Family living inside temple tower finally evicted

Family living inside temple tower finally evicted

Gokul.rajendran@timesgroup.com

Trichy:08.11.2020

Imagine an ancient, intricately carved temple rajagopuram for a roof for your house! A family has been residing inside the rajagopuram of Thopparankatti Vinayagar templein Thanjavur by converting it into a house for several decades before public protests forced the Hindu Religious & Charitable Endowment (HR&CE) department to evict them andset right a wrong they committed by permitting it.

Thopparankatti Pillaiyar temple was one of the several temples coming under the Thanjavur Big Temple administration. About 60 years ago, the administration rented out approximately 430square feet of the mandapam in the rajagopuram to a temple employee named Sabapathi Pillai through a tenancy agreement. Pillai’s son Jayaraman, 75, and his wife Shyamala, 70, were the last tenants residing in the ‘house’.

There is no trace of the temple at the place now and only Shyamala was living in what looked like a house every bit inside the rajagopuram. Legally however, the family could not have been called encroachers till January 2019 when they were handed out the eviction order by the HR & CE officials after local people raked up the matter.

“They remained tenants until the order of termination of tenancy was issued by HR&CE, after which they were considered as encroachers,” said HR&CE department advocate V Chandrasekar. Asked how temple premises could have been rented out to an individual, Chandrasekar said, “It happened nearly 60 years ago, when the temple trustees took decisions without consulting the executive officers of the temple. Now, the issue was taken up seriously and the solution was found by evicting them.”

Big Temple executive officer S Madhavan told TOI they had asked the family to vacate the place, but they stayed put. Acting on the eviction order dated October 20 from the joint commissioner of HR&CE department, Thanjavur division, G Thennarasu, a team of officials carried out the anti-encroachment drive.

Thennarasu said the door frame (Nilai) put up at the entrance of the rajagopuram as the main door of the house was removed by the tenant Shyamala herself as she was evicted.

BACK WITH HR&CE: The family, which had been living in the rajagopuram of Thopparankatti Vinayagar temple in Thanjavur for 60 years, had even built a door frame at the house’s entrance (seen in photo on left)