Devipuram and the Open-Access Model

In 1983, on a hillock outside Visakhapatnam, a man who had spent more than twenty years at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research sat down to meditate and then started digging. What he said he found in the ground was a Meru, the three-dimensional form of the Sri Yantra, cast in panchaloha, the alloy of five metals. A great fire-offering had been performed in that area, the account runs, more than two hundred and fifty years before.

Eleven years later there was a temple on the hillock, and the temple was the diagram.

The claim

The Sri Vidya Trust, which Dr. Nishtala Prahlada Sastry founded in 1982 and which still administers the site, gives its objects as installing a temple of learning and teaching the world about ancient wisdom. Further down the same page, under its guiding principles and carrying no date, it adds one more thing: “Ultimately, we want to ensure that Sri Vidya is accessible to all without limitations of gender, caste, creed or faith.”

That sentence is why this chapter is here. It is also the hardest sentence in this volume to handle, because it is a claim about who may do what, made by the institution that gains from its being believed. Sri Vidya has been described in the scholarship as a socially Brahmanical tradition, and the lineages that carry it have largely been household ones. An institution saying it has stopped being one is reporting on itself.

So the question this chapter asks is narrow. Has anybody gone and looked.

The physicist

He was born on 26 September 1934, and on his own account he topped his tenth-grade year, won a place at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, and did not go, because the family could not find the train fare. He took physics honours at Andhra University instead, then a master’s by research in nuclear physics under Swami Jnanananda, who held the nuclear physics chair there. The doctorate came from Bombay University while he was working at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

His years in physics were long ones. Devipuram says twenty-three years; he himself said twenty-five, and this chapter found no source that reconciles them. In the last of those years he worked on an air-defence project, which Devipuram says conflicted with his conscience. He took two years as professor of physics at the University of Zambia in Lusaka, came back to India in 1981, resigned, and settled in Visakhapatnam.

He is called a nuclear physicist everywhere, including by the one peer-reviewed scholar this chapter could find who has written about him under his own name, and by the academic literature this volume’s last chapter surveys. The description is fair as to his training and his employer. This chapter looked for a published physics paper under any spelling of his name, in the high-energy physics literature database and in Crossref, and found none. That is an absence in the indexes, which for Indian experimental work of the 1950s and 1960s are patchy, and it is not a statement about what he wrote.

Who initiated him

Here the record divides, and the divergence is more interesting than either version.

Devipuram, the lineage site at Srimeru, Amrita Nilayam, the peetam at Rush in New York, and The Hans India all name the same teacher: Sri Swaprakashananda Natha Thirtha Avadhuta of Anakapalli, who gave him his initiation name at his purna diksha, his full initiation. Not one of them gives a date, and Devipuram’s own accounts differ over whether the Saraswati in the name came from that teacher or, later, from the goddess.

Mani Rao, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Religions in 2019 after fieldwork at the temple, says something different. On her account he and his wife Annapurna trained in Sri Vidya with B. S. Krishna Murthy in Mumbai and were initiated, and renamed, after a yajna at Kollur in Karnataka. A different teacher, a different place. Her note cites the Devipuram website as it stood in April 2015, and she records elsewhere that the site was revised after his death. The divergence may therefore sit inside Devipuram’s own account over time rather than between Devipuram and a scholar.

And his own first-person account of his life names no human guru at all. It refers once to “my Guru at Anakapalle,” who told him to do as he pleased, and otherwise attributes his authorisation to the goddess directly: a darshan of Balaji, whom Devipuram glosses as Bala Tripurasundari, on a pre-dawn walk in Hyderabad, which Devipuram calls his first initiation and has coming from the deity rather than from a man, and which his own account heads 1979 while other accounts of his life put it in 1977; Kamakhya telling him he would be a guru in her lineage; Saraswati telling him to carry the name.

A man who would go on to put initiation online described his own as arriving, in large part, without an intermediary. Whether that is the explanation or merely the pattern, this chapter cannot say.

Eleven years

The Putrevu brothers gave three acres in 1983 and asked him to build a temple to the Divine Mother. He bought the ten adjoining acres. The sixteen-day Maha Devi Yagna that his own writing treats as the beginning ran at Simhachalam from 27 April 1983 to the new moon of 12 May, with a hundred and eight officiants, and cost seventy thousand rupees against seventy-three thousand collected; the surplus went into the Trust. Devipuram treats the hillock meditation and the discovery of the Meru as a separate episode, dates it to the summer of 1983, and places it after the sixteen days and after the land had been acquired, when he was looking for a sign that he should start building. Mani Rao gives the same order.

Construction of the Meru temple began in 1985, on Devipuram’s Guruji page and on the account published under his own byline, although its Trust page says the temple was built over 1983 to 1994. He spent four years checking the geometry on the ground. The Khadgamala goddesses went in gradually between 1988 and 1994, each one sculpted to his specification: “As she revealed each goddess to me, I would translate those visions to the sculptor in words and drawings.” The consecration ran from 23 to 25 February 1994, ending on the Magha full moon.

The building is a hundred and eight feet square at the base and fifty-four feet high, in three storeys, and a visitor climbs inward and upward past more than a hundred life-sized images before reaching the sanctum. Devipuram’s biography page says “an area of 108 square feet,” a slip of wording that has propagated into other people’s reference works; its own temple page gives 108 by 108 by 54 feet, as do Mani Rao and The Hans India.

It is often said to be the first temple ever built as a walk-in Sri Meru. This chapter will not say it. Devipuram’s own claim is one of uniqueness rather than of priority, and it has made it on page after page: “the only three-dimensional Sri Chakra into which one can walk into” on its old Trust page, “the only Sri Yantra in the world that one can actually walk into” on the old temple page, “the only place in the world where you can physically enter a Sri Chakra” on the current one. A guest travel post on the Madhya Pradesh Tourism site describes the Shri Yantra Mandir at Amarkantak as built in the form of a Maha Meru Yantra, under construction since 1991 and still unfinished. Nobody this chapter could find has surveyed the field and pronounced on priority.

What was actually secret

The usual account of Devipuram’s openness runs that it published what the lineages had kept behind initiation. The texts named are the Nityotsava, Bhaskararaya’s Setubandha and the Parasurama Kalpasutra.

That account does not survive the printing record. The Setubandha was printed in the Anandashrama Sanskrit Series in 1908. The Parasurama Kalpasutra, with Rameshvara’s commentary, and the Nityotsava as its supplement volume, were edited by A. Mahadeva Sastri and published at Baroda in 1923 as numbers 22 and 23 of Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, a state-funded series under the Gaekwads. The Nityotsava reached a third edition in 1948 and a fourth in 1977; the Kalpasutra a second in 1950, and later editions from Sampurnananda Sanskrit University and Chaukhamba. These sat in research libraries for sixty years before anybody laid a brick at Devipuram.

What was scarce was never the text. He said so himself, in what his biographer calls a rare public defence of his practice against traditionalists who attacked it: “The main problem with books was that the soundtracks were not there.” Then, in the next breath: “Interactivity was not there. Now they are there, courtesy of the Web.” And, on the same question: “The wise must choose to speak; otherwise, the unwise shall have their way.”

A printed sutra does not tell you how a syllable is pronounced, when in the rite it falls, or who is permitted to say it. That is what initiation carried, and that is what he put online.

Somebody went and looked

Between 2021 and 2022 a scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies published a doctoral thesis and two peer-reviewed articles on a South Indian Sri Vidya temple complex where she had lived as both researcher and initiate. Monika Hirmer calls the place Shaktipur. She never names it, and a footnote to the 2022 article says why: she uses pseudonyms for the temple complex where she worked between 2014 and 2019, and for the practitioners in it.

This chapter takes Shaktipur to be Devipuram. That identification is the chapter’s, it goes against the choice its source deliberately made, and the reader should weigh both of those things. It is made because the details she publishes identify the place to anyone who reads them, and because a chapter that leaned on her findings while pretending not to know where they came from would be worse. It rests on six things she reports: a rural site in South India near the south-eastern coast; a complex built from the mid-1980s and consecrated in 1994; a founder referred to only as Guruji; a Kamakhya shrine on the grounds; the two rituals kalavahana and siri jyoti puja, a collective and simplified form of the nine-enclosure worship of the Sri Chakra, which are the two practices Devipuram names as its own and the second of which she says Guruji designed on the goddess’s instructions; and the Sri Chakra described by practitioners as “the genetic code of the cosmos,” which is Amritananda’s own phrase from his Understanding Sri Cakra Puja of 1998. No other site this chapter could find fits.

What she found, first, supports the institution. The temple’s official stance, she writes, “outspokenly rejects caste and gender barriers.” She writes that in the first half of a sentence whose second half qualifies it, and the qualification is below.

The central rite is kalavahana, the drawing of the kalas, which Mani Rao renders as the aspects of the goddess, into the body of the person receiving it. Anyone inside the lineage with the knowledge and the intention may receive it or perform it. She noticed a prevalence of women among the recipients; men are about a third of them and about a third of the ritual specialists. Across the two articles she describes four priestesses, under the same pseudonyms she uses for everything else: one near eighty and the founder’s first disciple, another initiated at twenty-three and now running a peetham, a seat of her own. The daily navavarana puja, the worship of the nine enclosures of the Sri Chakra, is conducted by a priestess. Her thesis abstract gives the doctrine behind that: female and male practitioners alike, she writes, access ultimate oneness and, becoming Devi, partake in primordial creativity.

A priestess conducting the daily worship disposes of a claim this chapter used to make. Devipuram does not do without priests. It has a priesthood, and what is unusual about it is who is in it.

What the same ethnography also says

Hirmer’s conclusion is not the one an admiring account would reach. In the abstract of the thesis the articles came out of, she argues that esoteric rituals at the site “ensure the auspicious unfolding of mainstream setups, rather than challenging them,” and that the Meru temple embodies a cosmic household in which practitioners emphasise women’s roles as housekeepers and mothers and men’s as their supporters. In a footnote to the 2021 article she adds that the temple is aligned with mainstream Brahminical values in prohibiting non-vegetarian food and alcohol, and in confining sexual activity to heterosexual marriage.

She also documents a retrenchment, and it runs the opposite way from the usual story. Recipients of kalavahana used to sit naked on the yoni in the Kamakhya shrine; men are now given a white dhoti, the wrapped cloth, and women a red tunic. Devipuram’s own page says robes are provided, though it gives a practical reason rather than a modest one, since the rite involves pouring water. The roughly sixty-centimetre linga in that shrine was moved to another shrine and replaced with a modest rounded elevation. Images from the Kamasutra were taken off the walls. The Lajjagauri is behind a curtain. The Amritakarshini has been dressed in a sari.

The older chapters of this volume said the temple’s sensuous iconography had attracted external protest. This chapter searched for a report, a complaint, a petition or a named objector, and found none. What this chapter could document against the iconography is pressure from inside: practitioners divided over the changes, some continuing the older practice quietly, and some leaving to found peethams of their own. The one external attack it found runs on a different axis. When he put mantras on the web, his biographer records, traditionalists attacked the practice fiercely, some of them saying the goddess would extract a price for it. Devipuram itself confirms the fragmentation from its own side, in a notice disclaiming programmes run in Guruji’s name and listing only two affiliated bodies.

The half with no count behind it

The Trust’s sentence makes two claims, about gender and about caste. The gender claim has external support, with one step in it: it rests on the same ethnographer under the same identification, and on the pseudonymous women she describes holding ritual office. Outside her work this chapter found no account at all of who holds ritual office at Devipuram.

No count was found. Hirmer reports the rule and not the roll. She writes that kalavahana “can be received independently of one’s gender and caste,” that for anyone in Guruji’s lineage with the knowledge and the intention “neither caste nor gender is a hindrance,” and once, in a parenthesis, that the adepts at the site are “of any caste.” That is a resident ethnographer’s impression of a composition she did not set out to measure, and this chapter found no other external evidence. Mani Rao does not mention caste, Brahmin or non-Brahmin status, or eligibility rules anywhere in her article. This chapter found no journalist who has counted. No survey, no itemised observation and no named non-Brahmin practitioner at Devipuram itself appears in any source this chapter could reach.

That is a gap in the record and not a finding about Devipuram. It is worth saying plainly, because the caste half of the claim is the half that carries the weight, and after four decades it rests on the institution’s own word and on one ethnographer’s unmeasured impression.

Rush, New York

The clearest documented case of the opening Devipuram claims to have made is not at Devipuram.

In October 1979, in Lusaka, where he was then professor of physics, Amritananda initiated a Sri Lankan Tamil named Wijayaharan, and his wife. Wijayaharan became Sri Chaitanyananda, and the temple he founded at Rush in upstate New York has been studied twice: by Corinne Dempsey in The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York, published by Oxford in 2006, and by P. Pratap Kumar in South Asian Diaspora in 2014. Dempsey, as her reviewer Eliza Kent summarises her, records that devotees are encouraged to participate fully regardless of caste, gender, age or place of national origin. Kumar records that the founder is neither Brahman nor Smarta, that most of his followers are not Brahmanical, that the inner sanctum is open to lay people, and that during his visit a woman led the midday ritual and women chanted the Lalita Sahasranama, which he notes is restricted to men in the Smarta tradition.

Dempsey should be read knowing that she took a mantra from the teacher she was studying. She does not hide it, and Kent’s review records it. Kumar makes no such disclosure and writes that he went to Rush to find explanations for Aiya’s authority rather than to experience it.

The structural break at Rush is sharper than anything documented in Andhra, because the man at the centre of it was not a Brahmin. The diaspora chapter returns to what travel did to this tradition. What belongs here is the order of events. The opening was made in Zambia, three years before there was a Trust and four before there was a Devipuram, by a man who had not yet founded anything.

What the record will carry

He died in October 2015, at eighty-one. One disciple site gives 10 October; Devipuram’s own pages give only the year, and no obituary in a named newspaper could be found. He was a householder to the end, and Devipuram still heads his page with his wife’s name beside his own.

Devipuram is not the most radical of the modern Sri Vidya institutions. That was never a measurable thing to be, and the one scholar this chapter could find who has lived at the site argues something close to the reverse. What it is, on the evidence, is explicit, and has been for a long time: an institution whose pages have said, through two generations of website, that this material should be open to anyone, and which has spent four decades finding out what saying that costs.

The question of who may be initiated is the oldest of the disputes this treatise has followed, and the mathas answer it differently. The next chapter follows the tradition out of India.

A printed book has no soundtrack. He spent his last thirty years supplying one, and the record of what that changed is still mostly in the institution’s own hands.