Gopan Swami, samadhi and the society: A Kerala story

What do you do when a human being dies? In civilised societies, there is a protocol. The man or woman has to be pronounced dead by the family, members of the public, and/or by a competent medical authority. Then the nearest police station has to be informed and a death report filed. If it is a natural death the body will be prepared for burial or cremation according to the person’s or the family's wishes. In case of an unnatural death, the body is taken to a hospital or a mortuary for a post-mortem.

That used to be the practice in Kerala, too, until the death of 78-year-old Gopan Swami, alias Maniyan, from Neyyantikara near Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the south Indian state.

Gopan’s son Sanandan claimed his father attained samadhi on January 9 and he and his brother Rajasenan performed the last rites. They had also built a shrine at the burial site.

His sons dutifully printed a number of plastic banners with Gopan Swami’s photos and placed them at vantage points in the village. This is a common practice in Kerala following a death. However, the banners this time declared that his father had achieved samadhi. (Samadhi is an ancient mystical term used to denote a state that some Hindu religious men reportedly enter when they realise their time has come. There is no scientific proof. The term is also used to denote the shrine built at the burial site.)

Samadhi is virtually unheard of in modern Kerala. This aroused the suspicion of some neighbours as they had no clue about it. A particularly alert person complained to the police and started the chain of events which led to heated debate that also saw communal colouring given to the protest of the neighbours.

The family, with the support of some vested interests such as Hindu Aikya Vedi, managed to ward off the authorities and the public from ascertaining the truth. Was he dead or murdered? No one is sure. In fact, for a week, they have prevented the authorities’ access to his body, which they say is entombed under a concrete slab. Nobody outside the family had seen his body during this period so it couldn’t be said with any certainty that he is dead. He was just a missing person.

The family went to the court and Kerala High Court refused to block the authorities from accessing the body in the tomb and asked for a full report within a week. The police finally managed to exhume the body on Thursday and started the formalities.

Gopan was a head load worker linked to BMS, the union associated with the BJP. After retirement he became a “holy man” and set up a temple near his house. Swami is a suffix sometimes given to a priest or a person of religious bent. Some neighbours say he collected money from the public to build the temple and there were some big donations also. The temple used to welcome neighbours initially but soon there were some restrictions — dress code for women, etc. The family also started worshiping there at night, sometimes with noisy rituals even at 3.30am, which irked the neighbours who began to stay away from the temple.

Neighbours say Gopan was a pious person who even sent his second son for some tantric training associated with daily rituals of the temple. At least a couple of them went on record saying the sons were ‘not of right character.’

Gopan Swami was, according to locals who frequented the home, bedridden for a couple of years. He was reportedly suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes for which he used to take medications. His son’s account also attests this.

On the fateful night, according to his younger son Sanandan, his father informed him that the time had come for the samadhi. After taking his medicines and a ritual bath, Gopan walked to the shrine and sat inside it. Sanandan who appears to be the closest accomplice in Gopan Swami’s alleged samadhi, said his father went through various steps of attaining the samadhi and he was witness to it. The brothers then covered the structure with a holy slab and completed the samadhi rituals. The elder son, in one interview, said there was a beat left in him, when they placed the father in the shrine. Both the sons and family insist on using the term samadhi, instead of death in the incident.

The public seemed to disagree and insisted they wanted to know the truth of what happened to Gopan Swami. They ask: how can a bedridden man suddenly walk to the place of his samadhi in the middle of the night? They also point to the flaw in the son’s narrative that he took his medicines before announcing to them that the time for samadhi has come. Why should a man, with the calm knowledge that his end is near, bother to swallow those tablets, the neighbours ask? Good question. Next question, please.

The next questions are both legal and medical ones and involve the rights of the dead man and how he met with his end. Answers to these questions will be gathered when the authorities conduct an autopsy.