KALINGA — Land of my ancestors
Chapter 2: The Maṅgu-Nyāyapati Households
Every family carries two kinds of memory. One is written — a gotra recited at a wedding, a temple record, a copperplate somewhere in an archive we have not yet visited. The other is carried on the body — a mark on the shoulder, a name a grandmother would not let us forget, a height, a hunger. This chapter is about both kinds, and about what happens when they don't completely overlap cleanly. I am writing this as a record of our collective memory to be preserved for posterity — for the benefit of curious descendants like myself. I have tried to piece together a probable story based on what I know. Members of the family can provide more details that could make this story tighter, correct any errors, and help me build on this.
शङ्खचक्रे
Although coming from the Rāmānujācārya sampradaya, I did not receive the śaṅkha-cakra on my shoulders. My father's father did not have one, and did not pass it to my father, and so it did not come to me. But my mother's people, the Nyāyapati household, Kauṇḍinya gotra, Parlakimidi, kept it. Their children bore until recently, the physical marks of samāśrayaṇam: the conch and discus branded onto the shoulders by an ācārya's own hand, the formal act by which a Śrī Vaiṣṇava is initiated into Rāmānujācārya's sampradāya. My mother's grand parents and some family members also kept the ūrdhvapuṇḍra as daily practice, and, more than either of these, kept the living tradition of svāmis visiting the house to recite the Divya Prabandham, the Tamil hymnody of the Āḻvārs that sits beside the Sanskrit Veda as scriptural authority in our tradition. Ubhaya-vedānta, the "twin Vedānta" — this is not a phrase from a textbook in that house. It is what happens when a svāmi arrives. When my own parents passed away, we kept the tradition alive.
My own Maṅgu line, Bhāradvāja gotra, did not continue the branding, and I no longer think this was a discontinuity at all. I do not recall my tātagāru ever speaking to the sectarian question directly — that is not a memory I have, in either direction. What I do recall, with confidence, is narrower and comes from a specific setting: at wedding ceremonies, he would tell my mother that we are not Yajurvedis but Ṛgvedis. That is all. A small correction, offered at a specific ritual moment, about Veda-śākhā — not a sect, not a claim about Vaiṣṇava identity one way or the other. But small as it is, I think it is still telling. Sect and śākhā are different axes entirely; a family can be Ṛgvedī and Smārta, or Ṛgvedī and Śrī Vaiṣṇava, or Ṛgvedī and Mādhva. That the correction he thought worth making, at a wedding, was about the Veda and not the sampradāya, suggests which axis was live and operative for him in that setting. My mother's people, by contrast, never needed that kind of correction from anyone — their Śrī Vaiṣṇava identity announced itself, in the marks on their sons' shoulders and the svāmi at the door.
I think, then, that the Maṅgu line was most likely never formally initiated into Śrī Vaiṣṇavism at all, rather than having lapsed from it. I think it was, in all likelihood, ancient Ṛgvedī Smārta, and Śrī-Vaiṣṇava-adjacent — a household that lived inside Rāmānuja's world without ever crossing fully into it. I hold this as the most probable reading of the evidence I have, not as something my tātagāru told me outright.
There is one more piece of evidence, and it comes not from what my tātagāru said but from what his household actually did every year. Varalakṣmī Vratam was, and remains, a major festival in his family; a day of real importance, not a minor observance folded into a larger calendar. I want to be careful about what this can and cannot prove. Varalakṣmī Vratam is beloved across Andhra and Telangana broadly, in Vaiṣṇava and Smārta households alike, and I would be overreaching to call it a sectarian marker on its own. But its character is worth noticing all the same: it is a Purāṇic vrata, traced to the Skanda Purāṇa rather than to Āgama or Pāñcarātra injunction, performed by the women of the house at a kalaśam set up in the home rather than through temple liturgy, addressed to the Goddess in her own right as the giver of boons rather than routed through Viṣṇu as the household's iṣṭadevatā. That is, in shape, exactly the kind of devotional practice Smārta domestic religion is built from — home-centered, Purāṇa-rooted, open to whichever form of the divine a family has taken up, in the old Pañcāyatana spirit of honouring several gods without binding the household to one sectarian gateway. A strictly, formally Śrī Vaiṣṇava household does not stop keeping Viṣṇu and Lakṣmī together at the center of its worship, of course — but the particular prominence of an independent Devī-vrata, kept with real seriousness generation after generation, sits far more naturally inside a Smārta household's calendar than a Pāñcarātra-initiated one's. It is a small thing, on its own. Beside the wedding-day correction and the sixty registers of Akṣamālā, I think it belongs in the same column.
न्यायपति — the name and what it may carry
Nyāyapati. Nyāya-pati — master, or lord, of Nyāya. It is not a common kind of surname. Most Telugu Brahmin surnames I have traced — Maṅgu among them — resist easy etymology; they come down to us as place-names worn smooth, or occupational titles whose occupation is long forgotten. Nyāyapati is different. It names a discipline outright, and it does so with the honorific pati — not merely "one who knows Nyāya" but one who has mastery of it, is lord of it (as in the Nyāya darśana) . A family does not carry a name like that by accident. Somewhere in the depth of the line that became my mother's people, an ancestor was distinguished enough in the science of Nyāya that the distinction outlived him and became the family's name.
I want to sit with what that discipline actually was, because I think it matters for what kind of household my Nyāyapati ancestors were.
Nyāya — from ni + i, "to lead back," "to arrive at a conclusion" — is the darśana of right reasoning, founded by Gautama Akṣapāda in the sūtras that bear his name. It is not philosophy in the sense of speculation; it is philosophy as method. Its whole concern is pramāṇa — the valid means by which a claim can be known to be true rather than merely asserted: pratyakṣa (perception), anumāna (inference), upamāna (analogy), śabda (testimony). Nyāya gave classical India its formal logic — the five-membered syllogism, thesis through conclusion — and its rigor was forged, over centuries, in direct combat with the Buddhist logicians Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. A Naiyāyika was, by vocation, someone whose job was to not let an argument get away with being merely plausible.
In the thirteenth century this old Nyāya was made new. Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya of Mithilā wrote the Tattvacintāmaṇi and, without quite meaning to found a school, founded Navya-Nyāya — the New Logic — an apparatus of such precision that, in the words of one modern historian of the system, the whole of India spontaneously accepted this technique as the instrument par excellence for expressing any subtle idea in any branch of Sanskrit learning. From Mithilā it travelled to Navadvīpa in Bengal under Vāsudeva Sārvabhauma and his student Raghunātha Śiromaṇi, and from Navadvīpa — this is the part I did not expect to find — it travelled south. By some point after the sixteenth century it is explicitly recorded as reaching Madras. And Kaliṅga — my own Kaliṅga, the land this whole essay is about — carries, independently, a real and separate reputation as a serious center of Navya-Nyāya scholarship in its own right, with an institutional lineage at Puri that has not yet broken.
I cannot yet prove that my Nyāyapati ancestors sat inside that Puri-adjacent tradition, or that their mastery was Navya-Nyāya rather than the older school. That thread is still loose. But I can say this much without overreaching: a family who named themselves after Nyāya, in a region where Nyāya — old and new — was genuinely alive, were not merely pious. They were disciplined thinkers. And they were the family that carried samāśrayaṇam, the Divya Prabandham, the whole formal apparatus of Śrī Vaiṣṇava initiation, through to my own generation's living memory — while my own paternal line, by every sign I can now read, never took that step at all. I find something fitting in that. A family devoted to pramāṇa — to the discipline of not believing something merely because it is convenient to believe — is also the family that kept the marks of initiation, rather than merely the sentiment of it.
अक्षमाला — my tātagāru's own answer
My own tātagāru — Śrī Maṅgu Koneti Rāo, the very man whose one-line correction to my mother at weddings anchors this whole chapter — had already, in his own hand, answered the question I have spent this essay circling. He was not merely a Ṛgvedī who mentioned his śākhā in passing. He was a Vedāntin who spent more than thirty years of his retired life building a book.
He was born in 1905, graduated from Mahārāja's College, Vizianagaram, with Sanskrit as his second language, and joined Andhra Pradesh Government Service, retiring on superannuation in 1960. He settled at Viśākhapaṭnam, and it was there, in retirement, that he did the real work of his life. In his own words, prefacing what he called Akṣamālā — vedānta śabdārtha ratnamāla, a jewel-garland of word-meanings for Vedānta — he explains why: the technical words and phrases scattered across the Upaniṣads, the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, the Brahma Sūtras, the Nārada Bhakti Sūtras, and the Purāṇas do not all appear in ordinary dictionaries, and where they do, only a word-for-word gloss is given, so that the inner meaning is not brought out fully. The commentaries — of Śaṅkarācārya, of Rāmānujācārya, and others — explain these words properly, but no single place gathered them together. So he decided to do it himself: collect the words, arrange them alphabetically, and set beside each one an extract from the commentaries, with the source cited wherever he could manage it. To my knowledge, he wrote, no one has attempted a work of this kind so far.
He was not exaggerating the labour. He copied the entire manuscript by hand into some sixty ruled foolscap registers, two hundred pages each, using only one side of the page — a working method, I suspect, meant to leave room for correction and addition as the project grew, which it evidently did, since a small early portion of it had already appeared serially, years before, in a Telugu monthly called Divya Jīvanam, edited by Śrī N.S.V. Rāo, principal of a polytechnic in Tanuku, until that journal ceased publication and my tātagāru simply kept going on his own, at his own scale, for decades more.
What strikes me most, reading the surviving structure of the work now, is not just its size but its evenhandedness. Alongside his treatment of Bādarāyaṇa, the traditional author of the Brahma Sūtras, he set out expositions of Śaṅkara's Advaita, Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita, and Madhva's Dvaita side by side, each given its own careful, sympathetic hearing — Śaṅkara's Brahma Satyam Jagan Mithyā, Rāmānuja's Brahman as a Personal God with attributes, Saviśeṣa Brahman, set out in turn. This is not the method of a man writing from inside one sampradāya to defend it against the others. It is the method of a Smārta Vedāntin, surveying the whole field of Vedānta with equal seriousness given to each of its great commentators — which is, I now think, the clearest evidence I will ever find for the very claim this essay has been building toward by inference alone. He did not need to tell my mother, at a wedding, that we were Śrī Vaiṣṇava or that we were not. He had already spent thirty years showing, in sixty handwritten registers, that he belonged to the whole tradition rather than to one sect within it — and that the small correction he did think worth making, Ṛgvedi, not Yajurvedi, was exactly and only the correction a man in that position would think worth making. Everything else about where we stood, he must have felt, spoke for itself.
चतुर्गोत्रम् — four gotras, one neighborhood
The family chart my elders drew, and which I have only now begun to read properly, shows four root households, each a different gotra, all clustered in the same narrow world of Parlakimidi and Srikakulam:
- Maṅgu, Bhāradvāja gotra — my father's line, Parlakimidi
- Gāḍe, Hārītasa gotra — Parlakimidi
- Nyāyapati, Kauṇḍinya gotra — my mother's line, Parlakimidi
- Maṅgu, Bhārgavasu gotra — a second, unrelated Maṅgu household, Srikakulam
That is the real shape of the marriage network the chart preserves: Maṅgu, Gāḍe, Nyāyapati, and the second Maṅgu, circling the same handful of villages, marrying in and out of each other for generations, until the lines converge — through Koneti Rāo and Subhadrā (Tātagāru, Māmmagāru to the grandchildren), through Śrīnivāsa Rāo whom everyone still calls Kakka, and Subhadrā who is Ammamma — down to names I know personally: my father, Jogarao, the second Śrīnivāsa Rāo, and finally Lakshmi and Prem.
शासकाः — four hundred years under other banners
None of this happened in a vacuum, and before it happened, there was a simpler picture. Before Rāmānuja, this whole tract was Telugu Smārta — undifferentiated, following Śaṅkara's Advaita, with no Śrī Vaiṣṇava sect yet existing to belong to or not belong to. I have already written, in the first chapter of this essay, of Anantavarman Choḍagaṅga Deva, the Eastern Gaṅga king who built the Jagannātha temple at Puri and who tradition says turned from Śaivism to Śrī Vaiṣṇavism under Rāmānujācārya's own influence, ruling from Mukhaliṅgam, a few miles from where Srikakulam stands today. Whether that meeting between king and ācārya happened exactly as the tradition tells it, I hold loosely — hagiography and history are not the same instrument, and I do not want to claim more certainty than the copperplates themselves will bear. But the region's turn toward Viśiṣṭādvaita and Śrī Vaiṣṇava practice from that century onward is not in doubt, and it did not happen as a single clean conversion. It happened as a current — a theology, a temple culture, a devotional world that a great many Smārta households in Kaliṅga stepped into, to varying depths, over the centuries that followed.
Some households stepped all the way in. They took samāśrayaṇam, bore the śaṅkha-cakra, became formally, sectarially Śrī Vaiṣṇava — my mother's Nyāyapati among them. Others — and I now believe my own Maṅgu line among them — followed the theology, honoured the ācāryas, and, crucially, married freely into the initiated households, without ever themselves crossing the threshold of formal initiation. This is not a contradiction; it is how a shared religious world actually works at the level of real families. A Ṛgvedī Smārta household marrying its sons and daughters into Kauṇḍinya Nyāyapatis and Hārītasa Gāḍes for generations does not remain untouched by their practice — it absorbs the temple calendar, the svāmi's visits, even, eventually, something of the namam — while never itself taking the mark. That, I think, is the most likely sense behind the small correction — Ṛgvedi, not Yajurvedi — my tātagāru would make at weddings: not a rejection of Śrī Vaiṣṇavism, which he never spoke of one way or the other in my hearing, but the plain fact of a household that lived beside it, related to it by marriage a dozen times over, without formally becoming it.
That religious settlement was already old by the time the ground beneath it changed hands— Smārta households and Śrī Vaiṣṇava households, intermarrying freely across one social world. In 1571, in the reign of Ibrāhīm Quṭb Shāh, the Qutb Shahi sultanate of Golconda absorbed the Chicacole tract, Srikakulam included, into its territory. What followed, across the seventeenth century, was not simple oppression and not simple opportunity, but something more particular: a Brahmin administrative class, layered onto a sectarian landscape that had already settled generations earlier, staffing the new state's revenue machinery. Deshastha Brahmins held the senior posts; at the village level, Karaṇams, accountants, record-keepers, were drawn from a community that came to be called, and still calls itself, Golconda Vyāpari. The name means "trader," though the actual documented work was administrative, not mercantileone of those historical puzzles I have not fully solved. What the record does confirm is that Golconda Vyāparis were Vaiṣṇava, Mādhva and Śrī Vaiṣṇava both — and, tellingly, closely intermarried with Deshastha Brahmins, who are themselves overwhelmingly Smārta. My own reading now is that the "vyāpari" overlay arrived on top of a Ṛgvedī Smārta household that was already centuries deep into its Śrī-Vaiṣṇava-adjacent, never-quite-initiated position. The British administration that followed, and the whole colonial-era revenue apparatus after it, only extended the same arrangement further. The vyāpari identity, in other words, was never a change of faith at any point along this chain. It was a change of occupation, laid over a sectarian position that had already been settled, and left unmoved, long before Golconda ever entered the story.
That the administrative thread ran unbroken to the very end of it is not speculation in my own family's case. My tātagāru himself joined Andhra Pradesh Government Service and retired on superannuation in 1960, the last working generation of a line that had been, in one form or another, in government service since the Qutb Shahis first built the machinery that a Ṛgvedī Smārta household like ours found its place inside, four centuries earlier. It was only in retirement, freed from that service, that he turned to Akṣamālā — as if the administrative obligation the family had carried since Golconda had first to end before the older, prior obligation, the one to the Vedānta itself, could finally be taken up in full.
The clearest surviving voice from inside that world is not from my own family, but I think of it as their contemporary all the same. In 1683, Akkanna,one of the two Brahmin ministers who, by then, effectively ran the Qutb Shahi state under its last sultan, sat across from a Dutch East India Company official named Michiel Janszoon and told him, plainly, which government he thought served the country better: ours, he said, being wholeheartedly devoted to the country's welfare, unlike the Muslims, who sought foreign lands only for wealth or for what they held holy. It is a startling sentence to find preserved in a Dutch archive — a Telugu Brahmin administrator, deep inside an Islamicate state, drawing that distinction to a European trader's face. I do not know if any Maṅgu or Nyāyapati ancestor ever stood where Akkanna stood. But they lived in the world his sentence describes, and I think that sentence is worth more than any amount of my own speculation about what it might have felt like to be a Brahmin official under the Qutb Shahis. Akkanna simply tells us.
Four years after Akkanna spoke those words, the Qutb Shahi state itself was gone, folded into Aurangzeb's Mughal empire. Ganjam and its Brahmin administrators went on serving whoever held the revenue seat next — Mughal, then Nizam, then, from the 1750s, the French and the British by turns, until 1817 brought the ryotwari settlement to the Chicacole tract and the Ganjam plains, and a new and much colder arithmetic arrived: revenue fixed at half of a field's estimated produce, owed to the government whether the harvest failed or not.
शरीरम् एव साक्षी — the body as witness
I come now to the part of this chapter that is not archival at all, and that I trust more than any document I have cited above.
Until my grandfather's generation, the food in our house was thin. Rice, caru, pacaḍi, majjiga — a broth, a relish, a buttermilk. Not the variety of pappulu and kūralu that a fertile coastal district ought to have put on a table. My grandfather's generation was short. They were, by any honest word for it, not well nourished. And in two generations, not many, two, the men of this family grew to nealry six feet. That is not a small change. That is a body remembering an economy.
I have gone looking for the reasons, and I have found real ones, though I want to be honest that I cannot yet prove which of them, in which proportion, produced my own grandfather's plate of food. Qutb Shahi revenue-farming, where a governor bought his post at auction and had to squeeze the villages under him hard enough to cover the price of the bid and the punishment for failing to pay it. Ryotwari assessment from 1817 onward, fixed at half the crop, collected in drought as in plenty, revised only upward across a hundred years. Either mechanism, sustained across generations, is entirely sufficient to explain a family eating at the floor of what a fertile region could offer, regardless of what caste or land or office that family held — because a Brahmin household's table depends, in the end, on the same rice fields as everyone else's.
I have also gone looking for the number that everyone repeats, that a hundred years ago, an Indian child was born into a life expectancy of about twenty-two years, and I want to correct my own memory of it here, because the more precise fact is, I think, more useful than the round one. India's life expectancy did not sit at twenty-two as a steady baseline. It fell to figures near that, twice, in sharp crisis years: 1900, when bubonic plague swept the subcontinent, and 1918, when influenza, the same pandemic that circled the whole world that year, killed an estimated ten to twenty million people in India alone, more than in any other country on earth, concentrated with a terrible particularity among people twenty to forty years old, the parents of young children. Outside those two crises, life expectancy was still low, but not that low. What this means for my own family's memory is that we carried two burdens, not one, and they were different in kind: a slow, structural hunger, built by centuries of revenue extraction and pressing down on ordinary meals decade after decade — and, laid across that same generation, the sudden catastrophic mortality of plague and influenza, arriving and receding like weather. My grandfather's generation was small in stature and it was a generation that had watched people die of things a fed and rested body might have survived. Both of those are true. Neither one erases the other.
And then it changed. Two generations. Six feet.
I do not think that is a story about genetics. I think it is a story about the twentieth century finally, unevenly, breaking a much older arithmetic — the same arithmetic that runs underneath every zamindari record and every ryotwari patta I have cited above. And I think a family's height is, in its own way, exactly the kind of evidence my Nyāyapati ancestors would have respected. Not śabda, not testimony repeated on faith, but something closer to pratyakṣa — direct perception, plain to see, standing in the room.
इति
I began this chapter with a mark I do not carry and a name I did carry without fully understanding it. I end it having found something I did not expect to find at all: that the man behind both, the tātagāru whose wedding-time correction opened this essay, had already, in sixty handwritten registers, told me everything the rest of this chapter has had to reconstruct by inference. Ṛgvedī Smārta roots, Śrī-Vaiṣṇava-adjacent, a household that lived beside Rāmānuja's world without formally entering it: that is not only my best reading of a remark about the Veda made at weddings. It is the plain shape of a life spent giving Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja and Madhva equal room on the same page, in service to no sect but to Vedānta itself. The śaṅkha-cakra on my mother's people's shoulders, the discipline folded into "Nyāyapati," and the sixty registers of Akṣamālā all point toward the same inheritance in the end: a family, on both sides, that took proof seriously — in ritual, in reasoning, and in patient, decades-long scholarship. My own task, I think — the Maṅgu line, which never took the mark but kept the marriage ties, kept the region, and kept, without my knowing it until now, an actual finished work of Vedāntic scholarship in the family — is to go and find what is still findable of the rest. A maṭha register. A copperplate. A village name under Parvatipuram taluk that some archive in Rajahmundry or Bhubaneswar still holds.
Until then, this is what I have: four gotras, one neighborhood, maybe traces of an ancient Smārta household standing, most likely, at the edge of Rāmānuja's world for four centuries without quite entering it, four hundred years of other people's banners flying over our fields, a name that means "master of reasoning," a shoulder, not my own, that once bore the mark to prove it — and, waiting the whole time in sixty ruled foolscap registers, my own tātagāru's answer to the very question I learned, that he had already spent thirty years answering.
Chapter 3, when it comes, will go looking for the maṭha.
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