35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘I AM ALWAYS WITH YOU’
small, relatively prosperous South Indian village where life had
changed little in seven hundred years.
In those days Puttaparthi started as yet another unplanned,
cluttered community, but rapidly became something more as you
drove in through the dust, something you hadn’t seen before. After
eight hours of careering through rural eastern Karnataka and southwestern
Andhra Pradesh, I felt I’d seen all there was to see, which
had not amounted to much. But Puttaparthi, where this road
literally ended, more than fulfilled my expectations for the home of
a great holy man.
Cupped in the muscular brown palm of black-capped mountains
– mountains whose peaks were burned, as legend had it, by the
monkey god Hanuman’s blazing tail as he flew down to Lanka to
do battle with the demon king, Ravana – the village had an elegance
about it that reminded me of some unspoilt spot in the Greek islands.
Everywhere were whitewashed mud-brick houses, many boasting
the novelty of terracotta-tiled roofs and neat, cool courtyards. The
broad Chitravati River flowed past these dwellings, its waters
swollen deep and heavy that September, a month or so after
monsoon season, a tide of liquid turquoise beneath an enormous
blue sky, a sky more exposing than sheltering.
In the centre of it all, the ashram: an enclosure surrounded by
thick twenty-foot high walls that contained a domed temple made
of sculptured concrete as ornate as a gigantic wedding cake. This
extravaganza of Dravidian rococo was offset by banks of three-storey
buildings that would not have looked out of place in Warsaw. Yet
the temple’s riotous opulence somehow granted them respite from
this blast of industrial ugliness, as did the magnesium flares of fierce
sunshine that flashed red from their whitewashed walls and made
them at times seem like monoliths carved from solid light. There
was more than enough beauty to go around here. Immaculate
combed ochre sand filled the spaces between these structures and
their temple hub, holding tall, majestic palms that stood like wild
sentries, flailing their arms, turning their heads to see who came,
who went.
Immediately outside the ashram walls, lining the dust road we
drove along, was a strip of ad hoc bamboo lean-tos of varying
39