TIRUPATI: Tirumala is the kind of sacred place where kings and queens think nothing of divesting themselves of all their ornaments and offering them to Lord Venkateswara.
Literature is replete with lore of Pallava queens and Vijayanagara kings making grand donations. But the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) has no record of it.
Executive officer I Y R Krishna Rao admitted as much on Thursday. There is no information in any of its different ornament registers, including the Tiruvabharanam Register, specifying that one Krishna Deva Raya dropped all jewellery on his person into the hundi of the Lord 500 years ago.
Addressing a media conference, Krishna Rao said since the time of the Pallava queen Samavai, the temple has kept no records of who gave what. All ornaments placed at the feet of the Lord are treated alike. “It is rather unfortunate that there was no segregation of ornaments with antique value,’’ he admitted.
It is said that in 1953, the gold once donated by the Raya was used to gold plate the Ananda Nilayam.
The TTD Board Resolution of 20/3/1953 records the bald fact that 20 gold ornaments were melted for use in the gold plating work. It doesn’t say whether those ornaments were once the Raya’s.
Krishna Rao reacted sharply to reports in the media that jewels donated by the Vijayanagara emperor were missing.
He said the records only say that a gold crown donated by Srikrishna Devaraya in 1513 was used, during the time when the temple was under the administration of mahants, to make a new crown for the deity with the addition of some more gold to it. This was handed over to the TTD in 1945.
Krishna Rao said he was disappointed with the lack of antique records himself.
“Twenty days ago, I held a meeting with my colleagues to discuss the possibility of organising a photo exhibition of the Lord’s gold ornaments. I came to know then that there was no recorded evidence of the names of donors. The ornaments were never segregated. It was the archakas who took care of the ornaments in those days and after them it was the mahants. Any registration of the ornaments began only in the 1930s. The Tiruvabharan Register came into existence in 1953.’’ The executive officer said he would set up a committee of archaeologists and TTD officials to study the temple’s inscriptions to identify the ornaments and their donors.
“However, since the issue of ornaments is still in court, I am at no liberty to give any more details of the existing ornaments, but can only assure that every ornament is accounted for in the records,’’ he explained.
Krishna Rao said the literary references to ornaments purportedly donated by Krishna Deva Raya are only based on inscriptions and not visual verification.
He pointed out that there were historical records that some of the ornaments donated by the Raya, who last visited the temple in 1521, had gone missing in 1523.
At that time some priests’ houses were confiscated.