Tirupati god was originally offered pongal. North Indian pilgrims brought laddus

Tirumala was once a minor shrine with only local devotees. It grew as an investment destination for Vijayanagara elites in the 16th century.

About 3.5 lakh laddus are prepared at Tirupati's Tirumala shrine each day | Representational image | Commons

The laddu is synonymous with the great temple complex of Tirumala-Tirupati. It is hard to imagine a visit to the hill without, at some point, queueing up to get a laddu. The offering and consumption of such prasadam, believed to embody both human devotion and divine grace, is perhaps one of Hinduism’s most common practices today.

However, the evolution of prasadam in Tirupati took some interesting detours: sectarian competition, wars between Hindu rulers, and evolving trade. In the process, Tirupati’s prasadam transformed from a simple gruel of ghee and rice to a savoury pongal accompanied by vegetable curries—and finally, to the sweet, heavy laddu.

The origins of Tirumala-Tirupati

For at least the last two thousand years, the Venkata hill has marked the frontier of the Tamil and Telugu cultural zones. In the hill’s vast history, it’s relatively recent—around the 9th-10th centuries CE—that it became sacred to Vishnu as Venkateswara, literally “Lord of Venkata.” The earliest mentions of the god are from Tiruchanur, once a Brahmin-ruled village in present-day Tirupati, at the foot of the mist-wreathed hill. The only offerings made to Venkateswara were ablutions of water and lamps filled with pungent sheep’s ghee.

However, things began to change with the rise of Chola power further south, in the Kaveri floodplain. From the 11th century, the Cholas unleashed conquests across southern India and lavished Tamil temples with captured war loot, leading to innovations in ritual practices: the procession of bronze idols, the institution of calendrical festivals. The dynasty’s imperial temples, named after their kings, were the prime beneficiaries, but existing local shrines also received a cut, often from local notables or military officers who worked for the Cholas. Tirumala was no exception. By the early 11th century, temple inscriptions first mentioned its processional bronzes and a ritual calendar of just seven days. So, how did the temple grow to its current status, with offerings and rituals and processions year-round?

Interestingly, the first moves in this direction were due to a decline in Chola power in the 12th century. During this time, a wealthy class of landlords, while undermining the Chola state, lavished donations on local shrines. Gradually, Venkateswara acquired lands in various villages and a modest treasury of gold and jewels. He began to receive offerings of rice, ghee, and curd. As money flowed, innovative religious movements, such as the Sri Vaishnava order, opened temple activities to new groups of people. Tirumala was particularly successful for Sri Vaishnava Brahmins, who moved there and formed an alliance with a clan of shepherds-turned-warlords called the Yadava-rayar. (These Tamil and Telugu-speaking Yadavas shouldn’t be confused with the North Indian Yadavs.)

The Yadava-rayars lavished Venkateswara with new offerings: honey, betel, vegetable sambar, turmeric, sugar, and sandalwood. They even built a palace in Tirumala, where they boasted of their conquests. By the 13th century Venkateswara’s shrine was well-off but still modest by Tamil standards. However, a tremendous geopolitical change would soon transform the fortunes of Tirumala.

Vijayanagara’s investments

In the early 1300s, most of South India’s regional kingdoms collapsed under the onslaught of the Delhi Sultanate. This allowed new transregional polities to develop: the Bahmani Sultanate in the northern Deccan and the Vijayanagara Empire in the deep south.

Vijayanagara ruled over vast, diverse cultural zones: Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil, each with its own proud traditions. To unify these regions, major regional gods were given new temples in the capital, Vijayanagara city. Additionally, Vijayanagara strategically patronised older local shrines. For example, the Chenchu Adivasis of the Eastern Ghats came to believe they were in-laws of the popular Vijayanagara god Narasimha, thanks to Vijayanagara temple construction in Chenchu lands. Similarly, Venkateswara was deemed suitable for Vijayanagara’s imperial designs. As noted above, the god’s Venkata hill straddled the Telugu and Tamil regions. Vijayanagara’s warrior class mostly spoke Telugu, and their relationship with Tamil elites was turbulent. Devotion to Venkateswara gave both groups a common cause.

And so, from the 1400s to the early 1600s, the temple of Venkateswara rapidly became the richest temple in all of South India. From 1510 to 1570, Vijayanagara’s royalty and courtiers lavished the god with 8,05,653 gold coins, along with vast swathes of land and hundreds of cows and bulls. Some Vijayanagara emperors seemed to believe that the god assisted them in war. Krishna Raya of Vijayanagara (r. 1509–1529), for example, visited the temple after devastating the territory of his rival, Pratapa Rudra, the Hindu king of Odisha.

Gifts to the temple were meant to be invested, and the accrued interest was spent on offerings. The most important offering was a luxuriant pongal, based on the cuisine of Tirumala’s Sri Vaishnava Brahmins: rice and lentils cooked with generous amounts of ghee and pepper. Alongside these offerings, Tirumala’s ritual calendar ballooned, with multiple services not only for the god in the main temple but also for bronze idols of Venkateswara, his consorts, and other forms of Vishnu. Every day, every year, came to be filled with more and more ritual services. The temple complex transformed into a warren of kitchens, treasuries, tanks, shrines, and imposing gateways. This was the heyday of Tirumala, when it took on the form it retains today.

The origins of today’s prasadam

The Vijayanagara court was Tirumala’s primary patron, but it was not the only patron. In fact, the temple’s officials—mostly Brahmins—also considered it an investment destination, and donated both land and gold. In the 1500s, 43 percent of the temple’s 115 villages were gifted to it by various accountants, vendors, officers, and scholars. The temple treasury office, the Sri-Bhandaram, handled these gifts and investments, as well as the making and offering of prasadam. Surprisingly, however, barely any of this was distributed freely to pilgrims. Instead, according to Dr Thimmappa Valmiki, a historian of Tirumala, prasadam was mostly given to temple donors and Brahmins. After the death of the donors, the food went to various Sri Vaishnava institutions. In some cases, donors obtained permission from the temple to sell prasadam to pilgrims for cash. This was perhaps the beginning of Tirumala’s pilgrim prasadam tradition.

With the final end of Vijayanagara power in the 17th century, Tirumala lost some of its pre-eminence but not all. Though no longer a major political centre, it still received pilgrims. Various early modern Nawabs profited from taxing them. It was only under British rule in the 20th century that substantial numbers of North Indian pilgrims began arriving in Tirumala, leading to the god being named “Balaji”, and introducing the practice of laddu-making. It was in the 1940s that laddus became the primary prasadam of Venkateswara. This primacy has sparked considerable furore in the past week. Following reports that Tirumala laddus were cooked with animal fat, some politicians have melodramatically proclaimed this to be a “stain on the Hindu race,” and social media has erupted in vitriol.

But Venkateswara’s prasadam is much more than the laddu. It opens a window into centuries of cultural and religious evolution in South India, and shows how the Tirumala site developed through a confluence of imperial interests and Brahmin cultures. When it first rose to eminence, Tirumala was an elite enterprise, explaining its focus on ritual purity; yet in the centuries that followed, its appeal has spread to many sections of society, many kinds of devotees, many cultures, many diets.

The focus on ritual purity in the supposed prasadam scam is a political gimmick, exploiting sentiments in the name of a supposed affront to the god. But Tirumala’s history is vaster than short-sighted communalism.

Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.

This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.

(Edited by Prashant)