neighbourhood of Ooty. A few months later, Nithya Chaitanya Yathi was born in 1924. Today we are celebrating the births of Gurukulam and Guru Nithya.
That particular five-year period beginning in the 1920s is crucial in Indian thought. Gandhi postponed the Non-Cooperation Movement that had begun in 1920 and ended in Chauri Chaura violence. It created a severe fatigue in the freedom struggle. Many who rose with the momentum of independence gradually turned toward art and literature. They wrote early modern fiction in Indian languages. They published dailies, weeklies, and monthlies. That is how the literary revival in Indian dialects was born. I have to say one thing too: Hindutva politics and Islamic radicalism started at that time. During that period, the RSS and Muslim League came into existence.
From 1924, modern literature spread like a wave all over India. Till then, the literature we had was traditional; its content was devotional and moral. The educated and privileged minority was the natural intended audience. Modern literature emerged from the dream of social change. For this purpose, it addressed the common man; to communicate with the masses, modern media such as magazines and printed books were necessary. It is a revolution indeed.
Gandhi was preparing himself for a wider revolt. Through an organization named Seva Dal, he gathered and trained a large number of volunteers. He led the Vaikom struggle and through it formulated the principles of the Satyagraha struggle. Following the success of the Vaikom struggle, the temple entry struggle began all over India. The freedom struggle transformed into a people’s movement and a movement for social change. The emerging modern literature movement, naturally associated with it, played a major role.
One of the most creative and aggressive movements of that period was the Narayana Gurukulam. What was its contribution? A few years ago, my friend and yoga teacher, Soundararajan, had gone to Haridwar to study Indian philosophy. He was a member of the Satyananda Yoga Center, an organization based in Bihar. Nataraja Guru, Nitya Chaitanya Yathi, and Muni Narayana Prasad authored most of the books used as textbooks there.
Today, the Gurukulam bookshop has several hundred books written by the scholars created by the Gurukulam. There are books on all topics related to Indian philosophy in English and Malayalam. The Gurukulam has emerged as a significant intellectual movement in India today. These books are the flowers of this hundred-year-old grant tree. Many Gurus have come from this lineage: philosophers, writers, and saints. They are its fruits.
Narayana Guru was a poet. Kumaran Ashan is said to be the greatest poet of Malayalam. I will place Narayana Guru in a position equal to him. We usually discuss Narayana Guru’s contribution from sociology to spirituality in detail. It is important to discuss his literary contributions simultaneously. Great writers and thinkers have come from him for four generations. Kumaran Ashan and C.V. Kunjnuraman are the first generation. M.K. Sanu, P.K. Balakrishnan, and O.V. Vijayan are the second generation. I am the third generation.
Narayana Gurukula is primarily a Vedantic institution. But if someone has a taste for literature, he will find Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yathi. I have wandered for many years with a philosophical and spiritual quest. I have wandered as a monk. I have begged at Kashi and Thiruvannamalai. At that time, I met Yogi Ramsuratkumar, who was a fellow beggar of mine at Thiruvannamalai. Slowly I began to develop a dislike for sanyasis and yogis. Yes, many of the people I met were real spiritual persons with wisdom. However, they were not suitable for me. I can understand now that I could have gained enlightenment through literature.
I met yogi Ramsuratkumar after several years with my friend Bava Chelladurai. I asked the Yogi many questions in a teasing manner. One of them was, “Will I have a guru?” He said, “My father will bless you. You will find him soon.”
A few months later, my friend Nirmalya (Mani) took me to Nitya Chaitanya Yati. I found my guru. I never talked about spirituality with Guru Nitya. All I talked about was literature and arts. Or, all the spirituality I talked about was through literature and art.
When I asked a question about T.S. Eliot, I saw Nithya, who read T.S. Eliot for a long time ago, searching the library by torchlight at dawn and picking up Eliot’s book. That afternoon, he spoke to me about D.S. Eliot. He talked to me about Asan, Gorkey, and Derrida.
Once, I requested Nithya to teach me the yoga techniques. Nithya told me. “Literature is your yoga… it is your goddess.”
With a smile on his face, he added, “Not just a goddess, but Beatrice,” a phrase I vividly recall. He referred to Beatrice as the goddess who transported Dante from purgatory to paradise. Literature is my yoga. It is my ‘sadhana’ to achieve self-realization.
Narayana Gurukul is unique because it includes that ‘dream’ and presents spirituality. This is what Nataraja Guru calls integrated science, and Guru Nithya Chaitanya Yati calls the symphony of values.A place where arts, literature, philosophy, and wisdom are one. A point where wisdom and the wise become one.
Nithya had called two Tamil poets before me and shared his dream to create a movement of arts and literature in Tamil Nadu with them. They could not take interest in it. But when he expressed his idea with me, immediately I took it as my life’s mission. Today, through his grace, I have successfully transformed his dream into a movement. Ours is a journey that strives for true knowledge by merging yoga, art, literature, and philosophy. We call it unified wisdom, and now it has become one of the most active intellectual and art movements in Tamil Nadu. I am proud to say it on this platform.
Why do we need arts and literature? Wisdom is a pure thing. Philosophy is also a lofty one. They function like the eyes in the body. They know the soil; they do not touch it. Life is only a subject for them; they do not interact in life.
But art is never away from real life. It always touches the soil. Therefore, lust, anger, and passion are an inseparable part of literature. They will always be present with the artist, too. I am also not free from them in this life.
Vyasa crossed a river with his son Sugabrahma Rishi. Sugan reached the river first. Upon seeing the young man, the women, who had been bathing half-naked, decided not to conceal their bodies. Later, when the old man Vyasa reached the river, they hid their bodies.
Vyasa, confused, asked Krishna about it. Krishna said, “Sugan is a yogi. He has transcended the passions of lust. There is no lust in his eyes. You are a poet. A poet is not free from the passions of lust. There was desire in your eyes.”
But I am sure what I present as a literary work is also wisdom. As a writer, I am also in the pursuit of self-realization.
The research of an Australian biologist named Mandayam Srinivas is about bees. From a beehive, individual bees go separately in all four directions. They find the place where the honey is. They return and disseminate information to their fellow bees regarding the location of the honey, its quantity, the strength of the wind, and all other relevant details. On that basis, bees leave in swarms for bringing that honey to their home.
The bees do not convey those messages in language. They convey it through dance. It is such a complex, subtle dance. It’s an endless artistic performance. The artists are also bees. They know where the honey is. They know how to reach it. Yet, we can only express it in a dance.
Thank you.
