Agastya Muni
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Migrates to Pothigai mountains in the South
Vithal C Nadkarni, July 3, 2019: The Times of India
Back in 1918, with characteristic foresight, Gandhiji, for instance, established the Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha in Chennai. Languages had been crossing the Vindhyas over millennia. Migration and spread of new cultures enriched south Indian tongues immeasurably. Sage Agasthya is a stellar exemplar of such exchanges.
The Thirumanthiram describes Agasthya as a Vedic sage who came from the north and settled in the Pothigai mountains because Shiva asked him to do so. He is the rishi who perfected and loved both Sanskrit and Tamil languages, amassing knowledge in both, thus becoming a symbol of integration, harmony and learning rather than being opposed to either.
The Skanda Purana has a more humorous take. The whole world visits the Himalayas when Shiva is about to wed Parvati. This causes the Earth to tilt to one side. To restore the balance, Shiva requests Agasthya to go southwards: The short and heavily-built sage was uniquely capable of balancing the might of Shiva, combined with the weight of Kailasha and Mount Meru! Elsewhere, Agasthya drinks up the oceans of the world to expose the demons hiding underwater. During his peregrinations, he also stops the Vindhya mountain from growing merely by pressing it down with his toe. Apart from being a huge compliment to his gravitas, the story is also an allegory to linguistic prowess: No barrier is too high or too deep for she who is symbolised as the Goddess Vac.
Feminine power also plays a pivotal role in Agasthya’s life. Lopamudra, his wife, is a beauty sans pareil. Her name signifies the loss (lopa) that animals and plants endured by giving their stunning features (mudra) when Agasthya created her somewhat like Pygmalion in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But unlike the Cypriot sculptor’s ivory mannequin, Lopamudra is animated with a divine spark. This makes her a rishika in her own right with several verses to her credit in the Rig Veda.
Left to his own devices, Agasthya might have lived on without matrimony or progeny. But he gets a dream in which his ancestors hang by their feet into an infernal abyss and beseech him to fulfil his filial and social obligations. He marries but does not cohabit with his enchanting spouse. At long last, she brings him to his senses with a celebrated sermon that is now used in nuptials today.
Nor is she willing to put up with self-created poverty. Forced out of his austerity, the poetic harmoniser of languages is impelled to become a zillionaire by winning the demonic Ilvala’s treasures with his prodigious powers of ingestion and digestion.
Ultimately, the Agasthya-Lopamudra parable is a paean to dharma, the higher life that flows from kama, balancing love with work or artha, the search for meaning. In the Mahabharata, Dharma/ Yaksha asks, “How can the three perpetual opposites be made to unite in one place?” Yudhishtira’s answer is reminiscent of our three-language formula: “When Dharma and a wife submit to each other, then all the three unite!”
