Krishna devotee Pujyasri Dr Prema Pandurang, a renowned spiritual preacher, most eloquent exponent of Hindu scriptures, Managing Trustee of Kshetropasana, is no more. She is 76 years.
Born on 12th June 1945, Professor Prema Pandurang, was the daughter of Dr P Nagaraja Rao, a retired professor of Philosophy and hails from a devout family in Tamil Nadu. Dr Pandurang was a professor of English for PG students in the Presidency College in Chennai for around two decades. She was the founder and president of Samskriti (Home of Culture) and Kshetropasna religious and Charitable Trust and the founder Trustee of Shree Chakra Foundation. The Kshetropasna trust, jointly founded with Dr. P R Krishnakumar, to serve with a noble cause of establishing a unique organization to revive the values and ideals of Bharatiya culture in India and abroad.
The trust in Sriperumbudur encompasses several activities including cow shelter. She was the pioneer in setting up Goshala to give shelter to orphaned cows. Now it has a large number of Cows and the milk obtained from there is being distributed freely to old age home and the remaining is used for the ashrama inmates. Premji was attached to Lord Krishna from her childhood. She had been giving spiritual discourses on the Puranas and other Holy Scriptures since she was 15.
In the ashram, there are various temples, the most important one being the one dedicated to the Lord Guruvayoorppa, two small temples of Lord Ganesha and Devi Mookambiga. The trust runs an English medium school laying stress on faith, morality, love, discipline, moral values. It caters to the students from underprivileged children. Besides, the trust has an old age home ‘Sharanagathi, giving peace and shelter to the elders at the fag end of their lives. The ashram offers Annadhan, clothes poor, medical care and running Veda Padasala and Goshala ( Animal care). It plans to establish a Drug bank, a textile bank, a youth group, a book bank and a rural development scheme.
Professor Pandurang, a votary of Hindutva, was giving lectures in Hindi, English and Sanskrit on the great epics lie Srimad Bhagavad, Bhagavat Geetha and Ramayana and the cultural issues in Bharat and abroad. She was a prolific writer and had a God-given gift of magnificent eloquence. Mrs Prema Pandurang had a number of articles in various popular journals besides giving spiritual lectures. The Kanchi Acharya Endowment Lecture, Rt. Hon. Srinivasa Shastri Endowment lecture, Shrimad Bhagavat discourses etc were very popular drawing a large crowd.
She viewed Hinduism as an external way of life and presents it in all its catholic angles with relevance to modern life. She took part in international conferences in Hague, Prague, Copenhagen, Singapore, and Nepal and has conducted spiritual discourses in more than 30 countries including the USA, UAE and Bahrain. Her talks were well received. She had to her credit more than 300 bhajans in Tamil and Hindi. She cut across all barriers of religion, age, caste, creed etc with her soul-inspiring discourses. She took out a padayatra in support of Ram Mandir kara Seva, from Sriperumbudur to Srirangam with a few devotees. . Later a large number of BJP, RSS cadres took out. She was a devotee of Kanchi mutt.
Prema Pandurang breathed her last on 1st June morning.
