Hathiram Bhavaji: The Dice Player

The legend of the sadhu who played dice with the god, the sugarcane test, and the mutt that ran the temple for ninety years

A wandering sadhu from the north arrived at Tirumala with no lineage the South recognized, no Sanskrit, and no standing. The stories say the god himself came to his hut at night to play dice. The establishment accused him of stealing the deity's necklace, set him an impossible test, and lost. Two centuries later, the mutt bearing his name legally administered the entire temple for ninety years. This lesson asks the outsider's question: what actually earns a place inside?

The Necklace in the Hut

The tradition tells it like this. Night on the hill, some five centuries ago. In a mud hut near the temple, an oil lamp burns beside a game board, the cross-and-square cloth of pagade, the dice game every Indian courtyard once knew. On one side of the board sits a sadhu from the north, matted hair, worn shawl, a man the temple's scholars do not take seriously. On the other side, the stories say, sits the lord of the hill himself, come down from the sanctum, as he does most nights, because this particular devotee does not recite to him or plead with him. This devotee treats him as a friend, and friends play.

That night the god loses the round and, as stake or as token, leaves his necklace on the board before vanishing at dawn.

In the morning, the temple erupts. The deity's ornament is missing. The search ends at the obvious suspect: the strange northern sadhu, the outsider, in whose hut the necklace is found. Theft, the priests conclude. What else could it be? Men like him do not receive gifts from gods.

What happens next gave the man his name, and, in time, gave his successors the keys to the entire temple. Hold the two halves of this story as you read: the half that is legend, told with love for five hundred years, and the half that is hard, dated, documented history. Both halves answer the same question, the third of this chapter's four: when you arrive with no credentials, what actually earns you a place inside?

The Sadhu from the North

The man remembered as Hathiram Bhavaji was, the tradition holds, a bairagi: a wandering Vaishnava renunciant of the northern orders, walking south from pilgrimage to pilgrimage sometime around the fifteenth or sixteenth century. At Tirumala, he stopped. The lord of the hill was, for him, the end of the road.