MUMBAI, INDIA, June 15, 2007: As dusk falls on the corridors of one of the oldest temples in Matunga, chief priest M. V. Ganesh Shastry gently chides a youth squatting near him, “You haven’t got the intonation right. Chant it once more.” The 63-year-old Vedic practitioner warns the student that the holy chant becomes gibberish if an aksharam or letter is swallowed during the rendering. Perhaps it is this adherence to orthodoxy that has made Ganesh Shastry’s career soar–the poor brahmin from a remote Melattur village in Tamil Nadu is today a high-profile family priest. City-based brahmin priests have transformed the 7,000-year-old ritualistic Vedic tradition into a profitable service industry, catering to all classes of people.
Apart from performing rituals at temples, the priests move from one suburb to another through the day and perform pujas, havans and yagnas for a fee ranging from a few thousand rupees to heftier undisclosed amounts. “I would never have made it this big if I had stayed back in my village,” says Shastry sitting in his spacious three-bedroom apartment at Sion. Forty-six years ago, the priest left his village in Tamil Nadu which had nearly 400 brahmins eking out a living and burdened with a huge family responsibility. “I reached Bombay and slept at the entrance of this temple, which did not even have a proper roof,” he recalls. He began doing pujas at the Ram temple at Matunga.
There are around 200 Vedic priests from different parts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala who have settled down in Mumbai for the past three decades. They are affiliated to various temples and also carry out independent services according to the client’s needs. Ganesh Shastry recalls, “Initially I would go to people’s houses to perform religious ceremonies like the thread ceremony, shraadh, griha pravesh, and naming ceremony. It began as part-time freelance service, as I had to send money home.” His erudition in the Krishna Yejurveda proved beneficial to him. “Over 13 generations in my family have been learning the Vedas,” he says.