Interview with Kanchana Natarajan, Part I

Background:

Kanchana Natarajan is a full-time Associate Professor at Delhi University teaching Indian Philosophy, and has been working on the historical aspect of the Siddhas.

She is presently looking at Pokar, who had Chinese connections, either he was Chinese and lived in South India or he visited China like Ramadevar.

This informal interview was conducted over email:

Jake Pollack: “What is your background with Siddha philosophy and how did you come to the work?

Kanchana Natarajan: “My entry into siddha philosophy is through popular Tamil siddha mystical as well as esoteric poetry, the word siddha in Tamil culture referred to someone who had "attained" the "fullness" of experience, or "reached the destination". the popular myth is that siddhas keep moving around in subtle bodies helping the practitioners to attain the state of realization, perhaps like the bodhisattvas.

What was intriguing about the siddhas was their language, which revealed something and yet hid much thus motivating the readers to know more about them and their works.

Statements like –
"Hey, if one has climbed the heights of the mountains to drink the mango juice, will he interested in mere coconut milk of the plains?"

Basically what intrigued me and intrigues me with the siddhas is their impenetrable language which simultaneously offered some point of penetration and decoding the language was like walking on the uncharted path, and this was for me the most exciting challenge siddha poetry offered.

I always carry "siddhargal padalgal" a collection of siddha poetry with me whenever I travel and keep looking at them at new places with renewed enthusiasm.

This is about the mystic siddhas, and this is my entry point, however, I didn’t know much about alchemical siddhas, except knowing them as "Ceppadai viddai kararkal" which in Tamil means ‘those frauds who pretended to transmute copper into gold,’ such derogatory statements have some advantage in that one's curiosity is aroused, and one wishes to know more about these practices.

When i was in SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies http://www.soas.ac.uk/] in
London, on a commonwealth fellowship, I had the wonderful opportunity of meeting Dr Dominik Wujastyk who was at Wellcome Center giving a course on Ayurveda to the undergraduates. I audited that course and was fascinated by the Wellcome library and its very rich resources.

Dr Dominik informed me about the Tamil section, a large collection from Roja Mutthaia's library and also some early Tamil palm manuscripts. He also told me that I could see them and perhaps read them and out them to use. When I saw those collections I was really baffled and it was hard for me to extricate myself from the material.

The very next year I applied for a travel grant and went to Wellcome for 6 weeks. I again had the opportunity to look into the material, and as I came across text after text, I was surprised to see the siddha's lives embedded in their works, they were autobiographical, and I decided to pick up on Iramatevar, who was a tantric yogi as well as an alchemist, who for the sake of knowledge decided to undertake this long journey to Mecca under hostile conditions. This fascinated me a lot, and I looked into all available source material on Iramatevar alias Yakoppu and constructed his biography.

My special advantage was knowing Tamil very well to read the primary material, translate and construct his life and his travel. I now wish to work on other siddha alchemists like Pokar, Kalangi, etc. who have Chinese origin, or went from Tamil Nadu to China. There were also siddhas of Egyptian, Sri Lankan, and Roman origins. I am interested in working on their lives, based on their works.