Victory City(82)
At this point in her narrative Pampa Kampana, in a spirit of generous truth-telling, introduces the imposing personage of Madhava Acharya, which is to say Pontiff Madhava, the head of the Mandana mutt and the preserver and reinvigorator of the philosophy of old Vidyasagar, the mutt’s founder.
“O mighty Madhava!” (She addresses him directly in the text, as if he were standing in front of her.) “Set not your face against me, for I am not your foe!” From this we may deduce that Pontiff Madhava was in fact an adversary of Pampa Kampana’s reforms, a powerful opponent whom she needed, with some urgency, to placate.
The high priest was approximately in his middle forties, had risen rapidly through the Mandana seminary system and recently assumed the leadership of the mutt. He was, Pampa Kampana tells us, an unusually tall man, a full head taller than most men in Bisnaga, and would have towered over Krishnadevaraya himself except that courtly protocol obliged him always to lower himself in the presence of the king. Of his character she tells us little, suggesting only that it was forceful and commanded respect, and that he was prone to outbursts of a foul temper—a temper, people said, that was the equal of the king’s own explosive rage, and which was greatly feared in the Mandana temple world.
When the king set off to the wars, accompanied by his chief minister, senior wife, and two most powerful warriors, Madhava Acharya—unimpressed by the regency of a woman—thought he saw a power vacuum and moved swiftly to take advantage of it. He delivered a stirring series of orations, symbolically seated cross-legged under Vidyasagar’s favorite banyan tree, and made the case that Bisnaga had moved too far from the ways of Vidyasagar—too far, he came very close to saying, from the ways of the gods. He reinstated the mass worship meetings that had fallen out of favor long ago, and the crowds were large, giving Madhava a power base which all could easily see. Pampa Kampana’s reforms were hard for Madhava to endure, and his first fulminations against them, in particular against the removal of the priesthood from the heart of education, could not be ignored.
It was at this point that Pampa Kampana thought of reviving the Remonstrance, or at least creating a new movement from its ashes.
Radical ideas can run out of gas, and after the New Remonstrance had entered the government of Bisnaga during the time of Deva Raya and become a part of the establishment rather than a protest movement, the time soon came when it no longer seemed relevant or necessary, and had dissolved. That was ancient history by now, but once Pampa Kampana’s spies had assured her of the popularity of her education reforms she charged those spies with assembling a movement that would defend them. Also, she hints in her narrative, she began her whispering again, and that won many people in Bisnaga to her cause. The whispering was even harder than the last time. Once again, she was feeling her age. Or maybe there had been a change in the world, and there were people who could no longer be moved by her sweet murmurings, people whose loyalty lay elsewhere and could not be shaken, immutable people, following Madhava Acharya as if he was a prophet and not merely a priest. Fortunately, there were others whose ears were happy to receive her silent whispers, and it seemed likely that these others still outnumbered the devotees of the Madhava cult. So she went about her nocturnal work, even though it was more demanding, more tiring than before; and once she was sure of the numbers she could mobilize if she needed to, she asked Madhava Acharya for a meeting at the mutt.
“…For I am not your foe!” We can reasonably assume that these words were actually spoken by the queen regent to the head of the Mandana mutt, probably in person. We have, after all, her own detailed description of that summit meeting, an account in which she abandons her usual lyricism to provide a hard-nosed account of how to make a political deal.
They met alone, in a sealed and guarded room in the heart of the Mandana complex. To show her respect, Pampa Kampana did not ask Madhava Acharya to lower himself below the height of her head, even though, as the queen in place of the king, she had the right to demand it. It was her way of saying that they met on equal terms. Madhava Acharya declared himself charmed by her gesture and then got down to business. It soon became clear to both of them that each could place a substantial crowd of people on the streets of Bisnaga at a moment’s notice, so that was a stalemate. Pampa Kampana had at her disposal the battalions that had remained behind to guard the city, which gave her an advantage, but, as Madhava Acharya was quick to point out, if she were to use those soldiers against the citizens of Bisnaga itself, she would quickly lose the advantages of her popularity and might well face a mutiny in the soldiers’ ranks as well as an uprising in the streets. So that advantage might notionally exist but in practical terms it did not.
To break the deadlock, Pampa Kampana first made an offer and then played a trump card. Ever since the time of Bukka I, the Mandana mutt had been granted limited powers of direct taxation to fund its work. The queen regent now proposed a significant increase in those powers, which would make Mandana wealthier than it had ever been, and would fund the establishment of a parallel education system at the mutt, which would focus on matters of faith and tradition, while her own new schools covered other things.
In other words: a bribe.
That was the offer. To force Madhava Acharya to accept it, she followed it by showing him a letter written in the king’s own distinctive handwriting, fully supporting all her decisions as regent. Once Madhava had read this letter he knew he could not unleash political turmoil in Bisnaga, or the king, when he returned, would exact a swift revenge; and he understood that the bribe that had preceded the playing of the trump—or, let us say, the offer of a compromise—allowed him an honorable way of backing down.