Vishnu Desam

Vishnu is the all-pervading: the ancient Vedic glossary of Yaska, the Nirukta, reads the name as 'one who enters everywhere'. His worship is spread the length and breadth of Bharat rather than gathered in any one region — Narayana asleep upon the serpent, Hari the preserver of the created order, and the avatars who descend age after age whenever dharma falters, each served under a hundred names and forms. The Vishnu Purana, the tradition's own scripture, is the very text that names this land: the country that lies north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains is Bharata, it says, the land of works, from which men go to heaven or obtain liberation. The temples of this tradition trace exactly that span — Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

The crown of that geography is the 108 Divya Desams — 'divine places' — the abodes praised in the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the four thousand Tamil verses of the twelve Alvars, the poet-saints who carried Vaishnava devotion through the early medieval centuries and whose canon Nathamuni gathered as the Dravida Veda, a Veda in Tamil. A shrine enters that list in only one way: through mangalasasanam, an Alvar's sung benediction upon the deity of that place, and no temple has been added since the age of the saints. Of the 108, one hundred and six stand on earth and two beyond it — Tirupparkadal, the ocean of milk, and Paramapadam, Vaikuntha itself. Eighty-four of the earthly abodes lie in Tamil Nadu and eleven in Kerala; the rest run north through Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Gujarat to Muktinath in the Nepal Himalaya.

What the Alvars sang, the acharyas set in order. Ramanuja (traditionally 1017–1137), seated at Srirangam, gave Vishishtadvaita — qualified non-dualism — its classic statement in the Sri Bhashya, his commentary on the Brahma Sutras; Madhvacharya, who founded the Krishna Matha at Udupi in 1285, argued the unqualified difference of Dvaita; Vallabhacharya (1478–1530) taught Shuddhadvaita and set the service of Shrinathji on Govardhan at the heart of his Pushtimarg; and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534), who made Puri his home for his last two decades, turned devotion into sankirtana, the congregational singing of the Name. In Maharashtra the same current runs through the Warkari sant parampara — Sant Dnyaneshwar, whose Dnyaneshwari opened the Bhagavad Gita in Marathi, and after him Sant Namdev, Sant Eknath and Sant Tukaram — whose lakhs of pilgrims still walk each Ashadha to Vitthal at Pandharpur.

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