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KANCHEEPURAM, INDIA, Sunday 14, 2004: “I am going to remove you from the leadership of the Kanchi Math,” goes the letter purportedly written by an angry middle-aged man on August 30 this year and reproduced in a leading Tamil daily. “You are misusing your authority.” On September 3, four days after he supposedly shot off that letter, five men in the temple he managed attacked 52-year-old Sankara Raman. The stab wounds were deep and numerous and within 15 minutes he was dead.



Kanchi Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati, who is accused of masterminding the murder, will have to stay in Vellore prison at least until Wednesday, as his bail hearing was postponed on Saturday. The prosecution claims it has records of phone conversations between the assailants and the Shankaracharya before and after the murder. It claims that the Kanchi Math had withdrawn the currency notes seized from the alleged killers from a leading bank. The public prosecutor, while accepting he is a “believer” in the institution of the Shankaracharya, has described the 69th pontiff as “a most undeserving criminal.”



That may be a harsh way to speak of a man who once mediated on the Ayodhya dispute and saw himself – and not the Sangh Parivar – as the true custodian of Hindu interests, but one man who knew him for decades had repeatedly challenged his authority. The biggest crisis in the Math’s history may have its origins in an improbable and apparently mismatched rivalry.



Sankara Raman, now dead, may have argued that his association with the Kanchi Math went back as long as the Shankaracharya’s. His father Anantakrishnasharma had worked there for 60 years and was among the four men who walked from Kanchi to Kashi with the previous Shankaracharya, the late Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati. When his father died, Sankara Raman, a matriculate, was given the job. In his own mind, he was the watchdog who would make sure that the Math stayed true to its traditions. It was, perhaps, inevitable that he should clash with Jayendra, the man who would become an unconventional seer.



This article goes on to describe some of the incidents between Sankara Raman and the Math.

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