As Udupi tells it
Udupi, Karnataka · 2 min read
In the town of Udupi, on the coast, there is a small black image of the boy Krishna holding a churning stick and a rope, and the monks of the eight mathas take turns to care for him.
In the sixteenth century a man called Kanaka came walking there. He had been born to a family of shepherds, the Kurubas, and had been a soldier and a chieftain once, and had given it up to sing. His teacher was the great monk Vyasatirtha of Hampi, who had taken him as a pupil when other monks would not, and his songs to Krishna were in Kannada, the language of the people who kept sheep, not in Sanskrit.
He reached the temple gate and the priests stopped him there.
"You cannot come in," they said. "Not you."
"I have only come to see him," said Kanaka.
"Then see him from the road."
They closed the gate. Kanaka did not argue. He walked round the outside of the temple wall until he came to the back of it, on the west side, behind the shrine where the god stood facing east towards the door. There he sat down on the ground with his little cymbals and began to sing.
He sang a song that asks the god for one thing: open the door, Hari, and let me serve you. He sang it over and over, all through the day.
Inside, the god heard him.
The story says that the image turned on its pedestal, slowly, all the way round, until it faced the west. And the wall behind the shrine cracked from top to bottom, and a narrow gap opened in the stone, just wide enough for a man outside to see a face inside.
Kanaka looked through it, and the child with the churning stick looked back.
The priests came running when they heard the shouting in the street. They saw the god with his back to their door and his face to the shepherd's crack.
"What have you done?" they said to Kanaka.
"Nothing," said Kanaka. "I only sang. He was the one who turned."
The monks did not turn the image back. They left the god as he had chosen to stand, facing west. They made the crack into a window, and they called it the Kanakana Kindi, Kanaka's window.
Kanaka went on singing. He and his friend Purandara Dasa, a rich merchant of Hampi who had given away everything and taken up the same road, filled Karnataka with songs to the god, and their songs became the ground of the music of the south. Kanaka is called Kanakadasa, the servant Kanaka.
Today the main door of the temple still faces east and the god still faces west, and the first thing a pilgrim does at Udupi is go round to the back and look at him through the window, the way the shepherd did.