Woman Power and the Birth of Devipuram

(from "The Goddess and the Guru"):

 “My biggest problem at Devipuram has always been manpower,” Guruji explained. “Since this place was a jungle, far from the city, I could not convince anybody to come here—and really, it’s not fair to expect city people to leave everything and come here. But that is how I came to realize the potential of the local people. From the beginning, it was mainly ‘woman power’ that built and sustained this place.”

In many ways, in fact, woman power was Guruji’s greatest advantage. On the mundane level, the girls’ impoverished rural upbringings had, in real and quantifiable ways, made them smarter, more intuitive workers—trained by lifetimes of shortage and “making do,” they were highly skilled at finding novel, creative solutions to difficult problems in the absence of sufficient materials and resources.

On the spiritual level, growing up immersed in the Goddess-drenched folk practices of Andhra Pradesh led the women to accept the Tantric features of Devipuram’s temples as natural and unremarkable. Neither yonis nor lingams perturbed them in the least; they displayed a frank and organic bhakti, or devotion, free from the inhibitions and prudery sometimes displayed by more sophisticated, educated urban visitors.

“What takes us intellectuals a long time to get, these village girls got quite simply and easily,” Guruji said. “They knew how to go with the flow. They had no inhibitions or fear. What I was able to pay them was nothing compared to the service they offered; it was Devi herself who brought those gems here.” He treated them accordingly, with a level of respect and deference that they had almost certainly never experienced before in their lives.

“In the evening, after the day’s work was through, he would invite the girls to sit down, and he would wash their feet and do puja to their feet,” remembered Sundhara Arasaratnam, the Toronto management consultant, who spent time with Guruji at Devipuram during those formative days. “Guruji would say, ‘They are, each of them, embodiments of the Mother. It is the Devi herself who is helping me build these temples.’ When it came time to distribute wages, if he had 10 girls working there, he would bring pay for 11; they would each get a little extra. The bonus, according to Guruji, was for the invisible 11th worker, who was the Devi herself.”

Indeed, it was these young builders who gave the place its name by referring to the once-forlorn “Thicket of Thieves” as Devi Talligudi (“Goddess Shrine”), the local name for the ancient Kamakhya yoni. Devi Talligudi was subsequently Sanskritized to Devipuram (“The Goddess’s Abode”), the title it retains to this day.

Some of the women who contributed so much to building Devipuram can still be found worshiping there today, often with grown children and grandchildren in tow.