Chilkur Archaka calls for grand Vyasa Pournami celebrations in fishermen communities

Hyderabad: Chilkur Balaji temple chief priest C S Rangarajan has issued an appeal supporting the grand celebrations of Vyasa Pournami or Guru Pournami on July 13 being organised by fishermen communities in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

The Fishermen community claims that they are the descendents of Satyavathy, the mother of sage Veda Vyasa and the great grandmother of Pandavas and Kauravas of the Mahabharata. According to the epic, Satyavathy, the attractive daughter of a fisherman, had her son Veda Vyasa from a sage Parasara Maharshi.

Later when King Shantanu desired to marry Satyavathy, her father agreed on condition that their children should inherit the throne of Hastinapura. Accordingly, after his death of King Shantanu, Satyavathy ruled Hastinapura along with her sons Chitrangada and Vichitravirya.

The identity of fishermen clan with the Great sage Veda vyasa who belonged to the same clan, the call was given by Chilkur Balaji Temple to educate and revive the grand celebrations of Vyasa Jayanthi on July 13, a press release said on Monday. Apart from Matsyakara Samkshema Samithi, different organisations from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have chalked out programs on July 13 to celebrate Guru Pournami on a grand scale.

In 2018 Chilkur Balaji Temple had conceptualised the Munivahana Utsavam to show that our Sanatana Dharma does not discriminate among elevated and downtrodden strata in our society. It was nearly 2700 years ago that Tiruppanalwar, born in a ‘lower caste’, was carried from the banks of the river Cauvery into the Srirangam Ranganatha Swamy temple by a priest, which was hailed then as ‘Munivahana Utsavam’. In the present circumstances when discrimination in the name of caste and class had become rampant, the same scene was enacted in 2018 at Hyderabad, where C.S. Rangarajan, the priest at the famed Chilkur Balaji temple, carried a Dalit devotee Aditya Parasri into the Ranganatha Swamy temple in Jiyaguda amid fanfare.

“The idea is to show that Sanatana Dharma treated everyone as equal before God and the so-called discrimination crept into the system in the recent times,” sayd r Rangarajan.