Kataragama God’s twelve-man Canopy
For millennia, the elusive Kataragama god has been honoured in diverse ways by His devotees and servants. One of these traditions–that of the kudai or royal umbrella, flourished in the last century. I know, because I was often one of the twelve pilgrims who assembled and carried His elephant-sized canopy.
Every evening during the waxing moon of Aesala (July-August), accompanied by His retinue of Rājakāriya servants and mounted upon His tusker, Swāmi (Kataragama Deviyo) emerges from His temple compound shortly after dark each evening to pay a short visit to Valli Amma in her residence situated a short distance away in a forest setting beside the gently flowing Menik Ganga.
Since ancient times, canopies or umbrellas have been the symbols of royalty. When he visited India in 1911, King George of England walked beneath a royal umbrella. The umbrella, carried by an attendant as an emblem of royalty, not only shaded the king from the sun, but also symbolized his power in procession, battle and the hunt.
The earliest Buddhist sculptures did not portray the person of the Buddha, but rather objects associated with him: an empty platform, a bodhi tree, a cobra or an honorific umbrella all signify his presence.
This kudai was cleaned and deployed annually by us (male Pāda Yātrā devotees) from the 1950’s when it was conceived, designed, built and donated by Jaffna devotees. The tradition was that only male Pāda Yātrā pilgrims (i.e. who had kept their vows to walk to Kataragama) may handle the heavy and unwieldy structure built of solid aluminium.
The Kataragama god’s canopy or kudai (literally, ‘umbrella’) had been designed, constructed and donated by Jaffna devotees in the 1950s, hundreds of whom also walked from Jaffna to Kataragama in the annual karai yāthirai or Pāda Yātrā. It consisted of eighteen solid aluminium bars screwed together to form six two-storey high poles that lofted the cross-bars along with the gaily embroidered canvas canopy itself.
Jaffna devotees embroidered sacred phrases on all four sides or directions, beckoning the Lord to ‘come’, while also reminding Tamil devotees that He is present always and everywhere.
By tradition, only male devotees who had walked the distance from Jaffna at least once were allowed to handle the elephant-sized canopy.
However humble their backgrounds, Kataragama Pāda Yātrā pilgrims, including the author, considered it a deep honour and privilege to walk beside the Lord bearing His marvelous canopy, while also bearing witness to His mysterious activities.
Until 1983, there were always plenty of male foot pilgrims from Jaffna who would only too gladly accept the honour of walking beside Swāmi and bearing His kudai. However, by the 1990s when there were hardly enough such men that even a foreign devotee, Patrick Harrigan, was needed to complement the twelve-man team, as seen in the above 1991 photo by Xavier Zimbardo. The kudai and its tradition have since been retired since it fell into disrepair in the 1990s and became more and more unstable and difficult to handle safely.
For more about the history of royal umbrellas, see: “In the Shade of the Royal Umbrella“.