It was a midnight knock that opened the door to a devastating transformation of the divine. Rude awakening could not have been more dramatic as the highest guru of Hinduism opened his eyes to the intruders in uniform. And they were not there to seek his blessings. They invited him to a journey that would take him, the wandering monk who is revered as the embodiment of Vedic redemption, to a destination he had never imagined to be his. That was the cruellest night in the life of Sri Jayendra Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Kanchi. In mythology, it was Naraka Chaturdasi, the night the demon was slain and good triumphed over evil. In reality, it was the night the ascetic became the accused. Arrested from a town in Andhra Pradesh and flown to Tamil Nadu to be jailed in Vellore on charges of murder, the saint in saffron began another life: the central character in a crime story with the sacred and the political as subplots.

PICTURE SPEAK
THE SEER AND THE SAVAGED: Jayendra Saraswati being taken to a court in Kanchipuram after his arrest; the mutilated body of Sankararaman (right)

It opens with a murder in Kanchipuram on September 3. The killers, six of them, all young, came on three motorcycles-two Yamahas and a Hero Honda. They were looking for the manager of the Sri Varadaraja Swamy temple. When they reached his house, he was not there. Uma, his daughter, told them they would find him at the temple. Less than an hour later, she found the riders returning from the temple to she didn't know where. She also didn't know that at the moment her father lay dying on the temple premises. The killers left A. Sankararaman, his neck hacked, bleeding to death.

WHY SANKARARAMAN WAS KILLED    Tamil Nadu Police's list of reasons:

1 For questioning the authority of the Sri Kanchi Kamakoti Muth in managing its assets, including the sale of its lands. 2 For stalling the proposed visit of the Shankaracharya to China in 2001 as it is against muth traditions. 3 For exposing nepotism and financial malfeasance in the muth in the public eye through pseudonymous letters and petitions to authorities. 4 For complaining to the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Commissioner about the mismanagement of the Kanchi muth and appealing for its intervention to take over muth affairs.

With witnesses available to identify the killers and information that Sankararaman had enemies in the Sri Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, the seat of the Shankaracharya, the police began their search for clues in the 52-year-old victim's house itself. During their visit, before and after the funeral, they found several leaflets, pamphlets and letters exposing the muth (the monastery), written by Somasekhara Ganapadigal. On closer examination, it became clear that the author was Sankararaman himself.

His long association with the muth came to an end when he began to challenge the authority of Jayendra Saraswati, against whom he even filed a petition in the Madras High Court in 2001 asking it to restrain the monk from visiting China as Hindu scriptures forbade the Shankaracharyas from crossing the seas. An embarrassed Shankaracharya had to oblige. (Sankararaman would have approved if the Shankaracharya had walked all the way to Beijing.) And Sankararaman-a favourite of the previous Shankaracharya, Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, and whose father had once walked with the Paramacharya from Kanchipuram to Kashi-was denied access to the muth. But he continued his epistolary crusade against the muth and its highest custodian. His pseudonymous letters addressed to the influential followers of the sage highlighted "corruption" in the holy echelons.

PICTURE SPEAK
MURDER MOST FOUL: One of the accused in police custody (left); Sankararaman's wife and son

The Shankaracharya never reacted, and that is why the police initially suspected that one of his staunch supporters could have been behind the murder. Sketchy media reports reinforced their suspicion but they remained puzzled about who did it and why. By then, the chief investigating officer, Additional sp S.P. Sakthivelu, expanded his team to 29 while three district superintendents of police monitored an emerging sensational case. They remained clueless about the identity of the assailants until five men surrendered before a metropolitan magistrate in Chennai on September 27 claiming responsibility for the crime. Relieved that a baffling case was drawing to a close the police checked the past record of the five after they confessed to have been hired for a contract killing. One of them was in jail for an earlier offence on the day Sankararaman was killed. It was a fake surrender meant to sabotage the investigation.

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