cover next page > of Experience - The... · Although Tamil is the least Sanskritized of all the Dravidian languages, the vocabulary of Tamil bhakti includes many loan words from Sanskrit

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title: Songs of Experience : The Poetics of Tamil DevotionReligion in Asia and Africa Series

author: Cutler, Norman.publisher: Indiana University Press

isbn10 | asin:print isbn13: 9780253353344

ebook isbn13: 9780585108964language: English

subject Religious poetry, Tamil--History and criticism, Tamilpoetry--To 1500--History and criticism, Bhakti inliterature, Religious poetry, Tamil--Translations intoEnglish, Tamil poetry--To 1500--Translations into English,Bhakti--Poetry.

publication date: 1987lcc: PL4758.2.C88 1987eb

ddc: 894/.8111/09382subject: Religious poetry, Tamil--History and criticism, Tamil

poetry--To 1500--History and criticism, Bhakti inliterature, Religious poetry, Tamil--Translations intoEnglish, Tamil poetry--To 1500--Translations into English,Bhakti--Poetry.

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Songs of Experience

RELIGION IN ASIA AND AFRICA SERIES

Judith Berling and Patrick Olivelle, editors

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Candesanugraha (The saint Candesa being garlanded bySiva). Cola dynasty, eleventh century. Brhadisvaratemple,Kankaikontacolapuram, Tamilnadu. (Photograph courtesy

of Richard Davis.)

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Songs of Experience

The Poetics of Tamil Devotion

Norman Cutler

Indiana University PressBLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS

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Disclaimer:This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 8859-1character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in theoriginal text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the textsearchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 8859-1 list willbe represented without their diacritical marks.

for my parents

This book was published with the assistance of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

© 1987 by Norman J. CutlerAll rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutesthe only exception to this prohibition.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cutler, Norman, 1949-Songs of experience.(Religion in Asia and Africa series)Bibliography: p.Includes index.1. Religious poetry, TamilHistory and criticism.2. Tamil poetryTo 1500History and criticism.3. Bhakti in literature. 4. Religious poetry, TamilTranslations into English. 5. Tamil poetryTo 1500Translations into English. 6. Religious poetry,EnglishTranslations from Tamil. 7. English poetryTranslations from Tamil. 8. BhaktiPoetry. I. Title.II. SeriesPL4758.2.C88 1987 894'.8111'09382 86-45051ISBN 0-253-35334-3

1 2 3 4 5 91 90 89 88 87

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments viii

Note on Transliteration ix

Abbreviations x

Introduciton 1

Part I. Poems, Poets, and Poetics

Chapter One Poet, God, and Audience in the Poetry of the Tamil Saints 19

Chapter Two The Devotee's Experience of the Sacred Tamil Hymns 39

Chapter Three The Poetics of Bhakti 57

Part II. Tamil Classicism and Bhakti: Conflict and Accommodation

Chapter Four A Devotional Poem in the Classical Mode 81

Chapter Five A Tamil Allegory of Love 93

Conclusion 111

Part III. Poems

Karaikkalammaiyar 117

Poykai, Putam, and Pey: The First Three Alvars 122

Nammalvar 131

Manikkavacakar 148

Notes to the Poems 175

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Appendix A. The Saints' Hymns in Present-Day Temple Ritual 187

Appendix B. Index of Mythological/Iconographic Allusions and Proper NamesOccurring in the Poems 194

Appendix C. Index of Motifs 196

Bibliography 203

Index 207

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POEMS TRANSLATED

Poems of Karaikkalammaiyar

Arputattiruvantati1, 5, 11, 16, 20, 33, 37, 61, 77

119

Tiruvalankattu-mutta-tiruppatikam1, 11

121

Poems of the First Three Alvars

Poykaiyalvar, Mutal Tiruvantati1, 11, 35, 55, 61, 70, 86, 92, 98

125

Putattalvar, Irantam Tiruvantati1, 14, 35, 67, 90

127

Peyalvar, Munram Tiruvantati1, 2, 38, 44, 63, 79, 81, 94, 99

128

Poems of Nammalvar

Tiruvaymoli1.1.5, 1.1.7, 1.1.8, 1.1.10, 1.2.1, 1.2.8, 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 1.3.6, 1.3.10, 1.5.1, 1.5.4, 1.5.6,1.5.8, 1.5.9, 1.6.3, 1.6.7, 1.6.10, 1.7.3, 1.7.4, 1.7.5, 1.7.7, 1.7.8, 1.8.7, 1.9.2, 1.9.4,1.9.5, 2.2.9, 2.3.1, 2.3.2, 2.3.8, 2.3.9, 2.3.10, 2.4.1, 2.4.3, 2.4.10, 2.5.1, 2.5.7, 2.7.5,2.7.9, 2.8.3, 2.8.5, 2.8.7, 2.9.5, 2.9.6, 2.9.10, 2.10.3, 2.10.4, 2.10.5, 1.3.11, 1.6.11,2.2.11, 2.8.11, 2.10.11

133

Poems of Manikkavacakar

Tirukkovaiyar1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 11, 20, 23, 70, 71, 75, 102, 109, 115, 120, 144, 166, 178, 248, 250, 287,289, 292, 304, 315, 324, 335,341,343

150

from Tiruvacakam

Tiruccatakam2, 8, 11, 14, 15, 26, 28, 29, 32, 36, 41, 43, 47, 55, 72, 90

160

Tiruvammanai2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20

165

Annaipattu1-10

170

Tiruttacankam1-10

172

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The contents of this book are based on research I conducted in Tamilnadu between 1977 and 1979 in connectionwith my Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago. I wish to acknowledge the generous support I received fromthe American Institute of Indian Studies, which enabled me to spend twenty valuable months in India.

While researching my dissertation I received guidance from many quarters. In Madurai my reading of Tamil bhaktipoetry was guided by M. Navaneethakrishnan and S. Venkataraman, faculty members in the Tamil Department ofMadurai Kamaraj University. Others in Tamilnadu who provided me with valuable information concerning thesaints' poems and their role in temple ritual include P. A. S. Rajasekharan, Govindaraja Iyengar, P. Sarangacharya,and Anantanatarajan Dikshitar, to mention only a few.

I wish to express special thanks to K. Paramasivam of American College in Madurai, who, both in Chicago and inMadurai, shared his love and knowledge of the Tamil language with me and taught me most of what I know aboutmedieval Tamil and strategies for reading early Tamil literature. And above all, I wish to thank A. K. Ramanujan,my dissertation advisor and present colleague, who has always given freely of his insights and who has doubtlesslyinfluenced my response to the Tamil saints' poems in more ways than I am aware.

The dissertation I submitted in 1980 has gone through a number of substantial changes before assuming the formof this book, and I hope that as my perspective on Tamil bhakti poetry has changed it has also matured. Commentsoffered by Vinay Dharwadker, George Hart, Wendy O'Flaherty, and Glenn Yocum on drafts of the revisedmanuscript have been of great help to me, and I wish to thank them for their time and advice.

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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

The culture of Tamil bhakti draws upon a rich vocabulary of Tamil and Sanskrit, and words in both languages arefound in the pages of this book. Throughout the book, Sanskrit words are transliterated in accord with the standardsystem, and Tamil words are transliterated in accord with the system employed by the Madras University TamilLexicon. Though Sanskrit and Tamil phonology are not identical, the transliteration scheme for Tamilcomplements the standard system employed for Sanskrit in most respects. The representation of a few phonemes,however, should be noted. Tamil, unlike Sanskrit, has in its phonological repertoire a retroflex r (represented as l).Also, the Tamil script distinguishes alveolar n (n) from dental n (n), and single flapped r (r) from alveolar trilled r(r), even though the distinction is not preserved by many speakers. Finally, Tamil, unlike Sanskrit, distinguishesbetween short and long e (e/e) and short and long o (o/o). Sanskrit e and o, usually transliterated without themacron, correspond to the long Tamil vowels.

Although Tamil is the least Sanskritized of all the Dravidian languages, the vocabulary of Tamil bhakti includesmany loan words from Sanskrit. Depending upon a number of social factors associated with dialect variation, manyTamil speakers will "Tamilize" the pronunciation of such loan words, an adaptation almost always preserved inwriting because the Tamil script contains no symbols to represent many elements of the Sanskrit phonologicalrepertoire. By and large, I have tended to transliterate Sanskrit words, even if used in Tamil discourse, in the morefamiliar Sanskrit form (e.g., dravidaveda, Adhyayanotsava). However, in some cases, where Sanskrit loans are lesslikely to be perceived as such or they are compounded with native Tamil words, I have used Tamil spellings (e.g.,antati, Catakopan, Nalayira-tiviya-pirapantam).

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ABBREVIATIONS

AP Annaipattu (Manikkavacakar)*

ATA Arputattiruvantati (Karaikkalammaiyar)

ITA Irantam Tiruvantati (Putattalvar)

MTA Mutal Tiruvantati (Poykaiyalvar)

MuTA Munram Tiruvantati (Peyalvar)

TA Tiruvammanai (Manikkavacakar)

TAMTP Tiruvalankattu-mutta-tiruppatikam (1) (Karaikkalammaiyar)

TC Tiruccatakam (Manikkavacakar)

TK Tirukkovaiyar (Manikkavacakar)

TT Tiruttacankam (Manikkavacakar)

TVM Tiruvaymoli (Nammalvar)

* The name of the author of each text appears in parentheses.

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SONGS OF EXPERIENCE

Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory todivision. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetoric to proclaim theirunity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man's very essence.It would not be an ideal, as it now is, partly embodied in material conditions and partly frustrated by thesesame conditions; rather, it would be as natural, spontaneous, and total as with those ideal prototypes ofcommunication, the theologian's angels, or ''messengers."Kenneth BurkeA Rhetoric of Motives

In identification lies the source of dedications and enslavements . . .W. C. Blumquoted in A Rhetoric of Motives

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INTRODUCTION

The poems brought together in this collection are songs of experience, but not, as in Blake, of an experience that isopposed to innocence. To the contrary, the experience these poems are intended both to describe and to invoketranscends the Blakean poles of innocence and experience, for in their native Hindu tradition the authors of thesepoems are regarded as saints, 1 and the experience embodied in these poems is no less than the experience of god.Without a certain innocence, the saints could not have experienced god at all, for the saints never lost the ability todiscern the divinity underlying the mundane world of names and forms.

The direct personal experience of god and the quest for it is known as bhakti in Hindu tradition, and any standardwork on Hinduism will mention a number of essential points concerning this important "movement" withinHinduism:

1. The term bhakti is a derivative of the Sanskrit root bhaj, "to divide, apportion, share." In the religious spherebhakti denotes an attitude of devotion on the part of a worshiper to a personal god. In this religious atmospheredevotees are linked with their god and with one another by a bond of "shared" love and grace.

2. The bhakta's (devotee's) relationship to god is characteristically modeled after a select number of humanrelations: master-servant, friend-friend, child-parent, and most importantly, beloved-lover. In the Tamil context,bhakti is also frequently expressed in the idiom of the relationship between king and subject,

3. In Sanskrit literature one gets a sense of the beginning of a shift toward bhakti in the Bhagavad Gita (c. 300A.D.), while the Bhagavata Purana (c. tenth century A.D.) is among the most important textual statements onbhakti in a later, fully elaborated form.

4. Bhakti took hold as a popular religious movement and served as a catalyst for the literary development of manyof India's vernacular languages. Regional vernacular-oriented bhakti movements began during the sixth to ninthcenturies A.D. in the Tamil-speaking South and gradually took hold in other regions of the subcontinent.




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While this short list hardly amounts to a complete profile of bhakti, and some of these features are more relevant tothe Tamil bhakti tradition than others, it is nevertheless clear that even this partial profile touches upon matters oftheological, historical, sociological, linguistic, and literary interest. No doubt all these perspectives on bhakti arecapable of yielding many rewarding insights. In the following pages it is the literary view of bhakti that will be ofgreatest explicit concern; however, as will become clear in the course of this book, the literary form of bhaktipoetry is, in the final analysis, a mirror image of its religious content.

The Tamil Saints and Their Poems

The poems in this collection are attributed to five men and one woman who lived in the Tamil-speaking region ofsouth India between the sixth and ninth centuries A.D., a time when bhakti was beginning to take shape as a majorforce in Tamil Hinduism. All of these poets composed their poems in their native language, Tamil. I chose to studyand translate the works of these poets because collectively they offer a broad historical and sectarian profile of thepoems associated with an important episode in the history of South Asian religion. Among the earliest devotees ofthe god Visnu who composed poetry were Poykai, Putam, and Pey, known to Tamil Vaisnavas as mutal muvar,"the first three." According to Tamil Vaisnava tradition, these three poets, whose life stories are intertwined, werethe first alvars, the poet-saints of Tamil Vaisnavism. Alvar literally means "one who is immersed" (from Tamil al,''to be immersed"), and, according to sectarian scholars, the saints are called alvars because they "immersed"themselves in their devotion for Visnu.

The poems of Poykai, Putam, and Pey are included in the canon of Tamil Vaisnavism, as are the poems of alltwelve 2 Tamil Vaisnava saints. Tamils refer to the collected poems of the alvars as the "arrangement of fourthousand heavenly hymns" (nalayira-tiviya-pirapantam). (See Table 1.) The poems were collected and arranged intheir present order by Nathamuni, a devotee who lived during the tenth century. From the Vaisnava wing of Tamilbhakti tradition I have also included poems by Nammalvar, who is considered by many to be the most important ofthe Tamil Vaisnava saints.3 Nammalvar's dates are controversial. Tradition situates Nammalvar's lifetime aboutmidway in the chronology of the alvars. Essentially in agreement with tradition, at least as far as relative dating isconcerned, Friedhelm Hardy proposes the seventh (or early eighth) century as the time when Nammalvar composedhis poems, though other twentieth-century scholars would date the saint's lifetime at least a century later.4

Turning to the devotees of the other great Hindu god, Siva, I have included poems by two poets: a woman,Karaikkalammaiyar (sixth century), and a royal minister turned saint, Manikkavacakar (ninth century).5 Thecategories of saintliness in Tamil Saivism are a bit more complicated. The




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Table 1THE NALAYIRA-TIVIYA-PIRAPANTAM

Mutal Ayiram (The First Thousand)

Poet Work

Periyalvar Tiruppallantu

Tirumoli

Antal Tiruppavai

Nacciyar Tirumoli

Kulacekarap Perumal Tirumoli

Tirumalicaiyalvar Tiruccantaviruttam

Tontaratippotiyalvar Tirumalai

Tiruppalliyelucci

Tiruppanalvar Amalanatipiran

Maturakavi Kanninunciruttampu

Irantam Ayiram (The Second Thousand)

Poet Work

Tirumankaiyalvar Periya Tirumoli

Tirukkuruntantakam

Tirunetuntantakam

Munram Ayiram (The Third Thousand, also known as Iyarpa)

Poet Work

Poykaiyalvar Mutal Tiruvantati

Putattalvar Irantam Tiruvantati

Peyalvar Munram Tiruvantati

Tirumalicaiyalvar Nanmukan Tiruvantati

Nammalvar Tiruviruttam

Tiruvaciriyam

Periya Tiruvantati

Tirumankaiyalvar Tiruvelukkurrirukkai

Ciriya Tirumatal

Periya Tirumatal

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*Tiruvarankattamutanar Iramanucanurrantati

Nankam Ayiram (The Fourth Thousand)

Poet Work

Nammalvar Tiruvaymoli

*Iramanucanurrantati by Tiruvarankattamutanar, a disciple of Ramanuja, is included in the Nalayiram bysome but not all Srivaisnavas.




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Tamil nayanmar (leaders) whose life stories are recounted in Cekkilar's great twelfth-century hagiography, PeriyaPuranam, are sixty-three in number. The canonical literature of Tamil Saivism is arranged in twelve "sacredcompendia" (tirumurai), which include both Saiva devotional poetry and Cekkilar's lives of the saints (see Table2). The authors of the Tirumurai poems number twenty-seven, and while some of these poets are included amongthe nayanmar, some are not. Karaikkalammaiyar, one of the earliest Saiva saints, belongs to the former group. Theranks of the nayanmar seem to have been closed by the time Manikkavacakar entered the picture, but nevertheless,Tamil Saivas regard him as one of the most important personalities of their sect. 6

Table 2THE TIRUMURAI

No. of book Poet Work

1 *Tirunanacampantar Tevaram I

2 Tevaram II

3 Tevaram III

4 *Tirunavukkaracar Tevaram IV

5 Tevaram V

6 Tevaram VI

7 *Cuntaramurti Tevaram VII

8 Manikkavacakar Tiruvacakam

Tirukkovaiyar

9 Tirumalikaittevar Tiruvicaippa

Centanar Tiruvicaippa

Tiruppallantu

Karuvurttevar Tiruvicaippa

Punturutti Nampi Tiruvicaippa

Kantaratittar Tiruvicaippa

Venattatikal Tiruvicaippa

Tiruvaliyamutanar Tiruvicaippa

Purutottama Nampi Tiruvicaippa

Cetiriyar Tiruvicaippa

10 Tirumular Tirumantiram

11 Tiruvalavayutaiyar Tirumukappacuram

*Karaikkalammaiyar Tiruvalankattumuttatirupatikam (1 & 2)

Tiruirattaimanimalai

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Arputattiruvantati

*Aiyatikal Katavar Kon Ksettiratiruvenpa

*Indicates that author is included among the sixty-three nayanmars




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No. of book Poet Work

11 *Ceruman Perumal Ponvannattiruvantati

Tiruvarur Mummanikkovai

Tirukkailaya Nana Ula

Nakkiratevar Kayilaipati Kalattipatit Tiruvantati

Tiruinkoymalai Eluppatu

Tiruvalanculi Mummanikkovai

Tiruelukurrirukkai

Peruntevapani

Kopappiracatam

Kar Ettu

Porrit Tirukkalivenpa

Tirumurukarruppatai

Tirukannappatevar Tirumaram

Kallatatevar Tirukannappatevar Tirumaram

Kapilatevar Muttanayanar Tiruirattaimanimalai

Civaperuman Tiruirattaimanimalai

Civaperuman Tiruvantati

Paranatevar Civaperuman Tiruvantati

Ilamperuman Atikal Civaperuman Tirumummanikkovai

Atiravatikal Muttappillaiyar Tirumummanikkovai

Pattinattatikal Koyil Nanmanimalai

Tirukkalumala Mummanikkovai

Tiruvitaimarutur Mummanikkovai

Tiruekampamutaiyar Tiruvantati

Tiruvorriyur Orupa Orupatu

Nampi Antar Nampi Tirunaraiyur Vinayakar Tiruirattaimanimalai

Koyil Tiruppanniyar Viruttam

Tiruttontar Tiruvantati

Alutaiya Pillaiyar Tiruvantati

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Alutaiya Pillaiyar Tiruccanpaiviruttam

Alutaiya Pillaiyar Mummanikkovai

Alutaiya Pillaiyar Tiruvulamalai

Alutaiya Pillaiyar Tirukkalampakam

Alutaiya Pillaiyar Tiruttokai

Tirunavukkaracu Tevar Tiruvekataca Malai

12 Cekkilar Periya Puranam

In this study of the poems of the Tamil saints, I have aimed to do justice both to the poetic talent of their creatorsand to the poems' significance for devotees. Before doing a literary study of bhakti poetry, one must ask, Is itmeaningful to speak of "bhakti poetry" as a literary genre? What distinguishes




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the poems of the saints from, say, Sanskrit kavya, the poems of classical Tamil, or Vedic hymns? As Ramanujanpoints out, "early bhakti movements, whether devoted to Siva or Visnu, used whatever they found at hand, andchanged whatever they used." 7 This principle is as applicable to the literary forms of bhaki as it is to tenets ofbelief. While the saints did favor certain formal devices that have come to be especially associated with theirpoems, at the same time there is a great deal of formal variety among the poems included in the Tamil Vaisnavaand Saiva canons. This is because the saints drew upon an extensive repertoire of literary models. If, in the saints'poems, we hear echoes of classical Tamil poems of love and war, of folk songs, of Sanskrit stotras, and even ofVedic hymns, there is good reason for this. These are among the many sources from which the Tamil poets drewinspiration. It is also important to keep in mind that Tamil and Sanskrit thrived for many centuries side-by-side insouth India, and that southern authors of Sanskrit texts were also influenced by the themes and forms of Tamilliterature.8

But despite the formal eclecticism found in the poems of the Tamil saints, the corpus, in more than a superficialsense, is generically unified. In order to apprehend the parameters that define bhakti poetry as a viable literarygenre in Tamil, one must be prepared to think about literary form not just in terms of rhyme and meter but also asa structure of communication between author and audience. This idea will come as no surprise to anyone with evena passing familiarity with recent literary critical thought, but I would further argue that to fully comprehend themeaning of the saints' poems for Tamil devotees, one's sense of literary form must be expanded to includestructures of reception, interpretation, and performance as well. It is not enough to study Tamil bhakti poetry as aself-contained textual corpus. A culturally accurate understanding of the poems can be achieved only by lookingsquarely at the relationship between text and context.

This proposition calls to mind Barbara Stoler Miller's observation that a narrowly formal analysis of the Sanskritpoetry of Bhartrhari and Bilhana fails to fully appreciate the work of these poets.

In both cases, the legends surrounding the verses [i.e., the legends of their authors' lives] are mythicalcontexts for the poetry. The drama of its author's legend makes the poetic personality of each collectionmore vivid. The legends serve as parables indicating the dominant poetic structures of the collections, inmuch the same way that the prologue of a Sanskrit drama announces its dramatic structures. They explainthe poetry by means that are different from academic analyses of Sanskrit poetics, which characteristicallyfocus attention on the formal elements of individual stanzas. The legends illuminate the human emotionalbasis of the poetry, which the preoccupation with form obscures.9

For the Tamil Hindu, Miller's point, as far as the saints' poems are concerned, is self-evident. Tamil Hindus havealways turned to the legends of the saints' lives to illuminate their poems. Also, the critic of bhakti poetry is




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less likely to succumb to academic formalism because tradition provides him with no codified poetics of bhaktipoetry. 10 For the native exegete the corrective called for is quite the reverse. All too often the saints' poems areseen as no more than reflections of their human emotional basis. A saint is not supposed to exercise a studied skillin the manipulation of poetic forms. To the contrary, a bhakti poet is entitled to saintly status only if he or shecomposes without premeditation. To paraphrase the words of devotee-critics, "poems should well up and pour outof the poet's heart like tears."11 The ideal of poetry composed spontaneously in a burst of inspiration is deeplyrooted in Tamil Hinduism. The critic of Tamil bhakti poetry must take this ideal into account, but at the same timehe must not allow it to limit his perspective. He must appreciate the saints' formal expertise and also understand thecontexts that shape the meanings these poems hold for their intended audience.

The Tamil Veda

In Srivaisnavism (the southern Vaisnava sect that claims the eleventh-century philosopher Ramanuja as its mostcelebrated spokesman) the four Tamil works attributed to Nammalvar are equated with the four Vedas. Extendingthe Vedic analogy, the works of another of the twelve saints, Tirumankai, are equated with the "limbs of the Veda"(vedangas), and the poems of the other saints with the "minor limbs" (upangas).12 In Tamil Saivism also, thecollected poems of the saints are sometimes referred to as the ''Dravidian" or Tamil Veda (tiravitavetam; Sanskrit:dravidaveda), though the analogy is not elaborated in point-for-point detail. When the standard descriptiveaccounts of Hinduism make so much of the differences between the elitism of Vedic religion and the popular basisof bhakti, what are we to make of the Tamils' interest in equating the poems of their saints with sacred Sanskrittexts?

In a sense the answer is obvious. This analogy seems to be yet another example of the "fifth Veda" principlethenotion that the text at hand, be it the Mahabharata or a puranic text, is the fifth Veda, composed to bring salvationto the classesspecifically, people of low caste (sudras) and womenwho are not entitled to hear the immortal versesof the four eternal Vedas. Only, being composed in the vernacular, the Tamil hymns are more likely than Sanskrittexts like the Mahabharata or the mahapuranas to have a real impact on people who are excluded from theeducated elite. The idea that the "Tamil Veda" is more accessible than its Sanskrit counterpart, and equallyeffective, is explicitly set forth in Srivaisnava theological writings.13 But there are other dimensions to the analogythat critics of these poems will certainly find suggestive.

Many later bhakti movements are noted for their contempt for established ritual and for the protocol of correctsocial behavior. A Virasaiva saint of Karnataka, for instance, may shun stationary temples of stone (sthavara) andworship the god within, who is always present no matter where one may




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go (jangama). 14 But in the Tamil country, the first region of India to produce a vernacular bhakti movement,defiance of established patterns of worship was not the dominant bhakti stance.15 It is true that the life stories ofsome of the saints do carry the message that a devotee's purity of intent is far more important to god than technicalcorrectness in ritual forms.16 Nevertheless, the Tamil saints were never leaders of a militantly iconoclasticmovement.

To the contrary, the era of the saints was a time when the worship directed toward images in temples wasbecoming the dominant form of religious practice in Tamilnadu, and not a few of the saints contributed to thegrowing role of temples in Tamil religious life. The Tevaram hymns, composed by the Saiva saints Appar,Campantar, and Cuntarar, to give the most obvious example, are associated with particular temples.17 Not only didthe saints sing the praises of various sacred places18 in their hymns, but within a few centuries of theircomposition, the saints' poems themselves were incorporated into the ritual of temple worship. In Srivaisnavismthis development is remembered in the story of the first celebration of the Adhyayanotsava (recitation festival)recounted in Koyil Oluku, the chronicle of the temple of Rankanatan (a manifestation of Visnu) at Srirankam.19

The standard sectarian accounts of the collection and codification of the saints' poems suggest that from the veryfirst, the canonizers intended to employ the poems in ritual. Nampi Antar Nampi, who most likely lived during thereign of Rajaraja I (985-1014), is credited with recovering and organizing the poems of the Saiva saints at thebehest of a Cola king, identified in sectarian literature as Abhaya Kulasekhara. We also know, from inscriptionalevidence, that the saints' poems were recited in the Brhadesvarar temple at Thanjavur, the imperial temple ofRajaraja I, as early as the tenth century A.D., when the temple was constructed.20

It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that the canonization of the saints' poems during the tenth/eleventhcenturies represents a self-conscious attempt to create a Tamil Veda in more than a superficial sense. Certainly bythe thirteenth century the term dravidaveda was in common use among sectarian writers.21 The VaisnavaAdhyayanotsava, mentioned above, is devoted to the recitation of the saints' hymns, and the name of this festival(adhyayana, "recitation" + utsava, "festival") self-consciously alludes to the recitation (adhyayana) of the Vedas.And, of course, the saints' poems, like Vedic hymns, are employed in ritual.22

The Vedic poets, known as rsis, are believed to have composed their poems under the inspiration of a divineagency. The rsis are said to be dhira, that is, they possess dhi inspired vision. Further, the medium of their art isvac, divine speech. According to Vedic metaphysics, vac is at the root of all being; the whole universe is anemanation of vac. Recitation of the Vedic hymns is thus a matter of enormous consequence. The rsis' hymns ofpraise for the gods bring the gods pleasure and cause them to regard men with favor and grant them prosperity.Further, the gods are nourished and strengthened by




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the rsis' hymns, for, like men and all of creation, their existence is grounded in vac, eternal speech, Gondadescribes a reciprocal and cyclical exchange between Vedic poets and gods. The gods are pleased and fortified bythe hymns, while poets are inspired by the gods. 23

The Verbal substance of the Vedic hymns must be treated with the utmost care. The signifier is valued as highlyas, if not more highly than, the signified. When recited correctly, the sound of these hymns carries enormouspower. Brahmanical tradition has thus put great emphasis on the accurate recitation and transmission of the hymns.Methods of instruction emphasize units of sound over units of meaning, for it is essential that not a single syllablebe out of place or mispronounced when the hymns are recited in ritual. The Vedic hymns are commonly referred toas mantras, a term that underscores their status as effectively articulated sound. Only male members of the "twice-born" (dvija) classes may hear and study the Vedas, for, it is believed, only they are qualified to work with thispowerful and potentially dangerous instrument.

There are many revealing similarities and dissimilarities between the saints' poems and the rsis' hymns. Within thecontext of a changed religious vision, the saints, like the rsis, are believed to have composed their poems under theinfluence of a faculty that surpasses ordinary human capacities. Nammalvar even asserts that Visnu is the realauthor of his poems and that he is merely the god's mouthpiece.24 The Vedic rsis are described as vipra, inwardlystirred or excited. Likewise, the sometimes overwhelming love the Tamil saints feel for Visnu or Siva is said toexpress itself spontaneously in the form of poetry, though their inner excitement sometimes takes forms that wouldhave been unfamiliar to the Vedic seers.

Though both the saints' poems and the rsis' hymns may have been divinely inspired, it is also true that the Vedicseers composed their hymns in the language of the gods, the "perfected" (samskrta) language, whereas the Tamilsaints expressed their devotion in the vernacular. Students of Hinduism often emphasize this contrast betweenbhakti poetry and sacred Sanskrit texts. Bhakti poetry, the conventional wisdom tells us, is democratic, while theVedas are reserved for the elite. Sectarian writers do praise the Tamil Veda for its wide accessibility,25 but it is notcorrect to think of the relationship between Sanskrit and Tamil as a token of the standard contrast between"refined" (samskrta) and "unrefined" (prakrta) language.

While Sanskrit had already gained a foothold in the Tamil-speaking region by the era of the saints, Tamil, aDravidian language, has a history that is largely independent of Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan languages. As earlyas the first century A.D., Tamil grammarians scrutinized the forms of their language with as much care as Paninilavished upon the forms of Sanskrit. Tamil grammarians distinguished between formal and colloquial languagemuch as Sanskrit was distinguished from the Prakrits. From very early in Tamil literary history, Tamilgrammarians and poets demonstrated tremendous pride in the "sweet strains" of the Tamil tongue. Tamil devoteesare




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inclined to regard the saints' poems not as a democratic and less elevated alternative to Vedic hymns, but as a realequivalent to the poems of the seers, composed in a linguistic medium entirely equal in status to Sanskrit. If thesaints' poems are accessible to a wider range of people than the Vedas, this is not because Tamil is a less refinedlanguage, but because the religious-social context in which Tamil language developed was different from that ofthe early Aryans.

The question remains whether or not the saints' hymns may reasonably be described as mantras in the same senseas the Vedic hymns. The answer to this question necessarily brings to light some very important ways in whichbhakti is genuinely different from Vedic religion. While the sound of the recitation of the Tamil hymns may pleasethe ear and "cool the mind," ultimately it is the quality of the worshiper's feeling that is most important in bhakti.Bhakti poems are valued first and foremost because they signify a certain state of mind. If the saints' poems arepowerful, it is primarily because they induce a worshipful state of mind in the hearer, rather than because the verbalsound elements of which they are composed are powerful in and of themselves. In this milieu the signified is ofgreater importance than the signifier.

This is not to say that the idea of ritually effective sound disappeared from Hindu religious consciousness in thepost-Vedic period. The tantric tradition places enormous emphasis on mantra, 26 so much so that certain tantricmantras, the so-called bija (seed) mantras, do not carry any lexical meaning, as if to emphasize that their powerderives purely from the sound units of which they are composed. In simplistic terms, it appears that tantric mantras(which, incidentally, also play a role in temple ritual) and bhakti poems represent two lines of development fromthe Vedic hymns: the former developing from the notion that the phonetic matter of the hymns is inherentlypowerful, and the latter preserving an active awareness that, semantically, the Vedic hymns are poems of praise.This is not to deny, however, that the saints also drew upon other, especially panegyric, traditions or that theirpoems represent a substantially transformed religious sensibility.

Critical Approaches to the Poems of the Saints

In his study of the devotional poems of Surdas, a fifteenth/sixteenth-century poet of north India, Kenneth Bryantwrites, "the poet of Krsna-bhakti must participate in the lila [divine sport] [of Krsna] if his poetry is to be true; if itis to be effective, he must lead his audience to participate as well."27 It appears to me that Bryant's perception ofbhakti poetry as essentially a poetry of participation is right on the mark.28 In the atmosphere of late medievalbhakti in north India, the mythos of Krsna's lila or "sports" provided a paradigm for Vaisnava theology andreligious poetry that sharply focused the bhakti ideal




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of participation. It is therefore logical to build an explanatory framework for Sur's poetry on the foundation ofKrsna's lila. I believe that the ideal of participation is already present in the much earlier poetry of the Tamil saints,whether Vaisnava or Saiva, even if the mythos of Krsna's divine sports is found only in the alvars' poems, andeven there it is only one of the Vaisnava myths treated, albeit an important one. 29

It makes good sense, when reading the compositions of the saints critically, to concentrate on the participatoryqualities of these poemsspecifically, on the relationships they establish among the poet, the god, and the audience.The critic is faced by a number of choices when defining his project. Bryant concentrates on Surdas's textsonnarrative and figurative devices the poet employs to achieve rhetorical effects that complement his theology. Giventhe important role the poems of the Tamil saints play in the ritual of temple worship, if the critic of these poems isto grasp their meaning for Tamil Hindus, it is essential that he look not only at texts but also beyond texts to thesurrounding climate of interpretation and performancein effect, that he understand the full meaning of theappellation "Tamil Veda" and all it implies. Only then can he attempt to formulate a culturally accurate appraisalof this literature.

Tamil bhakti poetry is a corpus with fuzzy edgesnot that Tamil Vaisnavas and Saivas are unclear about which textsconstitute the sacred canons of their faithbut there are poems included in the canon that stand apart formally fromthe majority of the saints' poems and that sometimes closely resemble other poems that are not included in thecanon. I will argue that "typical" bhakti poems present themselves or can be manipulated to be interpreted as directexpressions of their authors' devotion to Visnu or Siva, and that poems structured in terms of genres that mask thepoet's voice behind the voices of narrators that cannot easily be identified with the poet, even if they evincesentiments of devotion, are in a certain sense subordinated to poems of the first type. Proceeding on thisassumption, I have divided my discussion of the poems into two parts: Part I deals with the "typical" and Part IIwith an especially interesting example of the "marginal." In both parts discussion moves from text to context.

Bhakti is a religion of emotionally charged contact between the devotee and god as well as among devotees. The"typical" bhakti poem functions as both a description of and a medium for such contact. In Part I, I have attemptedto trace the multifold ramifications of this proposition, beginning with a variety of relationships among the poet,the god, and the audience that are encoded in the saints' poems. I then show how, through a series of identificationsand substitutions, the poems become a participatory vehicle for all devotees. This process, whereby a poembecomes a context for direct religious experience, is clearly expressed in sectarian literature and in temple ritual. Itis this particular confluence of text and context, both interpretive and ritual, that constitutes the essence of Tamilbhakti.




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There are some texts included in the Tamil Vaisnava and Saiva canons, however, that are not easily turned intovehicles for direct experience of god. Such a text is Manikkavacakar's Tirukkovaiyar, a text that in many ways hasmore in common with other poems of its genre that are not included in the canon than it does with "typical" bhaktipoems. Doubtless, it is because Manikkavacakar also composed Tiruvacakam, one of the most popular of all Saivabhakti texts and a text in which the poet's own voice is clearly heard, that Tirukkovaiyar is also included in theTamil Saiva canon. Employing many of the conventions of classical Tamil poetry, Tirukkovaiyar vigorously resistsinterpretation as a vehicle of direct communication among poet, god, and audience; but in spite of, or perhapsbecause of, its incompatibility with "mainstream" bhakti tradition, Tamil Saiva pandits have worked out anallegorized interpretation of the text that appears to be designed to draw Tirukkovaiyar into the bhakti fold as far aspossible. These efforts by Tamil Saiva commentators to normalize the text can in fact tell us a great deal abouttheir sense of what bhakti poetry is and what it is intended to do.

Studying Indian poetic theories can be useful to the outsider in at least two ways: (1) It provides a way tounderstand in the abstract how Indians at various points in time have defined literature and the experience ofliterature. (2) It offers a way of access into specific works of Indian literature. Familiarity with the Sanskritic theoryof rasa may not be all an audience member needs to appreciate every nuance of a Sanskrit play, but certainly thelack of that knowledge reduces from the start the likelihood that an outsider will be able to respond as an Indianconnoisseur would. The same applies to a person who attempts to read classical Tamil love poetry but who is notconversant with the Tamil poetic theory of mood and landscape.

The poems of the Tamil saints may, on the surface at least, appear to be far more direct and unencumbered byconventions than either Sanskrit drama or classical Tamil poetry. Up to a point the saints' poems are moreaccessible to the uninitiated, but I would argue that in order to appreciate these poems as a Tamil connoisseurwouldthat is, a Tamil devotee of Siva or Visnuit is necessary to unearth and to understand the poetic theoryimplicit in the devotee's response to these poems. While there is no codified poetics of bhakti poetry in Tamilliterary tradition, the devotee does bring certain expectations to his experience of the poems, and these expectationsare shaped by traditions of sectarian exegesis and ritual performance that emerged within a few centuries followingthe time of the poems' composition.

At times my analysis of the poetic theory that gives culturally relevant meaning to the saints' poems may appear tobe more rhetorical than poetic, but I believe that in the literary universe of Tamil bhakti it is not possible to make astrict separation between the two. The saints' poems, to a large extent, are about and serve as a vehicle forcommunication between the devotee and god. If the subject of rhetorical criticism is the process of communicationbetween author and audience that is established in and through literary works,




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then the saints' poems are supremely suited to rhetorical analysis. But at the same time the saints' poems convey anexperience that is at once aesthetic and religious. Savoring an aesthetic flavor or rasa is the poetic goal for theaudience of Sanskrit drama, and, similarly, experiencing god through poetry is the goal for the Tamil devotee.Within their respective frames of reference, as different as they are, these are equivalent poetic experiences. Hence,my discussion of the saints' poems works toward a "poetics" of Tamil bhakti.

Notes

1. There is actually no word in any Indian language that carries the precise meaning of the English word "saint."The words in various Indian languages that denote "saintlike" figures generally refer to persons associated withspecific traditions and are not applicable in a more universal sense. For example, the Tamil term alvar is used todenote just twelve persons in the Tamil Vaisnava tradition and cannot be used to denote "saints" in a more generalsense. (I am indebted to A. K. Ramanujan for this observation.)

2. One sometimes encounters references to ten rather than twelve alvars. This is because two of the Vaisnavasaints, Maturakavi and Antal, are considered to be different from the other tenMaturakavi, because he worshipedNammalvar as his guru rather than Visnu directly, and Antal, because she is considered to be an incarnation of thegoddess Earth (Bhudevi).

3. Excellent translations of Nammalvar's poems can be found in A. K. Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning:Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

4. Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti: The early history of Krsna devotion in South India (Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1983), p. 267. An argument for a later date is found in B. V. Ramanujan, History of Vaishnavism in SouthIndia up to Ramanuja (Annamalainagar: Annamalai University, 1973), pp. 235-42; also K. A. Nilakanta Sastri,History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1966),pp. 426-27.

5. Manikkavacakar's date, like Nammalvar's, is controversial, though the majority of scholars are of the opinionthat the saint lived during the ninth century. For a review of the various arguments, pro and con, see Glenn E.Yocum, Hymns to the Dancing Siva: A Study of Manikkavacakar's Tiruvacakam (New Delhi: Heritage Publishers,1982).

6. By and large, poets whose works are included in the Tirumurai but who are not numbered among the nayanmarlived later than the saint Cuntaramurti (eighth century), who sang in his poem "Tiruttontattokai" of his vision ofsixty-two Saiva devotees. Cuntarar's poem became the model for Cekkilar's Periya Puranam, the "official"hagiography of Tamil Saivism. The nayanmar include the saints mentioned by Cuntarar in his poem in addition toCuntarar himself. The most important saints in Tamil Saivism are known as the nalvar (the four), namely, Appar,Campantar, Cuntarar, and Manikkavacakar.

7. Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning, p. 104.

8. Concerning the influence of classical Tamil poetry on Sanskrit literature, see George L. Hart III, The Poems ofAncient Tamil: Their Milieu and Their Sanskrit Counterparts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975),especially Part Two. Friedhelm Hardy argues that the Sanskrit Bhagavata Purana is essentially a Sanskrit"translation" of the bhakti of the Tamil alvars. See his Viraha-Bhakti.




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9. Barbara Stoler Miller, The Hermit and the Love-Thief: Sanskrit Poems of Bhartrihari and Bilhana (New York:Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 6.

10. Rupagoswamin, a sixteenth-century Bengali Vaisnava follower of Caitanya, ingeniously used Sanskritic rasapoetics as a template for an elaborate theology of bhakti. This, however, is not the same thing as a poetics ofbhakti poetry.

11. David Shulman has formulated a typology of Tamil authorial images in his paper "From Author to Non-Authorin Tamil Literary Legend." He particularly contrasts the image of the kavi or court poet, a master of technique, andthat of the bhakti poet, whose poems are supposed to arise as a spontaneous expression of deeply felt emotion.

12. The six vedangas, or ancillary subjects to the Vedas, are kalpa, matters pertaining to the performance of thesacrifice; siksa, correct pronunciation, or phonology; chandas, meter and prosody; nirukta, etymology; vyakarana,grammar; and jyotisa, astronomy, or the science of the calendar. The upangas include the puranas (mythologicaltexts), the classical schools of philosophy, and the texts on dharma (social and religious norms of behavior).

13. The thirteenth-century Srivaisnava theologian, Alakiyamanavalaperumalnayanar, gives considerable attention tothis idea in his important work Acarya Hrdayam. For a useful summary and critical account of the content of thistext, see G. Damodaran, Acarya Hrdayam: A Critical Study (Tirupati: Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, 1976).

14. See A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973).

15. Besides the "mainstream" bhakti tradition in Tamilnadu, there was a group of Tamil Saiva poets who weremuch closer to the Kannada-speaking Virasaivas in spirit and who, unlike the Virasaivas, remained on the fringesof society. Traditionally, these poets, known as cittars (Sanskrit: siddhas, those who have perfected the siddhis oroccult powers), are said to be eighteen in number. While the tradition claims great antiquity, most of these poetsprobably lived no earlier than the seventeenth century. On the Tamil cittar tradition, see Kamil Zvelebil, The Poetsof the Powers (London: Rider, 1973); also, David C. Buck, trans., Dance, Snake! Dance! The Song of PampattiCittar (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1976).

16. The legendary life stories of the Saiva saint Kannappan (who is mentioned in poetry but composed no works ofhis own) and the Vaisnava woman-saint Antal are noteworthy examples. Kannappan was a hunter who, upondiscovering a Siva linga, offered worship in a form consistent with his rough lifestyle, but hardly in harmony withorthodox ideas concerning the proper way to perform puja. Not only did he bring offerings of flesh to the god; hedefiled the flowers he brought to adorn Sivas's image by wearing them in his own hair and he carried in his mouththe water he used to bathe the image. The depth of Kannappan's devotion was tested when blood began to pourfrom Siva's eye. Without hesitation, Kannappan gouged out his own eye and offered it to the god. When Siva'sother eye also began to bleed, Kannappan showed himself willing to repeat his heroic performance, but the godstopped him and carried him off to heaven. Another actor in Kannappan's story is a Brahmin priest who wasoutraged by Kannappan's unorthodox mode of worship. Siva arranged that he witness Kannappan's salvation andthereby come to realize the real meaning of devotion.

Antal is said to have been found as an infant in a garden of tulasi (sacred basil, a plant especially sacred toVisnu) at the Visnu temple in Srivilliputtur by the saint Periyalvar, who was a Brahmin priest at the temple.Periyalvar assigned his adopted daughter the task of making the flower garlands that were offered to the godevery day. Unknown to Periyalvar, Antal, like Kannappan, violated convention by wearing the garlands shemade for Visnu herself before offering them to the god. Periyalvar was deeply chagrined when he discoveredhis daughter's transgression and refused to allow Antal to continue her profession as garland maker. But Visnu,who treasured the




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garlands he received from Antal above all others, appeared to Periyalvar in a dream and instructed the saint toallow his daughter to resume her customary practice.

17. On the Tevaram hymns and their authors, see Indira V. Peterson, "Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the TamilSaints"; also David Shulman's translation of the Tevaram hymns of Cuntaramurti (manuscript).

18. For a discussion of the concept "sacred place" in Tamil Vaisnavism, see Katherine Young, Beloved Places(Ukantarulinanilaikal??): The Correlation of Theology and Topography in the Srivaisnava Tradition of SouthIndia (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984).

19. A summary of this legend is found in chapter 2.

20. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Colas (Madras: Madras University, 1955), pp. 637, 639.

21. K. K. A. Venkatachari, The Manipravala Literature of the Srivaisnava Acaryas (Bombay: AnantacharyaResearch Institute, 1978) pp. 15, 21, 23.

22. In Srivaisnavism the parallelism between Tamil and Sanskrit sacred literature is elaborated in the doctrineknown as ubhayavedanta (twofold Vedanta). For discussions of this aspect of Srivaisnava thought, seeVenkatachari, especially pp. 1-46; also M. R. Parameswaran, "The Twofold Vedanta of Srivaisnavism."

23. See Jan Gonda, Vedic Literature (A History of Indian Literature, vol. I, Fasc. I, edited by Jan Gonda)(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1975), pp. 66-67.

24. Nammalvar forcefully expresses this idea in Tiruvaymoli 7.9.6 and Tiruvaymoli 7.9.1. English translations ofthese verses can be found in Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning, pp. 81, 85.

25. See above and note 13.

26. For an informative and concise discussion of the role of mantra in tantric tradition, see Agehananda Bharati,The Tantric Tradition (London: Rider and Company, 1965), pp. 101-63.

27. Kenneth E. Bryant, Poems to the Child-God: Structures and Strategies in the Poetry of Surdas (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1978), p. 21.

28. Similarly, A. K. Ramanujan has described bhakti poetry as a "poetry of connections." See Hymns for theDrowning, pp. 166-69.

29. In his analysis of Tamil bhakti, Friedhelm Hardy places much greater emphasis on the Krsna-lila theme than Ido. See his Viraha-Bhakti.




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PART IPOEMS, POETS, AND POETICS




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Chapter OnePoet, God, and Audience in the Poetry of the Tamil Saints

BECAUSE BHAKTI poetry is a ''poetry of connections," 1 in order to fully understand its nature it is important toaccount for the persons and things it connects and for the contact between them. As I hope to make clear, theprevailing intent of many bhakti poems is to establish contact or "communion" between the poet and an addressee,who in many instances is the god who inspires the poet's devotion, but who may also be an audience of devotees orpotential devotees. Also, very often the subject of a bhakti poem is the poet, the god whom the poet worships (whomay also be the addressee), an audience other than the god, or even the very fact of contact between the poet andthe god (or between the audience and the god). For this reason I have found it useful to picture the structure ofcommunication encoded within the saints' poems in terms of a triangle of communication linking poet, god, andaudience. (The role of reciter, devotee, and other external participants will be considered in chapters 2 and 3.)

This diagrammatic representation of the rhetorical structure of bhakti poetry can be derived from the well-knownJakobsonian model of a verbal event. Jakobson argues that several linguistic functions are involved in mostinstances of verbal communication and that one important way different kinds of verbal messages, includingpoetry, are distinguished from one another is on the basis of how these several functions are hierarchicallyordered.2 Jakobson's functions are keyed to the following model of a verbal event:

REFERENT3

MESSAGE

ADDRESSER _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ADDRESSEE

CONTACT

CODE

This chapter appeared in slightly different form under the same title in the Journal of South AsianLiterature 14, no. 2 (Summer, Fall 1984).




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Jakobson identifies six functions of language that respectively emphasize each of these six constituents of a verbalevent:

REFERENTIAL

POETIC

EMOTIVE CONATIVE

PHATIC

METALINGUISTIC

Until relatively recently linguists have tended to devote a major portion of their effort to studying the referentialaspects of language. "But," Jakobson observes, "even though a set (Einstellung) toward the referent, an orientationtoward the CONTEXTbriefly, the so-called REFERENTIAL, 'denotative,' 'cognitive' functionis the leading task ofnumerous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions in such messages must be taken into accountby the observant linguist." 4

Jakobson defines the poetic function as a "set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the messagefor its own sake. . . ."5 However, in his view, poetry is not accounted for solely by this function. "Any attempt toreduce the sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a delusiveoversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determiningfunction, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent."6

A view of poetry as a verbal event in which "the message itself" is hierarchically prior to the other functions oflanguage encourages formal analysisa close scrutiny of sound patterns and figures such as simile and metaphor.Emphasis upon the formal texture of "the message itself" may, in certain cases, be useful in distinguishing poetryfrom other kinds of verbal events, but it will not help to distinguish bhakti poetry from other kinds of poetry. Atthis point it becomes necessary to turn to other functions of language.

The following poem by the early Vaisnava saint Putattalvar illustrates why this is so. The poem may be representedin terms of a Jakobsonian diagram:

Simple folk,don't say a word about peoplewho make a world of their bellies,who spend their lives steepedin shameful deeds and evil ways,

sing the names of the lord with four armswho stretched the eight directions,and travel the roads to sacred fords.

ITA 147




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REFERENT1 ("people who make a world of their bellies")REFERENT2 ("the lord with four arms")

ADDRESSER(poet) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ADDRESSEE ("simple folk")

CONTACT

The triangle of poet, god, and audience actually accounts for both the rhetorical structure of bhakti poetry and itscontent. A survey of the poems of the saints reveals that not only do the poets speak to the deity or to an audienceof devotees, but the information carried by their poems invariably involves identifying characteristics of the deity,the poet's state of mind, the relationship between poet and deity, the deity's relationship with other devotees or withthose who shun the path of devotion, or other possibilities implicit in the triangle.

Most of the "rhetorical variants" of Tamil bhakti poetry are represented in the compositions of the early poets, andsome of these are outlined below with accompanying examples from the works of Karaikkalammaiyar and the firstthree alvars.

However, before turning to the saints' poems, there is another important point that should be considered. As A. K.Ramanujan has observed, to account for the rhetorical structure of many poems, Jakobson's model of the verbalevent has to be expanded. 8 For example, a poet may create a dramatized narrative voice. Likewise, the addresseein a poem may be dramatized so that the poem's "real-life" audience "overhears" the message conveyed by thepoem. When analyzing many poems it thus becomes necessary to speak of internal and also external addressers andaddressees:

MESSAGE

ADDRESSER(poet)

ADDRESSER(narrator) ---------

ADDRESSEE(narratee)

ADDRESSEE(audience)

CONTACT

In poems that fit this model, CONTACT between the poet and his audience is mediated by a narrating persona andan implied addressee.9

There are examples among the poems of the saintsa perfect illustration is Manikkavacakar's Tirukkovaiyarthat, onthe surface at least, are best analyzed in terms of this expanded model. However, in bhakti a more direct mode ofcontact between poet and audience is preferred, and this is why students of Hinduism perceive the saints' poems as"personal" poetry. In the vast majority of bhakti poems the narrative voice heard in the poem is identified as thesaint's own voice. Similarly, the saint speaks not to a fictive or implied listener but to a god and/or audience thatinhabits the real world. In those instances where the saints composed poems according to models that distinguishinternal narrator and addressee from poet and audience (e.g., classical Tamil love poems), sectarian interpretershave traditionally employed conventions that are designed to neutralize the poetic distance thus created.




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Triangular Communication in the Poems of the Early Saints

The Poet Speaks to the Deity

Sometimes the poet speaks directly to the deity, and the audience of devotees or potential devotees stands aside and"overhears" the poet's words. The "message" the audience overhears may take a number of forms. The principalsubject of the following poem by Karaikkalammaiyar is the relationship between the poet and Siva, but the poemalso conveys information about Siva that does not directly concern the poet's biography ("lord of gods, lord withthe splendid black throat").

When I was born and learned to speakI was overcome with loveand I reached your red feetlord of gods, lord with the splendid black throat,

will my sorrows never end?ATA 1

Within the same rhetorical framework, a poem may bring out other dimensions of the poet-god-audience triangle,as the following poem by Poykaiyalvar demonstrates:

Tall lord,whatever the unchecked ardor of your servantsmay prompt them to say,don't take offense

didn't the ten-headed demon scheme against youonly to find truthand reach your feet at last?

MTA 35

Here the poet speaks to Visnu about other devotees, and he urges the god to overlook their occasional indiscretions.The poet almost seems to be pleading on behalf of an unseen audience who is allowed to eavesdrop from thewings. The allusion to Ravana ("the ten-headed demon") adds a rhetorical flourish to the poet's argument. Ravanawas Rama's archenemy; but because his every




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thought was directed toward Rama, he attained liberation when he was slain, even though he was hostile to Rama.The poet suggests that it would be inconsistent for the god to take offense at the indiscretions of an overly zealousdevotee when even the demon's perverse mode of "worship" bore fruit.

These suggestive overtones are characteristic of the way the saints incorporate mythological allusions into theirpoems. Not invariably, but with considerable frequency, the saints allude to myths that complement or enhance apoem's "core message." Considering the prominence of suggestive figuration in classical Tamil poetry, especiallyin classical love poetry, it comes as no surprise that the saints saw in myths an opportunity to add layers ofmeaning to their poems. The suggestive use of myths in the saints' poems is analogous to the classical suggestivetechnique called ullurai (inner substance). In classical poetry an ullurai is an implied comparison between a scenein nature and an event that engages the emotions of human actors, as in the following poem:

In your town of kanci trees and ricefields,a kentai fish dives as a heron tries to seize itand then is frightenedof the white buds of a shapely lotus nearby.Since your bard tells lies,it seems to those you have leftthat all bards are thieves.

Oram Pokiyar, Kuruntokai 127, trans. George L. Hart III

The effect of this poem hinges upon an implied comparison that Hart explicates as follows: "Like the fish that hasescaped from the heron and thereafter mistakes all white things for the predator, the heroine [the narrator of thispoem], once cheated by the hero's bard, is in no mood to believe him again." 10

An analogous "mythological ullurai" is found in the following poem by Peyalvar, a poem also of the poet-speaks-to-god type:

Today I saw your feetand I cut myself freefrom all the seven births,

lord with the splendid basil-covered chestlike a mountain dipped in gold,you captivated Tiruwhen you first caught her eye.

Tiruma1,my mind is all yours.

MuTA 2




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This poem hinges on a paradox: in order for a person to escape the limitations of karma and the cycle of births, hemust surrender his will to Visnu (Tirumal); in other words, a person must sacrifice his personal freedom to be trulyfree. The verse can be divided into two components that are linked together by an implied comparison.

Component1 Component2Today I saw your feetand I cut myself freefrom all the seven births,lord

with splendid basil-covered chest like amountain dipped in gold, you captivatedTiru when you first caught her eye.

Tirumal,my mind is all yours.

Peyalvar declares that he has freed himself from the bonds of birth by surrendering his mind to Visnu, and heimplies that this was inevitable once he caught a glimpse of the god's feet. In the same way, the sense of visionwas the medium for the goddess Tiru's (Sanskrit: Sri) surrender to Tirumal. Description of the god's basil-coveredchest is a further reminder that Visnu is a refuge of safety for his devotees. Lying on his chest, the special placereserved for the goddess, basil symbolizes the consort's intimate relationship with the god.

Interestingly, the poet has reversed the articulation of the captor-captivated relationship in the two componentseven though Tirumal remains the captor in both cases. The alvar says, "I saw your feet . . . my mind is all yours"(more literally, "my mind has embraced you": unnai marukkantu kontu en manam), but "you captivated Tiru whenfirst you caught her eye." There is a shift in rhetorical prominence from the alvar in Component1 to Tirumal inComponent2. The poem focuses the reader's attention first on the alvar (who offers his own experience as anexample for his audience), then on the god, and finally back on the alvar. The alvar's relationship with the deitystands out as the poem's "topic," but the goddess's relationship with the deity enriches this topic. The theme ofPeyalvar's poem follows a pattern that is amply represented in the poetry and theology of bhakti throughout thesubcontinent. As Visnu's devotee, the alvar assumes a feminine identity. In love with the deity, he hopes to beloved by him and to receive his protection. Tiru is the god's beloved par excellence, who sets an example for allaspirants for the lord's grace. The alvar and all Visnu's devotees try to be like the goddess.




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The Poet Speaks to the Audience

A bhakti poet may pull his audience into a poem by using second person pronouns and verbal forms, imperatives,vocatives, and similar resources of language. As A. K. Ramanujan remarks, these linguistic forms are

rather special: although most general in their reference [especially pronominal forms], they point to realparticulars in the living context outside the language. . . . Such words are called "shifters;" they mediatebetween speech and speaking, between language and the context in which language lives. Thus the poem,in using such shifters, is both most general in naming all possible people and objects and most particular inpointing to the very people and objects in the audience at the moment of speaking. 11

In the following poem, Poykaiyalvar concentrates upon the audience's relationship with the deity. He tells hisaudience to worship Visnu, and he details acts of worship that will please the god. The poet pulls the audience intothe poem with the imperative verb and second person pronouns; further, the audience's contact with Visnu is thesubject of the poem.

As long as there's life in this fleeting bodyworship Tirumal with garlands of perfect blossoms,with sacrifice, sacred rites and chants,and if you sing his names in praise,

that's best of all.MTA 70

The Poet Speaks to His Own Heart

Not infrequently the bhakti poet addresses his own heart (neñcu, ullam), his mind (manam), or the "breath of life"(uyir) that animates his body. In these poems the poet is both speaker and addressee, and so it appears that the deityas well as the audience overhears the poet's words. There is a prototype for this type of poem in the cankamanthologies, but the classical poem and its bhakti counterpart differ in an important way. In the former it is adramatized character, not the poet, who addresses his heart. In contrast, the bhakti poet speaks to his own heart inhis own voice. Often in these poems the poet speaks about his relationship with the deity, and he either upbraidshis heart for impeding complete surrender or praises his heart for helping him to achieve




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union. The split in the poet's identity implied by the rhetorical structure of these poems complements a view ofhuman identity as a composite of body and heart/mind (utal/ullam) or of body and life-breath (utal/uyir), a motifthat frequently appears in the poetry of the saints. In this poem by Peyalvar, the poet speaks to his heart aboutVisnu, and he encourages his heart to surrender to the lord.

He became the world, the Eon,and the ocean,he became red fireand the sun's brilliant, far-flung rays,O my heart,give your whole being to the feet of the lordwho wears a crown of pure dazzling gold.

MuTA 44

The Poet Speaks to an Unspecified Addressee

In the poems cited so far, the contact between the poet and the deity, the audience, or even the poet himself isdirect and unambiguous. The Tamil saints also composed hymns that are neither so clearly "personal" as thesepoems nor so decisively "impersonal" as the classical love poems. The rhetorical structure of these bhakti poems isambiguous to varying degrees.

In some poems the poet clearly identifies himself as the speaker, but he does not invoke his audience "by name."Here the poet clearly is not speaking to the deity, and we know this is so because the deity is spoken of in the thirdperson. However, the poem does not specifically prevent audience members from viewing themselves as theaddressee, as in the following poem by Putattalvar:

When I approach Tirumal, our ruler,and offer my prayersto the tall lord with red eyes,

won't I rule all the earth,won't I enter the heavensand become a god among gods?

ITA 90




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Neither Speaker Nor Addressee is Specified in the Poem

There are poems that are rhetorically even less explicit than the poem cited above, and in such poems the reader isgiven even wider scope to infer the poem's rhetorical structure. Again, the deity usually cannot be the addresseebecause he is referred to in the third person. This verse by Karaikkalammaiyar illustrates the type:

Whatever penance a man performs,whatever image he conjures,the perfect lordwhose throat is blue as sapphiretakes the form of his vision

and all the while these dullardsspeak the wisdom of booksand follow aimless paths.

ATA 33

I would argue that Tamil Vaisnava and Saiva audiences use poems in which the poet unambiguously addresses thedeity, the audience, or his own heart as a standard for interpretation of poems with less precisely defined rhetoricalstructures. This contention is supported by sectarian exegetical literature in which the poetry of the saints tends tobe interpreted as a confessional document of the poet's quest to obtain the lord's grace or as a sermon in which thepoet shows his audience the way to find the lord. From this point of view, the poems that are rhetorically mostdirect may, for purposes of analysis, be considered to be at the "core" of the Tamil bhakti corpus; they constitute astandard. Poems in which no addressee is specified occupy a stratum once removed from the core, and poems inwhich neither speaker nor addressee is specified are located even farther from the center.

Signature Verses

Many of the Tamil bhakti texts are arranged in decads, which are encompassed by a common theme and/or formaldesign. These verse sets, called patikams, 12 are followed by an eleventh or signature verse (called phalasruti, orsometimes srutiphala). A phalasruti (the verse that includes "the hearing of the result") also extols the benefits adevotee may count on if he (or shebhakti is, after all, a preeminently "feminine" mode of worship)13 hears orrecites the set of ten. Phalasrutis operate in a different rhetorical register




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from the other verses of a patikam, for in a phalasruti the poet speaks of himself in the third person. In this sensethe phalasruti verses are metapoems poems about poems. A phalasruti brings the verses it follows into "earshot" ofa historical audience, and it makes an explicit connection between the narrative voice heard in the poems and aquasi-historical author. This author, the saint-poet, is a persona who stands somewhere at the boundary between the"real-life" author, in the Western critic's sense of the word, and an "implied author" who exists solely in the wordsof his composition. For a Tamil Vaisnava or Saiva audience, the saint-poet is a composite of a voice heard inpoetry, a legendary figure whose life story is recorded in hagiography, and a sacred personality who is enshrined intemples. Tamil audiences have never distinguished the saint, whose identity is fashioned from poetry, legend, andritual, from a historical author. The phalasruti, which invariably includes the name of the poet and of his nativevillage or town, "historicizes" the voice heard in bhakti poetry.

Some critics have suggested that phalasrutis were appended to bhakti texts by later sectarian authors, because theyoften are thematically discontinuous with the other verses of a decad. 14 It is possible that phalasrutis are thecompositions of anonymous poets who paid homage to the bhakti saints, their poetry, and their chosen deity bycleverly wedding their own compositions to the poems of the saints. However, this hypothesis poses otherproblems. For instance, if all the phalasruti verses were deleted from Nammalvar's Tiruvaymoli, the metricallinkage (called antati that interconnects the verses of the text would be interrupted between each set of ten.15 Also,there is another genre in Vaisnava literature that fulfills this function and that is traditionally recognized as a laterauthor's gesture of appreciation for the saint's poems. This is the verse called taniyan, which is appended to asaint's or a sectarian scholar's composition as an introductory verse.

Following is a phalasruti verse from one of the two decads composed by the early Saivite poet Karaikkalammaiyar.If not the earliest, it is probably one of the earliest examples of this genre in Tamil literature.

Demons gather around the peerless lord,beat one another with gleeand rend the air with their cries,a partridge joins in the songwhile jackals who live nearbyhowl the part of the lute,and the wild-haired she-demon of Karaikkaltells about the Father, lord of splendid Alankatuin these ten verses of pure Tamil

people who master themwill find the path that leads to Sivaand thrill with joy.

TAMTP 11




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This verse contains all the elements that are typically found in a phalasruti references to the poet and her nativetown (''the wild-haired she-demon of Karaikkal"), to the preceding verses of the decad ("these ten verses of pureTamil"), and to the rewards of reciting the decad ("people who master them will find the path that leads to Siva andthrill with joy"). According to the legendary biography of Karaikkalammaiyar, the saint begged Siva to let her joinhis demon attendants so she could watch him dance at the cremation ground of Tiruvalankatu. The scene depictedin this verse is directly related to the legend of Karaikkalammaiyar's life. Among phalasrutis this one is unusual forthe large amount of "biographical" detail it contains. In the phalasrutis of Tiruvaymoli one does not usually findany more information about the poet than his name, Catakopan (Sanskrit: Sathakopaone of several names by whichNammalvar is known), and the name of his native village, Kurukur.

Manikkavacakar's Tiruccatakam: The Poet's Appeal to Siva

Tiruccatakam is the fifth section of Manikkavacakar's Tiruvacakam, one of the best-known works in the TamilSaiva corpus. These one hundred metrically interlinked verses 16 (the name is derived from Sanskrit sataka,"consisting of one hundred") are usually ranked with Manikkavacakar's best poetry. The poem is subdivided intoten groups of ten verses each (there are no phalasruti verses), and the verses of each group share a common meter.Also, commentators have perceived an underlying theme for each ten-verse set.

While commentators may identify distinct themes for each of Tiruccatakam's ten groups of verses, critics ofTiruvacakam are also careful to point out that these groups are thematically continuous and that, in fact, the onehundred verses of Tiruccatakam, like Tiruvacakam as a whole, consistently document the development of thepoet's relationship with Siva.17 In terms of the triangular rhetorical model presented above, the verses ofTiruccatakam emphasize the relationship between the poet and the deity. Tamil Saivites greatly admireManikkavacakar's fervent declarations of devotion to Siva in poems like the verses of Tiruccatakam, where thepoet addresses the deity directly. These verses encompass the several variants of this rhetorical type: any one versemay concentrate upon Siva's attributes, the poet's thoughts and feelings, the nature of the relationship between thepoet and the deity, or any combination of the three. Other rhetorical configurations, such as verses where the poetspeaks to his own heart or to an unspecified addressee, are not categorically excluded from this poem, but wherethey do occur, the subject of the poem remains the poet's quest for Siva's grace.

Manikkavacakar excelled at composing poems that emphasize the relationship between poet and deity, or at leastthis appears to be the judgment of Tamil audiences. For generations, the persona of the poet in Tiruvacakam hasmade a deep impression on Tamil Saivites, and they have been moved by the




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alternating experiences of suffering and elation he expresses as he feels himself to be now hopelessly estrangedfrom Siva and now miraculously close to the god, even possessed by him. Though the early poets experimentedwith this type of poem, by and large their poems are not charged with the emotional intensity that prevails inTiruvacakam. There is a well-known proverb in Tamil that says that the person whose heart does not melt when hehears the words of Tiruvacakam is incapable of responding emotionally to any words whatsoever. 18 These poemsachieve a powerful effect by appealing to their audience's sense of empathy with the poet. In the following versesselected from Tiruccatakam, Manikkavacakar uses several of the rhetorical structures displayed in the poetry of theearly poets to frame the subject of this text: his relationship with Siva.


I won't bother with Purantaran, Mal, or Ayan,even if my house caves inI won't care for anyonebut your own servants,and if I sink into hellI won't complain

Lord, our master,by your graceI won't give a thought to any godbut you.

TC 2

Like an actor in a playI imitate your servantsand clamor to enter the inner chamber of your house,

Master,lord brilliant as a mountain of gems set in gold,

give your graceso I can love you with love so unceasingmy heart overflows.

TC 11

I don't surrender my heart at your feet,I don't melt with love,sing your praise or bring garlands,I don't tell of your glory,tend your temple, or dance




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King among gods,refuge for worthy people,

I rush toward my death.TC 14

The Poet Speaks to His Own Heart

Dead heart,

you resistthe lord who entered meand took me, an utter fool,for his own,

my father who graced me with knowledgeand showed me all noble paths,lord who cut my bondsand gave his sweet, unfailing grace

you plunge headlong into falsehoodand condemn me to ruin.

TC 32


The lord no one can hear,the lord who never fails,the lord with no relationswho heard all sounds without even trying

placed me on a thronewhile everyone stared with wonder,

though I'm just a lowly doghe showed me things never shown before,and let me hear what no one else has heard,he kept me safe from rebirthand made me his own:

this is the magic our lord performs.TC 28




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Rhetorical Variety in Tiruvaymoli

Nammalvar's Tiruvaymoli is a long work, and in this text of more than one thousand verses, interlinked by antati,the poet is given ample scope to try his hand at a variety of poetic forms. Nammalvar has taken advantage of thevast scope of his work to explore the several variants of the direct, personal type of poetry that are found amongthe compositions of the early poets and that have come to be regarded as "typical" bhakti poems. The text alsoincludes many poems (close to a third of the entire work) that are modeled after classical Tamil love poetry of the"interior" (akam). In these so-called akapporul verses (verses containing "the substance of akam"), both poet andaudience stand at a distance from the internal dialogue of speaker (kurru) and listener (ketpor) as they do in anyakam poem. However, commentators developed a mode of exegesis that ''personalized" the love poems ofNammalvar and brought them squarely into the bhakti fold. 19

The eleven verses of each verse set (tiruvaymoli) of Tiruvaymoli share a common metrical format, and more oftenthan not, they are also bound together thematically.20 The intertextual bond between the verses of a set may takemany forms. Each verse of 2.5,21 for example, includes a description of Visnu's physical appearance, and theverses of 1.7 develop the idea that Visnu resides within everyone and, not least of all, within the poet himself.Verses also tend to form clusters on the basis of rhetorical structures, even if these do not always encompass all theverses of a set, For example, verses 3 through 6 of 1.10 are appeals by the poet to his own heart. Nammalvar'sfacility with the several poetic variants that emphasize one facet or another of the triangle connecting poet, deity,and audience is demonstrated in the following selection of verses from Tiruvaymoli:


Lord, great blazing flame,who conquered seven bullsand turned splendid Lanka to ashes,

don't trust me!

When you take me to your feet of golddon't ever let me run off again.

TVM 2.9.10




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The Poet Speaks to the Audience

Drop everything,then release your life-breathto the lord, master of Release.

TVM 1.2.1

Bow your head at the feet of the lordwho chopped off all the heads and armsof the king who ruled Lanka,land girdled by the vast sea

and leave the ocean of days far behind.TVM 1.6.7


My mind won't leave the sideof the lord who can't be equaledor surpassed,

my tongue trills the words of his song,my dancing limbs are possessed.

TVM 1.6.3

The lordwho stands first among ancient immortals,who delights in Pinnai's long arms,

graceful as bamboo,will become a weaklingif he tries to leave meor stray from my good heart.

TVM 1.7.8

Neither Speaker Nor Addressee is Specified in the Poem

The lord fierce as a bull in battle,who wears a crown of goldand cool, flowering basil,

the lord who sleeps in the milky seawith a snake for his bed

vanquished seven bulls to win Pinnai,




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girl with arms graceful as bamboo,and pierced seven spreading Sal treescovered with blossomsrich in honey.

TVM 2.5.7

Akapporul Verses

What her mother said:

She dancesand her mind wanders,she singsand her eyes fill with tears,she searches all over and criesNarasimhaa . . . !

This girl, bright brow and all,is wasting away.

TVM 2.4.1

Like a bar of lac or waxthrust into fireher mind is in periland you are heartless.

What shall I do for you,lord who razed Lanka,

the land ruled by the demon?TVM 2.4.3

Night and day her peerless eyesswim in tears:

lord who turned Lanka's fortune into smoke,don't scorch this simple girland make her gentle glances wither.

TVM 2.4.10

Phalasruti Verses

Catakopan of Kurukur,fertile town filled with gardens,has performed humble serviceby singing these thousand polished versesfor the lord who churned the ocean capped with waves,the lord the gods worshipso they may rise to high places




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people who master these ten verses of the thousandwill rise with the godsand escape the prison of births.

TVM 1.3.11

Catakopan of Kurukurhas artfully sung these thousand versesin praise of the beautiful Dancerwho rules the seven worlds

people who faithfully singthese ten verses of the thousandwill never be in need.

TVM 2.2.11

These poems demonstrate that Nammalvar mastered all the rhetorical variants found in the poetry of the earlysaint-poets. But in his poems the coordinates of the poet-deity-audience model tend to collapse into one another;and this is one of the really outstanding effects of Nammalvar's poetry, a source of its great power. The poetestablishes a major theme in his work by first framing a poem in one of the familiar rhetorical models, and thenundermining the very premises of the model. Consider, for example, these three poems:

He wrestled seven bulls,swallowed the seven worlds,filled me with the coolness of his heaven

and became my very mind.TVM 1.8.7

O breaththat gives life to my flesh,what a treasure you are!

Because you are here within meMadhu's slayer, my Father,leader of gods in heaven,

and Ihave mingled our beings

just as honey, milk, ghee,sugar syrup and nectar

flow in a single stream.TVM 2.3.1




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Lord who can't be equaledor surpassed,great lord of illusionswho assumes the form of every being,

you became my life-breath, my fatherand the mother who bore me,

O Fatherwho reveals mysteries that defy comprehension,this slave can't fathom all you have done.

TVM 2.3.2

Each of these poems displays a different rhetorical structure. In 1.8.7, the poet appears to be telling the audienceabout Visnu; in 2.3.1, the poet speaks to his own life-breath; and in 2.3.2, he speaks directly to the deity. Butnotice the idea that is expressed in these verses. While they are all framed by the speaker-addressee relationshipsdiscussed in this chapter, each verse ultimately negates the distinction between the poet and the deity. Starting fromthree different vantage points, Nammalvar, in effect, challenges the rhetorical substructure of his poem. Forcomparison, consider this verse:

Examine these threethought, word, deed

abolish themand contain yourself in the lord.

TVM 1.2.8

Here the poet aims to eliminate the distance that separates the audience and the deity. But again, initially poet,deity, and audience are perceived separately. In Tiruvaymoli, poetry bridges the gap separating a limited point ofview, which respects distinctions, from perfected consciousness, where the building blocks of poetry are no longermeaningful.

A Critical Challenge

Because bhakti poetry disrespects and even undermines distinctions, it is subversive to certain hallowed principlesfavored by many literary critics in the West. The tendency in much Western criticism is to proliferate distinctionsbetween, for instance, narrator, implied author, and "real-life" author. Wayne Booth describes the "implied author"as a literary presence "we infer . . . as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man." In novels, the impliedauthor, who is not to be confused with the flesh-and-blood author, is also seldom identical with the narrative "I'' ofa work. 22 In a similar vein, Jonathan Culler writes of a "mediative persona" who is always a felt presence in lyricpoetry. He claims that even if a poem is not explicitly identified as the words of a




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fictional persona, readers usually construct a fictional situation that frames the words of the poem. 23 Also, on theopposite side of the literary equation, critics speak of the "narratee," a fictive presence coded in a literary workwho is not to be confused with either an ideal "implied reader" or a flesh-and-blood audience.24

The bhakti poet and, even more, the sectarian interpreters of the saints' poems offer a challenge to this way oflooking at literature. Unlike many Western critics who find multiplicity underlying a superficial appearance ofunity, the commentators find unity underlying a Seemingly multiple surface. The exegesis of Nammalvar'sakapporul verses is one of the best examples of this perspective. In the commentators' eyes, the "mother" onlyseems to be an internal narrator who is different from Nammalvar the saint. In reality the "mother" is an aspect ofNammalvar's essential self.

Identification rather than differentiation is the dominant critical mode in the interpretive climate of TamilHinduism. Hindu interpreters built images of the saint-poets around the voices they heard in the poems and thengranted the saints an existence that extends beyond the confines of poetry. And as the phalasruti verses plainlyaffirm, the poems of the saints have direct consequences for their audience, consequences that are not confined toaesthetic effect. The members of the audience are not mere onlookers; they are meant to identify with the audiencewho is either directly invoked or who is implied in the text. And this is only the first of a series of identificationsthat are inherent in bhakti poetry. The poet identifies with the god he worships; the audience identifies with thepoet, who is, above all, a model worshiper; and by following the saint's example, the audience finally identifieswith the god. These processes of identification, which typify both the rhetorical form of bhakti poems and themessage they carry, are explored further in the following pages.

Notes

1. A. K. Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1981), pp. 166-69.

2. Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in T. A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350-77.

3. Jakobson prefers "context" to "referent," but since I will be discussing the interpretive and performance"context" of bhakti poetry, I have used "referent" to avoid confusion.

4. Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," p. 353.

5. Ibid., p. 356.

6. Ibid.

7. All bhakti poems cited in this and in following chapters are also found in the anthology of translationsconstituting Part III. For commentary on mythological allusions and other references that may require specificcultural or literary knowledge, see the "Notes to the Poems" that follow the anthology.

8. Comments delivered for a panel presentation on the audience of Indian literature, annual meeting of theAssociation for Asian Studies, Chicago, 1982; and tom-




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ments delivered for a panel presentation on the author of Indian literature, Wisconsin Conference on SouthAsia, Madison, 1983.

9. See concluding section to this chapter and notes 22-24.

10. George L. Hart III, The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and Their Sanskrit Counterparts (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1975), p. 275.

11. Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning, p. 123; Roman Jakobson, "Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the RussianVerb," Russian Language Project, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 1957.

12. Patikam is a generic name for this form, but it may be called by other names in particular texts. For instance,in Tiruvaymoli each set of ten verses plus phalasruti verse is known as a tiruvaymoli.

13. A. K. Ramanujan, "On Women Saints," in John S. Hawley and Donna D. Wulff, eds., The Divine Consort:Radha and the Consort Goddesses of India (Berkeley: Berkeley Theological Union, 1982).

14. In the devotional poetry of north Indian languages one often finds signature lines that in some respects fulfillthe same functions as a phalasruti verse, but these usually refer directly to the poem they follow. See, for instance,the bhanitas that conclude many of the Bengali poems translated in Edward C. Dimock, Jr., and Denise Levertov,In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali (New York: Anchor Books, 1967). In the bhanita line the poet oftenspeaks directly to the narrator of the poem and comments upon the situation described in the poem.

15. The verses of Tiruvaymoli, like those of a number of other bhakti texts, are joined "end to end" by means of aprosodic device called antati (a Tamilization of the Sanskrit compound anta, "end" + adi, "beginning"). Accordingto the rules of antati, the last syllable or several syllables of a verse in a multistanzaic poem must be identical tothe first syllable or several syllables of its successor.

16. The verses of Tiruccatakam are interlinked by the prosodic device called antati (see note 15).

17. At least two studies of Tiruvacakam in English develop this premise. These are Ratna Navaratnam,Tiruvachakam : The Hindu Testament of Love (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1963); and G. Vanmikanathan,Pathway to God Through Tamil Literature IThrough the Tiruvacakam (Delhi: Delhi Tamil Sangam, 1971).

18. Tiruvacakattukku urukatar oru vacakattukkum urukar. Literally, "one who does not melt for Tiruvacakam (thesacred utterance) will not melt for any utterance."

19. For a more detailed discussion of this commentorial technique and its significance, see chapter 3.

20. While novices may experience some difficulty in finding a thematic center for some of Tiruvaymoli's versesets, this rarely poses a problem for Srivaisnava commentators.

21. See notes to the translations of Nammalvar's poems in Part III for an explanation of numbering conventions.

22. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 73-75.

23. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1975), pp. 161-88.

24. See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1982), p. 34.




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Chapter TwoThe Devotee's Experience of the Sacred Tamil Hymns

CONTACT, PARTICIPATION, communion, and ultimately identificationthese are the leitmotifs that pervadebhakti poetry at every level. The saints were continually striving for union with their lord; they delighted in thecompany of other devotees; and they sometimes despaired when they lost contact with god and fellow devotees.These themes appear in their poems time and time again.

When will I become a brilliant lightfree from joy and sorrow,free from births, disease, old age and death,

and when will I join the servantsof the lord of illusionswho holds a blazing wheel and a conch,

the lord who watches over the earthand the clouds in the sky.

Nammalvar, TVM 2.3.10

I saw only miseryI failed to seethat the seed of all beingresides in my own heart.

O lord who has no peer in heaven,you called me to serve you,but I can't

like an elephant with two trunksI can only stuff myself with food.

Manikkavacakar, TC 41

This chapter appeared in slightly different form under the same title in History of Religions 24, no. 2[November 1984).




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I'm a fraud,my heart is a fraud,even my love is false,but if, bound to my deeds,I implore you,can I still reach you?Honey! Nectar! Clear sugarcane essence!Sweet lord!Give your graceso this servant may come to you.


In the preceding chapter I showed that contact is more than an important theme in the saints' poems; the saints alsofavored poetic forms that highlight contact between poet, god, and audience. Further, contact continues to be animportant value even when focus shifts from the text to the context of Tamil bhakti poetry. This is apparent in theextensive sectarian literature dealing with the saints, their poems, and the place of both in temple ritual.

Author and AudienceA Srivaisnava Model

Not long after the alvars' poems were arranged in canonical form by Nathamuni (tenth century), Srivaisnavismdeveloped into a major sectarian institution. Vaisnava temples at such places as Srirankam, Tirupati, and Melkotebecame important centers of sectarian activity. In Srivaisnavism, as in other Hindu sects, doctrine is preserved,expanded, and passed on from teacher to pupil in lineages of spiritual authority (guruparampara-). Srivaisnavatradition recognizes Nathamuni as the first acarya or teacher in a spiritual lineage that begins with the alvars andcontinues to the present day. 1 The celebrated philosopher Ramanuja is a third-generation member of this lineage,and while Ramanuja's own works are exclusively in Sanskrit, he promoted recitation of the alvars' poems in theVaisnava temples of Tamilnadu and adjoining areas. Beginning in Ramanuja's time, commentaries on the saints'poems became an important vehicle for Srivaisnava doctrine. Other genres of sectarian literature include accountsof the alvars' and acaryas' lives, temple histories, and other works devoted to specific topics of theologicalinterest. Many of these works, especially the commentaries, were probably first delivered orally and later writtendown. Some of these works are in Sanskrit and others in a highly Sanskritized Tamil known as manipravala(rubies and coral).2

While all twelve alvars are highly revered in Srivaisnava thought and literature, Nammalvar occupies a place ofspecial prominence in the tradition. After all, it is Nammalvar's works that are equated with the four Vedas, whilethe works of the other saints are equated with the "limbs of the Veda" and the




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auxiliary limbs. 3 Further, the other saints are sometimes described as Nammalvar's limbs (avayava). Both theseschemes are organic and suggest that Nammalvar can stand for all the Vaisnava saints and his poems for the entirecorpus of sacred hymns. If this is so, it is not unreasonable to claim that, for Srivaisnavas, the relationship betweenNammalvar and Visnu encapsulates an entire theology. It is therefore worth taking a closer look at thatrelationship.4

An ideal place to begin is a statement by Nanjiyar, a twelfth- (or thirteenth-) century commentator on Nammalvar'smagnum opus, Tiruvaymoli. He asserts that the audience (bhoktr: literally "enjoyer") of Nammalvar's hymnsincludes "all those who wish to be liberated, are already liberated, and have eternally been liberated, and Visnuhimself, the husband of Sri."5 Further exploration will reveal some themes in Srivaisnava thought and practice thatunderlie Nanjiyar's statement.

According to Srivaisnava hagiographic accounts,6 Nammalvar, an incarnation of the divine general Visvaksena (insome accounts, of Visnu himself), was born the son of a Vellala7 chieftain who lived in the village of Kurukur(present-day Alvartirunakari) located in southern Tamilnadu. Nammalvar is said to have been filled with perfectconsciousness of Visnu from the moment of his birth, and for this reason, he experienced none of the physical orsocial needs of ordinary children. He was not inclined to suckle at his mother's breast; he never cried; he nevereven opened his eyes. The saint's parents were understandably bewildered by this extraordinary behavior, andtwelve days after his birth they took the child to the Visnu temple of Kurukur and left him there. The saint settledhimself at the foot of a tamarind tree growing inside the temple compound (the tree is said to be an incarnation ofthe snake Ananta), and there, for sixteen years, he sat in meditation, completely absorbed in contemplation ofVisnu.

The Divyasuricarita, one of the standard Srivaisnava hagiographic texts, continues the story as follows:

When sixteen years had come to an end, his overwhelming happiness burst forth from within him like waterfrom a full lake [appearing] in the form of his poems. When he had composed various songs which werelovely by virtue of Bhagavan's qualities [they described], he immersed himself in the ocean of His bliss,swooned and then recovered.8

This passage appears to support the commonplace notion that the saints' hymns represent a "spontaneousoutpouring" of their feelings of devotion for the lord. There is very little overt sense of an intended audience for thehymns implied by this notion, unless it be that the saints directed their hymns to the lord, the object of theirdevotion.

But this is not the end to the tale. A critical actor in Nammalvar's story, the saint Maturakavi, now enters thenarrative. Maturakavi, we are told, was a Brahmin who hailed from Kolur, a village near Kurukur. Maturakavi




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embarked upon an extensive pilgrimage to Visnu shrines in many parts of India, and one day, during hismeanderings in the north, he saw a bright light in the southern sky. He followed this light to its source, the saintNammalvar his destined guru. When Maturakavi posed Nammalvar a question, the saint, who had hitherto beenoblivious to everyone and everything other than Visnu, graciously interrupted his reverie to instruct this worthydisciple. 9 Maturakavi, we are told, set the alvar's poems to music and sang before audiences of devotees. In oneversion of the story he is also credited with instituting regular worship of Nammalvar's image.

With the introduction of Maturakavi, a more explicit notion of audience begins to come into focus. Thehagiographic accounts do not claim that Nammalvar had Maturakavi in mind as the audience for his poems whenhe composed them. In fact, in Tiruvaymoli the alvar proclaims that Visnu is the real author of the poems, and thathe, Nammalvar, is merely the god's mouthpiece.10 But the accounts do strongly imply that once these works(known as the Tamil Veda in Srivaisnava tradition) were manifest in the world, they became the content ofMaturakavi's spiritual education. Furthermore, the hagiographers suggest that the alvar's poems did not find anaudience by sheer accident, but rather that a divine purpose directed their composition and propagation. In thewords of the Divyasuricarita,

That Parankusa [i.e., Nammalvar]11 began to relate to Madhurakavi, who was eager to hear, the greatnessof the Tamil Veda. "In order to protect all beings, He who is born of Himself (svabhuh) made through mymouth these Tamil stanzas [filled] with the meaning of the Vedas."12

The idea that the composition of sacred poems by saint-poets is part of a divine stratagem to direct humanity alonga salvific path is elaborated in the hagiographies. The gist of these accounts is that Visnu, not succeeding in hisvarious efforts to promote the salvation of humankind through such devices as taking incarnations on earth, decidedthat a foolproof means was called for. He therefore decided that he would assume the form of the temple icon(arca) and that his various emblems and members of his heavenly retinue would be born on earth as saints, knownin theological terms as "partial incarnations" (amsavatara). One account suggests that the alvars were more likelyto succeed where Visnu, in his earlier efforts, had failed, because they were "of the same class as men" and thuswould act as decoys to lure humans toward a salvific path.13

The correlation of the alvars with the temple icon concurs with a scheme found elsewhere in Srivaisnava literaturewhereby each of Visnu's five manifestations (of which the arca is the fifth) is correlated with an authoritative genreof scripture (pramana). In this scheme Tiruvaymoli, as a metonym for the entire corpus of sacred Tamil poems, iscorrelated with the material image (arca).14 The essential quality shared by the Tamil poems and the templeimage, in contradistinction to other forms of scripture and Visnu's




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other manifestations, is maximum accessibility.

What this all seems to imply, in terms of the present discussion, is a composite notion of audience that is part andparcel of Srivaisnava theology. Nammalvar was born on earth in fulfillment of Visnu's plan to bring salvationwithin reach of humankind. The saint was graced with a complete revelation of Visnu, and this overwhelmingexperience "burst out" of him in the form of poetry. In accord with the divine plan, Maturakavi was drawn toNammalvar and became his disciple. If Nammalvar is Visnu's mouthpiece, Maturakavi is his public relations man,for he is the one who actually arranged for recitation of the hymns before audiences of devotees. Thus Nammalvarand Maturakavi are links in a chain whereby Visnu reveals himself to his devotees (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1

The idea of a rhetorical vector that originates in Visnu and is directed toward his devotees is underscored by theterm anubhavagrantha, used by Srivaisnavas to denote the acaryas' commentaries on Tiruvaymoli. According to K.K. A. Venkatachari, the appropriate interpretation of anubhava in this context is "enjoyment," and thus ananubhavagrantha is a "work of enjoyment." In other words, the commentaries capture the acaryas' "enjoyment" ofNammalvar's hymns. Furthermore, Tiruvaymoli is said to express Nammalvar's "enjoyment" of Visnu. Onecommentator tells us that "Nammalvar was enjoying the Lord by the Lord's grace, and so was considered to bequite full (of everything) (paripurna).'' 15 Nammalvar's poems are viewed as the by-product of his intense"enjoyment" of the lord's qualities. Venkatachari's summary of the "chain of enjoyment" that is implicit in the termanubhavagrantha is very much to the point:

Srivaisnavism can be called a tradition of spiritual enjoyment. The basis of the tradition is the alvars'enjoyment (anubhava) of the Lord. Secondly, there is the commentators' enjoyment (anubhava) of thehymns of the alvars. Because the




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commentators do not consider their task of commenting a pedantic work, but rather the very embodiment oftheir own enjoyment, their commentaries in turn become a literature to be enjoyed by the subsequentgenerations. In the Srivaisnava tradition direct enjoyment of the Lord can also be indirect enjoyment ofHim through the hymns of the alvars and also the commentaries, which are testimonies of the spiritualexperience of the community. 16

So far this reconstruction of an audience model in line with Srivaisnava conceptions involves a flow from Visnu tohis devotee, with the alvar playing an intermediary roleor, otherwise expressed, with the alvar taking the positionof first link in a chain of devotees. The model, as it now stands, encompasses all the audience categoriesenumerated by Nanjiyar in the statement cited above, with the crucial exception of the last, Visnu himself.(Nanjiyar's other categoriesall those who wish to be liberated, etc.are contained in the idea of devotee in itsbroadest application.) How can one account for the last member of Nanjiyar's list?

By further probing Srivaisnava belief and practice, it becomes clear that the rhetorical model implicit in this systemof religious thought includes a second dimension that has not yet been accounted for. Here the flow is reversed,moving from devotee to god, again with the alvar functioning as the first link in a chain. The idea of "enjoyment,"which Venkatachari has shown to be central to Srivaisnava spiritual experience, is important. Not only does thealvar "enjoy" the qualities of the lord and ultimately pass on his enjoyment to the Srivaisnava community at large,but Visnu is said to "enjoy" hearing the alvars' hymns recited. This, in fact, provides a rationale for reciting thealvars' hymns in Tamil Vaisnava temples: Visnu is entertained by the hymns.

A starting point for this interpretation is provided in the hagiographies that describe the redaction of the alvars'hymns by Nathamuni. According to the traditional account, Nathamuni (whose grandson, Yamuna, became thepreceptor of Ramanuja) went into a trance after reciting Maturakavi's poem in praise of Nammalvar 12,000 times.While he was in this state, Nammalvar appeared to him and taught him the hymns of the alvars as well as some ofthe pivotal doctrines of Srivaisnavism. In Srivaisnava tradition Nathamuni is credited with reviving the practice ofreciting the alvars' hymns at the temple of Rankanatan at Srirankam. In so doing he is said to have been followingan example set by Tirumankaiyalvar, another of the Tamil Vaisnava saints.17 He is also credited with teaching theproper mode of recitation to his sister's sons, who in turn passed on the tradition of ritual recitation to futuregenerations of Srivaisnavas.

Nathamuni fits into Srivaisnava hagiographic literature as the crucial link between the alvars and the later acaryas,and in this capacity he is a major actor in the official chronicle of the Srirankam temple. This chronicle, calledKoyil Oluku, relates how the alvars' hymns became a part of temple ritual, and in this version of the story Visnu isexplicitly portrayed in the role of audience.18




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The Oluku tells us that Tirumankai settled down at Srirankam and composed hymns for Visnu or Perumal, as thegod is known here. In addition, we are told that at this time Maturakavi installed the image of his master,Nammalvar, in the temple of Kurukur and instituted special ritual performances in honor of the alvar. ApparentlyMaturakavi also was in the habit of visiting Srirankam.

Once Tirumankai sang some of his compositions for Perumal during the festival celebrated in the month ofKarttikai (November-December), and he acted out the meaning of the hymns with gestures (abhinaya) as he sang.Perumal. was very pleased with Tirumankai's performance, and he asked the saint how he would like to be honoredfor his service. The saint requested that Perumal listen to Tiruvaymoli on the eleventh day of the bright half ofMarkali (the month that follows Karttikai) and that he honor Tiruvaymoli with all the honors due to the Vedas.Perumal agreed and arrangements were made for the festival called Adhyayanotsava (recitation festival), 19 whenTiruvaymoli would be recited along with the Vedas.

Maturakavi traveled to Srirankam for the festival with the image of Nammalvar that he had enshrined in the templeat Kurukur. When they arrived, Perumal bestowed many honors upon Nammalvar and gave him the name (whichmeans "our alvar") by which he has been known ever since. During the Adhyayanotsava the Vedas were recitedduring the daytime, and in the evening Maturakavi, as Nammalvar's representative, recited the verses ofTiruvaymoli and acted out the poems' meaning with gestures. The recitation took place every day for ten days, andafter it was concluded Perumal honored Maturakavi with gifts of garlands, sanctified food (prasada), scents, andtiruman ("holy earth," the clay used by Srivaisnavas to draw the sectarian mark on their foreheads).

The Adhyayanotsava was celebrated annually in this way for many years, but eventually observance of the festivallapsed and Nammalvar's hymns were forgotten. After Nathamuni recovered the hymns of the alvars, he revived therecitation festival and sang the hymns of Tiruvaymoli for Perumal as Maturakavi had before him. He also extendedthe scope of the festival by incorporating recitation of the hymns of all the other alvars into the ritual schedule.After Nathamuni's death this tradition was carried on by Kilaiyakattalvan and Melaiyakattalvan, his sister's sons.

In the continuation of the Oluku account we learn that the god bestowed the title araiyar (king)20 upon the tworeciters, and presented them with all the tokens of honor that he had previously bestowed upon Nammalvar. Fromthat time on the reciter of the alvars' hymns at Srirankam was called araiyar, a title that was given to no othertemple servant, and the araiyar received the turban, vestments, and garlands that had adorned the lord asrecognition for the service he performed during the Adhyayanotsava.

The ritual format described in Koyil Oluku is preserved, to varying degrees, in present-day Tamil Vaisnavatemples.21 It implies an audience




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model that, in a sense, is the inverse of the model discussed previously. Here the poems are a vehicle for thedevotee to bring enjoyment to the lord. As in the first model, the primary actors are Visnu and the alvar (who inSrivaisnava thought is regarded as Visnu's quintessential devotee), only now their roles are reversed· In Jakobson'sterms, 22 the alvar is now addresser and Visnu is addressee. And, as in the previous model, the alvar is the firstmember of a series that ultimately fans out to include the Srivaisnava community as a whole. In this case a seriesbegins with the alvar, the principal performer of the sacred hymns, and extends to his "substitutes"Maturakavi,Nathamuni, Nathamuni's nephews, the temple servant who holds the office of araiyar, and, by association, thecongregation of Srivaisnavas who "support" the araiyar's recitation. This second model implies that any devoteewho recites Tiruvaymoli in worship of Visnu not only follows the example set by Nammalvar but actually assumesthe persona of Nammalvar (see fig. 2).

Fig. 2

By superimposing the models offered here, it is possible to formulate a picture that does justice to the Srivaisnavaconception of the saints' hymns, their author, and their audience. And, it is worth noting, this composite modelaccounts for Nanjiyar's description of the proper audience of Tiruvaymoli in its entirety. In this picture Visnu is theultimate source of the hymns and their end. This conception can also be described as a transaction between Visnuand the alvar in which the two actors play alternating roles. From one point of view the alvar represents theSrivaisnava community: Visnu's grace is "filtered" to all Srivaisnavas through the person of the alvar. Fromanother, the




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community represents the alvar: the araiyar, with the congregation of devotees behind him, recites the sacredhymns for Visnu on behalf of the alvar. God and devotee are respectively both author and audience. The two arebound together in a closed circuit that is activated by the Tamil hymns (see fig. 3).

Fig. 3

As one would expect, this sectarian model of the saints' poems and their audience selects from and expands uponthe images of the audience found in the poems themselves. This is so because the sectarian establishmentconstructed hagiographies and an entire sectarian "history" partly on the foundation of suggestive passages fromthe saints' poems. 23 Further, this pattern pertains not only to the content of the poems, but also to their rhetoricalform. The poet-god-audience triangle that emerges from the poems themselves is expanded in hagiography into acircuit in which the same actors are linked in more elaborate ways. Also, the Srivaisnava conception complementsthe rhetorical form of the phalasruti verse and further develops the idea that the Tamil hymns are a medium for alldevotees to become saints.

Tamil Saiva Parallels

The degree to which Tamil Vaisnava and Saiva traditions are seen as similar or dissimilar is largely a matter ofemphasis. A motif analysis of the saints' poems in both traditions uncovers a large area of commonality, but alsocertain themes receive greater emphasis in either one tradition or the other.24 Formally, the poems of bothtraditions are practically identical, and this applies both to formal properties on a technical level (meter, use ofconventions of classical Tamil poetry, arrangements of verses, etc.) and to the rhetorical form of the texts. Thepoet-god-audience triangle is operative in poems of both traditions: the poets employ similar narrative devices, andboth Vaisnava and Saiva poets reflect upon their poetry through the device of phalasruti verses.

A close study of hagiography, theology, and the ritual contexts in which the saints' poems are recited in the twosectarian contexts will also reveal large




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areas of overlap, though significant differences exist. It is not my purpose here to undertake a thoroughcomparative study of Tamil Vaisnavism and Saivism. The question that concerns me here is simply, "to whatdegree is the rhetorical model implicit in Srivaisnava theological discourse and ritual also valid in the Tamil Saivacontext?" The answer seems to be that while one can point to particulars that suggest a parallel model is operative,Tamil Saivism does not provide a compact and elegant formulation of this model such as is found in thehagiographical account of Nammalvar's life or in the segment from the Srirankam temple chronicle discussedabove.

One reason a well-articulated model emerged so naturally from the Srivaisnava literature is that, as a system ofreligious thought, Srivaisnavism is very compact. Important tenets of belief intermesh to form an integrated whole.The hymns of the saints constitute the Vaisnava Tamil canon; hence the concepts of "saint" and "sacred scripture"are coterminous. The saints are related to Visnu by means of the doctrine of amsavatara, and they are related toone another through a model that parallels the Vedic model of the cosmic manthe other alvars are spoken of asNammalvar's limbs. Finally, the spiritual lineage of authoritative teachers in this tradition is seen as originating inNammalvar, the foremost saint.

One finds partially parallel concepts in Tamil Saivism, but they do not interlock quite so elegantly. For instance,Tamil Saivism recognizes sixty-three saints or nayanmars, but only some were poets whose hymns are included inthe Tamil Saiva canon, the twelve Tirumurai. Also, the Tirumurai include works by poets who are not numberedamong the nayanmars. One of these, Manikkavacakar, is, however, highly revered and is included as one of fourcamayacaryas or "preceptors of the faith." (The other three, Campantar, Appar, and Cuntarar, authors of the hymnsreferred to as Tevaram [Tirumurai 1-7], are also known as the muvar mutalikal, "the foremost three.") The TamilSaiva preceptor lineage begins with four cantanacaryas (preceptors of the lineage). While in a sense parallel to thecamayacaryas, they are not thought of as direct spiritual descendents of the saint-poets. Finally, Tamil Saivismprovides no direct commentaries on the saints' hymns, such as are found in Srivaisnavism, 25 nor is there a textquite like Koyil Oluku, which discusses the origins of temple ritual, though, as we shall see, the Saiva temple atChidambaram plays a role in the Saiva context similar to that of the Srirankam temple in the Vaisnava context.

Given this imperfect fit between the two sectarian traditions, it is still possible to identify certain features of TamilSaivism that suggest that a rhetorical model, such as is found in Srivaisnava discourse and ritual practice, is alsopresent in the Saiva context, even if its articulation is incomplete. Some of these features are described below,beginning with the first model, in which the rhetorical flow is from deity to devotee.

As noted above (fig. 1), in this model the ultimate author of the Tamil hymns is the god, who "speaks" through thesaint. There is some evidence that




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this idea also exists in Tamil Saivism. Like the Vaisnava Nalayira-tiviya-pirapantam, the Tamil Saiva canon isknown as the "Tamil Veda," and thus the saints' hymns are equated with "revealed" sacred literature in Sanskrit. Inhagiography we find another indication that at least the poems of Campantar originate with the god. According tothe Periya Puranam, 26 when Campantar was a child of three years, his father took him to the temple ofToniyappar (a form of Siva) and left him on the steps of the temple tank while he performed his ablutions. Thechild, thinking that his father had abandoned him, burst into tears, crying out the words "Amma [mother], Appa[father]." Siva and his consort Uma were touched by the child's cries and appeared before him. The goddess filleda golden cup with milk from her breast and fed the child Campantar. From the moment Campantar drank thegoddess's milk, his heart was filled with devotion for Siva, and his career as an inspired poet began. The story, ofcourse, suggests, in a eminently concrete way, that Campantar's inspiration and talent as a poet were divine inorigin.

The doctrine of amtsavatara in Srivaisnavism explicitly asserts that the authors of the Tamil hymns, among otherpartial incarnations, are divine, though their divinity is subordinate to that of Visnu himself. While I have not seenanything written on the subject, I was told by a professional reciter of Tamil Saiva hymns27 that Tamil Saivismrecognizes six avatarapurusas, in-eluding the four most important saint-poets, Campantar, Appar, Cuntarar, andManikkavacakar. The term at least suggests that these poets are accorded a measure of divinity, and if this is thecase, it helps explain why these four are elevated above the other saint-poets in Tamil Saiva doctrine. The termcamayacarya (preceptor of the faith), by which these four are known, suggests a similar conclusion. As acaryas, orteachers, the four saints are assimilated to the prototype of all Saiva acaryas, Siva in the form of Daksinamurti, theteacher.

What one does not find in Tamil Saivism is a figure who plays a role comparable to that of Maturakavi inSrivaisnava tradition. Maturakavi became a devotee of Nammalvar, consecrated an image of the alvar, andintroduced his hymns into temple ritual, thereby bringing Nammalvar's hymns to a community of worshipers. Onlyvery faint parallels can be found on the Saivite side. The nayanmars Campantar and Appar are said to have knownone another and to have shared a great mutual respect and affection. In a similar manner, the nayanmars Cuntararand Ceraman Perumal are said to have been close friends. However, these relationships are more or lesssymmetrical, whereas Maturakavi worshiped Nammalvar as his god. According to Srivaisnava tradition,Nammalvar sang his songs to Visnu in a state of rapture, without regard for his social surroundings, and it isMaturakavi who made his hymns accessible to the Vaisnava community. The Tevaram poets, in contrast, are notedfor the extensive pilgrimages they made and for forging a community of Tamil Saivites by bringing their poemsbefore the public as they moved from place to place. In fact, Appar and Campantar are




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respectively credited with converting the Pallava and Pantiya kings, and hence their subjects, from Jainism toSaivism.

The second part of the Srivaisnava model can also be matched with suggestive, but only partially articulated,parallels in Tamil Saivism. Like the Vaisnava hymns, the hymns of the Saiva saints are said to have beeneffectively lost to the Saiva community for a period of time after the lifetimes of their authors. Srivaisnavismcredits Nathamuni with recovering the hymns of the Vaisnava saints, arranging them in canonical form, andreviving the practice of reciting them in the temple. Two figures are credited with similar achievements in TamilSaivism. One of these is a Cola king, often identified with Rajaraja Cola (reigned 985-1014 A.D.); the other is apriest at a temple of the elephant-headed god Ganesa, Nampi Antar Nampi by name. The king embarked on hismission to recover the compositions of the Saiva hymnists after hearing a short excerpt from the Tevaram hymnssung by a devotee at his court. 28 He sought the aid of Nampi Antar Nampi, who in turn petitioned the god Ganesato fulfill the king's wish. The god revealed that manuscripts of the hymns were to be found in a sealed chamber atthe Siva temple at Chidambaram. However, before they could filfill their mission, Nampi and the king were facedwith another setback. The Brahmin priests of Chidambaram at first refused them access to the room where theTevaram hymns were stored, on the premise that the room could be unsealed only if the three Tevaram poets camein person to do so. Nampi and the king consecrated images of the saint-poets and conducted them in formalprocession through the streets surrounding the temple. They finally brought the images of the saints to the roomwhere the hymns were stored, and in this way they were able to open the room and recover the hymns. The storyclearly implies that the three saints Personally came to the temple in the form of their icons.29

Like the Nalayira-tiviya-pirapantam, the Tirumurai were, in a sense, recovered through divine intervention. NampiAntar Nampi, like Nathamuni, recited the saints' hymns before the deity in a temple; and like the Srirankam templein the Srivaisnava context, the Saiva temple at Chidambaram is a major center of sectarian activity. However, thereis no explicit indication that Nampi Antar Nampi assumed the personae of the Saiva saints when reciting theirhymns, though he did arrange for the saints' "personal" appearance at Chidambaram. The same holds true for thetemple functionaries, known as otuvars, whose duty it is to recite the Tirumurai hymns in the temple. IndiraPeterson, who has studied the otuvar tradition in depth, has concluded that when an otuvar recites a hymn of oneof the saints, he, in effect, expresses his personal devotion to Siva through the vehicle of the hymns.30 Herconclusion and the evidence on which it is based support the idea that the reciter establishes contact with the deityby "stepping into" the persona of the saint. Thus it appears that in Tamil Saivism, as in Srivaisnavism, the devoteeenters into a relationship with the deity through a series of identifications that originate in the bond joining saintand god.




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A Rhetoric of Bhakti

The model of bhakti poetry developed here is rhetorical insofar as it concerns the interaction between author andaudience and the ways that interaction is articulated in sectarian discourse. However, this is a special kind of"rhetoric" because the performance and reception of bhakti poetry involve not so much the communication of amessage from author to audience as a profound communion between the two. The hymns themselves are theinstrument of that communion. 31 The communion between author and audience, which, as I have emphasized, is acommunion between devotee and god (with each taking both roles), has profound theological significance. Theaesthetic/rhetorical process, as described here, is, in the final analysis, a process of divination, and the hymns fuelthat process. Through an all-consuming enjoyment of the sacred hymns, one experiences bhakti, and the experienceof bhakti itself transforms the experiencer. Devotion engenders divinity in the devotee; thus the perfected devoteeor saint is treated as a divine being.32 The sacred hymns, an important catalyst for devotion, originate in god andare offered back to godthe rhetoric of bhakti is cyclical. The experience of devotion that they engender and thedivinity that follows from this experience also "circulate" in this system.

This process is reminiscent of the cyclical give-and-take process between Vedic poet and god that Gondadescribes,33 and at the same time it is profoundly different. The Vedic poets receive inspiration (dhi) from thegods, and in return they compose hymns that bring the gods pleasure and dispose them to behave generously. Themost striking similarity between Vedic and bhakti models of poetic inspiration, composition, and reception is thatthey are both cyclical. God or "the gods" give(s) inspiration to the poet who, in an inspired state, composes poetryand offers it back to the god(s). But the conception of god is different in the two models, and this has far-reachingconsequences. Vedic poets and gods belong to two entirely different orders of being, though humans and gods dointeract with one another and influence one another's fortunes. The Vedic "poetic" cycle, in which the rsis andgods participate, mirrors the relationship between humans and gods in the Vedic sacrificial cycle. Gods dependupon humans to "feed" them with sacrificial offerings, and humans depend upon gods for the gifts of nature thatenable them to survive. This give-and-take relationship is predicated upon a divine/ human duality.

By the time of the bhakti poets the conception of divinity had evolved into something quite different from theVedic conception. The bhakti poet's Visnu or Siva is all-encompassing. For the bhakti poet, god is simultaneouslythe core reality, the "self" of everything in the universe (comparable to the Upanisadic brahman), and a palpablepersonality who can elicit the emotional immediacy of a parent, child, friend, master, or lover. Visnu or Siva,perceived in this way, is at once more abstract and more concrete than the Vedic gods.




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God, in these terms, is a full account of the five elements, the directions of the compass, and all living creatures, 34but the same god also resides in particular temples, where he is the principal subject of a unique local history.35The religious orientation of most of the saints is compatible with the philosophical stance known as bhedabheda(difference and nondifference) or visistadvaita (qualified nondualism).36 From this point of view god is one, butyet not entirely identical, with the world, because he is more than the world. In the devotee's eyes god issufficiently an "other" to be worshiped through the concrete acts of temple worship and at the same time god is apresence within, one's true self. This view leads to a special kind of poetic exchange between poet and god. Thetwo are sufficiently distinct for there to be an exchange, but the dividing line between poet and god is never morethan provisional. The poet is an expression of the god's self. The god, as the poet, sings of himself. Reciprocityshades into identity. If the logic of bhakti is pushed to the limit, it becomes clear that bhakti is not just a means butis actually an end in itself. Bhakti is moksa.

I have stressed that bhakti poems, like Vedic hymns, should be considered in their ritual context. But it is alsoimportant to be aware of the differences between the ritual environments of the Vedic sacrifice and templeworship. In the Vedic ritual manuals (Brahmanas) the sacrifice is viewed almost as a mechanical process; if certainritual acts are performed correctly, certain tangible results will necessarily follow. The correct recitation of theVedic mantras is as important a part of that process as nonverbal sacrificial acts.

Just as the Vedic mantra in a sense "fuels" the sacrifice and assures its effectiveness, the saints' hymns "fuel" theflow of devotion and divinity in the bhakti model, but the mechanics involved are different. Temple worship (puja)is primarily an expression of an attitude. Numerous authors have emphasized that in puja the worshiper honors godas a revered guest would be honored.37 No tangible result is expected automatically to follow from theperformance of puja, although one can perform puja in the hope of receiving tangible benefits.38 When the Vedicmantra is recited, there is a sense that the sounds themselves are objectively effective; the aesthetic dimension ofthe verses is generally not emphasized. But in bhakti, aesthetic considerations are critical. In order to experiencedevotion and thereby attain divinity, the devotee must savor the words of the saints' hymns and take them to heart.The words are effective if and only if they trigger a psychological and emotional response. The sacredness of thesaints' hymns is located not so much in external, objective features of sound as in internal, subjective states ofmind, which are reflected in and transmitted by the hymns. What is essential is the devotee's experience of thehymns.




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Notes

1. Actually, Srivaisnavas establish a divine sanction for their doctrine by identifying Visnu as the progenitor of theparampara. According to one parampara text, the lineage begins with Rankanatan (Visnu's manifestation atSrirankam), who transmitted the teaching to his consort, Sriranka Nacciyar, who in turn passed it on to Visvaksena,the commander-in-chief of Visnu's armies. The alvars are collectively portrayed as the disciples of Visvaksena.(Also, Nammalvar is sometimes said to be an incarnation of Visvaksena, and the other alvars, incarnations of thegod's weapons and other paraphernalia.) Nammalvar appeared to Nathamuni, the first acarya, in a yogic vision,and taught Nathamuni the sacred truths. The next two generations of the lineage are represented by Yamuna andRamanuja. After the fifteenth century Srivaisnavism split into two rival subsects, the Tenkalai or ''southern branch"and the Vatakalai or "northern branch," which look respectively to Pillai Lokacarya (1264-1369) and VedantaDesika (1268-1369) as their principal spokesmen on theological matters.

2. For an excellent overview of the acaryas' manipravala works, see K. K. A. Venkatachari, The ManipravalaLiterature of the Srivaisnava Acaryas (Bombay: Anantacharya Research Institute, 1978).

3. See Introduction, note 12.

4. In the following account, I am much indebted to Friedhelm Hardy's survey and analysis of a large body ofSrivaisnava literature dealing with Nammalvar. See his "The Tamil Veda of a Sudra Saint (The SrivaisnavaInterpretation of Namma1var)," in Gopal Krishna, ed., Contributions to South Asian Studies 1 (Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1979), pp. 29-87.

5. Hardy, "The Tamil Veda of a Sudra Saint," p. 48.

6. There are several Srivaisnava texts that give a history of the parampara (preceptor lineage) of the sect. Amongthe most often cited are the Kuruparamparai pirapavam "6000" by Pinpalakiya Perumal Jiyar (in Tamil) and theDivyasuricarita by Garudavahana Pandita (in Sanskrit). Scholars disagree on the dating of these texts. Hardysuggests that the Sanskrit work was composed in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. "The Tamil Veda of aSudra Saint," p. 35.

7. The Vellalas are a dominant land-owning caste in Tamilnadu. Though in terms of the varna scheme, they aretechnically classified as sudras, their status in the south Indian context is actually much higher than that suggestedby the Sanskritic classification.


9. As others have pointed out, the legendary relationship between Nammalvar and Maturakavi functions as an idealmodel for one of the cornerstones of Srivaisnava theology, the relationship between preceptor and disciple.

10. E.g., Tiruvaymoli 7.9.

11. Srivaisnavism knows Namma1var by several names Among these are Maran, Catakopan and Parankucan. Thename Maran was used as a title by the Pantiya kings. Popular accounts relate that the alvar's parents gave their sonthis name because he was different (from maru, "to be altered") from other children, but this probably is a folketymology. The alvar is said to have acquired the name Catakopan because he drove away the catam (Sanskritsatha, a vapor that normally obscures a newborn child's innate mental clarity) with his anger (kopa). Thisexplanation of the name, however, also sounds suspiciously like a folk etymology, and it may simply mean "one




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whose anger is directed against deceit (satha)." The name Parankucan (Sanskrit: Parankusa), which literallymeans "one whose goad [ankusa] is held by another," expresses the alvar's complete dependence on Visnu.Finally, it is said that Visnu himself called the saint by the name Nammalvar (our alvar) as a mark of his greatfondness for this extraordinary devotee.


13. Ibid., pp. 42-46.

14. The categories of sacred scripture and the aspects of Visnu are correlated as follows:

Vedas: para (supreme, transcendent) aspectPancaratrasastras: vyuha (emanations)Dharmasastras: antaryamin (indweller)Itihasa (epics): vibhava (Rama, Krsna, etc.)Tiruvaymoli: arca (iconic image)

15. The commentator in question is Vatakkuttiruvitippillai, author of the "commentary in 36,000 granthas"(Mupattarayirappati) on Tiruvaymoli. Sometimes Vatakkuttiruvitippillai's teacher, Nampillai, is credited withauthorship of the commentary in oral form with Vatakkuttiruvitippillai playing the role of scribe (Venkatachari,The Manipravala Literature, p. 93).

16. Ibid., p. 94.

17. As previously mentioned, dating of the alvars is controversial. The Srivaisnava parampara places Nammalvarfifth among the alvars and Tirumankai last. However, by and large, modern historians assign Tirumankai to theeighth century and Namma1var to the ninth century (e.g., K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, A History of South India fromPrehistoric Times to the Present [Madras: Oxford University Press, 1966], pp. 426-27). Hardy, standing by thetraditional order, postulates the seventh century as the time when Namma1var lived ("The Tamil Veda of a SudraSaint," pp. 41-42).

18. My summary of incidents from Koyil Oluku pertaining to the sacred hymns and their audience is based on theEnglish translation by V. N. Hari Rao, Koil Olugu: The Chronicle of the Srirangam Temple with Historical Notes(Madras: Rochouse and Sons, 1961).

19. See Paul Younger, "Singing the Tamil Hymnbook in the Tradition of Ramanuja: The Adyayanotsava Festivalin Srirankam," History of Religions 21, no. 3 (February 1982): 272-93.

20. The Oluku relates that Perumal bestowed the name "araiyar of the exalted Manavala Perumal" upon onebrother, and the name "natavinoda araiyar" upon the other. The name given to the first seems to indicate hispremier rank among the deity's servants. (Manavalan, which means "bridegroom" or "husband," is a name of Visnuat Srirankam.) The name given to the second brother, which literally means "king of the pastime of drama (ordance)'' underscores the nature of the araiyar's serviceto sing and act out the alvars' hymns for the deity. Perhapsthe araiyar was given this title to identify him with the king of the realm, who, in medieval Hindu India, was theparamount worshiper of the deity, a role that was of central significance in the Hindu conception of sovereignty.The araiyar is the "king" of the Adhyayanotsava because, in the context of this ritual performance, he representsVisnu's premier devotee. For an illuminating discussion of the ritual importance of the Hindu king, see RonaldInden, "Ritual Authority and Cyclic Time in Hindu Kingship," in J. F. Richards, ed., Kingship and Authority inSouth Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin South Asian Studies Publications, 1978), pp. 28-73.




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21. See Appendix A for a summary description of ritual occasions for recitation of the saints' hymns in modern-day Vaisnava and Saiva temples.

22. See chapter 1.

23. Hardy, "The Tamil Veda of a Sudra Saint," pp. 32, 38.

24. See Appendix B. A comparative study of the Vaisnava and Saiva "companion" pieces, Tiruppavai by Anta1(Vaisnava) and Tiruvempavai by Manikkavacakar (Saiva), for example, reveals a greater emphasis on mythologicalallusion in the Vaisnava poem and a greater emphasis on abstract characterizations of the deity in the Saiva poem.See Norman Cutler, Consider Our Vow (Madurai: Muthu Patippakam, 1979), pp. 3-4.

25. One now finds editions of some portions of the Tirumurai with commentaries, but the earliest suchcommentaries were written only in the nineteenth century, and they do not have the status of the "classical"commentaries in Srivaisnava tradition.

26. See Introduction.

27. My informant was P. A. S. Rajasekharan, otuvar at the Kantaswami temple in Madras City. The word otuvar,used in Tamil Saivism to denote a professional reciter of the hymns, means literally "one who recites."

28. The stories of the redaction of the saints' hymns in Vaisnava and Saiva contexts display some striking parallels.Nathamuni began his quest to recover the alvars' hymns after overhearing a devotee reciting a surviving hymnfrom the corpus. Both stories suggest a "golden age" of devotionthe age of the alvars and the nayanmars followedby a period of lapse and a subsequent period of revival and institutionalization.

29. According to the traditional story, recounted in the Tirumurai Kanta Puranam by Umapati Civacariyar (earlyfourteenth century), the majority of the Tevaram hymns were lost to the ravage of white ants, but those hymnsappropriate to the present day and age were spared the scourge.

30. See Indira Peterson, "Singing of a Place: Pilgrimage as Metaphor and Motif in the Tevaram Songs of theTamil Saivite Saints," Journal of the American Oriental Society 102, no. 1 (January-March 1982): 81.

31. This distinction was made by V. Narayana Rao in his comments on an earlier version of this chapter, which Ipresented at the thirty-fourth annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Chicago, April 2-4, 1982.

32. Raymond Williams shows in his study of the Swami Narayan religion of Gujarat that the close association ofdivinity with perfect devotion is a vital theme in modern-day Hinduism. See Raymond Williams, "Holy Man asAbode of God in the Swaminarayan Religion," in Joanne Punzo Waghorne and Norman Cutler, eds., Gods ofFlesh/Gods of Stone: The Embodiment of Divinity in India (Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima Publications, 1985).

33. See Introduction, note 23.

34. See poems listed under motif 4 in Appendix C.

35. See poems listed under motif 19 in Appendix C. There is a genre of literature (in Tamil and Sanskrit) devotedto the history of particular temple sites and the career of the particular manifestations of god at these sites. For alandmark study of these so-called sthalapuranas (place puranas) in Tamil Saiva tradition, see David DeanShulman, Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1980).

36. Lise Vail makes a similar observation regarding Virasaivism as practiced in northern Karnataka. See her"Founders, Swamis and Devotees: Becoming Divine in North Karnataka," in Waghorne and Cutler, Gods ofFlesh/Gods of Stone.

37. See, for instance, Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, "The south Indian

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temple: authority, honor and redistribution," Contributions to Indian Sociology, n.s., 10 (December 1976): 187-212.

38. Here I am using the term puja somewhat loosely to denote worship of god's image in a temple setting. I am notdistinguishing, as Appadurai and Breckenridge do, between puja in the sense of community-oriented ritual andarcana in the sense of ritual performed by a worshiper as a private act of devotion.




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Chapter ThreeThe Poetics of Bhakti

IN THE INTRODUCTION, I raised the questiondo the Tamil saints' poems constitute a coherent corpus in formalterms? I gave a tentative answer in the affirmative, but I also cautioned that this answer would hold up only ifliterary form were interpreted in a sense broad enough to include structures of communication between author andaudience and also structures of reception, interpretation, and performance. Structures of the first type, encoded inthe poems, were examined in chapter 1. Chapter 2 emphasized structures of the second type, and consequently thefocus in that chapter shifted from the text "on the page" to the broader sectarian context. The preceding twochapters prepare the ground for a head-on confrontation with the questionwhat is the literary status of the saints'poems in their own cultural environment? To answer this question satisfactorily one must confront anotherquestion that literary critics and scholars grapple with, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, every timethey engage in their professionnamely, "what is literature?" Starting with this elementary question, I will attempt toformulate a culturally accurate, literary profile of the saints' poemsin short, to articulate a "poetics" of Tamilbhakti.

While most of us assume that we know what literature is and behave as if we know what it is, arriving at asystematic definition of literature is not so simple. The question of what exactly literature is (or poetry, or verbalart, or whatever other term one may choose), is one that has intrigued speculative thinkers in many "civilized"cultures. In such cultures literature is recognized as an art form distinct from other forms of artistic expression andas a linguistic artifact distinct from other forms of language. In Western tradition, philosopher-critics have self-consciously pondered the nature of literature and its distinctive properties at least since Aristotle, whose Poeticsremains a classic statement on the defining properties of literary art. For Aristotle literature meant, first andforemost, tragic drama, but with the passing of time Western critics have applied his ideas to other genres, many ofwhich did not even exist in Aristotle's time.

In India too, speculation on the question "what is literature?" has a long and distinguished history. Probably bestknown among Indian theories of literature is the theory of rasa, which was originally developed in the context




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of Sanskrit dramatic theory (natyasastra) and was gradually extended until eventually rasa or "mood" was viewedas the "soul" of all aesthetic objects. Another branch of Sanskrit poetic theory is the theory of poetic figures(alamkarasastra). The alamkarikas were most concerned with the highly ornate stanzaic poetry in Sanskrit, knownas kavya. Finally, elements of natyasastra and alamkarasastra were brought together in a somewhat alteredtheoretical context by the expounders of the theory of dhvani or suggestion. 1

As the lingua franca of art and culture in ancient and medieval India, Sanskrit developed a voluminous literature,much of which was not considered to be "aesthetic literature" by poeticians, who addressed their theories only tocertain kinds of texts. The best-known Indian theories of literature were developed in the context of Sanskritliterature and culture, but their influence is not strictly confined to the Sanskritic sphere, for they have affectedattitudes toward literatures in India's vernacular languages as well. However, the ancient Tamils also developed atheory of literature that was largely independent of Sanskrit literary tradition, just as the ancient Tamil poetry that itaddressed exists independently of Sanskrit models. The Sanskrit drama can be fruitfully analyzed in terms ofnatyasastra, and kavya is illuminated by alamkarasastra. In the same way, the classical Tamil poems of love andwar find their theoretical counterpart in the analyses of the classical Tamil poeticians. But just as many genres ofSanskrit "literature" (such as the vast story literature) are not directly addressed by Sanskrit poetic theory, so too,the poetry of the Tamil saints cannot be neatly paired with classical Tamil poetic theory, though the poets didincorporate certain elements of classical poetry in their devotional hymns.2 If the natyasastrins' aim was to answerthe question "what is literature?" with reference to the Sanskrit drama, and the classical Tamil poeticians similarlyaimed to set out the governing principles of classical Tamil poetry, my aim here is to provide yet another answer tothe question, this time shifting the spotlight to the poems of the Tamil saints. In order to fully appreciate thedistinctive poetic conception that informs the poetry of the Tamil saints, it will be useful to review a few of themajor principles that distinguish Sanskrit and classical Tamil poetic formulations. It will then be possible to judgewhether these principles carry over into the domain of Tamil bhakti poetry or whether an alternative poetics isrequired to account for the structure and distinctive effects of the saints' poems. In order to focus this inquiry, I willconcentrate especially on the ways narrative and emotion are treated in each of these poetic systems.

The Theory of Rasa

The theory of rasa is undoubtedly the most widely known among Indian aesthetic theories. Perhaps the mostsophisticated exposition of this theory is found in the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri Saivite,Abhinavagupta. The following synopsis of the theory largely reflects Abhinavagupta's




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view, not least of all his commitment to philosophical monism.

The theory of rasa is an audience-oriented theory of poetic art (and, in its ultimate extension, of all art, no matterwhat the medium). It is particularly concerned with the emotional substratum of human nature and with the specialcircumstances that enable an audience of a work of art to experience emotion with a depth and clarity that isbeyond the scope of ordinary experience. Emotion experienced on this supra-real plane, known as rasa, is pure,universal, unconditioned, and unqualified by personal or circumstantial particularities. Rasa is never, or at leastrarely, experienced in daily life (which amounts to life outside the theater, in the original context of the theory), forwhen people are involved in the details of their daily lives they cannot see beyond their experience asindividualsthe particular experience of joy, sorrow, disgust, amusement, etc.to the universal, nonindividuated basisof that experience. Thus rasa is defined in contrast with concretized emotion as it is experienced in daily life. Thislatter the Indian theorists called bhava. One reason one does not experience rasa in daily life is that ordinarilypeople are subjected to a cacophony of emotional stimuli. Only under special circumstances, such as oneencounters in the theater, are the various and sundry interferences eliminated and a space cleared for theexperience of rasa or pure emotion.

Originally, the natyasastrins judged eight emotions to be dominant in human experience. These dominantemotions, known as sthayibhavas, are sexual passion (rati), humor (hasa), sorrow (soka), anger (krodha), vigor(utsaha), fear (bhaya), disgust (jugupsa), and wonder (vismaya). The sthayibhavas are the primary subject ofworks of poetry; in this view a poet creates characters in order to personify the dominant emotions and make thempalpable to an audience.

The audience, for its part, empathetically responds to the sthayibhavas that are portrayed in a play or poem becausethese same emotions structure the audience's experience of the world. But this empathetic response by the audienceto a character in a literary work does not, according to Abhinavagupta, mean that the audience simply identifieswith the character. Ideally, the audience of literature does not experience emotion exactly as it does in daily life oras the characters of a poem do within a fictive world. The audience looks from a distance upon the circumstancesthat condition the emotions attributed to the characters of a poem. It is this essential distance from thecircumstances that individuate and concretize emotion that enables the audience of literature to experience emotionin the pure, universalized form known as rasa. The audience's experience of rasa takes on the tone of the dominantemotion expressed in a literary work, and consequently the Sanskrit poeticians recognized eight rasascorresponding to the eight sthayibhavas. The eight rasas are the erotic (srngara), the comic (hasya), thecompassionate (karuna), the furious (raudra), the heroic (vira), the fearful (bhayanaka), the loathsome (bibhatsa),and the marvelous (adbhuta). 3




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The rasa theory, which can be described as a psychology of the audience, also provides a context for evaluatingliterature. A work of literature is deemed to be artistically successful if and only if its audience achieves anexperience of rasa. And this is possible only if the audience apprehends the presence of emotion or bhava in thesituation represented in the literary work, if the dominant mood is appropriately supported by subsidiary emotions(vyabhicaribhava) and is not contaminated by incompatible emotions, and finally, if the members of the audienceperceive literary characters and events as "fictive," for only then are they freed from the particularized emotionalresponses that are characteristic of daily life. The literary character (even if modeled after a historical character)and the audience member are understood to exist on different planes of reality. Rasa grows out of the interactionbetween audience and literary work. If this distance is not maintained, its growth is stifled.

The poetics of rasa assumes that the substratum of emotional life is shared by all human beings and is "more real"than the individual traits that distinguish one person from another. By engaging with a work of literature, a personof refined sensibility transcends his or her individuality and temporarily exists on a higher plane of reality.Ironically, the poetic distance that separates literary character from audience member makes possible an experienceof pure, universalized emotion, which undermines the empirical experience of characters or audience members asseparate individuals. Individual identity is transcended in aesthetic experience.

The rasa theory, in its mature phase as an aesthetic of all poetry and, indeed, of all artistic expression, does nothave an explicit narrative component, but in its original context as a theory of dramatic aesthetics, it is associatedwith a theory of dramatic plot. In natyasastra, rasa is described as the "soul" of the play and the plot as its "body."As this metaphor suggests, in this tradition plot is conceived of as a vehicle for the expression of emotion. In thewords of Edwin Gerow, "it is the conscious organization of the factors of drama that together suggest the dominantmood, which is what the play is about." 4 The building blocks of plot are five "spans" (samdhis). These aregenerated by projecting a conception of action expressed as five "phases'' (avastha) onto an analysis of dramaticsubject matter into five components (arthaprakrti).5

Without getting involved in a detailed exposition of the natyasastra's analysis of plot, its fundamental insight canbe summarized as follows: A universal theory of action (which pertains as much to action in the "real world" as itdoes to dramatic action) is "tempered" by a theory of uniquely dramatic subject matter. The wedding of the twoyields a plot (which can be contrasted with "raw" nondramatic action). Events in drama are thus distinguished fromor, one might say, "distanced" from events in daily life. (It would not be wrong to see an analogy between therelationship of plot and event and the relationship of rasa and bhava.) The five "spans" that constitute




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the plot are further analyzed into sixty-four "span elements" (sandhyanga). These motifs of action, colored byemotion, are the smallest units of narrative in the natyasastra scheme, and they function as carriers of emotiontheyare the smallest anatomical components of the play's "body."

The Poetics of Classical Tamil

Classical Tamil poetics lacks the kind of penetrating analysis of audience response found in the Sanskritic theory ofrasa. Tamil poeticians did write of an element in poetry that they called meyppatu. Meyppatu literally means"condition [patu] of the body [mey]," and thus the meyppatus are visible manifestations of emotion. 6 The eightmeyppatus obviously represent an attempt to incorporate the Sanskritic bhavas/rasas into Tamil poetics, but theTamil poeticians seemed to be unaware of the essential difference between bhava and rasa. This is not reallysurprising, for, as will soon be clear, Tamil poetics does not explicitly acknowledge the difference betweencharacter and event in the purely literary context and in the "real" world inhabited by the audience, though thisdistinction is axiomatic to the poetics of rasa. The treatment of meyppatu in the Tamil texts on poetics underscoresthe fundamental differences between the classical Sanskrit and Tamil poetic visions. Meyppatu is merely peripheralto the classical Tamil system, whereas bhava/rasa is central to Sanskrit poetics.

The classical Tamil poeticians appear to have viewed the literary work as a self-contained unit. They were moreconcerned with the harmonious interrelationships of the constituent parts of a poem than with the psychology ofthe audience of poetry. The ingredients of poetry that fall within the framework of their analysis range from thesmallest analyzable units of verbal sound to a "natural history" that provides poets with subject matter for theirpoems. It is revealing that among the thirty-four elements of a poetic composition (ceyyul) that are listed by theauthor of the early treatise on grammar and poetics called Tolkappiyam,7 those which indicate notions of aestheticsuccess (e.g., vannam, vanappu) pertain to qualities such as rhythm and structural proportion in the poem ratherthan directly to the response of an audience. The Sanskrit poeticians attended to the nature of the interactionbetween audience member and character, but their Tamil counterparts attended instead to the speakers (kurru) andlisteners (ketpor) within the world depicted in poetry and with the consequences (payan) of dialogue within thepoetic context.

While Sanskrit poetics foregrounds the "poetic distance" that separates the audience's plane of reality from thefictive plane inhabited by a poem's characters, poetic distance enters into the Tamil system only in the negativesense that the audience is not explicitly brought into the picture at all. However, especially in classical Tamil lovepoetry, the so-called poetry of the interior (akam), Tamil poetics is not completely unaware of a distinction




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between the "real world" and a fictive poetic world. The Tamil poeticians recognized that poets extract theirsubject matter from "real-world" experience and impose upon it a uniquely poetic order. They thus distinguishbetween the "protocol of the world" (ulaku valakku) and the "protocol of poetry" (ceyyul valakku).

In regard to narrative and emotion, the "protocol of poetry" is manifested, respectively, in the concepts turai anduri. Turais are conventional situations that poets use as the basis for their compositions. Turai is a basic unit ofanalysis in both Tamil love poetry (akam) and heroic poetry (puram). Especially in akam poetry, the turaisrepresent an abstraction and subsequent segmentation of a universal story, a common thread of experience that runsthrough the lives of all "noble people" (canror). In these poems, characters are given no proper names. They areknown only by their roles; they are, in brief, ideal types. The uris bear the same relationships to the emotionsexperienced in daily life as do the turais to events in the "real world." In akam poetry the uris are five: lovers'union (punartal), patient waiting (iruttal), anxious waiting (irankutal), lovers' quarrel (utal), and separation(pirittal). 8 The notion of uri indicates that the Tamil poeticians recognized that human beings, in their individuallives, do tap into a shared, universal realm of emotional experience. The movement from "worldly usage" to ''poeticusage" entails a movement from the discrete and particular to the universal, but unlike the Sanskrit poeticians, whoexpressed this idea in terms of the psychology of the audience, the Tamil theorists expressed their conception of"emotional universals" in terms of the content of poetry. Here too, fictiveness goes hand-in-hand with access to a"higher-level reality."

In puram poetry the picture is slightly altered. Puram poems are suspended between the particularity of history andthe universality of fictive poetry. The characters and events depicted in puram poetry are understood to behistorical, but even so, the "history" portrayed in these poems is refracted by the lens of convention. Historicalevents are matched with and classified in accord with a typology of "event universals" (turai).

Another important difference between akam and puram poetry involves the stance of the poet in relation to thepoem. In akam poems, the historical poet remains completely behind the scenes. The speaking voices heard in thesepoems are dramatized voices belonging to characters who represent universal dispositions of human nature. Incontrast, in puram poems the narrative voice is usually interpreted to be the voice of the historical poet, and thepoem is viewed as the documentation of an event in the poet's life.9 Further, whether the narrative voice in aclassical Tamil poem is identified as the voice of the poet or as the voice of a dramatized narrator, all akam poemsand many puram poems are understood to be addressed to a specific listener (ketpor). In akam poems the listeneris always dramatized. (In special cases the listener may be the speaker himself.) In many puram poems also, thelistener is dramatized, and, like the speaker, is understood to be a historical person.




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Other puram poems give no specific indication of an audience. In these poems one is free to surmise the presenceof an unseen dramatized listener, or alternatively, the rhetorical structure of the poem allows for the reader or theaudience in a performance situation to "step into" the role of listener. The following poems will illustrate most ofthe major "rhetorical varieties" one finds in the classical puram corpus:

I. Poet to King

On a high summit haunted by demonsa tiger grows tired of his cave,stretches, gets up,and goes wherever he wants,his hunger for meat urging him after prey,like you when you went off to killand the northern kings withered before you,Valuti of the well-made chariot,cruel and angry in the fight.Because you have committed yourself to battle,the rulers of this great earth are to be pitied . . .

Marutan Ilanakanar, Purananuru 52, trans. George L. Hart III 10

Ia. Poet To King (Focus On Poet/King Relationship)

Its black sides glisten,long straps fastened to them faultlessly.It shines with a garlandwoven of long, full peacock feathers,blue-sapphire dark,with bright spots,and is splendid with golden shoots of ulinai.Such is the royal drum, hungry for blood.Before they brought it back from its bathwithout knowing I climbed on to its bedand lay on the covering of soft flowersthat was like a froth of oil poured down.Yet you were not angry,you did not use your sharp sword.Surely that was enough for all of the Tamil lands to learn of it.But you did not stop there.You came up to me,you raised your strong arm, as big around as a concert drum;you fanned meand made me cool.Mighty lord, you must have done these things




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because you know that except for thosewhose fame is spread across the broad earthno one has a place for long in the high world of paradise.

Mocikiranar, Purananuru 50, trans. George L. Hart III

II. Poet To Listener Who Is Explicit In Poem But Not Identified

Enemies, be careful when you take the field.Among us is a warriorwho will face you in battle.He is like a wheel made over a monthPainstakinglyby a carpenter who makes eight chariotsin a day.

Auvaiyar, Purananuru 87, trans. George L. Hart III

III. Poet (Explicit In Poem) To Listener Who Is Not Explicit

His legs strong and lithe,his bravery fierce and unyielding,my lord is like a tiger living in a cramped cavewho stretches, rises up, and sets out for his prey.But they did not think him hard to fight against.They rose up bellowing,"We are best, we are the greatest.Our enemy is young and there is much plunder."Those foolish warriors who came with contemptran with dim eyes, showing their backs,but he did not let them be killed then.He took them to the city of their fathers,and as their women with fine ornaments died in shameand the clear kinai drum sounded,there he killed them.

Itaikkunrurkilar, Purananuru 78, trans. George L. Hart III

IV. Neither Narrator Nor Listener Is Explicitly Identified

Anyone, if he drinks toddy in the morningand gets happily drunk by the time he holds court,can give away chariots.But Maliyan, whose good fame never lessens,gives without getting drunk more tall ornamented chariots




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than there are drops in the cloudsthat form over rich Mullur mountain.

Kapilar, Purananuru 123, trans. George L. Hart III

Before moving directly into a discussion of the poetics of Tamil bhakti poetry, it will be useful to review some ofthe major features of classical Sanskrit and Tamil poetics, for these provide the foundation for a model of thepoetics of bhakti. The cornerstones of this analysis are the poet, the audience, and the characters and eventsrepresented in poetry.

In the Sanskrit drama and in some of the other genres of Sanskrit literature to which the theory of rasa was laterapplied, 11 the poet is positioned "behind the scenes." He is not a virtual presence in the poem or in the world ofthe play; his voice is masked by the voices of characters who are assigned speaking roles. The characters andevents that are portrayed in poems and that engender the experience of rasa in the audience are fictive. They do notelicit the same kind of emotional response as persons and incidents encountered in "real life." On the contrary, theaudience is encouraged to look past the particular characters and events represented in a play (or poem), for only inthis way can the ultimate purpose of art be realized. Finally, the audience, which is acknowledged as anindispensable component of the literary event (there can be no rasa without an audience to experience it), and thedramatic or narrated events exist on separate planes of reality.

Though at first glance akam poetry and Sanskrit drama do not seem much like each other, from a theoretical pointof view they share some important features. In both, the poet does not appear directly before the audience; hisvoice is heard only through the voices of dramatized characters. Characters and events are fictive; in both, butespecially in akam poetry, characters are more ideal types than individuals.12 In akam poetry, characters are noteven given proper names but are known only by their roles. Similarly, in akam poetry there is only one story, and itis analyzed and codified in the conventional poetic situations (turai). While there is a difference in the degree towhich Sanskrit plays and Tamil love poetry universalize characters and events, it is only when we turn to the placeof the audience and its status that we find a truly marked difference between Sanskrit and Tamil akam poetics. Theaudience is the center of attention in the former, and it is not even acknowledged in the latter.

In a puram poem, the position of the poet in relation to the words of the poem may be ambiguous. Sometimes it isnot clear whether the voice heard in the poem belongs to the historical poet or to a dramatized narrator. However,in the vast majority of cases, the colophons that accompany the poems identify the narrative voice with thehistorical poet. Likewise, the characters and events portrayed in these poems are understood to be historical (evenif they are molded to fit certain conventional patterns). Where the listener is




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clearly specified in the poem, the audience "overhears" the poem as a record of a historical conversation. When adramatized listener is not specified, the audience may assume that role.

The Poetics of Bhakti

Considered exclusively as textual artifacts, the poems of the Tamil saints are remarkably similar in structure toclassical puram poems. In fact, virtually all the "rhetorical varieties" that are found in the puram corpus have directcounterparts in the bhakti corpus. Working through the list of puram examples found in the previous section, if"god" is substituted for "king'' in the appropriate places, an exactly corresponding bhakti type results for all fourtypes in the puram typology. 13 It should be stressed that this is no mere accident of poetic structure, because, asothers have noted, in Tamil Hinduism gods are conceived of as sovereigns, and the services worshipers performfor gods in many ways parallel the services traditionally rendered to kings. In other words, the parallelism in thecultural construction of kingship and godship in Tamil south India has a counterpart in the structural parallelsbetween Tamil heroic poetry and Tamil bhakti poetry. 14 The following poems, all of which are now familiar (seechapter 1), in conjunction with the puram poems cited above, bring out the puram/bhakti structural parallels.

I. Poet To God (Focus on God)



Poykaiyalvar, MTA 35

Ia. Poet To God (Focus On Poet Or On Poet/God Relationship)

When I was born and learned to speakI was overcome with loveand I reached your red feet,lord of gods, lord with splendid black throat,

will my sorrows never end?Karaikka1ammaiyar, ATA I




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II. Poet To Listener Who Is Explicit In Poem But Not Identified

As long as there is life in this fleeting bodyworship Tiruma1 with garlands of perfect blossoms,with sacrifice, sacred rites and chants,and if you sing his names in praise,

that's best of all.Poykaiyalvar, MTA 70


and leave the ocean of days far behind.Namma1var, TVM 1.6.7

III. Poet (Explicit In Poem) To Listener Who Is Not Explicit



Putattalvar, ITA 90

My mind won't leave the sideof the lord who can't be equaled




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or surpassed,my tongue trills the words of his song,my dancing limbs are possessed.


IV. Neither Narrator Nor Listener Is Explicitly Identified



vanquished seven bulls to win Pinnai,girl with arms graceful as bamboo,and pierced seven spreading Sal treescovered with blossomsrich in honey.


In bhakti poems as in puram poems, it is not always clear whether the narrative voice heard in a poem is the voiceof a dramatized narrator or of the historical poet. In the vast majority of cases, the colophons that accompany thepuram poems identify the narrator's voice as the poet's own. Similarly, sectarian tradition resolves the equivalentambiguity in the saints' poems and uniformly interprets the narrative voices heard in these poems as the voices ofthe historical saints. And, as one would expect, events portrayed in the poems are taken to be events in the saints'lives. In Tamil Vaisnava and Saiva traditions, the biographies of the saint-poets are used as an interpretiveframework for the poems much as the turai structure is used as an interpretive framework for puram poetry. And,just as the turais in puram poetry shape historical events to fit the patterns set by a conventional apparatus, certainpatterns in the codified lives of the saints suggest that here too history is mediated by convention, even if there ismore individual variation in the stories of the saints' lives than in the system of puratturai.

One might protest that this portrait of bhakti poetry hardly does justice to the corpus in its entirety. After all, inmany of their poems the saints drew directly upon conventions of akam poetry, and to many, the link with theakam tradition may appear even more obvious than the connection with puram poems. It is true that the corpuscontains many akam-like poems. But at the same time, sectarian interpreters of the saints' poems place them in aframework that conforms to the puram/bhakti model. This model is constructed on the premise that poems that fallwithin its sphere are historical and specific. In contrast, the classical akam model responds to a poetry that is




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fictive and universal. The following discussion of the interpretive strategy Srivaisnavas bring to bear onNammalvar's poems will clarify the way in which commentators reformulate the akam model.

As mentioned in chapter 1, close to a third of the thousand verses of Tiruvaymoli are shaped by the conventions ofakam poetry, and for this reason commentators refer to these verses collectively as the akapporul (having thesubstance or meaning of akam) section of the text. The audience hears these verses, like akam poems, as the wordsof dramatized narrators. But only three of the stock akam characters are assigned "speaking" roles byNammalvarthe heroine (talaivi), the heroine's girl friend (toli), and the heroine's mother (tay). The hero (talaivan)is never given a speaking role in Nammalvar's akapporul verses; characters often speak about the hero, and there isno question that in Tiruvaymoli the hero's role is filled by Visnu. Note that by giving the hero a specific identity,however exceptional this may be, Nammalvar violates one of the axiomatic conventions of akam poetry, namely,that the dramatis personae are designated only by their roles, not by proper names. 15 In effect, Nammalvarinjected a puram element into his akapporul verses by giving his hero a particular identity.

The Srivaisnava commentators go the poet one better, for they impose upon the akapporul verses an interpretiveframework that, in its essentials, is borrowed from puram poetry. We have seen that the narrator in a puram poem(as in a "mainstream" bhakti poem) is usually identified with the historical poet. In order to "rationalize" theakapporul verses found in Tiruvaymoli (and in other devotional texts) and bring them into conformity with the"bhakti ideal," the commentators take the voices of Nammalvar's dramatized female narrators to be expressions ofthe alvar's "inner female self.'' They even assign the name Parankuca Nayaki to this facet of the alvar's persona(from Parankucan, one of the names traditionally assigned to the saint). This device allows commentators to readNammalvar's akapporul verses as historical documents of the saint's personal experience, instead of as fictivespeeches by fictive characters. In effect, the commentators neutralize the poetic distance that distinguishes akampoetry from its puram counterpart.

Considered solely as texts, the majority of the Tamil saints' poems are well accounted for by the puram poeticmodel. While a bhakti poem and a puram poem may differ markedly in content (though the saints do work manypuram-inspired motifs into their poems),16 the two are remarkably similar in their underlying poetic structures.The foregoing analysis of the status of the poet, the audience, characters, events, and emotion in the overall poeticdesign makes this clear. In each case the poem reads as a historical account17 of the poet's life experience, narratedby the poet in his own words. The audience is not usually directly implicated in these events, though the audienceand the poet do inhabit the same spatial-temporal plane. The poet often speaks of events in his own life or in thelife of another character who is of utmost importance in his life (for the puram poet this is usually a king andpatron, for




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the bhakti poet, a god). Emotion too is presented within a historical framework. In these poems emotion is of theindividual, of particular historical characters, not least, of the poet himself. Even when a bhakti poem would appearto resist assimilation to the puram model, as Nammalvar's akapporul verses do, commentators tend to manipulatetheir reading of the poems to make them fit.

Were it not for other contextual factors, the puram model would account quite adequately for the poetic structure ofthe saints' poems. However, historically, and in present-day Tamilnadu, audiences did not and do not experiencethe two in the same way. This is because the saints' poems are a part of the ritual performed in the temple and inthe homes of observant Tamil Hindus. From this perspective a bhakti poem is not simply a "record" of a historicalevent like its puram counterpart, but the occasion for a ritualized reenactment of the events and emotions portrayedin the poem. During the ritual recitation of a bhakti poem, the identity of the reciter temporarily merges with that ofthe poet-narrator, and the devotee listening to the recitation becomes a direct observer of the poet/reciter'sexperience. Ultimately, through the reciter, the devotee identifies with the poet, and, in this way, the devoteebecomes an immediate participant in the poetic reenactment. 18 It is as if a whole historical context is reincarnatedin the performance of a bhakti poem, just as the god, who is the object of the saint's devotion, enters history timeand time again.

The Western Critic and the Poetics of Bhakti

Some critical terms and concepts borrowed from Western critical discourse may help us understand the poeticprinciples at work when a bhakti poem is performed and also show how these principles are related to classicalSanskrit and Tamil poetic formulations. One influential Western critic, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, draws adistinction between "natural discourse" and "fictive discourse."19 Smith is especially intrigued by genres that fallon or near the boundary between the two.20 While Smith restricts her field of inquiry to Western literature, shewould probably be fascinated by the particular way in which "natural'' and "fictive" features combine in the poeticsof bhakti. For Smith, the critical distinction between a natural utterance and a fictive utterance involves therelationship of each to its context. Natural utterances are "the verbal acts of real persons in particular occasions inresponse to particular sets of circumstances. . .a natural utterance is a historical event: like any other event, itoccupies a specific and unique point in time and space."21 "A natural utterance not only occurs in a particular setof circumstanceswhat is often referred to as its contextbut it is also understood as being a response to thosecircumstances. In other words, the historical 'context' of an utterance does not merely surround but occasions it,brings it into existence."22 "A natural utterance is always continuous with the speaker's total ongoing behav-




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ior and also continuous with the total world of natural events." 23

In direct contrast to natural utterances, a fictive utterance (which for Smith includes all verbal works of art)"has noinitial historical occurrence. What a poet composes as a text is not a verbal act but rather a linguistic structure thatbecomes, through being read or recited, the representation of a verbal act."24 "A fictive utterance consists entirelyof a linguistic structure, unlike a natural utterance, which consists of a linguistic event occurring in a historicalcontext."25 Indeed, because a poem is not pegged to a particular historical context, its suggestive powers areenhanced. It invites the members of its audience to create, in their imaginations, a plausible context for it.26"Poetic language seemsand indeed isricher, more 'suggestive' and 'evocative' than the language of natural discourseprecisely because and to the extent that it requires the reader to participate in the creation of its meanings."27Theverbal act that a literary work represents may itself be spoken or written. Once one is aware of this, it is possible todistinguish various literary genres on the basis of the types of natural discourse they represent.

Poetry itself, as distinct now from novels and stories, traditionally represents various kinds of spokendiscourse. Certain kinds of discourse, however, are themselves typically textual inscriptions: that is, theyexist characteristically in written and often in printed formfor example, chronicles, journals, letters,memoirs, and biographies. And certain genres of literary art, roughly what we refer to as "prose fiction,"characteristically represent such varieties of inscribed discourse.28

A printed text may therefore be many things. It may, like a personal letter, be a natural utterance in writing; it may,like the printed transcript of a speech, be a transcription of a natural utterance; or it may, like a lyric poem or anovel, be a representation of a natural utterance, spoken or written.

Clearly, the Sanskrit poems selected by rasa poetics, and classical Tamil akam poems as well, are fictive works ofliterary art, and usually representations of spoken natural discourse. Particularly in the case of akam poetry,characters, events, narrator, and statements through which the narration is presented are unquestionably fictive.29None of these, in any way, are identified with particular historical realities, or, as Smith would put it, they are"unmoored from any specific context or occasion in the world of objects and events."30 The fictiveness of Sanskritdrama and other Sanskrit poetry may not be as immediately evident, since the characters of these works aresometimes epic heroes or others who, according to tradition, really lived in historical time. However, poeticians,such as Abhinavagupta, assert quite firmly that the Rama in a play is not the same as the Rama who lived on earthin the distant past.31 Smith would approve of this viewpoint, for she too asserts that a person who lived in historyis not at all the same sort of thing as a character in a novel who may be modeled upon a historical person (e.g., thehistorically real Napoleon vs. Napoleon the character in War and Peace).32




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Puram poetry, as it is understood and interpreted in Tamil literary tradition, falls between the cracks of Smith'sinterpretive framework. On the one hand the characters and subject matter of puram poetry are understood to behistorical. Viewed exclusively from this perspective puram poems could be characterized as transcriptions ofspoken natural discourse and hence not, strictly speaking, poetry at all. But while it may be true that Tamil literaryscholars traditionally view the events and conversations portrayed in puram poems as historical, it is not clear thatthey regard the poems as literal transcriptions of actual conversations. Also, because in puram poetry history isrefracted by convention, the poems achieve a level of universality that is most commonly associated with fictiveliterature.

Is it possible that the heroes and bards portrayed in puram poetry, like Napoleon in War and Peace, or like Ramain a Sanskrit play, are most accurately described as fictive characters who are modeled on "historical" ones?Classical Tamil poetics does not offer any directly supportive evidence one way or the other. The authors ofTolkappiyam and other authoritative texts on poetics specify that only in puram poems are people and placesnamed and particular, while akam poems are set in landscapes that are representative rather than specific and arepopulated by characters who are known only by their roles. It is possible that this axiomatic distinctioncorresponded, in the minds of early Tamil poeticians, to Smith's distinction between the "natural" and the "fictive."But it is equally possible that they would have understood both the akam and the puram hero to be ''fictive," or,even more likely, that the natural/fictive distinction, which is engendered by a dualistic habit of mind, is notentirely compatible with their poetic vision. This latter possibility is in keeping with the Indian penchant forholistic conceptions in which dualities tend to be encompassed by overarching unities. It can be argued that eventhe bifurcation of the classical Tamil poetic universe into akam and puram spheres is undergirded by a vision ofunity. 33 The ambiguous status of Tamil puram poetry when viewed in terms of Smith's framework (which itselfdevelops out of a Western poetic tradition that can be traced to Aristotle) serves as a reminder that theories ofliterature are almost always culture-bound, and that no matter how universally applicable a theory of art is intendedto be, theory is never completely free of cultural bias.

I have shown that, considered purely in textual terms, bhakti poems are structurally almost identical to purampoems, and from this perspective they cut across the major categories of Smith's formulation just as puram poemsdo. But if bhakti poems are considered from the standpoint of the traditional ritual contexts in which they areperformed, Smith's categories begin to collapse in even more interesting ways. If one accepts that the ritualrecitation of a bhakti poem is, in effect, a "reincarnation" of a historical verbal event, it follows that a bhakti poemin performance combines the essential features of fictive discourse and natural discourse, even though thesecategories may, at first glance, appear to be mutually exclusive. The historical verbal event




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enshrined in a bhakti poem, like all natural utterances, is occasioned by a context, that is, a particular set ofhistorical circumstancesat least this is the understanding of Tamil Vaisnava and Saiva traditions. But, unlike othernatural utterances, a bhakti poem is not limited by its contextor, from a slightly different perspective, the contextthat gives birth to the poem is not limited by ordinary spatial and temporal laws. Under special ritual conditions,the poem's original context is recreated and the poem "reincarnates" a natural utterance. Like a fictive utterance, abhakti poem is not bound to a specific historical context, but this is not because it "has no initial historicaloccurrence." 34 A bhakti poem is wedded to a particular context, but the whole context including the poemmigrates in space and time and consequently the devotee may relive its original occurrence.

The Poetics of Bhakti and Audience Psychology

Smith argues (I think convincingly) that fictive utterances engage the imagination and creativity of their audiencein ways that are not typical of natural utterances. She concludes that the meaning of a natural utterance is closelytied to its context. "Indeed, what we often mean by the 'meaning' of an utterance is its context, that is, the set ofconditions that occasioned its occurrence and determined its form."35 "The context of a fictive utterance, however,is historically indeterminate," and thus ''its characteristic effect is to create its own context or, more accurately, toinvite and enable the reader to create a plausible context for it. And what we mean when we speak of interpreting apoem is, in large measure, precisely this process of inference, conjecture, and indeed creation of context."36 It isprecisely because a poem requires its audience to actively participate in the creation of its meaning that a poemcan potentially engage the psyche of its audience at a deeper level than a natural utterance.

In our efforts to interpret the poem, to construct the context of human situations and motives it demands inorder that its meaning be realized, we will draw on all our experiences of the world and words of men.Indeed, the activity of interpreting poetry often becomes the occasion for our recognition andacknowledgement of otherwise inaccessible feelings and, in a sense, our own otherwise unknowableknowledge. The richer and more extensive our experiences and feelings or as we say, "the more we bring tothe poem"the more significance it can have for us, which is why, of course, subsequent readings of a poem"reveal" more meanings. The language of a poem seems characteristically "concentrated" because it allowsfor such an extraordinary and continuous expansiveness of meaning, not confined to finite and particulardeterminants, but drawing on all we know that we can relate to it. The language of the poem continues tomean as long as we have meanings to provide for it. Its meanings are exhausted only at the limits of thereader's own experience and imagination.37




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Sanskrit poeticians likewise recognized that aesthetic experience or rasa is possible only if a qualified audience isdirectly involved in the creative processaesthetically a work cannot be complete without an audience. Thesahrdaya, or man of refined sensibility, is the locus of rasa. In the view of the Sanskrit poeticians, a poem is aninstrument that enables an audience member to uncover and experience the emotional substratum of his being. Apoem can do this only because it is fictive, and because the audience's response is consequently freed from theconditioning circumstances of daily life; in Smith's terms, it is "historically indeterminate."

While a bhakti poem is not understood to be fictive, it can "reincarnate" in the experience of its audience only if ittoo engages the imagination of a sympathetic audience. Rasa cannot be realized unless the audience is receptive tothe bhava represented in a poem. Similarly, a bhakti poem cannot fully come to life unless its audience ispsychologically prepared to serve as a vessel for the poem's reincarnation. It is through a temporally limited, buttotal identification with the saint-poet that the audience realizes this special kind of aesthetic effect. In order toachieve its potential, bhakti poetry, like Sanskrit "rasa poetry," requires that its audience be predisposed to itsspecial effects.

Conclusion: Comparative Poetics

Though the poetics of bhakti poetry in performance may resemble rasa poetics in some very important ways, thetwo are not identical. In the view of the theorists of rasa, poetry is fictive, and it is essential that poetry beunderstood as fictive for it to achieve its intended effect. Bhakti poetry, in certain essential ways, behaves likefictive poetry, but at the same time it is not understood to be fictive. Once one is alert to poetic principles such asfictive-ness, the precise relationship of the poetics of bhakti to other poetic formulations, Indian and non-Indian,begins to come into focus.

The bhakti tradition does not provide a built-in vocabulary with which to articulate such relationships. In Tamiltradition, especially in Tamil Vaisnavism, a large interpretive literature grew around the poetry of the saints. Theacaryas were sensitive to the ways the saint-poets used conventions of classical poetry, and they developed atheological discourse using the vocabulary of classical poetics. But using classical poetics to construct theologicalinterpretations of bhakti poetry is not the same thing as analyzing the underlying poetic principles that governbhakti poetry. While Tamil sectarian scholars elaborately analyzed the theological import of the saints' poems, theydid not directly confront the question, "what is bhakti poetry?' The aim of this chapter has been to seek to definethis question and attempt to answer it through a series of contrasts and comparisons. Both classical Sanskrit andclassical Tamil poetry were singled out by Indian literary scholarship as foci for self-conscious inquiries into thenature of literature. Each provided the ground for a theory of literature.




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By comparing the characteristic effects of bhakti poetry with those of classical poetry in Sanskrit and Tamil, itgradually becomes apparent that certain adjustments are required to modify the classical poetic theory so that itaccurately accounts for bhakti poetry. A vocabulary developed in the context of Western literary tradition canprovide a useful mechanism for carrying out these operations. From the devotee's point of view, this vocabulary issuperfluous. If he experiences the aesthetic effect potential in the saints' poems, it is enough. He does not need andprobably does not want to analyze his experience. But for those who wish to come to terms with the devotee'sexperience intellectually, this kind of comparative exercise can be valuable. It provides a bridge between theexperience of the insider and the outsider's desire to understand,

Notes

1. For a compact and very useful account of the history of Sanskrit poetic theory, see Edwin Gerow, IndianPoetics (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977); also see Edward C. Dimock, Jr., et al., The Literatures of India: AnIntroduction (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), especially the portions by EdwinGerow in chapters 3 and 6.

2. For a discussion of the relationship between classical Tamil poetry and devotional poetry in Tamil, especiallybetween classical heroic poetry and the poems of the Vaisnava saints, see A. K. Ramanujan and Norman Cutler,"From Classicism to Bhakti," in Bardwell L. Smith, ed., Essays on Gupta Culture (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,1981), pp. 177-215.

3. Though only eight rasas are recognized in Bharata's Natyasastra, one of the earliest texts (no later than eighthcentury A.D.) to treat the theory of rasa, some later natyasastrins recognized a ninth rasa, santi (tranquility).

4. Gerow in Dimock et al., Literatures of India, p. 135.

5. For a more detailed rendition of the natyasastra's theory of plot and a detailed plot analysis of Kalidasa'scelebrated drama Abhijnanasakuntala in terms of this theory, see Edwin Gerow, "Plot Structure and theDevelopment of Rasa," Journal of the American Oriental Society 99 (1979): 559-72, and 100 (1980): 267-82.

6. The Tamil conception of meyppatu appears to correspond most closely to the Sanskritic notion of anubhava or"consequents of emotion," even though the names of the eight meyppatus are obviously inspired by the eightsthayibhavas or dominant emotions in the Sanskrit system.

7. Kamil Zvelebil suggests that "the nuclear portions of Tolkappiyam were probably born sometime in the 2nd or1st Cent. B.C. but hardly before 150 B.C." and "that the present text of the Tolkappiyam, which underwent finalediting and redaction sometime in the 5th Cent. A.D. or later, is rather the work of a grammatical school than of anindividual author." See Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan on Tamil Literature of South India (London: E. J.Brill, 1971), pp. 146-47.

8. In addition to the five phases of love (uri) that are considered to be appropriate to the experience of noblepeople (canror), the Tamil poeticians recognized two other varieties of experience in love, kaikkilai (one-sidedlove) and peruntinai ("the common type," love between mismatched partners or common, unrefined people).Though the poeticians mention these two additional varieties, the classical poets did not attend to them much intheir poems.




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9. As we shall see, based on textual evidence alone, the narrator's identity can be ambiguous.

10. This and the following puram poems are taken from Hart's Poets of the Tamil Anthologies (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. (in order poems appear in this chapter) 151, 148, 160, 156, 170.

11. In the introduction to his translation of selections from Vidyakara's eleventh-century anthology of Sanskritverse, Daniel Ingalls emphasizes that among the poetic concepts that are relevant for appreciating the poems in theanthology, rasa is of utmost importance. As Ingalls shows, the anthologizer's sources include mahakavyas (literaryepics), plays, small or "fragmentary" kavyas, anthologies, and stray verses. See Daniel H. H. Ingalls, trans.,Sanskrit Poetry from Vidyakara's Treasury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), especially pp. 31-44.

12. See Gerow in Dimock et al., Literatures of India, pp. 217-18; Ingalls, Sanskrit Poetry, pp. 17-18, 23-28,concerning characterization in Sanskrit poetry.

13. Not represented in the examples given above are puram poems composed by kings. Even this type of poem hasan equivalent of sorts in the bhakti corpus if we take into account the idea, expressed in sectarian discourse, thatthe bhakti poets were mouthpieces of the gods they praised. Sometimes this idea is even expressed directly in thesaints' poems. Two dramatic examples are TVM 7.9.6 and TVM 7.9.1 by the Vaisnava saint Nammalvar. Englishtranslations of these poems appear in A. K. Ramanujan, trans., Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu byNammalvar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 81, 85.

14. For further discussions of the king/god relationship in the south Indian and/or Tamil contexts, see thefollowing: Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, "The south Indian temple: honor, authority, andredistribution," Contributions to Indian Sociology, n.s., 10, no. 2 (December 1976): 187-212; George L. Hart III,"The Nature of Tamil Devotion," in M. M. Deshpande and Peter Hook, eds., Aryan and Non-aryan in India (AnnArbor: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, 1979), pp. 11-33.

15. One can argue, however, that Nammalvar's Visnu encompasses all of creation; and thus, in spite of theparticular names and deeds that are attributed to this divine hero, Visnu, in a somewhat different sense from theakam characters, is universal.

16. See Ramanujan and Cutler, "From Classicism to Bhakti."

17. In the saints' poems "historical" events often belong to a realm that is closer to the Western analyst's notion ofmythology than to his notion of history. However, a reading of the Tamil bhakti corpus clearly shows that in theworld view of the saints, no sharp separation is made between the realm of mythology and the realm of history.

18. I have developed this argument at length in chapter 2.

19. See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language (Chicagoand London: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), especially Part One.

20. In the title essay of her book (see note 19), Smith deals specifically with works that cannot unproblematicallybe classified as either fictive or natural and with works that can be classified in either one way or the other,depending upon circumstances. In particular, she attends to commercials, greeting card verses, quotations, andproverbs. Smith, pp. 41-75.

21. Ibid., p. 15.

22. Ibid., p. 16.

23. Ibid., p. 18.

24. Ibid., p. 31.

25. Ibid., p. 30.

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26. Ibid., p. 33.




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27. Ibid., p. 36.

28. Ibid., p. 30.

29. "Novels and tales are obviously also fictive [in addition to lyric poetry], but more radically so than issometimes supposed. For not only are the characters and the events narrated in a novel fictional, but so also is thenarrator whose voice relates the events, and, most significantly, so also are the statements through which thenarration is presented." Ibid., pp. 10-11.

30. Ibid., p. 10.

31. Gerow in Dimock et al., Literatures of India, pp. 223-24.

32. Smith, Margins of Discourse, pp. 10-11.

33. This idea is developed further in chapter 4.

34. Smith, Margins of Discourse, p. 31.

35. Ibid., p. 21.

36. Ibid., p. 33.

37. Ibid., pp. 36-37.




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PART IITAMIL CLASSICISM AND BHAKTI: CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION




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Chapter FourA Devotional Poem in the Classical Mode

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN the love and war poems of classical Tamil and the poems of the Tamil saints isa complex one. Anyone who experiences the two side by side cannot help but be struck by the difference in dictionand tone; and as I have shown in the previous chapter, the implicit poetics of bhakti poetry differs from the poeticsof classical poetry in several critical ways. Nevertheless, the bhakti poets clearly were familiar with cankam poetry,and it would be a distortion to postulate a complete break between the bhakti poetic tradition and the earlierclassical tradition.

It is true that the saints appeared on the Tamil literary scene several centuries after the earliest cankam poets andthat they selected from and revalorized the conventions of classical poetry. It is also true that the early classicalpoems are primarily about love and conflict among humans, while the aim of the bhakti poems is to express andpromote communion between humanity and divinity. But there are two additional points that should not beoverlooked. First, the saints' poems are not the only poems in Tamil that take Hindu gods as their subject. Second,the classical poetic tradition was not displaced by the bhakti tradition. Poets who were contemporaries of the Tamilsaints as well as poets who lived even later composed poems that follow the conventions of classical poetry muchmore faithfully than do the majority of bhakti poems.

Both of these points are demonstrated by a group of genres known collectively as pirapantam (prabandha inSanskrit) or, sometimes, as "small literature" (cirrilakkiyam). Many of these genres, which flourished from aboutthe eighth to the eighteenth centuries, are direct descendants of the classical poems and adhere to many of the sameconventions. In his historical survey of Tamil literature, 1 Kamil Zvelebil concedes that it is very difficult to isolatethe defining features of the Tamil prabandhas, which make up a rather widely dispersed family of genres.Traditionally, ninety-six varieties of prabandhas are enumerated, though those who have compiled such lists holdvarying opinions as to exactly which genres should be included. According to Zvelebil, the idea that theprabandhas are ninety-six in number probably dates from the sixteenth century. One reason it is so difficult todefine the prabandha class as a whole is that some genres traditionally included in this group




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are defined purely in formal terms (for instance, according to the type of meter or the number of stanzas theyemploy), some are defined purely in terms of their subject matter and content, and some in terms of both form andcontent. Zvelebil also points out that a prabandha, at least in his usage,

always contains a narrative and a descriptive component, and has the character of a connected discourseabout an event, or a series of events, or of connected description of an item or person. This principle ofinternal cohesion or connectedness, either formal or based on unity of content, is important: by virtue of thisclassification, the prabandhas belong to the totarnilaicceyyul hyper-class of literary works, as opposed tothe tokainilai works (anthologies of disconnected poems). 2

Further, by convention, the hero(ine) of many of these poems may be either human or divine.3 But despite the factthat their protagonists may be divine, prabandhas generally play no part in the nexus of hagiography and ritual thatcontributes to the meaning of the saints' poems in Tamil culture. More in the manner of cankam poetry, they aretreated as literary objects. They are regarded as products of a poet's learning rather than as evidence of divineinspiration.4

The Saiva canon does, however, include a famous prabandha poem. This is Tirukkovaiyar by Manikkavacakar, theninth-century saint who also composed the very popular Tiruvacakam.anikkavacakar's two works jointly constitutethe eighth Tirumurai in the Saiva canon. It is easy to see why Tiruvacakam is included in the canon. Many of itsverses are paradigms of the direct, personal style of poetry that has come to be identified so closely with Hindudevotionalism. Tirukkovaiyar, on the other hand, is an entirely different kind of poem. On the surface it appears tohave no more claim to canonical status than other prabandha poems that take gods for heroes, except, of course,that it was written by Manikkavacakar. This fascinating, marginal poem is the subject of this and the next chapter.

The genre kovai (garland), to which Tirukkovaiyar belongs, is usually described as a direct outgrowth of classicalTamil akam poetry. There is, in fact, a very large area of overlap between the conventional apparatus of a kovaiand that of the classical love poems. They share the same cast of unnamed characters and the same narrativesituations, but the 400 verses of a kovai differ from the akam anthologies, which in several eases also contain 400or 401 verses, in an important way. There is no sequential connection between the verses in the classical akamanthologies. Each verse, which embodies a narrative situation (turai), effectively stands alone, yet all akam poemsare embedded in an implicit narrative framework. A reader must know the background story in order to interpretthese poems successfully, and this narrative line resides solely in the minds of poets and their audienceand, onemight add, in grammars such as Tolkappiyam that set out the rules of




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composition. In a kovai, however, the implicit narrative framework of the classical anthologies becomes animportant principle of textual organization. The verses of a kovai present a sequential arrangement of the situationsthat constitute the background story of akam poetry. Also, in kovai poems there is a "thickening" of the akam storyline; the authors of these texts composed verses that embodied situations that are not represented in the classicalanthologies. This is probably because once Tamil poets brought the akam narrative framework into the foreground,they felt the need to fully systematize it. A survey of all the akam poems of the classical anthologies would nodoubt reveal that not only are some situations better represented than others, but some turai that are hypotheticallynecessary to complete the story line are not represented at all. In a kovai the "holes" have been filled; the turai areevenly distributed and sequentially arranged. In other words, unlike the classical anthologies that assume a story, akovai tells a story.

It is obvious that the kovai is a descendant of classical akam poetry, but it is less well recognized that the classicaltradition of heroic or puram poetry also contributed a great deal to this medieval genre. The puram contribution isfound in the references to a great hero or patron that are worked into each of a kovai's 400 verses. In many kovaipoems, the hero is a king. In Tirukkovaiyar the hero is the god Siva.

In the language of Tamil poetics, the god or hero who receives praise in each verse, usually in the form of areference that is worked into a description of setting or into a poetic figure, is called the "hero of the composition"(pattutai talaivan). Like the hero of puram poetry, he is a "historical" figure who bears a name and who isassociated with specific historic places and events. 5The pattutai talaivan belongs to the "real world,'' while the"hero of the narrative," (kilavi talaivan) and the other characters involved in the akam narrative inhabit the specialinterior landscape of the poetic world.

From one point of view the akam dimension of a kovai encompasses its puram dimension. Its overall narrativeframework is a legacy of akam tradition, as are the situations that govern the structure of each verse. The puramcontribution is restricted to localized references to the pattutai talaivan, to his realm, and to his heroic acts. Thereis no sequential or logical linkage between these references from verse to verse as there are between the akatturai.However, one can look at a kovai in a different way, and from this alternate perspective the puram dimensionranks first in the purposes of the poet. From this point of view the kovai poet's first concern is to honor the pattutaitalaivan, and the akam framework is an instrument to this end. A few poems will help demonstrate how thegeneric features discussed above are actually manifested in poetry. First, consider a few poems from the classicalakam anthology Kuruntokai.




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Bigger than earth, certainly,higher than the sky,more unfathomable than the watersis this love for this man

of the mountain slopeswhere bees make rich honeyfrom the flowers of the kurincithat has such black stalks.

Tevakulattar, Kuruntokai 3, trans. A. K. Ramanujan 6

Ramanujan has shown how the sentiment expressed through the words of the akam heroine (talaivi) in this poem isartfully complemented by the poem's imagery.7 Like most classical love poems, this poem is set in one of fivelandscapes that are specified by convention (though inspired by real landscapes found in south India), and itssentiment expresses one of five phases of love that are associated with these landscapes.8 Tamil poeticians wouldassign this poem to the mountain landscape, the landscape associated with the (usually premarital) union of lovers.In Tamil the five landscape systems of akam poetryeach including within its sphere features of time and place, aselective vocabulary of images, and a phase of loveare called tinais. Each tinai is named after a flowercharacteristic of the region. For example, the mountain landscape is called kurinci tinai, after a mountain flowerthat blooms once every twelve years.

Kuruntokai 3 contains several clues that it is a poem of kurinci tinai and one dead giveaway is the reference to thekurinci flower. In this poem the image of bees making honey from the kurinci flower is implicitly compared withthe hero and heroine of the narrative and their union in love: the hero is likened to the bees, the heroine to thekurinci flower, and honey to their love for each other.

This network of associations was well known to the audience of akam poetry, and the ability to discern this andother similarly implied meanings in the poems' imagery was an essential part of this audience's literarycompetence. Consequently, the suggested comparison (ullurai)9 that makes a critical contribution to the total effectof Kuruntokai 3 would also come into play in the interpretation of other poems that have bees, honey, and/ orflowers as part of their imagery. In Kuruntokai 116 several layers of meaning are suggested.

The woman I longed for,and stayed with,




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has hair that beesswoop down on;it is well arrangedand wavy,

like fine, black sandin ripples on the long beachof the prospering Cola'sUrantai town;

it is cool and fragrant.Ilankiran, Kuruntokai 116, trans.

M. Shanmugam Pillai and David Ludden 10

First of all, the hero who speaks the words of this poem suggests that bees mistake his lover's hair for flowersbecause her hair is so fragrant. Second, the girl's youthful beauty is compared to the prosperous town of Urantai.Such comparisons, overt or implied, between a beautiful woman and a city are very common in Tamil poetry.Finally, as in the preceding poem, the hero is likened to a bee and the heroine to a flower.

Yet another poem that displays this system of images is Kuruntokai 2.

O bee,with your hidden wings:you have lived a life in searchof honey.So tell me trulyfrom what you have seen:among all the flowers you know,is there one that smells more sweetthan the hair of this woman,

with her peacock gait,and close-set teeth,and ancienteternallove?

Iraiyanar, Kuruntokai 2, trans.M. Shanmugam Pillai and David Ludden11

The fact that Kuruntokai 2, 3, and 116 are attributed to different poets shows that the classical poets shared arepertoire of situations, characters, and images. Further, this repertoire ranged from basic principles of compositionto fine details of imagery.

Besides reinforcing one's sense of the strong conventional forces at work in classical Tamil poetry, Kuruntokai 2serves well as a point of entry into Manikkavacakar's kovai. Consider the following verse from Tirukkovaiyar:




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O bee,in your vast fieldsare the lilies as sweetas the mouth of this girlwhose waist is so frail

it suffers like people who don't singof Tillai and its Ambalam,

home of the lord adorned with a snakewho melts the bones of his devoteeswho worship him with hands joined in prayer?

TK 11

Needless to say, this poem, which very likely was composed as much as six centuries later than Kuruntokai 2,bears more than a passing resemblance to the classical poem. In the terms of classical Tamil poetics, the two poemsembody the same turai or poetic situation. This situation occurs very early in the story of the love affair betweenthe hero and the heroine. During the first meeting of the two, the man looks for a way to tell the girl that she isvery beautiful. However, she is terribly shy, so he pretends to address his words to a bee, making sure that she canoverhear him. In the classical poem the speaker implies that no flower is as fragrant as the heroine's hair.Manikkavacakar works a minor variation on this theme in TK 11, where the fragrance of the heroine's mouth iscompared to the scent of lilies. The syntactic kernel of the classical poem is a question: "Are any [flowers] morefragrant than the hair of this woman . . . ?" (arivai kuntalin / nariyavum ulavo). The "flesh" for this syntacticskeleton appears in the form of phrases describing the woman and a vocative phrase addressed to the bee. Here thepoet works out the conventional hero-heroine-love/bee-flower-honey analogy.

In Manikkavacakar's poem the syntactic kernel is a question that reads, "Do the lily buds emit fragrance like hersweet mouth . . . ?" (ival tinkani vay kamalum / ampalampotulavo). Obviously, the skeleton of this poem closelyresembles that of its classical predecessor, but beyond this point Manikkavacakar and the classical poet part ways.Manikkavacakar, in keeping with the rules that govern the kovai genre, turns his attention to elements that lieoutside the scope of the classical poem. The "flesh" of his verse largely concerns Siva, the pattutai talaivan ofTirukkovaiyar, and these elements are embedded in a phrase that describes the heroine. This embedding techniqueis typical of the various ways Manikkavacakar and other authors of kovais integrated the two registers of thisgenre. In Tirukkovaiyar, references to Siva most typically appear in similes and other poetic figures and indescriptions of setting. 12

Manikkavacakar's verse also carries overtones of the implicit comparison between details of a natural landscapeand human protagonists that is the hallmark of classical Tamil love poetry, but the implied meaning or ullurai,which is one of the most important sources of poetic effect in the classical poem, has given way to other concerns.The poetic center of a kovai verse is




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the interface between its akam and its puram elements. This is the hinge that holds the two registers of this genre inbalance. Akam and puram may be the bedrock of the classical poet's world, but the kovai shows that underlyingthis dualistic foundation is yet a deeper level, where these two fundamental realms of experience are unified. Theakam / puram dichotomy is just the first of many analytic distinctions early Tamil thinkers made in their efforts toarticulate their response to the variety of experience the world offers. The point of transition between the akam andpuram registers of a kovai verse is its most interesting aspect, for it is here that one gets a glimpse of theunderlying unity of the inner and outer realms of experience. 13

Before turning to Tirukkovaiyar to investigate some of the ways this principle is actually manifested in poetry, letus return for a moment to Kuruntokai 3. As noted above, this poem's effect centers on an implied comparison(ullurai) between a phenomenon in nature and the play of human emotions. The distinctive features of an ulluraiare, first of all, the suppression of all explicit indications of comparison, and second, the coexistence of the termsbeing compared in a time / space continuum. As A. K. Ramanujan has observed, the relationship between the termsof an ullurai is both metaphoric and metonymic. In Kuruntokai 3 the human protagonists share a landscape withbees and kuriñci flowers, and at the same time they are likened to them. The implication of this poem and otherslike it is that humankind is like nature at the same time that it is part of nature.

The relationship between the inner human life and nature in akam poetry, in certain ways, serves as a model for therelationship between the human drama and a Saiva mythological realm in Tirukkovaiyar. Occasionally the Saivasegment of a verse in Tirukkovaiyar is related to its akam frame both metaphorically and metonymically, in amanner reminiscent of the akam ullurai. More often, however, in a single verse the relationship is restricted to oneor the other of these two functions. It is only by stepping back and contemplating the text as a whole that one isable to grasp the underlying message of the text: humanity is like divinity, and humanity and divinity cohabit acommon universe.

In verse 11 (see above), it is the metaphoric aspect of the akam/ Saiva relationship that is enacted. An exceptionallybeautiful example of this metaphoric relationship appears in verse 109:

Vast as the love I feel for the lord,black as my bonds that he takes away,bright as Tillai, his home,white as the ash he smears on his shoulders,long as the words we speak to praise his flower-like feet

are her great eyes.TK 109

Verse 8 is one of many verses that illustrate the metonymic aspect of the relationship:




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If she is nectar and I am its savor,it is the god of fortune who made it so.

Who could tell us aparthere in this hidden gardenprotected by the bamboothat cover the rocks at Mt. Potiyil,home of Puliyur's spotless lord?

TK 8

And finally verse 71 is a relatively rare example of a full-fledged ullurai or metonymic metaphor in Tirukkovaiyar:

Like the crow's two eyesthat share a single pupil,

today these two share one life-breathin separate bodies.

Here at the mountain of the lordwho combines all things in himself,the lord who stays in Ambalam's great gardens,

this peacock of a woman and this manshare joy and pain alike.

TK 71

This verse, expressed as the words of the heroine's girl friend (toli), is about the miraculous union of the twolovers. The speaker declares that the lovers' union took place at Siva's mountain abode. At the same time the poemsuggests that the union of man and woman is like the union of all creatures in lord Siva. The separate identities ofthe lovers are effaced in their union, just as all distinctions are effaced and absorbed in the being of the god.

As mentioned earlier, the segment of a kovai verse that concerns the "hero of the composition" is directlydescended from classical puram poetry, and in Tirukkovaiyar this segment is taken over by Saiva mythology andexpressions of devotion to Siva. It has often been said that gods and kings share many features in south Indianculture. 14 The fact that either a god or a king can fulfill the function of pattutai talaivan in a kovai and in othergenres15 bears witness to this cultural pattern. In order to get a closer view of how the Saivite poet assimilates hisreligious concerns to the puram tradition, it will be instructive to compare Tirukkovaiyar with a kovai in which ahuman king fills the role of pattutai talaivan. Historically, Tirukkovaiyar is considered to be the second importantrepresentative of the kovai genre and the first that is extant in its entirety. The first important kovai, according tomost scholars, is a text called Pantikkovai, dated around 700 A.D. Though the original text is lost, 350 verses (outof a presumed 400) have been reconstructed from two commentaries. The pattutai talaivan of this poem, accordingto some schol-




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ars, is a composite hero constructed from the personalities of several Pantiya kings. R. Nagaswamy has identifiedthe hero as Arikecari Parankuca Maravarman (c. 670-700 A.D.), and Kamil Zvelebil concurs with Nagaswamy'sview. 16

Keeping Tirukkovaiyar 11 in mind, consider these two verses from Pantikkovai:

O bee,you know the flowersin the vast gardenson the slopes of southern Potiyil Mountainin the realm of the valiant kingwho conquered his enemiesand dispatched them to heavenwhen they dared to challenge himon the battlefield of Vilinam.

Tell me,are the lily blossoms thereas sweet as the coral-red mouthof this gentle girl?

Pantikkovai 4

O bees with perfect spherical bodies,tell me

in the groves by our seashoreare the flowersas sweet as the flowing hairof this girl whose eyes shamethe red mango buds from the Konku Country,

land ruled by the kingwho destroyed a hostile armyon the battlefield of Kottaru?

Pantikkovai 5

Clearly, Tirukkovaiyar 11 and these verses from Pantikkovai embody the same poetic situation, and, as mentionedpreviously, this situation can be traced to earlier classical poetry. In verse 4, as in TK 11, the speaker compares hislover's mouth to a flower. In verse 5, as in Kuruntokai 2, the scent of flowers is likened to the heroine's fragranthair. In both Tirukkovaiyar and in Pantikkovai, references to the pattutai talaivan are worked into the akam framein the form of "metonymic metaphors" and, like any number of classical puram poems, Pantikkovai emphasizes itshero's prowess on the battlefield.17

By looking at verses from Tirukkovaiyar and from Pantikkovai, side by side, it is apparent that in each verse of akovai there is a "slot" that is reserved




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for a reference to the poem's pattutai talaivan. When the pattutai talaivan is a human king, this slot is usuallyfilled with a reference to the hero's valor, and often to specific battles where he demonstrated his heroic qualities.The poet also includes references to locales that fall within the hero's sphere of influence. In Tirukkovaiyar, whereSiva fills the rule of pattutai talaivan, Manikkavacakar fills this slot with references to Siva's heroic deeds, 18 toother aspects of Siva's mythology and iconography,19 to the god's sacred places,20 and to the fruits of devotion21(or, concomitantly, to the unenviable fate of those who lack devotion to Siva).22

The formal framework of the kovai highlights correspondences between a king's realm and a god's sacred places,and between the reverence a subject shows his king and the reverence a devotee feels for god. In short, regardlessof whether a kovai's pattutai talaivan is a king or a god, the poet pulls the details he uses to fill the hero's slot in akovai verse from a paradigm that straddles the human and the divine.

It should be clear why Tirukkovaiyar is reputed to be a difficult, learned poem. To appreciate this poem fully areader must be well versed in the conventions of classical akam and puram poetry; he must be sensitive to thekovai's subtle manipulations of these genres in relationship to one another; and he must perceive in the poem thecoalescence of Saiva and puram paradigms.

In Tirukkovaiyar, Manikkavacakar's Saivism stands in a twofold relationship to classical Tamil poetic tradition. Inthe language of semiotics, the Saiva elements in each verse stand in a syntagmatic relationship to the akam side ofthe tradition. Akam and Saiva elements are bound together in a common syntactic frame; they are contiguous inspace and time. When verses from Tirukkovaiyar and from Pantikkovai are set beside one another, it becomesapparent that the relationship between these same Saiva elements and the puram side of the classical tradition is aparadigmatic one. As Roman Jakobson would put it, reference to the Pantiya king's heroism and to Siva's greatnessare drawn from the same axis of selection.23 When these two dimensions are conjoined, the result is a subtle andcomplex vision of Siva's universality. The classical poets divided all experience into two realmsthe interior and theexterior. In Tirukkovaiyar Manikkavacakar shows that Siva encompasses both of these realms; he is both "insider"and"outsider."24 In this way Manikkavacakar enlists both sides of the classical tradition to glorify Siva, but at thesame time he makes a very important statement about the classical poets' vision of the world. The organization ofthe compositions of the classical poets into separate akam and puram anthologies, and also discussions of theprinciples of classical poetry in treatises such as Tolkappiyam, imply that the classical Tamil view of the world wasessentially dualistic. The classical poet views human experiences as a composite of two distinct domainsthe privateor "interior" (akam) and the public or "exterior" (puram). But the very words classical poeticians chose to denotethese




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two domains suggest that underlying the apparent dualistic vision of the classical poets was a sense of an all-embracing unity of experience. Akam and puram elements belonging to multiple levels of analysis subtly interactwithin a single classical poem, even if nominally it is consigned to one domain or the other. 25 In Tirukkovaiyarthe latent sense of an underlying unity of experience found in classical poetry is brought into the foreground. Thestructure of Tirukkovaiyar and of all kovai poems highlights the complementarity of akam and puram, and inTirukkovaiyar not only is the latent monism of the classical Tamil poetic vision made manifest, but the entireclassical vision is placed within a Saiva frame.

Notes

1. Kamil Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1974).

2. Ibid., p. 193.

3. This trend can be found even in later cankam poems. For instance, the classical genre arruppatai is a guidepoem in which a bard praises the liberality of a king. In the late classical poem Tirumurukarruppatai, however, thebard-narrator praises the god Murukan, who bestows salvation upon his suppliant rather than food and wealth.

Further, the kovai (discussed in this chapter) is not the only medieval genre in which a conventional role issometimes assumed by a human hero and sometimes by a god. Among prabandha genres, a poem of the typecalled ula, for instance, describes a procession in which a hero, who may be human or divine, moves throughthe streets of a city, all the while inspiring love in the hearts of women of varying ages. (See Zvelebil, TamilLiterature, p. 197.) Likewise, the hero of another very popular genre, called pillaittamil, may be human ordivine. In a poem of this kind the poet praises the protagonist of his poem (who may be male or female) in aconventionalized description of his or her childhood. (See Zvelebil, Tamil Literature, pp. 211-15.)

4. David Shulman has written on these two competing poetic ideals in his paper, "From Author to Non-Author inTamil Literary Legend."

5. If the hero is a god, as in Tirukkovaiyar, the notion of history must be extended to include mythological timeand space.

6. A. K. Ramanujan, The Interior Landscape (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 19.

7. Ibid., pp. 108-109.

8. The five landscapes, each named for a characteristic flower, are kurñci, mullai, marutam, neytal, and palai. Thefive phases of love (uri) associated with each respectively are union of lovers (punartal), patient waiting (iruttal),lover's unfaithfulness and sulking (utal), anxious separation (irankutal), and elopement or hardship in separation(pirittal).

9. See chapter 1.

10. M. Shanmugam Pillai and David Ludden, trans., Kuruntokai: An Anthology of Classical Tamil Love Poetry(Madurai: Koodal Publishers, 1976), p. 43.

11. Ibid., p. 35.

12. TK 6 and TK 109 provide two clear examples of this pattern. (See Part III for translations.)

13. I am not suggesting that it is only in kovai poems that this vision is made manifest. In historical terms the trendis from almost complete separation of akam and puram in the early anthologies to a blending of the two in variousways in later works. But even in the early anthologized poems the separation is not absolute. For example,


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in Akananuru 36 (an akam poem) the noise raised by gossiping tongues (alar) is compared to the clamor of thebattlefield. While the poem's subject matter unmistakably belongs to the akam realm, a puram-like image isintroduced via a simile. (I wish to thank Professor V. S. Rajam for bringing this poem to my attention.) AsSally Noble has very ably demonstrated, both akam and puram traditions contribute a great deal to the epicCilapatikaram (fifth century). (See her M.A. thesis, "Narrative, Image and Song in the Cilapatikaram"[University of Chicago, 1981].) Also, some of the medieval prabandha genres, besides the kovai, mix akamand puram elements. Among these is one called kalampakam, which literally means "mixture." (See Zvelebil,Tamil Literature, p. 200.)

14. See chapter 3, note 13.

15. See note 3 above.

16. Zvelebil, Tamil Literature, p. 203.

The following poem is one of many that could be cited:

O lord whose fame is past the skill of poets!There was a fortress named Kanapper.Its moat was deeper than the earth;its walls seemed to touch the sky;its bastions were like flowering stars;the forest that guarded it was so thick with treesthat not a ray entered.Strong camps surrounded it.Yet that fortress is gonelike water vaporized by ironheated in a glowing fire by a black-handed smith,and Venkaimarpan grieves.O king wearing the tumpai garland of victory every day,your fame exhausts the conventions of poets.As they who scorn you perish along with their name,may your spear flourish, resplendent in its renown.

Aiyur Mulankilar sings Kanappereyil Katanta Ukkirapperuvaluti,Purananuru 21, trans. GeorgeL. Hart III

George L. Hart III, Poets of the Tamil Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 141.

18. TK 70 (see Part III for translation).





23. Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," in T. A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p. 358.

24. There is an interesting Vaisnava parallel in a verse by Nammalvar. In TVM 1.3.2, the Vaisnava saint describesVisnu as akattanan (he who possesses the nature of the interior) and as purattanan (he who possesses the nature ofthe exterior). For some commentators these terms indicate Visnu's qualities of saulabhya (accessibility) andparatva (remoteness). They say that Visnu is always nearby (akattanan) for his devotees and that he is always

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inaccessible (purattanan) for people who lack devotion. In my translation of this verse, I have translatedpurattanan as "container" and akattanan as "contained." (See Part III for translation.)

25. See A. K. Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War from the Eight Anthologies and Ten Poems of Classical Tamil(Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 262-69.




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Chapter FiveA Tamil Allegory of Love

WHILE A CLOSE READING of Tirukkovaiyar yields a poetically subtle vision of Siva's universality thatsupports Manikkavacakar's reputation as a poet and saint, Tamil Saivites have, over time, evolved a framework forinterpreting Tirukkovaiyar that builds on, but at the same time obscures, this vision. Apparently later generations ofTamil Saivites grew defensive about Tirukkovaiyar's erotic subject matter, which, as I have indicated in theprevious chapter, comes to Tirukkovaiyar in a direct line of succession from classical love poetry. For theologiansof the Saiva Siddhantins school, Siva's presence in Tirukkovaiyar as ''hero of the composition" could not in itselfallay their fears that readers would tend to perceive this work as a secular poem about love between man andwoman. Saiva Siddhantins distinguish the joys of this world, including the joys of love, which they call "lesserpleasure" (cirrinpam), from the incomparable joy of union with the godhead, which they call "greater pleasure"(perinpam). From their point of view, readers of limited insight are likely to interpret Tirukkovaiyar as a poemabout the former, while readers who are spiritually further advanced will realize that "greater pleasure" is the realsubject of this poem. A Siddhantin writing in 1965 asserts that it is a great error to regard Tirukkovaiyar as a workabout physical love, when it is actually a work about spiritual realization. 1

One may rightly ask how it is possible to read Tirukkovaiyar without taking account of its seemingly unmistakableerotic subject matter.2 Tamil Saivites, in fact, do not attempt to dismiss these aspects of the text. Instead theyassign them allegorical meanings. According to the Siddhantins' allegorical reading of the text, the "hero of thenarrative" (kilavi talaivan) of Tirukkovaiyar represents uyir, a Tamil word that is often rendered in English as"soul," though "life-breath" is probably a more accurate translation. Uyir is the "breath of life" that animates thecorporeal frame (utal) of a living being. The heroine (talaivi) of the kovai narrative is understood to be apersonification of civam, the godhead conceived in the abstract.3 The other dramatis personae of the kovai are alsoassigned allegorized identities. Most notably, the heroine's girl friend (toli) is said to represent arul or "grace."

The allegorical interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar is primarily an oral tradition in Tamil Saivism. For centuries Saivasavants have expounded the




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"covert" meaning of the text to their disciples, who in turn have passed on this teaching to their own disciples.Such transmission of knowledge through guru-disciple lineages (parampara) is, of course, a pattern common tovirtually all Hindu spiritual traditions of learning. Because the theological interpretation of the text belongs to atradition which is primarily oral, one cannot precisely describe the circumstances that gave birth to this "allegory oflove." Saiva Siddhantins, as one would expect, hold that the allegory is implicitly in the textthat Manikkavacakarput it there. Since the text has been preserved primarily in a sectarian environment, present-day historians of Tamilliterature more often than not accept this position as an article of faith; but given their cursory treatment ofTirukkovaiyar, one suspects that they have not examined the text carefully. 4

I find no reason to assume that Manikkavacakar intended for his kovai to be read as an allegory, or statedotherwise, that Tirukkovaiyar is generically an allegory. The situations that structure the narrative are conventional;they are found in other kovai poems and many are found among the early classical love poems. No one suggeststhat Pantikkovai, to take one example, is an allegory, though it shares a great many specific features withTirukkovaiyar, including dramatis personae and narrative situations. It may be useful to distinguish, as someWestern critics do, between allegory as a genre and allegorical interpretation or allegoresis as a critical mode.Maureen Quilligan, to cite one such critic, claims that "true" allegories generally do not respond well to allegoricalcriticism.5 An allegory such as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, to take a well-known example, encourages thereader's awareness of multiple levels of meaning through the extensive use of personification or other devices of itslanguage. But this is not necessarily true of texts that become the objects of allegoresis. The traditionally acceptedallegorical interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar actually upsets the formal balance of the text. Siva's essential role in thepoem as "hero of the composition" is pushed out of view, and the delicate balance between the poem's akam andpuram registers is disturbed. I have argued that the poetic structure of Tirukkovaiyar has theological implications.By interpreting Tirukkovaiyar as an allegory, Saiva Siddhantins may have gained a useful vehicle forcommunicating a theology, but at a price. The Siddhantins' use of allegoresis in their interpretation ofManikkavacakar's kovai is a better reflection of their own intellectual disposition than it is of the poetic structure ofthe text.

Sectarian interpreters of Tirukkovaiyar have been at pains to explain why Peraciriyar, the renowned thirteenth-century commentator who is given credit for the most detailed and authoritative written commentary that hassurvived with the text,6 did not attend to the allegorical meaning of Manikkavacakar's poem. While Peraciriyar'scommentary provides no evidence that he was cognizant of a "higher" meaning encoded in the verses ofTirukkovaiyar, a "preface to the commentary" (uraippayiram), also attributed to Peraci-




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riyar, provides a very different picture. In this preface, Peraciriyar, if he is in fact its author, situatesManikkavacakar and his authorship of Tirukkovaiyar in the context of a Saiva cosmology. The idiom of thispreface is pure Saiva Siddhanta, and in this respect the preface stands in sharp contrast to the commentary itself.Toward the end of the preface the author indicates that Manikkavacakar encoded two meanings in his textone thataccords with "the meaning found in wisdom literature" (arivanulporul) and another that follows "the protocol ofworldly literature" (ulakanul valakkam). He further explains that the subtle meaning of jnanayoga (the yoga ofknowledge) that is expounded in the agamas (manuals of ritual procedure and doctrine) is difficult to grasp(akamanul valiyinutaliya nana / yoka nun porulinai yunarttutarkaritu). For this reason, he continues, he restrictedthe scope of his commentary to the more accessible worldly meaning of the text.

Here, no doubt, is an explanation for Peraciriyar's neglect of Tirukkovaiyar's covert theological meaning. But, inmy opinion, it is open to question whether or not Peraciriyar actually wrote the preface to his commentary. Giventhe very different idioms employed in the preface and in the commentary proper, it is tempting to postulate that thepreface was appended by a Saiva Siddhantin who wished to protect a renowned commentator from the charge thathe was ignorant of Tirukkovaiyar's "higher" meaning. One modern commentator humbly proposes that thoughPeraciriyar obviously held Tirukkovaiyar in high esteem, he was not able to perceive its true meaning clearly.Apparently this commentator takes this position because Peraciriyar sees two meanings in Tirukkovaiyar, while anenlightened reader should realize that its meaning is purely spiritual. 7

There is a further dimension to this discussion that must not be ignored. Peraciriyar's reputation rests largely on thecommentary that he wrote for the early Tamil grammar and poetic treatise, Tolkappiyam. As a commentator onTolkappiyam, Peraciriyar belonged to a community of literati whose primary intellectual preoccupation was nottheological. Zvelebil has dubbed his age (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) the" 'golden age' of the commentators,"an age marked by "a definite 'return to classicism' (to the great classical literature of the 'Cankam' and post-'Cankam' epoch)."8 Contemporaneous with the nonsectarian commentatorial tradition to which Peraciriyarbelonged was a prolific Vaisnava commentatorial tradition. The sacred hymns of the alvars, and especiallyNammalvar's Tiruvaymoli, were the objects of commentaries through which the Srivaisnava acaryas expressedtheir highly sophisticated theological formulations. However, a comparable literature did not develop around thehymns of the Saiva saints until the nineteenth century. Apparently Tamil Saivites associated sacredness with a kindof immunity to commentary. It therefore appears likely that Peraciriyar thought of his commentary onTirukkovaiyar as a literary commentary, not a theological one, and that he approached Tirukkovaiyar not as asacred text but as a work of high literary




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culture. If this is so, it is still possible that he perceived a covert theological meaning in Tirukkovaiyar that he felthe could not appropriately address in his commentary.

The most important textual source we have for the sectarian tradition of interpreting Tirukkovaiyar allegorically isa compendium of colophon-like phrases called Tirukkovaiyar unmai (The "truth" of Tirukkovaiyar). The text iscomposed of a series of colophons that are intended to capture the allegorical significance of each ofTirukkovaiyar's four hundred verses and each of its twenty-five major divisions (atikara). Tirukkovaiyar unmaithus recasts the akam frame narrative as a story about the relationship between uyir and civam in union and inseparation. The allegory, as presented in this text, is worked out in a rather mechanical fashion. One has the feelingthat once "higher level" roles are assigned to the various dramatis personae of the frame narrative, the allegoricalinterpretation of particular situations follows automatically. To see how this works, consider the first three versesof Tirukkovaiyar, which portray the hero musing to himself after seeing the heroine for the first time.

Beautiful lotus blossoms, splendid blue lilies,colorful, flowering kumil from Tillai,

home of the lord,blossoms of silkwood and new November-flowers

are joined in this garlandfilled with a divine fragrance.

It is sinuous as a liana,graceful as a swan

and it shines brightas the handsome Love-god's triumphant banner.

TK 1 9

Is she a courier for Death,or a companion for Love, the disembodied god?

Is she a woman from incomparable Tillai,or an innocent peacock?

And where does she dwell

in a blossom, in the sky,in the watersor in the netherworld of serpents?

How can I say?TK 2




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Her lethal eyes blink,her feet touch the groundand the flowers she wears have withered

O my troubled mind

this girl with a small browhas a waist too frail to support her breastsand her long arms are graceful as bamboo,

she is lovely as Tillai,home of Lord Harawho rides a spirited bull

but she is no goddess.TK 3 10

The turais or poetic situations embodied by these three verses are called katci (sighting), ayam (doubt), and telital(clarification). In the first verse, the hero describes various aspects of the heroine's physical beauty in conventionalmetaphoric terms. In the second, he wonders if she is a mortal or some other kind of creature, and in the third hediscerns unmistakable signs that she is indeed mortal, even though her extraordinary beauty suggests otherwise.The colophons that traditionally accompany the verses, and that may have been written by an early editor,summarize the subject matter of each as follows:

TK 1: The man who holds a sharp spear sees the young girl11 whose forehead is bright as the moon.("mativanutal valarvañciyaik katirvelavan kannurratu.")TK 2: The man from the country of great mountains wonders, "Is this thing, which is difficult to identify, agod.?" (''terivariyator teyvamenna aruvarai natan aiyurratu.")TK 3: The man who holds a sharp spear notices [her] qualities and ascertains that she is not a goddess.("anankallalen rayilvelavan kunankalainokkik kuritturaittatu.")

And this is how the author of Tirukkovaiyar unmai revalorizes the subject of the three verses: The first is about"seeing the blessed form of the spiritual preceptor" (kuruvin tirumeni kantal). The second describes "the experienceof uncertainty after admiring the blessed form" (tirumeniyai viyantu aiyamurutal), and the third is about "knowingthe [guru's] form in the manner of a decoy" (parvai polum vativenrarintatu). Thus poems that, to the uninitiatedreader, seem to be about the first meeting of a young woman and a young man, from the theologian's point of vieware said to describe the soul's12 initial attraction to god. According to this interpretation, god, who is




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actually not bound to any limited, discernible form (and who, thus conceived, is known as civam), assumes thelimited, but still wondrous form of the spiritual preceptor (satguru) as an act of grace and attracts the soul as adecoy attracts a deer. 13

Tirukkovaiyar unmai provides no more than a brief, and sometimes cryptic, appraisal of the "higher" significanceof the situations portrayed in the verses of Tirukkovaiyar. It provides a foundation upon which teachers of theSaiva Siddhanta tradition constructed and continue to construct14 much more elaborate interpretations of the text.In true scholastic fashion, they squeeze theologically relevant meaning from the smallest descriptive detail. Sincethe tradition is essentially an oral one, teachers with an inventive bent of mind may give free rein to theirexegetical talents, while others may confine themselves to rather mechanical interpretive procedures.

An example of the latter, and the only published commentary I know of that elaborates the allegorized reading ofTirukkovaiyar favored by Saiva Siddhanta tradition, is the Tirukkovaiyar unmaivilakkam (The "illumination" ofTirukkovaiyar unmai), written by C. Tantapani Tecikar.15 Following a traditional commentatorial format, theauthor describes the situation that is embodied in each verse, gives an interpretive prose paraphrase (polippurai) foreach verse, and discusses in detail words and phrases deemed to be of particular interest. The first is essentially amore discursive rendition of Tirukkovaiyar unmai's terse description of the subject of each verse. Tecikar'spolippurai is closely modeled after a similar paraphrase commentary written in the thirteenth century byPeraciriyar, only in the Siddhantin's commentary the dramatis personae, and sometimes other elements, areassigned allegorized meanings.

Let us briefly see how the Siddhantin commentator handles the first verse of Tirukkovaiyar. Discussing the turai orsituation described in the verse, he writes, "the atman, which has attained a state of cessation of active energy[cattinipatam], wanders in search of the satguru and, through the agency of divine grace [tiruvarul],16 it clearlysees his [the satguru's] blessed form and admires it." ("cattinipatam perra anma carkuruvai nati alaintu tiruvarulkutta, avar tirumeniyai nanku kantu viyattalam.") Continuing his description of the subject of Tirukkovaiyar 1,Tecikar asserts that "in Tirukkovaiyar, which, among the four aims of lifenamely, virtue [aram], material things[porul], pleasure [inpam], and liberation [vitu]expounds the pleasure of liberation [vittinpam], the first verse treatsthe situation of 'making [the heroine's/ satguru's] appearance manifest' [katciyai unarttutal], which is classifiedunder 'one-sided love' [kaikkilai]."17 ("mutarpattu ennutalirro venin, aram porul inpam vitu ennum nar porulinumvittinpattai nutaliya tirukkovaiyinkan kaikkilaippalatakiya katciyai unarttutal nutalirru.'') He then writes, "If oneshould ask, 'how is it that this is one-sided love [kaikkilai].?' [the answer is,] the life-breath [uyir], having soughtand found the satguru who is the gateway [vayil] to 'greater pleasure' [perinpam], is impatient to attain that joy;




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thus in the form of passion [kamam] experienced by the soul alone, the desire [of the soul for the satguru]develops." ("itu kaikkilaiyamaru yannanamenin, tiruvarutpativuperra uyir perinpavayilana sarkuruvai natikkantuinpantuykka viraiyumatalin uyironranmatte nikalum kamamakak kaikkilaiyakiya orumarunkupparriya viruppayirruenka.")

A reader who is unfamiliar with Peraciriyar's medieval commentary on Tirukkovaiyar would most likely be baffledby the preceding discussion, for the key to understanding the motivation for this passage is a parallel passage inPeraciriyar's medieval commentary on Tirukkovaiyar 1. What Tecikar essentially has done is to translatePeraciriyar's comment into the language of theology. The medieval commentator writes,

If one should ask, "what is the meaning of this verse?" [the answer is,] in the form of a double entendre[utanilaic ciletai], it treats the preliminary part of the subject of clandestine love [kalaviyal], which isdescribed in this Tirukkovaiyar, which, among the four aims of lifenamely, virtue, material things, pleasure,and liberation tells of pleasure [inpam], and it treats the form of one-sided love called katci [manifestation],which comes first in one-sided love [kaikkilai], which is a part of it [i.e., clandestine love].

ippattennutalirro venin, aram porul inpam vitennu nanku porulinum inpattai nutali ittirukkovaiyinkanuraikkinra kalaviyar porulinatu polippilakkanattaiyum atarkuruppakiya kaikkilaittinaiyinkan mutarkitantakatci yennum orutalaik kamattinaiyum, utanilaicciletaiyaka vunarttutanutalirru.

While the cumbersome translation comes across as a jumble of technical gobbledegook, in reality, Peraciriyar'smeaning and purpose are straightforward. In this passage he is merely situating Tirukkovaiyar 1 within thenarrative framework for akam poetry that is stipulated by classical Tamil poetics. Most importantly, the passagereveals that Peraciriyar views Tirukkovaiyar as a work of erotic love poetry and that he finds the "grammar" ofclassical love poetry equally applicable to Tirukkovaiyar. This "grammar" analyzes the akam frame narrative intotwo major movementsclandestine love (kalavu) and married life (karpu) seven phases or moods of love (uri), andmany specific situations (turai). In the passage cited above, Peraciriyar attempts to precisely situate TirukkovaiyarI within this framework. He tells us that the specific situation embodied by the verse, katci (literally, "thesighting''), belongs to the phase of one-sided love (kaikkilai), which in turn is classified as a part of the largermovement, clandestine love (kalavu).

The modern-day Siddhantin reformulates Peraciriyar's explanation in a manner that supports the allegorizedreading of the text accepted in Saiva Siddhanta tradition, and his reformulation is predicated upon a distinctionbetween the "lesser pleasure" of mundane erotic love (cirrinpam) and the "greater pleasure" of spiritual love(perinpam). 18 Peraciriyar approaches the traditional scheme of the four aims of life in a straightforward manner,and,




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aligning Tirukkovaiyar with the third of these, inpam or pleasure (usually taken to mean erotic pleasure), he characterizes the subject ofTirukkovaiyar as erotic love and dissociates the text from the other three aims, including the fourth aim, vitu or "release" (i.e., spiritualemancipation). The Siddhantin refers Tirukkovaiyar to the same fourfold scheme, but he uses that scheme in a radically different way. For theSiddhantin, pleasure or joy, when understood as "greater joy" (perinpam), is actually equivalent to release (vitu). From the Siddhantin's pointof view, a text like Tirukkovaiyar, though it employs the poetic forms of love poetry, is really about spiritual fulfillment. The idea that pleasureand release are equivalent is implied by a compound noun that occurs in the commentatorial passage cited above: vittinpam, ''the pleasure ofrelease." Once it has been established that erotic love can signify spiritual fulfillment, the forms of erotic poetry become usable as a mediumfor theology. Consequently, the Siddhantin, like the medieval commentator, finds in the "grammar" of classical love poetry a key to the logicof Tirukkovaiyar, but in his eyes the characters in the text are not the talaivan ("hero"), the talaivi ("heroine"), etc., but the soul / life-breath(uyir), the satguru / civam, and other "characters" who dwell in the realm of theological discourse.

In the next section of commentary, an interpretive prose paraphrase of the meaning of the verse, the Siddhantin again works from a modelprovided by Peraciriyar. To demonstrate how the Siddhantin revalorizes Peraciriyar's paraphrase and how both commentatorial renderingsrelate to Manikkavacakar's poem, I have provided a word-for-word gloss of Tirukkovaiyar 1, followed by translations of the twocommentaries:

beauty grow lotus splendor grow blue lily Siva Tillai

tiru valar tamarai cir valar kavikal kavikal icar tillai

heavy grow flowering kumil silkwood fresh kantal together flourish divine

kuru valar pun kumil kontu pain kantal kontu onku teyva

fragrance grow garland one vine bend swan gait excel

maru valar malai or valliyin olki ana natai vayntu

form grow love-god triumph banner like shine

uru valar kamanran venrik koti ponru olirkinrate

Peraciriyar's paraphrase:This flourishing garland possessing a divine fragrance, which is composed of beautiful lotuses, splendid blue lilies, colorful kumilblossoms which grow at the border of Siva's Tillai, buds of silkwood, and new kantal (November-flower) blossoms, bending like avine, and having the gait of a swan, shines like the triumphant bow of the handsome god of love. What a wonder!tiruvalarun tamaraip puvinaiyum alaku valaru nilappukkalaiyum icar tillai varaippinkanuntakiya punkumilatu niram valarumpuvinaiyum konkarum-




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pukalaiyum cevvik kantatpukkalaiyum uruppakakkontu mempatta teyvamanam valarum malai oruvallipolanutanki annattinataipola natai vayntu vativuvalarum kamanatu verrik kotiponru vilankaninratu,ennaviyappo!

Tantapani Tecikar's commentaryThis sweet-smelling garland possessing a divine fragrance and having a face like a lotus in which divineknowledge (civananam) flourishes, eyes like blue flowers abounding in the beauty of compassion(karunai), a nose like the kumil flower at the border of Siva's Tillai that abounds in the quality of thepreceptor (aciriyattanmai), a bosom like silkwood buds, and hands like new November flowers, bendinglike a lightning-thin vine, and having the gait of a swan (as graceful as a mantra recited without effort),shines like the triumphant bow that conquers the god of love who causes fear.civananam menmelum valarum tamaraipolum mukattaiyum, karunaiyakiya alakumikum nilamalar polumkankalaiyum, icar tillaivaraippinkan untakiya aciriyattanmai valarum kumil polum mukkinaiyum,konkumalar polum marpinaiyum, cevviya kantalmalai polum kaikalaiyum, kontu mempatta teyvamanamkamalum malai oru minkotipol nutanki, hamcanataiyaki acapaiyai porunti, accamitukinra kamanaivellumvenrikkotipol vilankaninratu, iktu ennaviyappo enravaru.

The differences between the two commentatorial paraphrases are few, but important. The principal function ofPeraciriyar's commentary is to spell out the syntax of the verse as he perceives it. The poet uses syntactical markerssparingly, and consequently, in the original, the verse is difficult to construe. In Peraciriyar's rendering, syntacticmarkers clearly specify relationships among the words of the verse, and at certain points the commentatorsubstitutes more familiar words for words that may be obscure or ambiguous. In this kind of commentatorialparaphrase, the commentator directs interpretation of a poem along a straight path. Syntactic markers and lexicalglosses tend to isolate a single reading of a poem where the original may allow for several. 19

The Siddhantin commentator's contribution is of a completely different order. At only one point does he fail tofollow Peraciriyar's lead in construing the syntax of the verse,20 but, additionally, he finds in the verse anallegorical level of meaning about which Peraciriyar is silent. In Peraciriyar's frame of reference, the verserepresents the thoughts of a young man upon first seeing the young woman who will eventually become his lover.He expresses his impression of her appearance in the form of an extended metaphor in which the girl is likened toa garland and various parts of her body to different kinds of flowers. In the Siddhantin's frame of reference theyoung man stands for the soul (anma) or the life-breath (uyir), and the young woman for the satguru, an embodiedform of the godhead (civam). It therefore comes as no surprise when the commentator adds a theologicaldimension to the metaphorical association of various flowers and body parts, thereby equating the face / lotus




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with divine knowledge (civananam), the eyes / blue lilies with compassion (karunai), and the nose / kumil blossomwith the "quality of preceptorship" (aciriyattanmai). The commentator elaborates the logic underlying theseassociations in the last section of commentary, in which he discusses in detail the meaning of particular words andphrases.

Note also that the Siddhantin allegorizes only elements belonging to the akam register of Tirukkovaiyar and doesnot attempt to allegorize the puram-inspired references to Siva that are found in every verse. But though theSiddhantin does not uniformly transpose the meaning of all elements in the verses of Tirukkovaiyar, he does notappear to be vexed by this seeming inconsistency. Apparently he has no trouble switching levels in midstream.

Members of the Saiva Siddhanta tradition approach Tirukkovaiyar as "wisdom literature," and certainly one canlearn a great deal of Saiva Siddhanta theology by studying the tradition's interpretation of this complex poem. Butthe allegorized reading of Tirukkovaiyar is of interest because it tells us something about the criteria that TamilSaivites brought to bear on literature they deemed "sacred." I think we can begin to understand the Siddhantins'motives for allegorizing Tirukkovaiyar by considering the place of narrative in classical and in devotional Tamilpoetry. As mentioned previously, for the authors and audience of classical Tamil poetry, the dividing line betweennarrative and lyric poetry was far from impermeable. As Zvelebil has shown, Tamil poeticians did distinguish textsthat manifest the development of a story line (totarnilaicceyul) from anthologies of verses that are not directlyrelated to one another in a continuous narrative (tokainilaicceyul). 21 But this is not to say that narrative does notenter into the composition and interpretation of poems collected in the akam and puram anthologies, even thoughboth would be classified as tokainilaicceyul Every classical poem addresses a particular situation and consequentlyit is implicitly situated within a narrative framework. In the case of puram poems, this framework is historical; inthe case of akam poems it is an abstraction from human experience. The poetic principles at work in classicalTamil poetry prepare the ground for the use of narrative as an interpretive device. One arena where this device isemployed is in the interpretation of devotional poetry. In previous chapters I have Stressed that sectariancommentators responded to the saints' poems as records of the spiritual careers of their authors. Traditionalinterpreters therefore discover, or perhaps impose, frame narratives on the devotional anthologies, and thesenarrative frames are coincident with traditional stories of the saints' lives. It is also clear that only some of thesaints' poems easily support this mode of interpretation. Others that do not fit the bhakti ideal so comfortably are"normalized" through commentatorial maneuvering, and in the case of the akapporul verses in Tiruvaymoli, this isachieved largely by taking the dramatized narrator to be an alter ego of the author.22

In order to adequately interpret a classical poem, a reader must be




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familiar with the narrative Context in which it is situated. Hence, in classical Tamil literary culture, narrative is anindispensable aspect of interpretation. The poems of the saints are also frequently interpreted in the context of anarrative framework; but this is not always a necessary aspect of interpretation, and in some cases the poemsthemselves provide very little support for interpretation in these terms. Also, there is a critical difference in thenature of the narrative framework brought to bear on the interpretation of classical poems, especially of akampoems, and that invoked by sectarian commentators: the poet stands completely outside the frame story of akampoetry, whereas the frame stories posited by interpreters of the saints' poems are the stories of the poets themselves.In the classical poems, dramatized narrators stand between the poems' audience and their authors. Contrary to thispattern, the tendency to categorically identify the narrator with the author in the sacred poems is so strong, evendramatized narrators are interpreted as aspects of the saint-author's persona. This is plainly demonstrated inSrivaisnava interpretations of the akapporul portions of Tiruvaymoli, 23 where the frame narrative of akam poetryis subordinated to the autobiographical framework that these commentators bring to bear on the text as a whole.

It is instructive to compare the akam portions of Nammalvar's magnum opus with Tirukkovaiyar. Both drawheavily upon classical poetic conventions, but the poetic structure of the two differs in important ways.Nammalvar's akapporul verses stand in a much freer relation to classical poetic tradition than do the verses ofTirukkovaiyar. The general outline of the akam frame narrative is implicit in Nammalvar's poems, but only in ageneral way. The situations described in these verses are not strictly correlated with specific poetic situations asdefined by poeticians. Also, many of Nammalvar's verses portray the one-sided love of the poet's feminine alterego for Visnu. One-sided love (called kaikkilai in the terminology of poetics) was not considered to be a fit subjectfor poetry by early poeticians, and thus the classical poets usually avoided one-sided love as a subject. Visnu entersthese verses as an akam hero (talaivan), but here we again find a violation of classical poetic convention, for,according to the poeticians, the dramatis personae of akam poetry should not bear proper names. They representnot individuals but universal configurations of human feeling and behavior. Nammalvar brings Visnu directly intothe akam frame narrative, and in so doing he violates akam convention. Srivaisnava commentators, in turn, bringNammalvar directly into the narrative by identifying him with the female narrators of the akapporul verses.

The identification of Visnu with the akam hero and of Nammalvar with the heroine brings Nammalvar's akapporulverses fully in line with the bhakti ideal; the narrative line employed as a framework for interpretation of the poemsand the saint-poet's life story coincide. This pattern is found not only in the commentators' interpretation ofTiruvaymoli, but also in the interpretation of works by other Vaisnava saints that at least superficially resistautobio-




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graphical interpretation. Tirumankaiyalvar's akapporul verses and Periyalvar's lullaby songs, in which the saint issaid to imagine himself to be Yasoda singing to the baby Krsna, come to mind as examples.

Until the nineteenth century there was no tradition of written commentary for the saints' hymns in Tamil Saivism,but on the evidence of recently composed exegetical literature, we can surmise that a similar pattern ofautobiographical interpretation has been operative in Tamil Saivism in oral tradition. Manikkavacakar'sTiruvacakam, for instance, is almost always interpreted as spiritual autobiography. Like Tiruvaymoli, Tiruvacakamin-eludes verses that directly support such an interpretation, and Tamil Saivites refer to these as a norm for theinterpretation of other verses that do not so obviously conform to an autobiographical narrative framework. 24 ButTirukkovaiyar, because it strictly adheres to classical convention, presents sectarian interpreters with a greaterchallenge. This is because the akam frame narrative in Tirukkovaiyar is preserved in its essential classical form,and, at least on the surface, Siva is not an actor in the narrative. Siva does enter the poem via a puram route as thepattutai talaivan, but even here Siva's role in the poem has no direct connection with the life of the poet.

According to traditional accounts of Manikkavacakar's life,25Tiruvacakam documents the saint's spiritual evolutionas he traveled to many towns and villages in the Tamil country as a spokesman for Siva. We are told that when hereached his ultimate destination, the temple of Nataraja at Chidambaram, a scribe appeared before the saint andrequested that he sing all the hymns that he had composed in the course of his travels so that they could berecorded for posterity. The scribe, who was actually Siva, after recording the hymns of Tiruvacakam, askedManikkavacakar to compose a kovai with Siva as its pattutai talaivan, and the saint fulfilled this request bycomposing Tirukkovaiyar. This legend situates the composition of Tirukkovaiyar in a narrative framework thatdirectly involves Manikkavacakar's relationship to Siva, but it still does not integrate the content of Tirukkovaiyarinto this framework.

Is it possible to neutralize the distance that separates the poet Manikkavacakar from the several dramatized voicesthat narrate the verses of Tirukkovaiyar? In my view, the poetic structure of Tirukkovaiyar does not lend itself tothis mode of interpretation, but the allegorical interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar can at least be regarded as a move inthis direction. According to the traditional allegorical interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar, the hero represents uyir(soul) and the heroine represents civam (godhead). At least one modern interpreter attempts to go a step furthertoward personalizing the text. In his view, the hero / uyir is Manikkavacakar himself.26 Manikkavacakar isidentified with the hero of the akam narrative, and consequently Tirukkovaiyar becomes a personal account of thepoet's relationship to Siva, even if only some verses are narrated by the hero-uyir-Manikkavacakar.

But even when read allegorically, Tirukkovaiyar resists thorough assimi-




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lation to the bhakti ideal, because even allegoresis fails to account for the entire text as a direct expression of itsauthor's feelings. While Saiva scholars have formulated exegeses of great subtlety, building upon their reading ofthe text as allegory, such interpretations fail to render Tirukkovaiyar accessible as devotional poetry on a popularlevel, even if they may be highly satisfying for an audience of initiates. Today Tirukkovaiyar is viewed as anarcane text, a text that can be understood only by the select few who have received appropriate exegetical training.The Srivaisnava acaryas also often introduced an allegorical dimension into their interpretations of the alvars'poems, but the Vaisnava bhakti poems, for the most part, are accessible as religious poetry on several levels andthus appeal to a mass audience of devotees as well as to an audience of sectarian scholars.

I am not in a position to judge whether or not the "personalized" interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar referred to above,according to which the hero is identified with the uyir of Manikkavacakar himself, is widely accepted in TamilSaiva circles. Most authors, when making reference to Tirukkovaiyar's allegorical dimension, simply state that theheroine represents civam and the hero represents uyir, presumably in a general sense. A personalized interpretationof the text may be viewed as an attempt to bring Tirukkovaiyar in line with other bhakti poems, but evidencesuggests that interpretation on a more abstract plane is far more influential in the tradition. According to thepersonalized interpretation of the text, the protagonists are Manikkavacakar and Siva (civan in Tamil), the god ofmythology. According to the allegorical interpretation, in its most typical form, the protagonists are uyir andcivam, abstract entities. While this interpretation does not render Tirukkovaiyar a popular bhakti poem comparableto Tiruvacakam, it does successfully complement the aims of theological discourse.

As noted above, Srivaisnava commentators also employed allegory as a means of placing the alvars' poems in anabstract, theological frame of reference. They fully personalized the akapporul verses of Tiruvaymoli by identifyingthe dramatized narrators and especially the heroine with Nammalvar. (Visnu is explicitly identified with the hero inthe poems themselves.) The commentatorial process does not stop here, however. The Vaisnava acaryas alsoelevated the subject matter of these verses to an abstract plane of theological discourse through allegory. Forexample, Alakiyamanavalaperumal Nayanar, the author of Acarya Hrdayam, a theological work of the latethirteenth or early fourteenth century, developed a theological interpretation for every detail in the akapporul versesof Tiruvaymoli. Even the heroine's ornaments carry an allegorical meaning in this interpretation. Thecommentator's mode of exegesis is a secondary signification system. 27 In his discussion of the heroine's physicalcharacteristics, for example, he isolates a number of metaphors that Nammalvar and other poets often include intheir descriptions of the akam heroine. From the quality that binds tenor to vehicle in each of these metaphors, hedevelops a theological interpretation. In this way the




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commentator takes over the poet's metaphorical identification of the heroine's forehead with the moon as a signifierfor the purity of the soul. The interpretive process may be visualized as follows:

SIGNIFIER1(moon)

SIGNIFIED1(forehead)

SIGNIFIER2(lustre)

SIGNIFIED2(soul's purity)

The commentators' method represents an extensiona raising to a higher powerof a method used by the bhakti poetsthemselves. The saint-poets took over the whole erotic tradition of classical poetry with its signifiers (landscapeimagery) and its signifieds (the moods of love) as a signifier for bhakti. The commentator in turn takes over thesaints' poetry as a signifier for theological abstractions. 28

The route from classical akam poetry to Nammalvar's akapporul poems to the Srivaisnavas' personalizedinterpretation of these poems and on into abstract theological exegesis constitutes, in effect, a dialectic of thegeneral and the particular. The world of akam poetry is a world of universal human experience, but the akam poets'conception is not explicitly religious in nature. The dramatis personae of these poems are not individuals, butgeneralized representations of human nature. Nammalvar sets this poetic tradition in a religious frame of referenceand at least partially particularizes it by casting Visnu as the hero (talaivan). The commentators complete thisprocess by identifying the dramatized narrators with Nammalvar, thereby bringing these poems into conformitywith the bhakti ideal of personal poetry. But the commentators do not stop with the particular. Through allegorythey bring the text once again into the realm of the general, but now the frame of reference is not humanrelationships but abstract theological conceptions. The classical poets' observations regarding human nature are thustransformed into signifiers of divine truth.

The predominant allegorical interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar short-circuits this dialectical process. It moves directlyfrom the level of poetically expressed generalizations about human nature to abstract theology. This may bebecause Tirukkovaiyar simply is not suited to a particularized interpretation. As in classical akam poems, theauthor's voice is heavily veiled by conventional situations and dramatized narrators. Nammalvar's voice is notveiled to this extent in his akam-inspired verses, and consequently his poems do not resist a personalizedinterpretation so stubbornly.

I think it is fair to say that the allegorical interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar, when viewed in the context of the literaryand interpretive traditions of Tamil




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devotional Hinduism, reveals a good deal about an intellectual climate that prevailed in medieval Tamilnadu andthat lives on in modern-day Tamil Hindu scholasticism. A salient feature of this intellectual climate is the use ofnarrative as a framework for interpretation. Precedents for the medieval theologians' prolific applications of thisprinciple can be found in the earliest strata of Tamil literature. For the poets of the cankam age, narrative wasconventional; it was an indispensable part of literary competence for both poet and audience. Every cankam poem,whether it belongs to the akam or to the puram branch of classical tradition, requires interpretation in terms of anarrative situation that is part of a larger story frame. Innuendos conveyed by carefully crafted images acquiremeaning only against the backdrop of a story. The suggested comparison, one of the most effective techniques inthe classical poet's repertoire, is perhaps the quintessential example of a poetic image that rests on a foundation ofnarrative.

Classical Tamil literary culture, with its finely honed conventional apparatus, seems to have set the tone forpostclassical Tamil literary history in a number of ways. Not least of these is the close relationship betweennarrative and interpretation. The classical poetic tradition contributed a great deal to the bhakti movement thatbegan to emerge in Tamilnadu in full force around the seventh century, 29 and one feature of classical poetics thatcontinued to exert a strong influence in the intellectual climate of the "bhakti period" and beyond is the use ofstory to organize thought. In this regard it seems to be immaterial whether the thought forms in question arepredominantly poetic or predominantly religious in nature. This may account for the close association of poeticsand religious thought in Tamil intellectual history, as well as in the intellectual history of Hindu India outside ofthe Tamil-speaking region.

The transition from classical Tamil poetics to the poetics of bhakti and subsequently to theological commentary onthe saints' poems is marked by a movement from a psychological and social frame of reference to a religious frameof reference and by a back-and-forth movement between the universal and the particular. The stories that frameclassical puram poems are particulartheir dramatis personae are historical characters but at the same time, theevents depicted in these poems are projected onto a story line that is predetermined by convention. In akam poetrythe particular yields totally to the universal. Classical love poems are populated by characters who are identifiedonly by their roles the chief man (talaivan), the chief woman (talaivi), the girl friend (toli), the mother (tay), etc.The poetics of bhakti brings us back to the particular. The stories that frame these poems, according to tradition,are the life stories of the saint-poets. But the personae of the saints, like those of the puram heroes, are molded, toa degree, by convention. Saintly lives are not random; they follow certain patterns that are built up from hintsfound in the saints' own poems and from other sources.30 The saints are vivid to us as religious "heroes," but wedo not feel we know them as, say,




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we feel we know Samuel Johnson when we read Boswell. Finally, in allegorical exegesis of the saints' poems weare in the realm of the universal once more. Details of the poems, which on a surface level are interpreted inbiographical terms, are assigned abstract meanings.

By drawing out the threads that connect medieval Tamil Hindu culture with classical Tamil literary culture, itbecomes apparent that story precedes poetry, in the sense that it is a major part of the conventional apparatus poetsemploy when they "make" poems, and also that story generates commentary upon poetry. This suggests thathistorically, whether Tamils directed their aesthetic and intellectual energy toward poetic expression or towardtheological expression, they often used stories to order their ideas. It is intriguing to speculate to what extent thistheme in Tamil intellectual history manifests a wider Indian pattern. Indeed, stories of all kinds, whethermythological, folk, or courtly, abound in Indian languages. Just think of the Mahabharata, the Puranas, thePañcatantra, the Jatakas, etc. Furthermore, in many of these texts, stories are strongly flavored with didacticism.Authors use stories to illustrate principles. Often stories are embedded in other stories, with the framing storycontaining a commentary on the story it frames. 31 This structure carries over into and perhaps originates intraditional performance genres. Storytellers throughout India offer running commentaries on the stories theyperform.

The Tamil material discussed in this chapter suggests that Indians are so accustomed to thinking through storiesand presenting ideas in story form that they will manipulate a text in various ways to make it yield the story theyneed to generate a favored interpretation. Thus Srivaisnava commentators find a feminized Nammalvar in theakapporul verses of Tiruvaymoli, and the Saiva Siddhantins allegorize the familiar akam frame narrative thatstructures Tirukkovaiyar. It is doubtful that Manikkavacakar wrote Tirukkovaiyar as an allegory. Tirukkovaiyardemonstrates Manikkavacakar's great poetic and religious sensibility, allegory notwithstanding. However, the factthat the Siddhantins find allegory in Tirukkovaiyar reveals a great deal about the standards of interpretation thatprevailed in medieval Tamilnadu and about the culture that produced these standards.

Notes

1. "anupavananiyana manikkavacakar anupavanananulakac ceyta itanaik kamanulakak karutavatu ettunaipperumpilai." C. Tantapani Tecikar, Tirukkovaiyar unmaivilakkam, munnurai [introduction] (Tiruvavatuturai:Tiruvavatuturai Atinam, 1965), n.p.

2. Note, however, that Tirukkovaiyar, like the love poetry of classical Tamil, while it plainly makes reference to thephysical dimension of love, is never graphically erotic, in the manner of some Sanskrit-erotic poetry.

3. Tamil Saivites distinguish between an abstract conception of divinity, which they designate civam, and theanthropomorphized god of mythology, who is known in




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Tamil as civan A. The latter term, in contrast with the former, is grammatically marked as masculine singular.

4. E.g., Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan on Tamil Literature of South India (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), p.198, n. 1; C. and H. Jesudasan, A History of Tamil Literature (Calcutta: YMCA Publishing House, 1961), pp. 86-87; T. P. Meenakshisundaram, A History of Tamil Literature (Annamalainagar: Annamalai University, 1965), p.138.

5. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 20.

6. Two "old" commentaries are extant. Very little information, not even the author's name, is available concerningthe second.

7. P. V. Comacuntaranar, Tirukkovaiyar: Palaiya uraiyum putiya vilakkamum (Tinnevelley: The South India SaivaSiddhanta Works Publishing Society, 1970), p. xxi.

8. Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan, p. 248.

9. Each of the flowers in the "garland" beheld by the hero signifies a particular part of his lover's anatomy. Thelotus (tamarai) is compared to her face, the blue lily (kavi) to her eyes, the kumil blossom to her chest, and theNovember-flower (kantal) to her hands. Though the anatomical correlate for each flower is not given in the poem,an audience familiar with poetic convention would automatically make these associations. In terms of theologicalallegory, each of the flowers / body parts has further significance. The lotus / face signifies divine knowledge(civananam), the lilies / eyes signify compassion, the kumil / nose signifies "the quality of preceptorship"(aciriyatanmai), the konku flower (chest), because it is golden in color, signifies the radiance of civam that attractsthe soul, and the kantal (hands), which are filled with nectar, signify the nectar of divine bliss (civananatten). Thecommentator also points out that the five landscapes of classical poetry are represented by these flowers(lotusmarutam, lilyneytal, kumilmullai, konkupalai, kantalkuriñci). This in turn is found to have theologicalsignificance. (See Tirukkovaiyar unmaivilakkam, pp. 2-4.)

10. The heroine's eyes are lethal because her glance "cuts to the quick" like a sharp spear (see TK 250). The signsby which the hero confirms that the heroine is mortal correspond point for point with the signs whereby Damayantiwas able to distinguish the real Nala from the gods who were impersonating Nala in the famous story from theMahabharata. (The eyes of the gods never blink; their feet float above the ground; and the garlands they wearnever wither.)

11. The actual term in the original Tamil is valar vañci, literally, "growing creeper," a metaphor for a slim, younggirl.

12. The commentator (Tantapani Tecikar) uses the term anma. Throughout the commentary the terms anma (self)and uyir (life-breath) are used more or less interchangeably.

13. Tirukkovaiyar unmaivilakkam, p. 6. Also, note the parallel with the Srivaisnava author's statement that Visnusent the alvars to earth in order to lure human beings to Visnu's service. (See chapter 2.)

14. Margaret T. Egnor's recent work on Tirukkovaiyar with Temmoliyar, a modern-day exponent of Saiva learning,shows that the tradition is very much alive and that it gives wide scope to the talents of a creative commentator.See Egnor's "Ambiguity in the Oral Exegesis of a Sacred Text: Tirukkovaiyar."

15. See note I for full reference.

16. Saiva Siddhanta commentators understand the character known as the toli, the heroine's female companion, tobe a personification of tiruvarul, the divine grace of civam.

17. "One-sided love" or kaikkilai is one of the seven phases of love (uri) recognized

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in the poetics of classical Tamil love poetry. However, kaikkilai and perunturai, love between unrefined peopleor mismatched love, only come to be considered an acceptable subject for poetry during the late classicalperiod (c. fifth to seventh centuries A.D.).

18. See above.

19. Margaret Egnor discusses the polysemy of verses from Tirukkovaiyar in her paper ''Ambiguity in the OralExegesis of a Sacred Text: Tirukkovaiyar." (See note 14.)

20. The phrase in question is kamanran venrik koti, which Peraciriyar glosses as kamanatu verrikkoti (Kama'svictorious banner) and Tantapani Tecikar glosses as kamanai vellum verrikkoti (the victorious banner that conquersKama). On grammatical grounds the former is most likely correct, but Tecikar's version is predictable in light ofhis skittishness regarding Tirukkovaiyar's eroticism.

21 See chapter 4.

22 See chapter 3.

23. See chapter I for examples.

24. Navaratnam, Vanmikanathan, and, to a certain extent, Yocum respond to Tiruvacakam as spiritualautobiography in their studies of the text. See G. Vanmikanathan, Pathway to God through Tamil LiteratureIThrough the Tiruvacakam (Delhi: Delhi Tamil Sangam, 1971); Ratna Navaratnam, Tiruvachakam: The HinduTestament of Love (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1963); and Glenn Yocum, Hymns to the Dancing Siva: AStudy of Manikkavacakar's Tiruvacakam (New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 1982). The sections of Tiruvacakamthat are most resistant to such an interpretation are the "game-song" sections. The dramatized narrator of thesehymns of praise to Siva, which are formally modeled after folk songs, is a group of girls.

25. There are a number of traditional literary sources of Manikkavacakar's life story. Principal among these isTiruvatavurar Puranam by Katavul Mamunivar. M. Arunacalam suggests the fifteenth century as the most likelytime for its composition. Tamil Ilakkiya Varalaru (Tiruchitrambalam: Gandhi Vidyalayam, 1969), vol. II, pp. 116-39.

26. Tirukkovaiyar unmaivilakkam, munnurai [introduction]. Egnor also cites this interpretation (see note 14 above).

27. For a discussion of signifier, signified, and secondary systems, see Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology(with Writing Degree Zero), trans. A. Lavers and C. Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

28. A. K. Ramanujan has developed the idea of bhakti taking over the signification system of classical erotic poetryin the Afterword to his Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1981). See especially pp. 157-61 on "The Signifiers of Bhakti." Also, see A. K. Ramanujan and NormanCutler, "From Classicism to Bhakti," in Bardwell L. Smith, ed., Essays on Gupta Culture (Delhi: MotilalBanarsidass, 1983), pp. 204-207 on the commentators' method.

29. See Ramanujan and Cutler.

30. A. K. Ramanujan has analyzed recurrent patterns and typologies in legends about the lives of Hindu womensaints in his paper "On Women Saints," in John S. Hawley and Donna D. Wulff, eds., The Divine Consort: Radhaand the Consort Goddesses of India (Berkeley: Berkeley Theological Union, 1982).

31. During the discussion following a panel presentation on "Audience-oriented Approaches to South Asian Texts"(annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, April 1982), in which I participated, WendyO'Flaherty observed that many Indian story texts intermingle story and commentary and that many Indian storiesare generated from a core idea.

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CONCLUSION

IN INDIA it is not true that all poetry is religious, nor that all religious expression takes the form of poetry; yet therelationship between the two is an especially close one. The Vedic hymns, the earliest and most carefully preservedreligious texts in Hinduism, are poems. In these poems, the seers of ancient Indo-Aryan society recorded theirvisions of a higher dimension of reality that lay beyond the reach of the minds of ordinary human beings. With thepassing of time, however, the hymns of the Veda came to be valued more for their instrumental function in acomplex sacrificial ritual than as vital songs of experience; and eventually even the Vedic sacrifice was largelydisplaced by or, in some cases, subordinated to other forms of worship. Few Indians study the Vedas nowadays.Even among those Brahmin families that still ensure that their sons receive a traditional religious education, thetexts are learned by a procedure of rote repetition that emphasizes sound over sense. Consequently, the hymns areseldom comprehended as poetry. For many generations now, the living link between poetry and religion has lainelsewhere.

One context in which that link remains vital is bhakti, and nowhere in India has bhakti been a major force inreligious life longer than in Tamilnadu. The phrase "bhakti poetry" potentially may signify many different things todifferent people. In the Tamil-speaking region of India, "bhakti poetry" signifies first and foremost the poemscomposed by the Vaisnava and Saiva poet-saints who lived between the sixth and ninth centuries. In theirrespective sectarian traditions, these poems are sometimes referred to as the "Tamil Veda" (dravidaveda), and thisappellation is most appropriate in the sense that, like the hymns of the Vedic seers, Tamil bhakti poems arereflections of their authors' communion with divinity. For most Indians, however, the Vedic hymns have ceased tocommunicate a sense of direct communion with the divine. Furthermore, since access to the Vedas wastraditionally restricted to male members of "twice-born" (dvija) castes, which in Tamilnadu essentially meantBrahmins, only a relatively small proportion of the population was ever party to the Vedic seers' experience. Incontrast, the religious experience of the Tamil saints remains accessible to large numbers of devotees, largelythrough the medium of their poems, and access to the poems has always been unrestricted on the basis of caste orsex.




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My purpose in the preceding chapters has been, in part, to describe the various ways in which the saints' poems areverbal embodiments of their authors' experience of divinity. This description of the Tamil bhakti poems does not,however, do full justice to the important role they have played and continue to play in the lives of Tamil Vaisnavaand Saiva devotees, for these poems also serve as a paradigm upon which Tamil devotees model their ownexperience of divinity. Bhakti poems transmute the poet's experience into the devotee-audience's experience, and inthis way the audience is brought into the kind of close proximity to divinity that distinguishes the saints fromordinary mortals. The blurring of the boundary between saint and god and between devotee and saint is basic to thepoetics of bhakti. Further, a traditional poetic analysis of the content and form of bhakti poems as purely verbalicons is only the first step in reconstructing a poetics of bhakti that respects the meaning of these poems fordevotees. A poetic analysis of bhakti poems as they are experienced by Tamil Hindus must be complemented by arhetorical and performative analysis if it is to remain true to the context in which they are most meaningful fortheir principal audience. Bhakti poems are comparable to the script of a play in that the verbal document is onlyone aspect of a total performance situation. Just as an adequate poetics of the drama must take into account therelationships a play establishes among characters, actors, and audience members within a fictive theatrical reality,similarly, a poetics of bhakti must take into account not only the words of a bhakti poem but also the entire contextin which it is recited. One might even claim that bhakti poetry is more intimately connected with the context of itsperformance than is a script for a play. This is because the internal rhetorical structure of a model bhakti poem isactually projected onto the context of its performance. More specifically, the triangular relationship of poet, god,and audience that is encoded in the texts of these poems is embodied in the context of their performance.

It is useful to think of Tamil bhakti poetry as a poetic corollary of a theology of embodiment. In Tamilnadu, bhaktibecame a major force and the saints composed their poems at the same time that Tamil kings were building stonetemples that housed consecrated images of Visnu and Siva in their various local incarnations. One need not searchlong or far to find points of connection between the saints' poems and temple worship. On the one hand, the saintsfrequently refer to the locales where famous images of Visnu and Siva are enshrined, and in some of their poemsthey describe the physical characteristics of particular images of these gods as well as ritual acts that are includedin the routines of temple worship. On the other hand, recitation of the saints' poems is an important component ofthe ritual performed in temples. Yet these are only the obvious ways in which bhakti poems and the worship ofembodied images of god mutually implicate one another. The poetics of bhakti also mirrors the religious ideologyimplicit in temple worship, for just as the presence of divinity is thought to be literally embodied




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in a properly consecrated stone or metal image of god, similarly the saint's communion with divinity is literallyembodied in the recitation of his or her poetry in a consecrated ritual environment. All who participate in the ritualperformance of the saint's poem reenact the saint's experience of communion with the deity.

My description of bhakti poems as verbal embodiments of both their author's and their audience's experienceresponds to the role these poems fulfill in ritual and in sectarian discourse. The poems that can be most readilyaccommodated to this ideal are those in which the presence of the poet, the god, and the audience are clearlydelineated in the internal rhetorical structure of the poem. These poems are complemented by the hagiographicaccounts of their authors' lives, by the sculptural images of their authors found in temples, and by the ritualoccasions that include recitation of the poems by ritual specialists who, within the ritual context, are identified withtheir authors.

However, some poems that are included in the canons of Tamil Vaisnavism and Saivism do not accommodatethemselves so readily to this ideal. Especially in a poem where first-person narration is replaced by dramatizednarration, one is less likely to interpret the poem as a direct reflection of the author's personal experience. Facedwith a large number of such poems, composed by the same poets who authored poems that are paradigms of thebhakti ideal, Vaisnava and Saiva sectarian leaders are offered three possible strategies: they can reject or modifythe ideal; they can shape their perceptions of these poems to fit the ideal; or they can choose not to accept poemsthat deviate from the ideal as "true" bhakti poems and consequently refuse to view the entire corpus of the saints'poetry as a unified oeuvre. For the most part, they choose the second alternative and interpret dramatized narratorsas imaginative projections of the saints' own personae. In many cases, as in the Srivaisnava interpretation ofNammalvar's akapporul verses (discussed in chapter 5), this entails postulating that the male saint imaginedhimself to be a female intimate of Visnunot an entirely unlikely supposition in a theological environment where theaim of all devotees, male and female, is to identify with the female consort of god. The game-song poems includedin Manikkavacakar's Tiruvacakam, which also have female narrators, are normalized in much the same way bymodern Saiva commentators. But one does occasionally encounter a text such as Manikkavacakar's Tirukkovaiyar,which, because it is so rigorously structured by poetic conventions that are incompatible with the bhakti poeticideal, cannot, through a few deft commentatorial moves, be interpreted as a direct reflection of its author'sexperience. For this reason, though it is included along with Tiruvacakam in the eighth Tirumurai, Tirukkovaiyar istreated by the Tamil bhakti tradition as a marginal text. It is technically considered to be part of the Tirumuraibecause it was composed by Manikkavacakar, but its content is not directly related to Manikkavacakar's life story,recitation of the text is not incorporated into home or temple ritual, and, for the most part, it is ignored by laydevotees. The only context in which




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Tirukkovaiyar occupies a place of any significance in the religious life of Tamil Saivas is as a vehicle for anabstruse theological allegory that is studied only by a relatively small number of Saiva savants.

In conclusion, Tamil bhakti poetry as a genre is defined by the confluence of textual, rhetorical, and performativevariables. In Tamil Hinduism, bhakti poetry is an ideal that is closely affiliated with the sectarian biographies of thebhakti poets and with the worship of the embodied images of the deities they celebrate. The central value in thisideal is the unification of saint, god, and devotee in a common experience of one another, and in this sense they aretruly "songs of experience."




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PART IIIPOEMS




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Karaikkalammaiyar

THE POEMS OF Karaikkalammaiyar ("the lady of Karaikkal") are included in the eleventh Tirumurai of theTamil Saiva canon. She is numbered among the sixty-three nayanmars, and consequently her story is recounted inthe twelfth-century hagiography, Periya Puranam. According to the purana's account, she was the daughter of amerchant who lived in Karaikkal, a port town on the Coromandel coast, and before she attained sainthood she wascalled Punitavati. As a girl she was supposed to have been a great beauty as well as a dedicated devotee of Siva.She was married to a young merchant named Paramatattan, with whom she lived in Karaikkal, all the whilecultivating the virtues of a faithful wife.

One day a customer of Punitavati's husband gave him two mangoes, which he in turn gave to his wife to keep forhis midday meal. Before Paramatattan returned, a Saiva mendicant came to the saint's house begging for alms, andshe gave him rice and one of the two mangoes her husband had given her. When Paramatattan came home for hismeal, Punitavati served him the other mango. After eating the fruit, which he found very tasty, Paramatattan askedhis wife to bring him the second. Punitavati retired to the kitchen and prayed to Siva to help her in herpredicament. Instantly another mango appeared in her hand, and she served it to her husband. This mango,however, was infinitely more delicious than the one that he had just finished eating, so the merchant knew that itcould not be one of the two he had received from his customer. He asked his wife how she acquired theextraordinary fruit, and Punitavati reluctantly revealed her secret. However, Paramatattan doubted the veracity ofhis wife's story, and he asked her to perform the same miracle again, while he watched. Again Punitavati prayed toSiva, and again a mango appeared in her hand. Seeing this, the merchant took fright, and he fled from his wife,neglecting to release her from her conjugal responsibilities.

While her husband set up another household and pursued his career as a merchant, Punitavati kept his house andlooked after her physical well-being in anticipation of the day when he would return. After several years hadpassed, the saint's parents learned of her husband's whereabouts and brought their daughter to his house. Whenthey arrived, Paramatattan and his second




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wife fell at her feet and worshiped her. Learning that her husband did not want her as a wife, Punitavati beggedSiva to turn her body into a skeleton since she no longer had any use for her beauty. She then made a pilgrimage toSiva's abode in the Himalayas, walking on her hands with her feet dangling in the air. She was received by Siva,and the god allowed her to join his demon attendants and witness his dance at the cremation ground at Alankatu.

Karaikkalammaiyar's story, like that of other Saiva devotees, expresses an underlying tension between the saint'sintuitive calling to serve Siva and her responsibilities in the social realm. Karaikkalammaiyar's dedication to Sivadid not mesh comfortably with her sense of wifely dharma; nevertheless, the saint refrained from defiantlythrowing off her dharmic duty and pursuing a path of uncompromising bhakti. The saint was relieved when herhusband released her from her obligation to keep a household for him, but she never considered walking out onhim without his consent. (This more forceful sort of rejection of social role for the sake of bhakti is illustrated bythe life of the Virasaiva saint Mahadevi.) The critical point in Karaikkalammaiyar's career came when her husbandfinally released her from her duties as a wife. Only then was she in a position to disregard the ways of the world,and this watershed in her life was dramatized by her transformation from a beautiful woman into a ghoulishskeleton. The saint's eccentric upside-down manner of walking seems to emphasize further the reversal of worldlyvalues that, for the Saiva saint, is frequently a corollary of total dedication to god. The puranic account relates thatduring her journey to the Himalayas, people were struck with wonder and fear at the sight of the saint, but she wasoblivious to everyone and everything around her.

Karaikkalammaiyar is the attributed author of four works. These are Arputattiruvantati (one hundred verses),Tiruirattaimanimalai (twenty verses), and two short poems called Tiruvalankattu-mutta-tiruppatikam (elevenverses each). Few "hard facts" are known about the saint's life. Most scholars are of the opinion that she livedduring the mid-sixth century A.D.




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Arputattiruvantati

1

When I was born and learned to speakI was overcome with loveand I reached your red feetlord of gods, lord with the splendid black throat,

will my sorrows never end?

5

The lord who gives birth to every living creature,the very lord who brings life to an end,will change our burning troubles to blessingsif we just cryLord! My Father!

11

My mind was filled with one thing and nothing more,and when I saw it clearlyI locked it inside my heartI gave myself to Ganga's lordwho wears the shining moon in his hair,the lord whose palm radiates a bright light.

16

Now we have the lord's grace andwe're free for all time, O my heart!We left all our sorrows behindwhen we swam across the pounding sea of birth,inlet to the ocean of deeds.

20

He is the knower,the one who grants knowledge,the knowledge that knowsand the object of knowing,he is the brilliant sun, the earthand the sky.




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33

Whatever penance a man performs,whatever image he conjures,the perfect lordwhose throat is blue as sapphiretakes the form of his vision

and all the while these dullardsspeak the wisdom of booksand follow aimless paths.

37

If people are free from maliceand they give their bodies and their mindsto the lord who wears the moon in his long, matted hair,the lord who razed the three fortressesmanned by cruel demon armies,they'll never be burdened by birth in this world.

61

I became your slaveeven though I couldn't see you,and now your image still eludes my eyes

when people ask me,"how does your lord appear?"what can I say?

which among all these forms is yours?

77

When the lord moves his feetthe netherworld moves too,when he moves his headthe highest heaven follows,and when he shakes his wrists, bound with bracelets,the four quarters tremblethe stage will never bear the burden of his dance.




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Tiruvalankattu-mutta-tiruppatikam

1

She has shriveled breastsand bulging veins,in place of white teethempty cavities gape.With ruddy hair on her belly,a pair of fangs, knobby ankles and long shinsthe demon-woman wails at the desolate cremation groundwhere our lord,whose hanging matted hairblows in all eight directions,dances among the flamesand refreshes his limbs.

His home is Alankatu

11

Demons gather around the peerless lord,beat one another with gleeand rend the air with their cries,a partridge joins in the songwhile jackals who live nearbyhowl the part of the lute,and the wild-haired she-demon of Karaikkaltells about the Father, lord of splendid Alankatuin these ten verses of pure Tamil

people who master themwill find the path that leads to Sivaand thrill with joy.




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Poykai, Putam, and Pey: The First Three Alvars''

THE FIRST THREE alvars" (mutal muvar) share a common legend in Srivaisnava hagiographic tradition.Appropriately, the first, second, and third tiruvantatis (of one hundred verses each), respectively attributed toPoykai, Putam, and Pey, are identical in form and very similar in content. Furthermore, there are some strikingparallels in the first verses of each of the tiruvantatis, and these are accounted for in the legend that relates thecircumstances that led the alvars to compose their poems.

The legends of the alvars' lives are found in the Srivaisnava guruparampara texts. Two of the earliest and mostfrequently cited of these are the Arayirappati Guruparamparaprabhavam by Pinpalakiya Perumal Jiyar (thirteenthcentury) and the Divyasuricarita (in Sanskrit) by Garudavahana (twelfth-thirteenth century?). A summary of thehagiographic account follows.

The first three alvars are said to have been "born" from flowers during three consecutive days: Poykai, anincarnation of Visnu's conch, from a lotus in a golden lotus pond at Tiruveka (present-day Kancipuram) during theTiruvonam naksatra (the day the moon appears in the asterism Tiruvonam) of Aippaci month (October-November); Putam, an incarnation of Visnu's mace, from the blossom of a matavi vine at Tirukkatalmallai duringthe Avittam naksatra of Aippaci month; and Pey, an incarnation of Visnu's sword, from a red water lily growing ina well at Mayilai (present-day Mylapore, an area of Madras) during the Catayam naksatra of Aippaci month.Explanations for the alvars' names are also given: the first alvar was called Poykai because he was born in a pond(poykai); the second alvar was called Putam (Sanskrit: bhuta) because he was in communion with the mostessential plane of being (according to this interpretation, the name is derived from Sanskrit bhu, "to be, to exist");and the third alvar was called Pey (ghost) because he was so consumed by his devotion for Visnu that he behavedlike a man possessed by a spirit. (Since Sanskrit bhuta is actually a close synonym for Tamil pey, Putam probablyalso acquired his name because he was "god-possessed.")

At first, the alvars lived in their respective places of birth, each pursuing the path of devotion, unaware of oneanother's existence. Visnu, however,




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arranged to bring his three ardent devotees together. All three resolved to visit some of the places most sacred toVisnu, and they happened to arrive at Tirukkovalur at about the same time. When night fell, Poykai took shelter inthe entrance hall of a sage's asrama, where he lay down, intending to spend the night. After some time had passed,Putam arrived at the same spot, also hoping to find shelter in the entrance hall. Upon recognizing a fellow devotee,Poykai welcomed Putam warmly and though there was little room in the hall, he said that where there is room forone to lie down, two may sit. The two saints thus resolved to spend the night sitting up in each other's company.But before long Pey arrived and he too received a warm reception from the others. Poykai and Putam told him thatwhere there is room for two to sit, three may stand, and thus the three alvars planned to pass the night together.

Visnu did not let matters rest there, however. He caused a violent storm to descend upon Tirukkovalur, and the skygrew so dark that the three alvars could not even see one another in the small entrance hall. Huddled together intheir shelter, the saints gradually began to feel more and more crowded, and for no apparent reason. Then theysimultaneously realized that the lord himself had joined them and that this was why there seemed to be less space inthe small room. Upon attaining this realization, their "vision" was no longer hindered by the darkness, and theywere able to "see" by the light of the lord's grace. This event is said to have inspired the first verse of each of theirthree antatis:

Taking the earth as bowl,the vast sea as oil,and the burning sun as my lamp,I laid this garland of versesat the feet of the lordwho holds a dazzling red wheel

to keep the ocean of sorrows far away.Poykaiyalvar, MTA 1

With love as bowl,ardor as oil,and a joyful mind as wick,I swoonedand lit a blazing lamp of knowledgefor Naranan,

even as I delight in the sage Tamil tongue.Putattalvar, ITA 1




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I saw Tiru,I saw his body of gold,I saw his glorious hue, bright as the sun,I saw his golden wheel, triumphant in battleand the spiral conch he holds in his hand

today I saw all these signs of my lord,whose body is blue as the sea.

Peyalvar, MuTA 1

The alvars' experience of the lord's presence in the cramped entrance hall is also described in this verse from thefirst Tiruvantati:

Lord who lifted a mountainto block the driving rain,

in this beloved town of Kovalyou neither departed through the gatenor came inside,but chose to stay, together with the goddess,here in this entrance hall.

Poykaiyalvar, MTA 86

The story of the first three alvars expresses in narrative form several important themes in Tamil Vaisnava thought.Miraculous birth seems to be a hallmark of major characters in Hindu myth and legend, and the alvars are noexception. Not only were the early alvars untainted by the pollution of passing through a womb (ayonija), but theirbirth from flowers, one of the typical offerings to a deity, adds extra emphasis to the point that they are completelypure beings (a flower is considered a suitable offering to a deity because it is pure). The story of the stormhighlights the contrast between ordinary vision, which has the phenomena of the mundane world as its object, anda super-ordinary faculty, which, when developed, can enable one to catch a "glimpse" of the absolute. Metaphorsof vision and light in this context are frequent in the poetry of the saints, no less so in the compositions of theSaivite saints than in the compositions of the alvars. But most important of all, this story seems to emphasize thetheme of mutual respect and camaraderie among the lord's devotees. The ideal bhakta is intent upon honoring otherbhaktas as much as he is intent upon honoring and worshiping the lord himself. Designated bhagavata seva (serviceto the devotees of Bhagavan), this theme was given considerable attention by the Srivaisnava acaryas.

There is very little available information concerning the first three alvars other than the legend summarized above.Most scholars believe that they lived during the sixth century.




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Poykaiyalvar, Mutal Tiruvantati

1

Taking the earth as bowl,the vast sea as oil,and the burning sun as my lamp,I laid this garland of versesat the feet of the lordwho holds a dazzling red wheel

to keep the ocean of sorrows far away.

11

My mouth praises no one but the lord,my hands worship no one but the lordwho bounded over the world,my ears hear no name, my eyes see no formbut the name and form of the lordwho made a meal of the poison he suckedfrom the she-devil's breast.

35



55

See, Death's henchmen will never lay their handson people who give themselvesto the mighty cowherd who rests on a snake,for they know that whatever his servants do,our king keeps them for his own.




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61

The world and the end of the world,the black sea that flings brilliant waves,the mountains, red fire,the wind and the sky

are all the creations of Tirumal's mind.

70

As long as there's life in this fleeting bodyworship Tirumal with garlands of perfect blossoms,with sacrifice, sacred rites and chants,and if you sing his names in praise,

that's best of all.

86

Lord who lifted a mountainto block the driving rain,

in this beloved town of Kovalyou neither departed through the gatenor came inside,but chose to stay, together with the goddess,here in this entrance hall.

92

Tirumal,lord who became sky and fire,the restless sea and the wind,lord sweet as honey and milk,

how could you hope to fill your bellywith the cowherd-woman's butter,when you swallowed the whole earthand spewed it up long ago?




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98

Punniyan,the god with tangled hair and body of shining gold,and Netumal,the god who leaped over the world,may wander, each his own way,in two separate forms,

but one god always dwellsin the other one's limbs.

Putattalvar, Irantam Tiruvantati

1

With love as bowl,ardor as oil,and a joyful mind as wick,I swoonedand lit a blazing lamp of knowledgefor Naranan,

even as I delight in the sage Tamil tongue.

14

Simple folk,don't say a word about peoplewho make a world of their bellies,who spend their lives steepedin shameful deeds and evil ways,

sing the names of the lord with four armswho stretched the eight directions,and travel the roads to sacred fords.

35

Some say the pleasures of the body are sweet,and some say water is sweeter still,O Father,if people could forget pleasure and waterand just remember your grandeur,their safety would be sure.




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67

Dreaming,I saw the lord's bodyand the blazing wheel he holds in his hand,I saw the power of the lordwho curses the disease of deeds, good and evil,the lord who cures ills of every kind.

90



Peyalvar, Munram Tiruvantati

1

I saw Tiru,I saw his body of gold,I saw his glorious hue, bright as the sun,I saw his golden wheel, triumphant in battleand the spiral conch he holds in his hand

today I saw all these signs of my lord,whose body is blue as the sea.

2

Today I saw your feetand I cut myself freefrom all the seven births,

lord with the splendid basil-covered chestlike a mountain dipped in gold,you captivated Tiruwhen you first caught her eye.

Tirumal,my mind is all yours.




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38

The lord appears in austerities,in the stars and in burning fire,he became the lofty mountains,the eight directions,and the two spheres that illumine the sky

every form is his form,only the lord can match the lord.

44

He became the world, the Eon,and the ocean,he became red fireand the sun's brilliant far-flung rays,O my heart,give your whole being to the feet of the lordwho wears a crown of pure dazzling gold.

63

Two bodily forms mingle in my Fatherwho dwells on the mountainwhere waterfalls cascade to earth

he has long matted hair,a all crowna gleaming axe and a wheel,his waist is bound by a snakeand by a thread of gold.

79

When thoughtful people stand by the lordwho covers his chest with garlandsand wears sweet basil on his body,black as the surging sea,

when they restrain the five senses,examine them and banish them,

they leave all the seven births behind.




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81

O my heart,

he may elude the powers of the mind,but if we just give him a thoughthe comes to stay in our heartsand never leaves

Be firm and tell me:who can resist his charms?

94

I lit the lamp of discernment,I searched for the lord,and caught him in my netthen the lord of illusions quietly entered my heartand therehe stands, sits, and reclinesalways without flaw.

99

The victorious lordwho wields eight invincible weapons,the eight-armed lordwho aimed his wheeland cut down the crocodile-monster in the pond

is our refugeto the very soles of his feet.




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Nammalvar

The circumstances of Nammalvar's birth and upbringing, like those of many other saints, were far from ordinary.*Nammalvar's parents, a Vellala chieftain named Kariyar and his wife, Utaiyanankaiyar, are said to have lived in thevillage of Kurukur (present-day Alvartirunakari). The couple lived for many years without a child, and for thisreason they were unhappy. Once while traveling from Tiruvanparicaram, Utaiyanankaiyar's native village, toKurukur, they stopped at a Visnu shrine at Tirukkurunkuti and prayed to the deity for the boon of a son. Visnuappeared to the temple priest in a dream and told him to inform the alvar's future parents that he, Visnu, would beborn on earth as their child. Utaiyanankaiyar subsequently conceived and gave birth to Nammalvar on the day ofthe Vicakam naksatra during the month of Vaikaci (May-June). The child was very tranquiltoo tranquil, his parentsfeared, for he never cried, ate, or even opened his eyes. According to the guruparampara accounts, the alvar didnot react to his surroundings because he was entirely absorbed in his experience of the lord and therefore did notexperience the physical or social needs of ordinary human beings. The parents, however, being normal humanbeings, were understandably alarmed. Twelve days after the alvar's birth they took him to the Visnu temple inKurukur and left him under a tamarind tree that was growing inside the temple compound.

For sixteen years the alvar remained under the tree, utterly unresponsive to the world around him. Finally, when hewas approached by Maturakavi, he broke his silence in order to answer a question posed to him by the other saint.In this way Maturakavi, a Brahmin who hailed from a village not far from Kurukur, found his master, Nammalvar,after making an extensive pilgrimage to Vaisnava shrines in many parts of India. After the meeting of the twosaints, Nammalvar composed his four works, and, according to tradition, Maturakavi set them to music and sangthem before audiences of devotees. Maturakavi is credited with only one composition of his own,Kanninunciruttampu, a hymn of praise to Nammalvar. The guru-disciple relationship exemplified by the two saintsis considered to be eminently appropriate since, in the

* Further discussion of Nammalvar's life story and its significance appears in chapter 2.




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hagiographers' view, Nammalvar is an incarnation of Visvaksena, the commanding general of Visnu's armies, andMaturakavi is an incarnation of Kumudaganesa, a subordinate of Visvaksena. The lord himself is said to havebestowed the name Nammalvar (''our alvar") upon the saint in recognition of his premier position among thealvars. He is also known as Maran, Catakopan (Sanskrit: Sathakopa), the name found in the phalasruti verses ofTiruvaymoli, and Parankucan (Sanskrit: Parankusa).

Nammalvar is the bhakta par excellence in Srivaisnava tradition, and in his story this is demonstrated by hisunwavering contemplation of the lord and by his absolute indifference to anything that did not concern the worshipof Visnu. The saint is said to have attained the paramount goal of union with the lord, and even today this union isgiven palpable form in the ritual of Vaisnava temples in Tamilnadu (see Appendix A).

Nammalvar did not give any sign of recognition to his own parents, yet he did recognize Maturakavi, anotherdevotee, who subsequently became the alvar's disciple. This aspect of the saint's story illustrates the idea that tiesof spiritual affinity supersede those of blood. As this story implies, calls of duty to family and the call to achievespiritual fulfillment are often perceived to be in conflict in Hindu tradition, yet the model of blood lineage(kulaparampara) is taken over by the spiritual "establishment" and transformed into a preceptor lineage(guruparampara). The idea that family ties are detrimental to a person's spiritual development is encounteredfrequently, both in stories about the saints and in their poetry. While some of the saints are portrayed as beingconcerned only with praising and performing service for the lord, later theologians emphasized that submission to aguru (a "father" figure) and membership in a "brotherhood" of devotees are indispensable prerequisites for mostpeople who aspire to be bhaktas. The emphasis on brotherly loyalty among bhaktas is illustrated in the story of thefirst three alvars, and the importance of the preceptor or acarya is illustrated in the story of Maturakavi's dedicationto Nammalvar. In fact, the relationship between Nammalvar and Maturakavi became paradigmatic for latergenerations of Srivaisnavas who developed the idea that the acarya is a critical mediator between the devotee andthe lord. Their relationship not only emphasizes the precedence of the spiritual bond over the claims of blood, but itasserts that spiritual hierarchy does not necessarily follow the hierarchy of caste in the social realm. Maturakavi, aBrahmin, declares his subservience to Nammalvar, a non-Brahmin. The author of Acarya Hrdayam, a latethirteenth-century theological text, emphatically asserts that Nammalvar is the greatest of the saints, irrespective ofhis birth to non-Brahmin parents, and he generalizes this assertion by claiming that devotion, not caste, is the truemeasure of a person's status.

Nammalvar, who probably lived during the ninth century, though some would claim that he lived earlier, is theauthor of four works: Tiruviruttam (100 verses), Tiruvaciriyam (71 lines), Periyatiruvantati (87 verses), andTiruvaymoli (1,102 verses).




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Tiruvayrnoli

1.1.5

Every man knows the lordin the fashion of his own knowing,and the lord takes the formof every man's god,

every man's godis a god with no failing

the lord stays within reachof every man's law.

1.1.7

The lord who became the firmament,fire, wind, water and dry land,the lord who hides in everythingas life-breath fills the body,the lord who pervades all of space,who dwells in the luminous Vedas,

is the very same lord who swallows them all.

1.1.8

The lord, First in heavenand in all other worlds,the lord who defies the gods' comprehension,the supreme lordwho swallowed all of creationand razed the three cities,the lord who gives knowledge even to gods

was called Aranwhen he destroyed,and Ayanwhen he created the world.




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1.1.10

In the vast, cool seafilling each dropas he fills a whole world,

everywhere on earth and in heavenwithout any exception,in every tiny, hidden space,and in every object that shines in space,concealed,yet all-pervading

is the lordwho swallows all.

1.2.1

Drop everything,then release your life-breathto the lord, master of Release.

1.2.8

Examine these threethought, word, deed

abolish themand contain yourself in the lord.

1.3.1

For his devoted servantshe's easy to reach,

but for everyone elsehe's a mysterious sage:

our elusive lord,who kindled passion in the goddess born from a lotus,was caught in the actstealing butter from the churn.

How could he bear his shamewhen they bound his waistand tied him fast to a mortar?




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1.3.2

In birth after birth with no fixed place or boundary,the lord comes within everyone's reach,

ever radiant, filled with goodness,with no origin or demise,

complete, never-endingRelease, key to insight,

the lord and his graceare both container and contained.

1.3.6

Think, and again thinkabout the being not contained by any formthat plunges low, spreads wide, and rises high,but after thinking and thinking,even in the act of thinkingthe being of the lord is rarely known.

O creatures filled with life!

Think, and again think about them,call, and again call to them:

Ari, Ayan, Aran

Think about them,call to them,

what the mind knows is only One.

1.3.10

I'll never grow tired of shouting praisefor the good, lotus-feet of the lord

dark as black clouds,who grew taller than the skyand traversed the vast earth

I'll bow my headand embrace the feet of the lordwho conjures illusionsthat baffle even wise godswith steady minds.




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1.5.1

Laden with my deeds,I call to the lord of the gods who dwell in the sky,First in the seven fertile worlds,

"Thief," I cry,"Glorying in your thieveryyou stole butterand gulped it down."

Then I think again,my body melts and I say,

"Father,you became a leader of hardy cowherdsand wrestled seven young bullsto win Pinnaiwhose smile blossoms fresh as jasmine."

1.5.4

The lord who has a single formbecame a single seed,and within his own beinghe became the three great gods,all the gods in heaven,the sages, all mankindand every other creature.

This very lordwho dwells in Vaikunthaand sleeps in the ocean he created within himselfis the master of gods,the great lord,my own master.

1.5.6

Lord who became the cure for the deedsof this deed-laden man,

leader of gods in heaven,Kesava, head of all households in the village of cowherds, Madhava, great lord of illusionswho pierced seven spreading Sal trees,Sri's protector,




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O lord who bears all these names,

this servant calls youand melts with love.

1.5.8

Black God,long ago you swallowed the seven worlds,disgorged them and entered themby the power of your illusions,

then you appeared with a child's humble bodyand feasted on butter

did you eat butterto dislodge some clods of earththat lay heavy in your stomach,so you wouldn't be touched by the illsthat plague mortals?

1.5.9

We won't perishif we lean on the lordwho appears in radiant form,

the peerless leader of the gods,mother of all creatures,the lord, his own master,who wed the lotus-born goddess,

my ruler,the lord of illusionswho turned poisoned milk to nectarwhen he became an innocent infantand foiled the treacherous she-devilwho babbled corrupt words.

1.6.3

My mind won't leave the sideof the lord who can't be equaledor surpassed,

my tongue trills the words of his song,my dancing limbs are possessed.




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1.6.7


and leave the ocean of days far behind.

1.6.10

Handsome Madhava,the lord who carries a fierce birdas his banner,

annihilates evil deeds in a flash.

1.7.3

I slashed away the delusions of birthwhen I gulped down that pure nectar,

my brilliant ruby, master of illusions,who became a tender sprout in the cowherd clanand caught a spankingat their hands.

1.7.4

How could I ever desert the lordwho settles in my mindto set me free from delusion,

the lord bright as a display of brightly burning lamps,leader of the gods who are never forgetful,tender sprout who gives marvelous gifts,

the lord who took me into his fold.

1.7.5

Could I ever desert the lordwho comes in a flashand grants salvation,

my lamp, my life-breath,the prankster who lewdly peeredinto the eyes of cowherd maids?




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1.7.7

I never tried to make himstay inside me,the lord came on his ownand stole away my heart,he sticks to my fleshand mixes with my breath of life

when this is his waycould he ever let me go?

1.7.8

The lordwho stands first among ancient immortals,who delights in Pinnai's long arms,

graceful as bamboo,will become a weaklingif he tries to leave meor stray from my good heart.

1.8.7

He wrestled seven bulls,swallowed the seven worlds,filled me with the coolness of his heaven

and became my very mind.

1.9.2

My Father, Kesava,who appears in infinite forms,became a boar long agoand carried off the world,

this lord who eludes the thoughts of godscracked the elephant's tusks,he dwells deep in the ocean

and still is always at my side.




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1.9.4

Never parted from his three ardent ladiesthe goddess of riches, the Earth, and the simple cowherd maid,

the lord who rules the three worlds and swallows them whole,our lord who rests on a banyan leafand conjures great illusions in the ocean

is Kannanthe child I carry on my hip.

1.9.5

The lordwho drank the she-demon's life-breath with her milkwhen she sat him on her hipand gave him her breast,

the lordwho created the naked god,the god without birth, Indraand all the world

is the lord of illusionswho lives in my heart.

2.2.9

Lord Kannan, the Protectorwho takes all of creation into his belly,made the creator-god who faces all the directions,

he made lord Indra,the gods in the skyand the heavenly worlds.

2.3.1

O breaththat gives life to my flesh,what a treasure you are!

Because you are here within meMadhu's slayer, my Father,leader of gods in heaven,and Ihave mingled our beings




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just as honey, milk, ghee,sugar syrup and nectarflow in a single stream.

2.3.2

Lord who can't be equaledor surpassed,great lord of illusionswho assumes the form of every being,

you became my life-breath, my fatherand the mother who bore me,

O Fatherwho reveals mysteries that defy comprehension,this slave can't fathom all you have done.

2.3.8

Others may focus their mindsand perform penancefor eons without end,but I reaped the fruit of penancein this very life,

in a matter of daysI overcame the sorrows of birth,

my heart stayed true to my Masterwho raided the larder and ate milkand butter on the sly.

2.3.9

When I dived inand gorged myself on the virtuesof the pure lord, Kannan,who wears cool basil that fills the air with its fragrance,master of gods in heaven,the lord who can't be contained on earth or in the sky,

the jungle of disease withered awayand then this slave went mad with joy.




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2.3.10

When will I become a brilliant lightfree from joy and sorrow,free from births, disease, old age and death,

and when will I join the servantsof the lord of illusionswho holds a blazing wheel and a conch,

the lord who watches over the earthand the clouds in the sky.

2.4.1


She dancesand her mind wanders,she singsand her eyes fill with tears,she searches all over and criesNarasimhaa . . . !

This girl, bright brow and all,is wasting away.

2.4.3


Like a bar of lac or waxthrust into fireher mind is in periland you are heartless.

What shall I do for you,lord who razed Lanka,

the land ruled by the demon?

2.4.10


Night and day her peerless eyesswim in tears:

lord who turned Lanka's fortune into smoke,don't scorch this simple girland make her gentle glances wither.




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2.5.1

My master with shining hairwho wears a garland, sandal, and a sacred thread,who holds a conch and a wheel,

showed me his loveand took my life-breath into his heaven

his great eyes are red lotuses,his mouth, red as ripe fruit,is a red lotus,and his feet are red lotuses, too

his body is burnished gold.

2.5.7



vanquished seven bulls to win Pinnai,girl with arms graceful as bamboo,and pierced seven spreading Sal treescovered with blossomsrich in honey.

2.7.5

Madhu's slayer,the lord who wears a shining crown,has lotus-feet, lotus-handsand brilliant red lotus-eyes,his body is a luminous black mountain,his wondrous conch the bright moon,and his wheel is the sun.




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2.7.9

Night and dayI cried aloud,

''Lord who shelters Sri,O lord with red lotus-eyes!"

I whirled around in confusion,and tears poured from my eyestill my breath came in hot sighs,

then all my evil deedsfell away,my happiness grewand you stayed here inside meday after dayO lord with wild hair.

2.8.3

As Ayan, the creatorwho appeared in his navel,as Aran, the destroyerwho is part of his body,together with Tiruthe goddess who rests on his chest,he performs great deedswhich meet our senses at every turn.

2.8.5

The unaging lord, source of all things,who protects the three worlds,the lord who saves us from ceaseless birthsand from all our other sorrows,my pure lord, first among the gods,

became a horse, a tortoise, a Fishand a man.

2.8.7

Who can fathom the illusionsconjured by Malon this earth,the woman with long armslocked tightly in his embrace?

he measured the world with his strides,he became a boar




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and scooped up the earthfrom the depths of the sea,

he reclines, sits, and standson the very earth he swallowedand spewed up once more.

2.9.5

No matter if death finds mein heaven, in hellor in the glory of Release,I'll rejoiceand keep my thoughts fixedon the lord without birthwho has taken countless forms.

2.9.6

Lord of blissful gods,of creatures with senses and insentient things,lord who shines with the light of joy,

come to me so I may worship youand delight alwaysin joyous thoughts, words, and deeds.

2.9.10

Lord, great blazing flame,who conquered seven bullsand turned splendid Lanka to ashes,

don't trust me!

When you take me to your feet of golddon't ever let me run off again.

2.10.3

There's no profit in vain deeds,O heart,

but to reach the temple on the mountainat Mal's dark grovesurrounded by gardens of dazzling beauty,

the temple where the lord dark as a stormmakes his home,

that is a real deed.




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2.10.4

Casting off the strong bonds of deeds,wandering in search of salvation,reaching the magnificent templeon the mountain, veiled in cloudsat Mal's dark grove,home of the lord who lifted a great mountain,

that is real strength.

2.10.5

To gather strength,to turn from evil deedsand travel to the templeon the mountain, surrounded by clear poolsat Mal's dark grove,

the temple of the lordwho upholds virtue with his wheel,

is real skill.

Phalasrutis

1.3.11

Catakopan of Kurukur,fertile town filled with gardens,has performed humble serviceby singing these thousand polished versesfor the lord who churned the ocean capped with waves,the lord the gods worshipso they may rise to high places

people who master these ten verses of the thousandwill rise with the godsand escape the prison of births.




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1.6.11

Catakopan has spoken these flawless thousand verseswhich tell of Madhava,the lord who is never tainted by sin or loss of power

people who faithfully sing these ten verses of the thousandwill never be born again.

2.2.11

Catakopan of Kurukurhas artfully sung these thousand versesin praise of the beautiful Dancerwho rules the seven worlds

people who faithfully singthese ten verses of the thousandwill never be in need.

2.8.11

This man of the fertile Valuti country,where gardens swarm with bees,has sung these thousand Tamil versesand set them to musicto honor the lord with black body and red eyes

people who are devoted to these ten verses of the thousandwill reign in heavenand win the glory of Release.

2.10.11

Accomplished Catakopan of Kurukur,fertile town never plagued by confusionattained clear visionand spoke these thousand versesabout the fame of the lord who created the worldand filled it with meaning

these ten verses of the thousandwill bring life in this world to an endand show the wayto the gracious lord's feet.




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Manikkavacakar

THE STORY OF Manikkavacakar's life is not included in the Periya Puranam, the "official" Tamil Saivahagiography, but incidents relating to his life appear in other Tamil puranas such as the "Old" TiruvilaiyatalPuranam, a work of the thirteenth century, and the better-known Tiruvilaiyatal Puranam of the seventeenthcentury. There is also a shorter work called Tiruvatavurar Puranam, which is exclusively devoted to an account ofManikkavacakar's life. According to these accounts, Manikkavacakar, the son of Brahmin parents, was born inTiruvatavur, a village not far from Madurai, the capital city of the Pantiya kingdom. As a boy he showedexceptional intelligence, and he was summoned by the Pantiya king, called Arimarttanar in the puranic account, toserve as his minister when he was still a youth. Manikkavacakar's career was characterized by repeated andsometimes violent conflicts between his responsibilities to the Pantiyan and his all-consuming urge to devotehimself heart and soul to the service of Siva. The beginning of this conflict was marked by a conversion experiencethat totally remade the saint's sense of loyalty and priorities. (See note to Tiruvammanai 9.) Because of histemporal master's lack of insight, Manikkavacakar was punished more than once for not fulfilling his ministerialduties, but the puranic account presents these incidents as a series of lessons by which Siva, through the(sometimes unwilling) instrument of his devotee, arranged to enlighten the king and secure his commitment to theSaiva cause.

Manikkavacakar longed to renounce the world from the day he became Siva's disciple, but Siva appeareddetermined to prolong his devotee's days on earth. He would not allow the saint to resign his post as minister untilthe Pantiyan's commitment to Saivism was secure, and even then he ordered him to travel to various places in theTamil country, singing his hymns. When Manikkavacakar reached Chidambaram at the end of his journey, Sivacommanded him to represent the Cola king in a debate with Buddhist monks who were patronized by the king ofCeylon. In the end, the saint merged with the image of Nataraja (Siva as "lord of the dance") at Chidambaram andleft the world behind, but only after Siva came to Chidambaram disguised as a scribe, recorded the hymns ofTiruvacakam, and commissioned the saint to compose Tirukkovaiyar.




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Manikkavacakar's story, like Karaikkalammaiyar's, manifests a sense of conflict between religious commitment andsocial responsibility, but the source and implications of this conflict are somewhat different in the two stories. Butfor the command of his guru, Siva, Manikkavacakar would have deserted his post as king's minister and retiredfrom life in the world. But in the interest of propagating Saivism, the saint was required to maintain his ties withthe world until he had fulfilled the task Siva had determined for him. His major contributions were to consolidatethe Pantiyan's commitment to (and hence patronage of) Saivism, and to attract people to the Saiva faith through thepower of his poetic talent. Manikkavacakar's story, like the stories of a number of other major Saiva figures, butunlike Karaikkalammaiyar's story, reveals a preoccupation with the relationship between representatives of theSaiva faith and the authority of the state. The saint's faith is treated not just as a personal affair, but also as anaffair of vital interest for the future of Saivism. Manikkavacakar's story also shows that later generations of TamilSaivites thought about the audience of the saint's poemshe is depicted traveling to various Saiva shrines singing hishymns and thereby winning converts, and also the scribe appears to record his hymns for the benefit of futuregenerations of Saiviteseven if the subject of the poems themselves is the relationship between the poet and thedeity.

Manikkavacakar's poems and life story, taken together, reflect both the private and the public faces of Tamilbhaktiin the terminology of classical Tamil poetics, its akam and its puram dimensions. On the one hand, bhakti ispsychological and emotional, a matter of communion between devotee and deity. Even in the early saints' poemsthis is clear, but the poems of Tiruvacakam carry a stronger emotional charge than the poetry of most ofManikkavacakar's predecessors. But, however much Manikkavacakar's poems may be admired for the "heart-melting" effect they have on their audience, the saint's life story seems to make the point that religious commitmentis not only a private relationship between devotee and deity. The hagiographers also envision a Saiva social andpolitical order, and at the top of this order is a king-devotee whose rightful role is "defender of the faith."Manikkavacakar is admired not only because his expression of personal devotion is a model for other devotees, butalso because he contributed to the goal of a Saiva society.

Evidence of various kinds points to the conclusion that Manikkavacakar lived during the ninth century, thoughsome scholars have argued that the saint lived earlier. In Tirukkovaiyar Manikkavacakar refers by name to a kingnamed Varaguna. If indeed this was Varaguna Pantiya II (reigned 862-80) and saint and king were contemporaries,as a number of scholars believe, Manikkavacakar's lifetime can be assigned with a reasonable degree of certaintyto the ninth century. Manikkavacakar is the author of two works: Tiruvacakam (containing fifty-one separatepoems of varied length and structure) and Tirukkovaiyar (four hundred verses).




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Tirukkovaiyar

1

What he said after seeing her for the first time

Beautiful lotus blossoms, splendid blue lilies,colorful, flowering kumil from Tillai,

home of the lord,blossoms of silkwood and new November-flowers

are joined in this garlandfilled with a divine fragrance.

It is sinuous as a liana,graceful as a swan

and it shines brightas the handsome Love-god's triumphant banner.

2

What he said

Is she a courier for Death,or a companion for Love, the disembodied god?

Is she a woman from incomparable Tillai,or an innocent peacock?

And where does she dwell

in a blossom, in the sky,in the watersor in the netherworld of serpents?

How can I say?

3

What he said

Her lethal eyes blink,her feet touch the groundand the flowers she wears have withered

O my troubled mind

this girl with a small browhas a waist too frail to support her breastsand her long arms are graceful as bamboo,




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she is lovely as Tillai,home of Lord Harawho rides a spirited bull

but she is no goddess.

6

What he said to his own heartso that she would overhear

It's as if a shaft were flungfrom the shell-covered shore of the Eastern Seaand slipped into a great yoke on the Western Sea's shore.

This girl with eyes shapely as kentai fishleft her own people on Kailasa

home of Tillai's ancient lord.

I'll praise no god but the fatewhich gave her to me.No other god fills me with awe.

8

What he said after their union in love

If she is nectar and I am its savor,it is the god of fortune who made it so.

Who could tell us aparthere in this hidden gardenprotected by the bamboothat cover the rocks at Mount Potiyil,home of Puliyur's spotless lord?

11

What he said to a passing bee

O bee,in your vast fieldsare the lilies as sweetas the mouth of this girlwhose waist is so frail

it suffers like people who don't singof Tillai and its Ambalam,

home of the lord adorned with a snakewho melts the bones of his devoteeswho worship him with hands joined in prayer?




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20

What his friend said to himwhen his body grew thin from lovesickness

Did you go to study sweet Tamil versesat the academy of Kutal,high-walled city of the lord

who dwells in my mindand in my heart,who stays at Tillaiwhere flowing streams are held by dams,

or did you go to study musicwhere they play the seven tones?

My lord,whatever has happened to your shouldersgreat as mountains?

23

What he said in responseto his friend's advice

You'd never say such thingsif you sawthis golden sprout, perfect as a painting,this girl, my life-breathwhose breast glitters with jewels.She's a peacock on Kailasa, the northern mountain,

home of the ruby-red Dancerwhose pure gold temple at Tillai's small Ambalamshines from afar.

You didn't see her armsgraceful as sugarcane.

70

What her girlfriend said to herafter she met with her lover

Tillai's lord shot a fiery blastfrom the eye he conceals in his browand burnt up the godwho spreads passion's contagionwith his sugarcane bow,




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and here on the lord's lofty mountainyour eyes change from black to redand your lips, once red as ripe fruit,turn pale.

Does this mountain pooladorn itself with flowers rich in nectarto compete with your eyes,the treasure sought by all these bees?

71

What the girlfriend saidabout the lovers' union

Like the crow's two eyesthat share a single pupil,

today these two share one life-breathin separate bodies.

Here at the mountain of the lordwho combines all things in himself,the lord who stays in Ambalam's great gardens,

this peacock of a woman and this manshare joy and pain alike.

75

What he said so that sheand her girlfriend would overhear

I'm hapless as peoplewho live without the grace of Ambalam's lord,

the god who wears a lion's skin,who stands unmoved at the end of time

when the heavens fold,vast floods rise and cover the hills,and solid earth caves in.

This girl, slim as a liana,makes me ride a palm-leaf horse.




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102

What her girlfriend saidso that he would overhear

He's overwhelmed like people filled with honest lovefor the feet of Ambalam's lord,the god with a jet-black throat.

This man holds a skirt of leavesin his trembling hand.He asks about a buffalo,yet he carries no bow.

It's a pity when such a noble manraves like one gone mad.

109

What he said to her girlfriend

Vast as the love I feel for the lord,black as my bonds that he takes away,bright as Tillai, his home,white as the ash he smears on his shoulders,long as the words we speak to praise his flower-like feet

are her great eyes.

115

What her girlfriend said to him

My lord,you gave me riches from the countryside

surrounding Tillai's Ambalam,home of the Rulerwho breaks the bonds of affection,

and I passed them on.

And what happened nextis quite a tale:

There is nothing that slim-waisted girlwouldn't do with that skirt of flowersshort of grinding it upand smearing it all over her limbs.




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120

What he said to herwhen they were alone

Innocent girl with jewelled breasts,

was it because you took me for lotus-eyed Netumaland this mountain he madefor the hooded cobra, his bed

or was it to stay in the lotus of my heartthat you came to this vast garden on cool Kailasa,mountain of Tillai's lord?

144

What her girlfriend said to her own heartso that he would overhear

On this tall mountainwhere waterfalls plunge to earth,here at the mountain-home of Ambalam's lord

who shows his compassionand takes me for his own

young parrots stay close to barren stalksin this meadow where the grain is all picked over.

They remind me that separation is always crueleven if only from a devil

Remember this well.

166

What he said

She is a water lily, rich in honeythat grows in forest ponds at Tillai,

town of shining gardenswhere the lord sweet as ripe honeymakes his home,

the lord who takes me as his servantso I won't perish in hell,

and I am the new moonthat climbs high in the skyand makes her bloomwith his steady light.




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178

What her girlfriend said to him,warning him of scandal

If you come hereand they mistake youfor the sonof the lord adorned with snakes

who lives on Tillai's great mountain,the lord who enslaves even people free of bonds

they will spread great blossoms before you,sing your praises and pay homage,

but if they should find you outhow can this lady survive?

248

What passersby said to the grieving foster motherwhose daughter had eloped with her lover

Sandalwood swarming with bees,pearls from the deep ocean floor,and white conchalways go to ornament the bodiesof people who crave them,

and sweet-voiced girls, supple as sugarcane,beautiful as small Ambalam,

home of Lord Sivawho wears the great river called Gangaas a crown

are just the same.

250

What her girlfriend said to himwhen he had failed to visit for several days

Good man from the mountainwhere a monkey feasts on sweet plantainsthat grow in upturned bunches,and then sleeps in cool shadebeneath the very tree he plundered,




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what sort of grace do you bringto this girl with mournful eyesthat cut to the quicklike well-sharpened spears?

She suffers like people mindlessof Ambalam's lordwho ploughs the field of battlewith his bloodthirsty spear.

287

What she said when her foster motherarranged for the exorcist to come

If this pallor doesn't leave meas soon as the goat loses its life to their ritesthe neighbors will tell tales,

but if I should be cured somehow,what will I beto this man of the harbor-townwho makes me sufferlike people who don't contemplate Ambalam,

home of the unfathomable lordthe two gods couldn't findin regions high or low?

289

What she said to her girlfriendin defense of her honor

Let mother burn with anger,let the neighbors scold,let the town laugh,and you, girl with flashing earrings,go ahead, reproach me,I will tell how it was.

I'm as pure as people who praise Tillai's lord,the One who never leavesmy thoughts or my words.

I give you my solemn word.




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292

What her girlfriend saidin ridicule of the exorcist

Let people drink toddy, if that is their way.I won't stop them.

While we bathed in a springon the towering mountain of the lord who lives at Ambalam,a man with bright shoulders stood near,but you had other ideas.O god! There is no one wise as you in all the world.

304

What her foster mother said to her mother

Our girl, beautiful as small Ambalamwhere the gods worship the feetof Tillai's lord

won't serve any god,

and when her man goes to rain arrowson enemies who hold back tribute,he stays in no house but hers.

This is the nature of peoplefine as jewels fashioned in the sea.

315

What her girlfriend said to herwhen she despaired because her lover had to leave

Girl with shining brow,beautiful as Tillai,home of the lord

who vanquishes enemieswhen he gives his trident a turn,the lord who raises people who love himhigher than the gods,

Mountain peacock,you mustn't melt away

like butter in fire,like salt in water

our lover won't leave,it's all a lie.




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324

What her girlfriend said to herwhen her lover failed to return at the appointed time

Fine girl, graceful as a swan,it's not true that the rains have come:

Kantal may send out snake-like shoots,they may burst into bloom and entice beesjust like your thick hair,

but they only hear the booming of big drumsfor the dance of Ambalam's lord,the lord with black throatwho makes me, a lowly slave,mad with joy.

They think it's a storm bringing rain.

335

What her girlfriend saidwhen he announced his intention to seek his fortune

She suffers like people who won't praiseour lord, the Dancerwho stays at Tillai,town protected by walls that touch the clouds.

When our man said he would go into the jungle,her shining breasts turned to goldand pearls fell from her eyes, bright as flowers.

What other riches can he want,this man, our king, whosegarland glistens with honey?

341

What he said when he left his belovedand went to seek his fortune

Wherever I lookin this whole world,wrought by the One

who made food from poisonthat appeared in the crystal sea,the lord who stays at Ambalam,city surrounded by walls that shine from afar,




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a flowering creeper appearswith black carp, red fruit,golden banglesand two lovely breasts.

343

What he said to his own heartafter he left his lover in search of riches

You went far awayas though leaving this girl of few wordswere a trifle,when separation even from a devil is hard.

She's just like small Ambalam,where the lord with body red as firetakes me into his service,though even a dog has more virtue than I.

O heart, your resolutionfills me with fear.

Tiruccatakam

2

I won't bother with Purantaran, Mal, or Ayan,even if my house caves inI won't care for anyonebut your own servants,and if I sink into hellI won't complain

Lord, our master,by your graceI won't give a thought to any godbut you.

8

When will the restless wind,fire, water, earth and skyall dissolve in the deluge?




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O lord,you'll become the dissolutionand when time endsyou'll keep this servant safefrom the snare of stubborn deeds.

11




14

I don't surrender my heart at your feet,I don't melt with love,sing your praise or bring garlands,I don't tell of your glory,tend your temple, or dance

King among gods,refuge for worthy people,

I rush toward my death.

15

You became the sky and the earth,wind and light, flesh and life-breath,that which isand that which is not,

you are the king,the lord who made everyone dancein the play of me and mine.

How can I sing your praise with mere words?




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26

Dog that I am,I turned all my thoughts to you,I filled my eyes with the imageof your feet, bright as flowersand bowed before them,I surrendered my voice to your bell-like words,

then you came to me,and all my five senses rejoiced,O wonder-worker who comes inside meand rules me,

great ocean of nectar,lord tall as the mountainswith body bright as a red-lotus forest,

you gave yourselfto this lonely manwho has no place in this worldor in any other.

28

The lord no one can hear,the lord who never fails,the lord with no relationswho hears all sounds without even trying

placed me on a thronewhile everyone stared with wonder,

though I'm just a lowly doghe showed me things never shown before,and let me hear what no one else has heard,he kept me safe from rebirthand made me his own:

this is the magic our lord performs.

29

Could there ever be magic as wondrous as this?

The lord let me serve his own loving servants,he released me from fear




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and took me for his own,he entered my beingand so overwhelmed me with lovemy heart dissolved and flowed like nectar,

our Father became man, womanand one without gender,sky, raging fireand the End of all things,

lord Sivawith body red as a great ceccai blossomis king of the gods,our lord who stands on the other shore.

32

Dead heart,

you resistthe lord who entered meand took me, an utter fool,for his own,

my father who graced me with knowledgeand showed me all noble paths,lord who cut my bondsand gave his sweet, unfailing grace

you plunge headlong into falsehoodand condemn me to ruin.

36

I didn't shed my desiresso I could enter that golden citypeople enter, never to return,

I didn't melt with lovefor the feet of my father,my lord and rulersweeter than nectar,sweeter than honey, milk and sugar-candy,

so what can I do,laden with deeds as I am?




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41

I saw only miseryI failed to seethat the seed of all beingresides in my own heart.

O lord who has no peer in heaven,you called me to serve you,but I can't

like an elephant with two trunksI can only stuff myself with food.

43

When will I see you,lord who eludes the thoughts of gods in heaven,beautiful lord, Dancer who rules me

you are the earth and the heavensand timethat comes and goes.

47

The lordmy father, my mother, my master,father, mother, master for all the world,

the lord with no father, no mother,no master of his own

is the precious lord no one can knowwho came to stay inside me.

55

O lordwho keeps doe-eyed Umaas part of your own body,

lord sweet as honey,nectar and clear sugarcane syrupwho came here to make me your own,

lord Siva,king of Tillai, the southern town,




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while other devotees know your mindand reside at your feet,I just stay hereguarding this body of flesh,no better than a nest of worms.

72

Peerless lord,I don't ask for pleasureor the joys of Purantaran and the gods.My lord,your two feet are all I have

my body melts,I'm filled with trembling,my hands join in prayer above my head,and my tears flow like a river,O master.

90

I'm a fraud,my heart is a fraud,even my love is false,but if, bound to my deeds,I implore you,can I still reach you?Honey! Nectar! Clear sugarcane essence!Sweet lord!Give your graceso this servant may come to you.

Tiruvammanai

2

No one can see him,be they from earth, heaven, or hellor even regions beyond,yet the lord who rules the South at Perunturaicame to me with perfect easehe made me go madand set me on the road with no return,filling my heart like a stream of nectarthat never runs dry.




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Let's sing about the lord,the ocean of blisswho cast his net in the wave-tossed sea.

Let's sing an ammanai

5

Wretched dog that I am,the mighty Lord drove me madand made my hard stone of a mindsoft as ripe fruitthe lord of the Vedas,who dwells in the South at Perunturai,drowned me in a flood of compassionand set me free from my deeds.

Let's sing about the lordwho rode a swift bulland came to stay at the small Ambalamin Tillai town.


6

Friend, did you hear about his magic?The lord who dwells in the South at Perunturai,the town enclosed in painted walls,showed me things no one has ever seen

his infinite goodness,his lotus-like feetand his grace, sweet as honey.

People of this land may mock,but we'll sing about the wayhe took us for hisown so we could rise and be free.

We'll sing an ammanai

9

Let's sing about the lordwho wears a lean crescent and a sacred thread,lord of the Vedas




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who appeared at Perunturai and rode a fine steed,the lord with black throat and red bodywho wears white ash,the lord, first in all the worlds,who gave endless bliss to his old servantsand made the world marvel.


10

Let's sing about the lordmore exalted than the gods who reign in heaven,lord of the Vedas,greater than all the kings in the world,who stays in the fertile Pantiya countrywhere cool Tamil thrives.

At Perunturai,the town we hold dear,the lord who is half-womanshowed me his feet,a sight to fill the eyes

Annamalai's lord took this dog for his own.


12

Listen, girl with bright eyes, black with kohl,in birth after birthMal, Ayan and Indraseek him in vain,yet in this very lifetimehe showed me his sweet grace,he took me for his ownand keeps me safe from births to come.

Let's sing for our Siva,the lord who appears in all that is true,refuge for truthand all that exists,the End of all things.





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14

As an elephant, a worm,as a man and a god,in bodies beyond countingI was born and then diedthen he melted my fleshand freed me from my deeds.

The lord, sweet as honey,milk and sugar-candy,came to me like a kingand made me his slave.

Let's sing about the lord of the skyand his feet, bright as flowers.


16

As flesh, as breath, as feelinghe mingles with my being,as honey, as nectar,as sweet sugar-candythis hero who wears cassia blossomsfilled with honey,shows me a path unknown to gods.

Let's tell how the lord,the light of unfading knowledge,became king for the countless creaturesthat draw breath in this world.


17

I wear a cassia garlandand cling to Siva's round shoulders,locked in his embrace, I swoonand then we quarrel like lovers.His red lips make me giddy with longing,my heart melting, I search everywhereand fix my thoughts on his feet.I wither,




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then I blossom once more.

Let's sing about the red feet of the lordwho dancesflame in hand.


18

Let's sing about the lord whose radiant bodyholds the goddesswho speaks words gentle as a parrot's,the mysterious lordMal and Ayan sought in vain,the lord pure as clearest honeycame with perfect ease to Perunturai,the town renowned for its virtues.

Filled with grace so sweetit defies the mind's powers,this generous Brahmin sage took pityand illuminedthe innermost chamber of my heart.


20

For others he's the lord beyond reach,but for his servantsPerunturai's lord appears on a regal steedhe removes their faultsand nurtures their virtues,he frees them from the tangle of family ties.

Clinging fast to his ancient famewe'll let go every other passion,we'll sing about the bliss we've foundand claim the lord for our own.

We'll sing an ammanai




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Annaippattu

1

She saysMother!His words are the Vedas,his body is red,he adorns himself with white ashand he holds a thundering drum,

She saysMother!The lord of lordswho holds a thundering drumrules the god with four faces and Mal.

2

She saysMother!His eyes are black with kohl,his compassion is an ocean,he's the lord who melts our hearts,

She saysMother!When he melts our hearts from withinwe'll shed tears of endless joy.

3

She saysMother!He's the eternal bridegroom, so very handsome,who dwells in the mind,

She saysMother!The lord who dwells in the mindand in the South at Perunturaiis the image of bliss.

4

She saysMother!Instead of clotheshe wears a dancing snake,the skin of a tiger, and ash,

She saysMother!Why does my heart witherwhen I gaze at the lordwho dresses this way?




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5

She saysMother!He has long handsand he wears a topknot,he's the king of the good Pantiya countrywho shows us the way,

She saysMother!This Pantiya king tames our restless thoughtsand fills us with joy.

6

She saysMother!The lord of Northern Kocamankaiwho's so hard to knowis fixed in my heart,

She saysMother!It's a wonder that he stays in my heartwhen he eludes even Ayan and Mal.

7

She saysMother!The lord wears a white cloth,smears white ash on his browand dresses like a hermit,

She saysMother!The lord who dresses like a hermitrode a prancing horseand stole away my mind.

8

She saysMother!The lord who wears sandal and an aruku garlandtakes us for his own,

She saysMother!The lord who takes us for his ownholds cymbals in his hand.




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9

She saysMother!He's the lord who's half-woman,who wears a hermit's robeand begs for alms,

She saysMother!Why does my heart failwhen he goes on his rounds?

10

She saysMother!He adorns his hair with cassia, bilva,the flower of madness and the moon,

She saysMother!Why do those flowers of madnessmake me lose my mind?

Tiruttacankam

1

Parrot, in the prime of youth's splendor,ponder the glorious nameof the King who rules Perunturai,and sing it aloud.Sing his name like the god who sits on a white lotusand the other who rests in the milky seawho cryLord of Arur, Ruddy Lord,

Leader of gods, our Master.

2

Emerald-green parrotwho speaks sweet, faultless words,clearly sing of the countryof the lord who makes us his own,master of the seven garden-worlds.The lord who rules his ardent devotees with loveand saves them from rebirth in this worldalways resides in the southern land of Panti.




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3

Parrot who dwellsamong blossoms covered with pollen,sing of the town of our ruler,the lord, half-woman.He dwells in Northern Kocamankai,the town all the bhaktas praiseas Siva's own city on earth.

4

Little girl with red beak and green wings,sing of the river of our Father,lord of Perunturaiwho dwells in our mind.Girl, don't you see?The Master's river is the flood of blissthat washes all taint from the mindso it can soar and touch the sky.

5

Parrot with beak red as a coral-flower,sing of the mountain of the invincible King,the lord lofty as the cloudswho rules Perunturai.Don't you see?That mountain is the gracethat dispels the heart's darknessand brings Release with its radiant joy.

6

My own parrot,don't fly away to your nest.Come here and sing of the chariotof the lord without peerwho comes rejoicing with horses from heavenwhile celestial maidens think thoughts sweet as honeyand sing hymns of praise.




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7

Parrot who speaks words sweet as wild honey,sing of the weaponthat crushes the foes of the faultless Kingwho rules Perunturai.Don't you see?The weapon he wields is the tridentthat drives off the three taintsso the spotless hearts of his servantswill melt with love.

8

Parrot who speaks words sweet as milk,sing of the drum that heralds the comingof our lord, King of Perunturai.Bliss soars on its thundering beatwhile the curse of birth founders on his love.

9

Parrot who speaks elegant words,sing of the garland that adorns the chestof the lord of Perunturaiwho cherishes friends whose bones melt with loveThe lord who takes me, a dog, for his slaveand dispels evil deeds for all timedelights in a garland of aruku grass.

10

Green parrot who dwells in gardens,sing of the splendid bannerthat flies for the kingwho rules Perunturai,the town flowing with pure water.This banner, emblazoned with his faultless bull,spreads beauty far and wideand makes his foes tremble with fear.




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Notes to the Poems

The following notes explain mythological and iconographic allusions as well as names of deities and sacred placesthat occur in the poems. Also, in some instances, cultural and literary conventions that would be familiar only to anaudience well versed in Hinduism and/or Tamil arts and letters are annotated. Some annotated items occur withconsiderable frequency, and in most cases I have included a note only for the first occurrence. Additionaloccurrences are noted in the index to mythological and iconographic allusions and proper names included inAppendix B.

Poems of Karaikkalammaiyar

Karaikkalammaiyar's Arputattiruvantati contains one hundred verses in venpa meter, a meter also employed bymany of the poets who composed the so-called eighteen minor works (patinenkirkkanakku) of classical Tamil.Some of these poets lived earlier than Karaikkalammaiyar, and some were her contemporaries. The one hundredverses of Arputattiruvantati are linked together by means of a prosodic device called antati (Sanskrit anta, ''end" +adi, "beginning"). In a poem that follows the rule of antati, the first syllable or several syllables of one versereplicate the last syllable or several syllables of the preceding verse. Further, the first syllable or syllables of thepoem's first verse are repeated at the end of the last verse, thus binding the entire text together in a "garland" ofverses. The antati technique became very popular with the Tamil saints, both Saivites and Vaisnavites. Formally,the three antati poems attributed to Poykai, Putam, and Pey, the first three alvars, are nearly identical toKaraikkalammaiyar's poem.

ATA 1. Siva's throat is. black because he swallowed the deadly poison called halahala, which appeared when thegods and demons were churning the primeval ocean of milk in hope of obtaining the nectar of immortality. Thepoison posed a threat to the universe, and Siva warded off calamity by swallowing the virulent substance. He wasnot harmed, but the poison, which he held in his throat, made his throat turn black.

ATA 11. The river Ganga (Ganges), which is also represented anthropomorphically as a goddess, was originally ariver of heaven. Ganga was summoned to earth by Bhagiratha so that her waters would cleanse the bones of hisgreat-uncles who were cursed by the sage Kapila, whom they had abused, and burned by his fiery wrath. However,because the earth would be unable to withstand the impact of Ganga's fall from heaven, Bhagiratha entreated Sivato break the river's fall and thus enable his ancestors to win a place in heaven. Siva consented and caught the riverin his tangled locks of hair, only then allowing the river to reach earth in a harmless trickle. Siva is also oftendepicted wearing the crescent moon in his hair. It is said that he placed the moon on his head to cool himself afterhe swallowed the halahala poison (see note for ATA 1).

ATA 16. This verse, like many others among the poems of the Tamil saints, assumes a familiarity with the doctrineof karma, the idea that the moral residue of action performed in one lifetime affects a person's fate in futureembodiments. Samsara, the never-ending cycle of birth and death, is frequently imagined as an endless ocean. Thesaints affirm that sincere devotion enables the devotee to cross over the samsaric ocean and to escape the relentlesscycle of rebirth.

ATA 37. Siva came to the rescue of the gods when the demon residents of Tripura, "the three fortresses," werecausing the gods great affliction. This story is just one of many that describe a struggle on a cosmic scale betweentwo orders of beings in the universe, the devas or gods and the asuras or "demons." The story begins, as do many




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others, with the demons securing a boon from the creator-god, Brahma, as a reward for performing rigorouspenance. Granting the demons' request, Brahma allowed them to establish three great cities, one in heaven, one inthe air, and one on earth. Brahma also granted that the only way these cities could ever come to ruin would be ifthey were somehow consolidated as one and then destroyed by a single arrow. The demons flourished in theircities, and in the course of time, in their arrogance, they began to act in a manner offensive to morality and justice.The gods, who were being oppressed by the arrogant demons, eventually turned to Siva for aid in their distress.Consolidating the combined energies of the many gods and constructing a chariot from various elements of thecosmos, Siva waged war on Tripura and demolished the demon fortresses with a single fiery arrow.

ATA 77. One of Siva's most important iconographic forms is Nataraja, lord of the dance. Siva is the cosmic dancerwho performs both a dance of universal creation and a dance of universal destruction. Thus, by dancing, Sivaprovides the energy that keeps the cosmic cycle of creation, destruction, and re-creation in motion. This verse, likeothers among the poems of the early Tamil saints, alludes to the god's iconography in a playful manner.

Karaikkalammaiyar composed two short texts (eleven verses each) that go by the name Tiruvalankattu-mutta-tiruppatikam (The ancient patikam of Tiruvalankatu). The word patikam, related to the Tamil word for "ten"(pattu), denotes a formal device that became very popular with the saint-poets. A patikam is a set often verses,almost always related by meter and usually by theme, followed by an eleventh, so-called phalasruti verse, whichidentifies the poet by name and tells of the fruit (phala) to be gained by listening to (sruti) and/or reciting thepreceding group of ten verses. Some earlier classical texts also are subdivided into verse sets containing ten verseseach, and the bhakti patikam appears to be an extension of the classical convention. Karaikkalammaiyar's twopatikams are considered to be the earliest in the bhakti corpus. In these two poems Karaikkalammaiyar describes ahorrific Siva, dancing amid cremated bodies at the cremation ground at Alankatu. She also describes a demon-woman (pey) who watches Siva as he dances, and worships him. The demon-woman of the poems is taken to bethe saint herself, who, according to legend, was turned into a pey or ghoul by Siva at her own request so that shecould reside with Siva's ghostly hordes and serve him at the cremation ground. (See the introduction to translationsof poems by Karaikkalammaiyar for a synopsis of the saint's life story.)

Poems of the "First Three Alvars" (mutal muvar)

"The first three alvars, Poykai, Putam, and Pey, each composed an antati poem of one hundred verses. (On antati,see above.) These are known, respectively, as the "first," "second,'' and "third" antatis of the Tamil Vaisnavacanon.

MTA 1. Visnu is frequently depicted holding four emblematic objects, one in each of his four hands: a conch, amace, a lotus, and a discus. The cakra or discus is Visnu's special weapon, and it figures prominently in myths.(See the introduction to translations of poems by the first three divers for further discussion of this poem.)

MTA 11. When Krsna was just a baby living under the care of the cowherd chieftain Nandagopala and his wife,Yasoda, the she-demon Putana assumed the form of a beautiful woman and came to Gokula, where Krsna and hisfamily were residing, intending to kill Krsna, who was a potential threat to all demons. She picked up the babyKrsna and gave him her breast to suckle, assuming that the child would die from drinking the deadly poisoncontained in her own body. However, Krsna was unharmed by the she-demon's poisonous milk and sucked on herbreast until she assumed her true demonic form and died.




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MTA 35. The ten-headed demon is Ravana, the king who ruled in the demon kingdom of Lanka. Ravana was thearchenemy of Rama, Visnu incarnate as the son of King Dasaratha of Kosala. It is frequently said that Ravanaattained spiritual release when he died by Rama's hand, because, even though he harbored only hostility for theman-god, his thoughts were always focused on Rama. This back-door route to salvation is known as dvesa bhakti,devotion through enmity.

MTA 55. Not infrequently bhakti poems contain descriptive phrases that conflate allusions to more than one aspectof the god's mythology or iconography. Such a conflated allusion occurs in this verse, which makes reference bothto Visnu in his incarnation as Krsna, who lived his early life in the community of cowherds, and to the image ofVisnu sleeping on-the snake Ananta in the primeval, cosmic sea when the universe is in dissolution. According toIndian cosmology, the universe is periodically created, dissolved, and re-formed. When Visnu is awake, theuniverse is alive with the activity of its countless creatures, but when Visnu is asleep the universe reverts to anundifferentiated, potential state.

MTA 61. Tirumal, also sometimes known as Netumal or simply Mal, is a Tamil name for Visnu that frequentlyoccurs in the alvars poems. The name can be interpreted alternatively as "the black god" or "the great god," bothappropriate appellations for Visnu. Some scholars have speculated that originally Mal was a Tamil god who laterwas identified with the Sanskritic Visnu.

MTA 86. The first two lines of this poem allude to a well-known Krsnaite myth. According to this tale, Krsnaprovoked the god Indra by advising the cowherds to make offerings to Mt. Govardhana instead of to Indra. Inretaliation Indra sent down a torrent of rain and hail, but Krsna proved his superiority by lifting the mountain andusing it as an umbrella to shield the cowherds and their cows. (For further discussion of this poem, see theintroduction to translations of poems by the first three alvars.)

MTA 92. Some of the most popular myths concerning Krsna's childhood in Gokula relate the child-god's pranks. Afavorite story tells how Yasoda bound Krsna by the waist and tied him to a mortar in a fruitless attempt to preventKrsna from surreptitiously stealing and eating all the butter that she churned. The child continued to crawl along,dragging the heavy mortar behind until it lodged between two Arjuna trees that grew in front of his parents' house.Continuing to pull on the rope that bound his waist, Krsna uprooted the two trees, thereby liberating two spirits thathad been imprisoned in the trees because of a curse. This verse ironically plays the myth of Krsna, the butter thief,against the image of Visnu, the universal god, who, during the cosmic dissolution, takes the whole world intohimself.

MTA 98. Punniyan, which literally means "the auspicious one" refers here to Siva. Netumal, "the tall, black god," isa Tamil name for Visnu (see note above). The idea, expressed in this verse, that the two great gods of Hinduismare essentially one and the same is found more frequently in Vaisnava than in Saiva poetry. The verse also alludesto the story of Visnu's incarnation as Vamana, the dwarf. The story tells of a time when the world was ruled byBali, a demon, who nevertheless was a model ruler. In order to trick Bali into relinquishing his hegemony andthereby further the cause of the gods, Visnu took the form of a dwarf and went to Bali's court as a supplicant.Vamana-Visnu asked Bali for a boon, and, being the virtuous ruler that he was, Bali agreed. The boon Vamanarequested was to be granted as much territory as he could traverse in three strides. When Bali agreed to grant thisrequest, the dwarf grew to enormous size and traversed all of heaven and the whole earth in his first two strides.When Vamana asked Bali to suggest where he might place his third step, Bali entreated Vamana to tread upon hisown head. Vamana complied, and in this way Bali's salvation was assured by the touch of the god's foot.

ITA 1. Naranan is a Tamil form of the Sanskrit name Narayana, a frequently occurring name of Visnu.




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ITA 14. The phrase "who stretched the eight directions" is an allusion to Visnu's avatara as Vamana (see note forMTA 98 above).

ITA 90. Visnu's eyes are frequently described as resembling red lotuses. In Sanskrit the god is known asPundarikaksa, the lord with red-lotus eyes. However, the Tamil poets do not ordinarily use the Sanskrit epithet.

MuTA 1. Tiru is a Tamil equivalent for Sanskrit Sri. In the abstract this word denotes wealth and auspiciousness. Itis also an alternate name for Visnu's consort Laksmi, the goddess of wealth and good fortune. Both Sanskrit andTamil forms also occur as an honorific prefix that is attached to the names of both persons and texts. The conch isone of Visnu's four emblems. (See note for MTA 1 above.)

MuTA 2. The alvar's declaration that he has freed himself from all the seven births most likely is a way of sayingthat he will not be reborn in any form whatsoever. In Hinduism there is a classification of all living beings intoseven classes, with each successive class being one step higher on a hierarchical scale of sentience andconsciousness than the class preceding it. The classes range from insentient plant life to the gods. Also, in somepoems the phrase elu pirappu (seven births) occurs in the sense of seven generations in a family lineage orparampara. In some poems a narrator may speak of winning salvation for seven anterior and seven posteriorgenerations in his family through his devotion. "Holy basil" (tulasi in Sanskrit, tulay in Tamil) is a plant of specialsignificance for Vaisnavas. Typically, tulasi will be given to worshipers as prasada, the god's grace in tangibleform, at worship ceremonies in Vaisnava temples, and the plant is considered to be a form of Visnu's consort, Sri(or Tiru in Tamil), who resides on Visnu's chest.

MuTA 63. In this verse characteristic attributes of Siva and Visnu are combined to form a single, composite imageof god. Siva's iconography contributes the long matted hair, the axe, and the snake (see note for TK 178), allattributes of the ascetic god, while the royal imagery typically associated with Visnu contributes the crown, thediscus or wheel, and the thread of gold.

MuTA 94. The various iconic representations of Visnu (arca) enshrined in Visnu temples throughout Tamilnaduare categorized on the basis of the god's posture. The ritual manuals (agamas) that describe procedures for creating,installing, and worshiping icons of the god specify that Visnu may be represented in standing, sitting, or recliningposture and discuss various special qualities of each.

MuTA 99. At the Visnu temple at Tirukacci, Visnu is depicted with eight arms and is known as Astabhujan, "theeight-armed one." In each of his eight hands the god holds a weapon. The eight weapons are arrow, bow, club,sword, discus, conch, shield, and lotus (counted here as a "weapon"). The verse also alludes to the story ofGajendra, an elephant who was a great devotee of Visnu One day when Gajendra came to a river pool to bathe, acrocodile seized his foot and began to drag him into the water, intending to kill him. The elephant called to Visnufor help, whereupon Visnu immediately appeared and rescued his devotee by killing the crocodile with his discus.

Poems of Nammalvar

Among Nammalvar's four works, Tiruvaymoli is by far the most ambitious and the work that has had the greatestenduring impact on Tamil Vaisnavas Conventionally, the text is spoken of as having one thousand verses; however,a more literal accounting of the number of verses in this text yields a total of 1,102 verses. The text is subdividedinto ten large subsections, known in the tradition as pattu (ten). Each of these in turn is composed often smallerverse sets consisting often verses each plus a phalasruti verse. Generically, these verse sets would be known by thename patikam (see above), but in this text each is known as a tiruvaymoli. One "deviant" tiruvaymoli containsthirteen rather than eleven verses. While Nammalvar changes meter from one tiruvaymoli to




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another, the entire text of 1,102 verses is bound together by antati links (see note above for poems ofKaraikkalammaiyar). All the verses translated here are taken from the first two major sections of Tiruvaymoli.Verses are identified by three numbers separated by periods. The first number identifies the pattu or major section;the second number identifies the tiruvaymoli or smaller verse set within the pattu; and the last number identifies theverse within the tiruvaymoli. The five phalasruti verses translated here have been grouped at the end ofNammalvar's section of the anthology and thus appear out of sequence.

TVM 1.1.8. Aran is a Tamilized form of Hara, a name of Siva. Ayan is similarly a Tamil form of Sanskrit a-ja("without birth"), an appellation of Brahma. This verse asserts that Siva and Brahma are multiforms of Visnu Inorder to emphasize this point, Nammalvar attributes to Visnu the feat of destroying Tripura (see note for A TA 37above), a well-known mythological attribute of Siva.

TVM 1.2.1. The word translated here as "Release" is vitu, a nominal form of the verb vitu, "to leave, release." Vituoften occurs as an equivalent to Sanskrit moksa, release from the cycle of birth and death.

TVM 1.3.1. According to mythological accounts, Visnu's consort Sri (also known as Laksmi), the goddess ofwealth and good fortune, emerged seated on a red lotus from the primeval ocean of milk when the gods anddemons churned the ocean in hope of obtaining the elixir of immortality. The idea expressed in this verseillustrates a well-known theme in Srivaisnava thought, namely, that Visnu simultaneously embodies the traits ofaccessibility (saulabhya) and remoteness (paratva). In this verse the allusion to Krsna, the butter-thief, emphasizesVisnu's saulabhya aspect, while the image of Visnu as the lord of Sri emphasizes the god's paratva aspect.

TVM 1.3.2. The corresponding Tamil for "container" and "contained" in this translation is akattanan andpurattanan. See chapter 4, n. 24, for a discussion of the significance of these terms.

TVM 1.3.6. Ari is a Tamil form of Sanskrit Hari, a frequently occurring name of Visnu (On Ayan and Aran, seeabove.)

TVM 1.5.1. According to Hindu cosmography, Mt. Meru, the central axis of the universe, is surrounded by sevencontinents or "worlds." In this system India is known as jambudvipa, the island of rose-apple trees. Pinnai, alsoknown as Nappinnai, is an important figure in Tamil Krsnaite mythology Pinnai is a girl from the community ofcowherds who became Krsna's wife. Krsna won the girl as his bride by successfully wrestling seven of her father'sbulls in a bull-baiting contest. References to Pinnai are frequent in the alvars poems, and she is also mentioned inthe earlier Tamil epic Cilappatikaram.

TVM 1.5.4. The three great gods of Hinduism, known collectively as the Trimurti, are Brahma (the creator), Visnu(the preserver), and Siva (the destroyer). Visnu's heavenly abode is known as Vaikuntha.

TVM 1.5.6. Kesava and Madhava are names for Krsna. Kesava literally means "one with long hair," but it isusually interpreted as a designation for Krsna as destroyer of the horse-demon, Kesinasura. Madhava can beinterpreted to mean "sweet one," from Sanskrit madhu, "sweet." It also can be taken as a patronymic, since aprogenitor of Krsna's Yadava clan was named Madhu; and further, it can be taken as a designation of Krsna asdestroyer of a demon named Madhu. (In this regard Krsna is also known as Madhusudana.) The story of the sevenSal trees (maramaram in Tamil) belongs to the Rama cycle. Rama pierced seven Sal trees with a single arrow inorder to prove his prowess to the monkey-king Sugriva, who sought Rama's aid against his brother Vali.

TVM 1.5.8. This verse, like others, alludes to Visnu's double nature as saulabhya and paratva (see note for TVM1.3.1), but in this case the two aspects of the god's




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nature are juxtaposed in a playful manner. At the end of a cosmic cycle, Visnu, as lord of the universe, "swallows"the world, and therefore the poet jests that the god has clods of earth in his stomach.

TVM 1.6.10. Each of the major Hindu gods is associated with an animal vehicle, which the god also carries as astandard. Visnu's vehicle is Garuda, the eagle.

TVM 1.7.5. Krsna is known for his amorous sports with the young women of the cowherds' community.

TVM 1.9.2. Visnu assumed the form of a boar, known as Varaha, in order to rescue the goddess Earth when thedemon Hiranyaksa abducted her and hid her in the depths of the ocean. The elephant referred to here isKuvalayapida, an elephant sent by Krsna's demonic uncle Kamsa to kill Krsna. Kuvalayapida was eventually killedby the god.

TVM 1.9.4. Visnu is sometimes depicted with two consorts, Sri (the goddess of wealth) and Bhu (Earth), andsometimes with a third wife, known in some Sanskrit sources as Nila, but known in most Tamil sources as Pinnaior Nappinnai (see note for TVM 1.5.1 above). The three worlds are heaven, earth, and hell. In some versions ofHindu cosmology an embryonic Visnu is said to rest on a banyan leaf that floats on the primeval ocean when theuniverse is in the phase of dissolution. Kannan is a Tamil name for Krsna, probably derived from Kanha, aPrakritization of Krsna. In this verse the narrator assumes the persona of Yasoda, the cowherd woman who raisedKrsna during his childhood.

TVM 1.9.5. The naked god is Siva (the ascetic); the god without birth is Brahma, who emerged from Visnu's navelseated on a lotus.

TVM 2.2.9. Brahma is usually depicted with four faces, one facing each of the cardinal directions. In Tamil,Brahma is sometimes known as ticaimukan, "he whose faces are the directions," or alternatively, nanmukan, "thefour-faced one."

TVM 2.4.1. Narasimha is the man-lion incarnation of Visnu. Visnu assumed this form in order to rescue hisdevotee Prahlada from the persecutions of his demon-father, Hiranyakasipu, who had been granted a boon thatstipulated that he could not be destroyed by man or beast, either indoors or outdoors, during the day or during thenight. Taking the man-lion form (neither man nor beast), Visnu killed Hiranyakasipu by ripping open his chest onthe threshold (neither indoors nor outside) at twilight (neither day nor night).

TVM 2.5.1. All male members of the Brahmin caste who have undergone initiation into adulthood are supposed towear a thread that is draped over one shoulder and encircles the torso.

TVM 2.7.9. "Lord with wild hair" is a possible translation of Hrsikesa, an appellation of Krsna.

TVM 2.8.5. References to four of Visnu's incarnations are found in this verse, although one, the horse, is notusually included among the standard ten avataras of the god. The horse is Hayagriva, a form Visnu assumed inorder to rescue the Vedas when they were stolen by two demons. The tortoise is Kurma, Visnu's tortoise-avatara,and the fish is Matsya, Visnu's fish-avatara. Visnu assumed the form of a tortoise in order to stabilize themountain Mandara, which the gods and demons used as a churning rod when they churned the ocean of milk. Thestory of Visnu's incarnation as a fish is an Indian version of an ancient flood myth found in many cultures.According to this story, the man Manu saved a small fish from a predator. The fish gradually grew larger andlarger and later towed Manu's boat over the flood waters that destroyed all other creatures. Visnu was incarnated asa man when he appeared on earth as Rama.

TVM 2.10.3, 2.10.4, 2.10.5. The ten verses of TVM 2.10 celebrate an ancient site sacred to Tamil Vaisnavas locatednear Madurai called Maliruncolai, "Mal's dark grove," known today as Alakarkoyil. References to this site appearin the late classical anthology Paripatal as well as in the alvars' poems.


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TVM 1.3.11. Catakopan is a name of Nammalvar, and Kurukur is the name of the saint's native village. (Seeintroductory section accompanying translations of Nammalvar's poems.)

TVM 2.8.11. Valuti is an epithet of the Pantiya kings. Kurukur is located within the Pantiya king's domain.

Poems of Manikkavacakar

In order to fully appreciate verses from Tirukkovaiyar, it is necessary to understand which of the dramatispersonae involved in the frame drama is narrating the words of the verse and what situation or turai underlies theverse. This is the kind of information often found in the colophons that accompany the classical poems collected inthe akam anthologies. (On the relationship of Tirukkovaiyar to classical Tamil akam poetry, see chapter 4.) Inpublished editions of Tirukkovaiyar, commentatorial apparatus and colophons serve much the same purpose. Thecolophons that accompany the translations do not, however, correspond with the colophons that traditionally appearin the Tamil text. Rather than translating the Tamil colophons, which tend to paraphrase the gist of each verse butoften do not identify the speaker and addressee, I have devised my own colophons, ased upon information providedby commentators, in order to help the reader situate each verse. I have followed the practice introduced by A. K.Ramanujan in his translations of classical akam poems by using phrases such as "what he said," "what she said,"etc.

TK 1. The Love-god is Kama, the personification of sexual desire.

TK 2. "The disembodied god" (anankan) is an epithet of Kama (see note for TK 70). In Hinduism death ispersonified as the god Yama.

TK 3. Siva's vahana or vehicle is the bull Nandi. Further discussion of TK 1-3 is found in chapter 5.

TK 6. Siva is often depicted as a yogi, seated in meditation upon Mt. Kailasa in the Himalayas. Many verses inTirukkovaiyar mention Tillai and/or Ambalam. Both refer to the site sacred to Tamil Saivites at present-dayChidambaram, Tillai referring to the town and Ambalam to Siva's "court" at Tillai. Amabalam literally means courtor public hall, but in a Saiva context it almost always refers to Siva's temple at Chidambaram. Sometimes theChidambaram site is referred to as Cirrambalam, "small Ambalam," to differentiate it from Siva's Perambalam or"large Ambalam" at Madurai. In some verses of Tirukkovaiyar reference is made to both Tillai and Ambalam orCirrambalam, in other cases to only one or the other. In a few verses I have managed to incorporate only one or theother into the translation where both occur in the original Tamil.

TK 8. Mt. Potiyil, located in south India near Cape Comorin, is said to be the abode of the sage Agastya, a figurewho is very prominent in Tamil literary legend, for it is Agastya who is traditionally credited with having writtenthe first formal Tamil grammar, though the work is not extant. As the reference in this verse implies, Agastya isoften considered to be a manifestation of Siva. Puliyur (tiger-town) is a name for the sacred Saiva site commonlyknown as Tillai or Chidambaram. This particular name alludes to the story of a Saiva devotee named Vyaghrapada(tiger-foot).

TK 20. Kutal, literally the "confluence," is an alternate name for the Pantiya capital city, Madurai, a city renownedin literary legend for its literary academy or cankam. "The seven tones" are the seven tones of a musical scale.

TK 70. This verse alludes to the myth that tells how Siva burned up the body of Kama, the god of passion, with ablast of fire from his third eye. The universe was threatened by a fierce demon, Taraka, and only a son of Sivawould be able to stand up against the formidable demon. Parvati, the daughter of the Himalaya, wished to marry




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Siva, but the ascetic god, who was totally absorbed in his meditation, took no notice of her. When Kama (theIndian Cupid) attempted to arouse Siva by shooting one of his flower-arrows at him, Siva opened his third eyeonly long enough to emit a jet of flame that reduced Kama's body to ashes. Because the heroine's eyes are red andher lips are white, her friend knows that she has recently made love. The underlying conceit of the verse is that thecolorful change in the heroine's appearance causes bees to be attracted to her as if she were a beautiful flower.

TK 71. In Tamil folklore one encounters the belief that crows have only one pupil that migrates from one eye tothe other. This idea is based, at least in part, on the observation that crows always cock their heads to one side orthe other when they look at an object.

TK 75. Siva is frequently depicted wearing a tiger's, or sometimes a lion's skin (see note for TK 178). According tothe Hindu view of time and the cosmos, periodically the entire universe is destroyed in a great conflagration calledthe pralaya. As the lord of destruction, Siva presides over the pralaya, and further, because Siva's existence isabsolute while that of the universe is provisional, the god is untouched by the pralaya. The "palm-leaf horse"referred to in the verse is called matal in Tamil. At a certain stage in the development of the romance between thehero and the heroine, the hero is consumed by pain and frustration because the heroine is holding herself aloof fromhim. He threatens to construct a horse from the sharp leaves of the palmyra palm and to ride through the townproclaiming his love for the girl and simultaneously causing himself great pain. This will ruin the girl's reputation,and consequently no one else will want to marry her.

TK 102. The skirt of leaves (or sometimes flowers) referred to here is called talai in Tamil. If a girl accepts a talaifrom a young man, she, in effect, is indicating that she agrees to become his lover. When the hero encounters theheroine and her girl friends in the forest, he pretends to be hunting and asks about the buffalo as a pretense inorder to initiate conversation.

TK 109. Saiva devotees often smear ash on their bodies, emulating Siva, who is covered with ash because heresides at the cremation ground. In Saiva temples worshipers receive sacred ash (tiruniru, viputi) as a sign of Siva'sgrace.

TIC 115. See note for TK 102.

TIC 120. Netumal is a name for Visnu (see note for MTA 61).

TIC 144. In akam poetry and in some of the medieval genres that developed from it, suggestion (iraicci) is animportant source of poetic effect. In this verse the heroine's girl friend implies that the hero ought to give somethought to marrying his lover. The parrots have consumed all the grain growing in the meadow, but even thoughthe stalks are now devoid of grain, the birds still remain loyal to their meadow. The narrator implies that the heroshould not abandon his lover just because he has enjoyed her favors. Rather, he should be loyal to her and marryher.

TK 178. Siva is typically depicted wearing a snake around his waist or in his hair. According to Saiva myth, agroup of forest sages became furious with Siva when the god purposefully disrupted their sacrificial rites with hisdancing. They conjured a deadly serpent in the sacrificial fire and turned it against the god, but Siva effortlesslysubdued the serpent and wrapped it around his waist. The sages also conjured a tiger (or in some versions, a lion)in the fire, and the god likewise killed it and wore its skin as a garment.

TK 250. This verse contains a good example of a poetic figure called ullurai, a kind of implied comparison. Theverse implies that the hero who first made love to the heroine and now has been neglecting her is like the monkeythat first plunders the plantain's fruit and then adds insult to injury by enjoying the tree's cool shade.

TK 287. The cause of the heroine's pallor is lovesickness, but her parents are


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unaware of this. Thinking that the girl is the victim of a malignant spirit, they arrange for the velan, a kind ofpriest-exorcist, to come and try to work a cure. In this verse the heroine describes the problematic situation thiscreates for her. The verse also contains an allusion to the famous pillar-of-fire myth, which asserts Siva'ssupremacy over Brahma and Visnu. According to the myth, Brahma and Visnu each claimed to be the supremegod, and consequently the two gods became embroiled in an argument. Just then a pillar of fire appeared beforethem. Brahma and Visnu were baffled by this and determined to find the apex and the base of the mysteriouspillar. Brahma mounted his vehicle, the swan, and flew up into the heavens in hope of finding the pillar's apex.Visnu assumed the form of a boar and began to burrow into the ground in order to find the pillar's base. However,both gods were unsuccessful, and thus they realized that Siva, whose symbol is the lingam or phallus (hererepresented by the pillar of fire) was superior to them both.

TK 292. Here the heroine's girl friend mocks the velan, knowing that his attempt to rid her friend of the "malignantspirit" that plagues her is doomed to failure. (See note to TK 287.) The velan drinks toddy (palm wine) inpreparation for the ritual.

TK 324. The hero has promised to return by the onset of the rainy season. The heroine is distraught because, thoughthe rains are imminent, the hero has not yet returned.

TK 335. According to poetic convention, when the heroine is suffering from lovesickness, usually due to separationfrom her lover, her chocolate brown complexion (mamai: the color of a new mango leaf) turns a sallow color(pacalai). The heroine's girl friend compares the heroine's yellowed complexion to gold and the tears she sheds inanticipation of separation from her lover to pearls. She then asks rhetorically, with these "riches" so close by, whyshould the hero feel the need to travel to distant lands in search of wealth?

TK 341. Several conventional metaphors for female beauty are worked into this verse. A beautiful woman iscompared to a creeper (which I have sometimes translated as "liana") because her waist is so thin. Her black eyesare shaped like small fish, and her lips are as red as the ripe kovai fruit. In this verse the hero declares that even inseparation from his lover, his eyes are still filled with her image.

Manikkavacakar's Tiruvacakam is one of the most popular texts in the Tamil Saiva corpus. The text is actually acompendium of fifty-one poems that range in length from two short verses (Tiruppataiyelucci) to one hundredverses (Tiruccatakam, from Sanskrit sataka, "one hundred"). Translations from four of the fifty-one componentpoems of Tiruvacakam are included here. These are Tiruccatakam, Tiruvammanai, Annaippattu, andTiruttacankam, respectively the fifth, eighth, seventeenth, and nineteenth sections of the text. Tiruccatakam, thelongest and most varied of these four sections, is composed often subsections consisting often verses each. All tenverses in each subsection share a common meter, and each set often is identified by an underlying theme, e.g.,"realizing the truth," "acquiring knowledge," etc.

TC 2. Purantaran (Puramdara in Sanskrit), which means "sacker of fortresses," is a frequently occurring epithet ofIndra, a god who, while quite prominent in the Vedas, is accorded a much lower status than Brahma, Visnu, andSiva in later Hindu literature.

TC 8. This verse describes the pralaya, the periodic dissolution of the world into unformed primordial matter,described in Hindu cosmologies.

TC 26. The word nayen (or in this case, nayinen) frequently occurs in Manikkavacakar's poems. This word, whichis a compound of the morphemes nay (dog) and en (first person singular) means something on the order of "I whoam a dog," a term of self-denigration.




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TC 29. The theme of bhakta worship, that is, worship of the lord's true devotees, is prominent in Manikkavacakar'spoetry.

TC 36. According to the commentator, the "golden city" mentioned in this verse is Sivaloka, Siva's heaven.

TC 55. Uma is Siva's consort. The verse alludes to a popular iconographic form of Siva called Ardhanarisvara, "thelord whose one half is woman." To emphasize that Siva's full nature encompasses both male and female genders,the god's right side is represented as male and his/her left side as female.

Tiruvammanai is one of nine sections in Tiruvacakam that are modeled after game songs. In each case the narratoris a group of girls who sing while they play a game or engage in other activities especially associated with youngwomen or girls. In the case of Tiruvammanai they are playing a game very similar to jacks. One of the hallmarksof Tiruvammanai and the other game-song sections of Tiruvacakam is the refrains that conclude each verse, whichundoubtedly are very similar to the refrains of "authentic" folk songs.

TA 2. The town of Perunturai (known as Avataiyarkoyil in present-day Tamilnadu) figures prominently inManikkavacakar's life story. It was at Perunturai that Manikkavacakar first came face to face with Siva and wasmoved to dedicate his life to the Saiva cause. The verse also alludes to a Saiva tale that is well known inTamilnadu. A brief summary follows: Once Siva was expounding the meaning of the agamas (texts on ritual anddoctrine) to his consort Parvati. However, Parvati was inattentive, and Siva angrily cursed her to be born as afisherman's daughter. Siva's sons, Ganesa and Skanda, were greatly upset by this. Seizing the ägamas, they cast thesacred books into the sea. Siva had not instructed his gatekeeper, the bull Nandi, to allow the two boys inside hischamber, and so he cursed Nandi to become a shark as punishment. Later Siva came to earth as a fisherman,recovered the agamas, redeemed Nandi, and married the fisherman's daughter.

TA 9. This verse contains an allusion to an episode in Manikkavacakar's life story. Manikkavacakar, beforeadopting the life style of an ascetic saint, was the chief minister of the Pantiya king. Once the Pantiyan entrustedManikkavacakar with a large sum of money to purchase horses for the royal stables. Manikkavacakar journeyed toPerunturai to fulfill his mission, but there he met Siva, who had assumed the form of a guru. Realizing at once thathe had found his true master, he donated all the king's money to the Saiva cause. When Manikkavacakar returnedto the palace without horses or money, the king had him punished. But on avani mula day (the day when the moonappears in the constellation Mulam during the month of Avani [August-September]), Siva appeared in the guise ofa foreign horseman leading a herd of fine horses to the the Pantiyan's stable. The "horses," however, were reallywild jackals, and later they reverted to their original form and caused havoc within the palace. The saint waspunished once more.

TA 10. The Pantiyas ruled over a territory that encompassed the southern districts of present-day Tamilnadu, andthey resided in Madurai, their capital city. The Pantiyas figure prominently in Tamil Saiva mythology. Forinstance, Siva is said to have married a Pantiya princess, Minaksi, and to have ruled the Pantiya territory asCuntara Pantiyan. Also, Manikkavacakar served as chief minister for another Pantiya king. Annamalai is the site ofa famous Saiva temple in Tamilnadu.

TA 14. This verse contains a clear-cut reference to the Hindu doctrine of transmigration of the soul. As the verseindicates, during the course of its journey through the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, the soul may assume awide variety of embodiments. The "god" referred to here does not mean one of the great Hindu gods, but a deva, abeing of greater refinement than a human being but nevertheless subject to the law of transmigration.




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TA 16. Cassia (konrai in Tamil) is a flower that is especially associated with Siva.

TA 17. Nataraja, Siva as lord of the dance, is depicted with four arms: one hand points to his lifted foot (as asymbol of spiritual liberation), one hand is held in the position that signifies freedom from fear (abhayamudra), athird hand holds a drum, and the fourth hand holds a flame, symbols respectively of cosmic creation anddestruction.

The ten short verses of Annaippattu ("the ten spoken to the mother") display the direct, almost naive quality of folksongs, yet at the same time they presume familiarity with the dramatis personae and the conventional narrativeoutline of classical akam poetry. The narrator for the verses of Annaippattu is understood to be the akam heroine'sgirl friend (toli), who is speaking to the heroine's foster mother (cevvili tay), who also happens to be her ownnatural mother. In each verse the toli reports what the heroine has told her about her love for Siva. The word"mother" (annai), which appears twice in each verse, is not to be taken in a literal sense, Here it is an affectionateaddress form spoken by the heroine to her girl friend.

AP 1. "The god with four faces" (nanmukan) is Brahma (see note for TVM 2.2.9). At the pralaya (see note for TC8), Siva dances the tandava dance, and as he dances he plays an hourglass-shaped drum.

AP 6. Uttarakocamankai (Northern Kocamankai) is the site of a Siva temple where Manikkavacakar is said to havespent some time shortly after his conversion experience. Presumably he was instructed to go there by Siva.

AP 8. Aruku is a type of grass that is frequently associated with Siva. Although in the standard image of Nataraja,Siva is not depicted holding finger cymbals (talam), the reference to cymbals here is clearly a corollary of Siva'sstatus as lord of the dance.

AP 10. "The flower of madness" mentioned here is umattam (or simply mattam), known in English as datura. Wheningested this plant has a hallucinogenic effect, and thus it is appropriately associated with Siva, who sometimesbehaves like a "madman."

Tiruttacankam (the ten limbs [of the kingdom]) is a clear expression of the close relationship between south Indianconceptions of gods and kings. The ten verses of this poem describe the ten "limbs" (anga) of Siva's kingdom. Inthe translation each of the ten "limbs" appears in italics.

TT 1. "The god who sits on a white lotus" is Brahma. According to Hindu mythology, cosmic creation begins withthe creator-god, Brahma, appearing from Visnu's navel seated on a white lotus. Thus Visnu is seen as the ultimatesource of creation, while Brahma is the active agent of creation. Arur is the site of an important Saiva temple inTamilnadu.

TT 7. "The three taints" (mu-malam) figure prominently in Tamil Saiva theology. These three psycho-metaphysicalentities cloud the intelligence of human beings and keep them mired in the cycle of birth and death. The threetaints (malam literally means "dirt") are anavam, "egoism," mayai, the power of illusion, which causes people tobelieve in the reality of the empirical world; and kanmam or karma, the accumulated effects of action, whichentraps living beings in samsara, the cycle of births and deaths.




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APPENDIX ATHE SAINTS' HYMNS IN PRESENT-DAY TEMPLE RITUAL

The Tamil saints were witnesses to the rise of the Hindu temple in south Indian religious life, and it was not longafter their lifetimes that the saints' hymns were incorporated into the ritual routines of major temples. 1 The patternof worship that evolved in medieval Tamilnadu is vital today, for both temples and the canonical hymns continueto play a major role in the religious lives of Tamil Hindus. In the following pages I will describe particularoccasions for recitation of the sacred Tamil hymns in modern-day Saiva and Vaisnava temples. This description isbased upon personal observation and upon interviews I conducted in 1978-79 at two templesthe Atinatar (Visnu)temple at Alvartirunakari in Tinnevelly District and the Kapalisvara (Siva) temple in the Mylapore area of Madras.While the details of ritual organization do vary somewhat from one temple to another, the basic agamic paradigmfor worship is fairly uniform. Therefore these descriptions will give a rough idea of how the Tamil hymns figureinto the ritual of Saiva and Vaisnava temples throughout Tamil-speaking south India.

Selected hymns from the Tirumurai and from the Nalayira-tiviyapirapantam are recited respectively at Saiva andVaisnava temples for both daily (nitya) and special, festival (naimittika) worship ceremonies. The ritual event that,by far, focuses the greatest amount of attention on the Tamil canon is the Vaisnava Adhyayanotsava or ''recitationfestival." 2

The Adhyayanotsava is still celebrated in Tamil Vaisnava temples, but only the temples at Srirankam,Srivilliputtur, and Alvartirunakari (the name by which Nammalvar's native town of Kurukur is presently known)continue the tradition of araiyar cevai ("worship by the araiyar," the temple functionary who leads recitation of theTamil hymns). 3 At these temples, the araiyar recites the verses of the Nalayiram before the festival image of thedeity, and, employing the stylized pantomime technique called abhinaya, he symbolically acts out the meaning ofselected verses with hand gestures (mudra) and facial expressions (bhava). He also recites portions of a traditionalcommentary for some of the verses. The araiyar's recitation generally conforms to the schedule that Nathamuni issaid to have established in the tenth century, and the araiyar, who traces his descent from Nathamuni, receives thevestments and garlands that had adorned the deity, just as his ancestors had. The musical modes employed by thearaiyar when he recites the alvars hymns are collectively referred to as devagana, a word that can be translated as"divine melody." This word is motivated by the identification of the Nalayiram with the Vedas and their "limbs,"because the word gana denotes a prosodic/ musical unit of the Samaveda. The araiyar's role seems to bespecifically




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identified with musical recitation of the Tamil hymns, and this is probably the reason why the araiyar recites onlythree of the four "thousands" of the Tamil pirapantam during the twenty days of the Adhyayanotsava. The versesof the remaining iyarpa "thousand" are recited in a nonmusical manner on the day following the conclusion of thefestival. The word iyarpa, from iyal, "literary composition" + pa, "verse," denotes a poem that is not intended formusical performance. Metrical structure seems to be the primary consideration for identifying a verse as iyarpa oricaippa (musical verse). The climax of the Adhyayanotsava, called carrumurai (from carru, ''to declare") falls onthe final night of the festival, when the last portion of Tiruvaymoli is recited. In these verses Nammalvar declaresthat he has finally received the lord's grace and that he now dwells at the lord's feet. At a specified point in hisrecitation the araiyar lifts the festival image of Nammalvar and touches its head to the feet of Perumal's (i.e.,Visnu's) image, thus symbolizing that the alvar has found refuge with the lord.

The Adhyayanotsava is the most explicit demonstration of the significance of the saints and their hymns in thecontext of temple worship, but this festival is by no means the only occasion for recitation of the Tamil hymns inVaisnava temples. Practice varies from one temple to another, but in most, provisions are made for the recitation ofat least some portions of the Nalayiram during one or more of the daily pujas and during festivals, when the deityrides in procession through the streets. Vaisnava temples also celebrate the janma naksatras of the alvars, i.e., theconjunctions of the months and the lunar asterisms during which, according to tradition, the alvars were born.

The traditional view that Maturakavi established a shrine for Nammalvar in the Visnu temple of Kurukurestablishes a precedent for the practice of enshrining iconic images of the saints in temples. Today almost everyTamil Vaisnava temple houses a shrine for Antal, the "bride" of the lord, and usually an image of one of thealvars, whose biography may be connected with the temple's history, is kept in the prakara (temple corridor) justoutside the main sanctum. Some temples may house icons for all twelve alvars. In most instances, after one of thedaily pujas, the oil lamp (arati), which has been displayed before the lord, is taken to the alvars shrine and isdisplayed there for the saint's benefit. The ceremonial act of displaying the lamp is called diparadhana. Antal isgiven special attention during the month of Markali (December-January), when there are special recitations of herpoem, Tiruppavai, and other acts of worship are performed at her shrine. Nammalvar also has a unique status inthe temple, which is demonstrated during the daily puja. After puja is performed in the main sanctum, the templepriest may touch the head of a worshiper with a metallic crown as a mark of honor. The crown, called Catakopan.,one of the names of Nammalvar, symbolizes Visnu's feet. For a devotee to be touched by the lord's feet is a greathonor. Since Nammalvar, Visnu's greatest devotee, eternally abides at the feet of the lord, the crown thatsymbolizes Visnu's feet bears the name of the saint.




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Following is a summary description of the occasions for ritual recitation of the alvars hymns at the Atinatar templeat Alvartirunakari. 4 There are probably few, if any, Vaisnava temples where the alvars hymns receive suchthorough attention at the present time, though they receive at least some attention at virtually all agamic Vaisnavatemples in Tamilnadu. As is the case at most temples, the deity's day is composed of two segments. The temple isopened and the deity receives worshipers from the early morning, when he is awakened, until midday. After themidday puja has been completed, the doors of the sanctum are closed, and the deity "rests" until about 4:00 P.M.,when the doors of the sanctum are opened and the deity can again be viewed by the public. After the last eveningrituals are completed, the deity "sleeps" for the duration of the night. In ideal terms, there are said to be six dailypujas, three in the morning and three in the evening, but there are actually eighteen separate ritual events listed onthe schedule of daily ritual activity that is displayed in the temple. Ten of these, the first at 6:00 A.M. and the lastat 11:00 A.M., are designated "daytime" (pakal) events, and eight more, beginning at 5:00 P.M. and ending at 8:45P.M., are designated "nighttime" (iravu) events. It is therefore more useful to think in terms of a bipartite ritualday, divided between morning and evening.

Selections from the alvars hymns are recited twice daily, once in the morning and once in the evening. AtAlvartirunakari certain select hymns are recited every day, and there is also a provision to recite the entireNalayiram over the course of a month. The corpus is divided into twenty-seven portions, each corresponding toone of the twenty-seven naksatras (segments of the ecliptic identified by particular stars they contain) throughwhich the moon passes in its orbit, and each day one of these portions is recited. In the morning when the deity isbeing bathed and anointed, the araiyar sings ten verses from Periyalvartirumoli. In these verses the poet,Periyalvar, describes Yasoda bathing Krsna. In this instance the textual portion is obviously of particular relevanceto the ongoing ritual activity. Afterward, while the deity is being adorned (alankaram), the gosthi (i.e., thecommunity of male Srivaisnavas attending the puja) chants Kanninunciruttampu by Maturakavi, Antal'sTiruppavai, and the daily portion of the Nalayiram, which is determined by the current naksatra. The araiyar alonesings the first and last verse of each text. During the evening the Nityanucantanam, a selection of verses from theNalayiram, is recited. Alvartirunakari, first nine compositions are recited before the image of Visnu, and then threemore are recited before Nammalvar's image. This, for the most part, is the daily schedule for recitation of the alvarshymns, but during festival times it is superseded by the special festival schedule.

At Alvartirunakari, four great ten-day festivals, or Brahmotsavas, are celebrated annually during the Tamil monthsof Cittirai (April-May), Vaikaci (May-June), Maci (February-March), and Pankuni (March-April). All templescelebrate at least one annual Brahmotsava, which may fall at different




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times of the year at different temples, depending upon the local mythology of the temple. Four, however, is anunusually large number of major festivals for a temple to celebrate in a year. The most important ritual events ofthe Brahmotsavas are the ceremonial processions that are conducted in the streets surrounding the temple, once inthe morning and once again in the evening. The ritual schedules for the four annual festivals celebrated atAlvartirunakari are essentially identical. During the Brahmotsavas the alvars hymns are recited during the ten daysof the festival. Portions of the first "thousand" and of Tiruvaymoli are recited daily in one of the temple mantapams(pillared halls), and the other half of the corpus is recited in the street during the morning and evening processions.

This does not exhaust all the occasions for recitation of the alvars hymns at Alvartirunakari. At this temple theentire Nalayiram is recited eighteen times and Tiruvaymoli even more often during the course of a year. Theoccasions for recitation of the hymns include the monthly recitation by naksatra, the celebrations of the alvars'janma naksatras, the four Brahmotsavas, and the Adhyayanotsava. But even in Vaisnava temples that do not lavishso much attention on the alvars hymns, at least some portions of the Nalayiram are recited during the daily pujaceremonies, and the hymns are recited in procession during the annual festival(s).

Turning now to recitation of the Tamil Saiva hymns, the occasions for ritual recitation are, by and large, quitesimilar to those described above, only there is no Saiva equivalent to the Vaisnava Adhyayanotsava, which isdevoted to recitation of the entire canon. Today, in the Kapalisvarar temple, puja, defined as a ritual occasionwhich includes displaying the flame of an oil lamp before the deity's image (diparadhana), is performed five timesdaily in the main temple sanctum, and hymns from the Tirumurai are recited during all five of these ceremonies. 5Recitation of the Tamil hymns is one of the final events of the puja. In the latter portion of the puja, the lamp isdisplayed for the deity, and Sanskrit mantras from the Vedas and other sources are recited by Brahmin priests(gurukkal). After the Sanskrit recitation, the gurukkal indicates that it is time for the recitation of the dravidaveda,and the otuvar, a non-Brahmin, sings five hymns selected from the Tirumurai, called panca puranam (the fivepuranas). The first is one of the Tevaram hymns (first through seventh Tirumurai, by the saints Campantar, Appar,and Cuntarar); the second is a hymn from Tiruvacakam; the third is one of the Tiruvicaippa hymns collected in theninth Tirumurai; the fourth is a verse from the Tiruppallantu by Cetanar, a poem also included in the ninthTirumurai; and the last is a verse from Periya Puranam, Cekkilar's twelfth-century hagiography of the sixty-threenayanmar. The choice of particular verses for ritual recitation is often determined by the local mythology of thetemple. Tirukkovaiyar, Tirumular's Tirumantiram (the tenth Tirumurai), and the poems anthologized in the eleventhTirumurai are not included among the Tamil hymns




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recited in the temple. The most obvious explanation is that these compositions are not written in meters that areappropriate for musical recitation, and music is central to the otuvar tradition.

At the Kapalisvarar temple a procession of priests and other temple functionaries visits all the subsidiary shrines inthe temple twice daily, once after the noon puja, and again after the evening twilight puja ceremony. At eachshrine the Brahmin priest performs diparadhana, and at most of the shrines the otuvar also recites one of theTevaram hymns. While making the rounds of the temple shrines, the procession visits a shrine that houses the iconsof the four premier saints of Tamil Saivism, known as the nalvar (the three Tevaram poets and Manikkavacakar)and another that houses the icons of the sixty-three nayanmar. At the first, the otuvar recites a verse of praise to thenalvar (the four), written by a poet named Caivayellappa Navalar, and at the second he sings one of the Tevaramhymns by Cuntarar, the saint who first praised the nayanmar in poetry.

The dual role of the saints as the lord's servants and as recipients of service performed by worshipers is plainlyexpressed in the daily ritual routine of the Kapalisvarar temple and of many other Saiva temples where the ritualday follows the same basic pattern. In the main sanctum the saints' hymns are recited as an act of service to Siva.During the daily tour of the temple's secondary shrines, the saints are honored with a display of the oil lamp and ahymn of praise. In both aspects of their ritual role the Saiva saints are not unlike the alvars, only in the Saivacontext the saint's status as the lord's servant and as recipient of the lord's grace is not represented as graphically asit is the Vaisnava Adhyayanotsava. Also, it does not appear that the otuvar is explicitly identified as the saint'srepresentative, while the Vaisnava araiyar clearly is so identified.

The saints' hymns are recited during two other types of temple events. At many major Saiva temples a period oftime is set aside for musical performance of the hymns, especially of the Tevaram hymns. These performances takeplace in a mantapam, which is located within the temple precincts, but outside the main sanctum. For theseoccasions, called Tirumurai parayanam (reading of the Tirumurai), the otuvar sings the Tamil hymns to theaccompaniment of musical instruments. These performances are not as formal as the ritual recitation of the hymnsfor the pujas, and consequently they are not subject to the rules that govern ritual performances. Instrumentalaccompaniment is allowed at a Tirumurai parayanam, and the performers are not required to render each hymn inthe musical mode that is traditionally thought to be proper to it. Recitation of the hymns during festival processionsoutside the temple walls is similar in performance style. On these occasions the otuvars and accompanists walk atthe very end of the procession and sing the Tamil hymns.

The importance attached to musical rendition of the Saiva hymns has a long history in Tamil Saiva lore. Numberedamong the sixty-three nayanmar




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is a musician named Tirunilakanta Yalppanar, a player of the yal (an ancient south Indian instrument of the lutefamily) and member of the panar caste of musicians. He accompanied the Tevaram poet Campantar on hisnumerous visits to Saiva shrines, and as the saint composed devotional hymns, the panar set them to music.Tirunilakanta Yalppanar set a precedent for musical performance of the Tevaram hymns, and when Nampi AntarNampi recovered the Tevaram manuscripts from the locked room at Chidambaram, 6he also had to reconstruct theproper musical modes for their performance. He accomplished this by visiting the native village of TirunilakantaYalppanar, where he met a woman of the panar caste who learned the modes by divine revelation. She returned toChidambaram with Nampi, and there she sang and danced for Siva.

In both Vaisnava and Saiva temple settings, the hymns of the Tamil saints are recited as an act of service to thedeity, and the saints themselves are members of the divine population that inhabits the numerous shrines housedwithin the temple walls. Worship of the saints follows the same forms that are employed for worship of theprincipal deity, but on a commensurately smaller scale.7 The diparadhana performed daily at the shrines of thesaints is not preceded by an elaborate puja as in the shrine of the principal deity, nor is it performed as many timesduring the day. On the level of periodic ritual, Vaisnavites honor the saints by celebrating the janma naksatras, orbirthdays, of the alvars, and Saivites annually observe the moksa atainta naksatras of their saints, the asterismsunder which the saints attained moksa, i.e., the anniversaries of their deaths. These periodic observances in honorof the saints fit into the paradigm of the great annual festivals, which reenact important events in the mythicalbiography of the presiding deity.

The differences between the ways the Tamil saints and their hymns are incorporated into the ritual of Vaisnava andSaiva temples tend to reflect certain differences between Vaisnava and Saiva theological traditions in Tamilnadu.Ritual performances in Vaisnava temples reiterate the Srivaisnava doctrine of ubhayavedanta, the doctrine thatboth Sanskrit scripture and the alvars' hymns are equally sacred. In Vaisnava temples, both Sanskrit and Tamiltexts are recited as part of the daily ritual, and, at least in the three temples where the araiyar tradition survivesintact, the Tamil tradition is vested in the araiyar and the Vedic tradition is vested in the priest or pattar (Sanskrit:bhatta) who recites Vedic mantras during ritual performances. Both functionaries are given opportunities toreceive highly prized tokens of honor from the deity. Also, during festivals, provision is made for Vedic recitationof the Vedas and the Tamil pirapantam recitation when the deity travels through the streets in procession. Thegosthi of pirapantam reciters walks immediately in front of the deity, and the reciters of Vedic hymns walkimmediately behind the deity as the procession moves through the streets. Thus, the deity is supported on eitherside by the reciters of the sacred texts,




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and recitation of both is viewed as divine service (kainkarya). In Tamil Vaisnavism the Tamil hymns of the alvarsand Sanskrit Vedic hymns occupy essentially symmetrical positions in the structure of daily pujas and festivalcelebrations, and both are recited by Brahmin functionaries. In the broad view, the organization of ritual inVaisnava temples highlights the continuities that bind Sanskrit and Tamil elements together in a unified system.

In Saiva temple ritual, Sanskritic and Tamil spheres are not as closely bound. During the daily performance of pujaa non-Brahmin functionary recites the Tamil hymns, and while performing his service he stands slightly fartherfrom the deity than the Brahmin priest who recites Vedic hymns for the puja. Also, in festival processions, theotuvars and musicians stand at the end of the procession, not in immediate proximity to the deity as the Vaisnavapirapantarn reciters do.

On the surface these characteristics of Saiva temple ritual suggest that the Tamil element in the ritual is subordinateto the Sanskrit element, but it is doubtful that the otuvars who recite the Tamil hymns would agree. They wouldlook not to the Brahmin temple priests but to the non-Brahmin heads of Saiva mathas (monasteries) forauthoritative pronouncements on religious matters. In fact, frequently the affairs of the temples are administered bythese mathas. The organization of ritual activity in the Saiva temples of Tamilnadu may reflect a history ofincomplete fusion between a Sanskritic tradition, which is represented by the Brahmin priesthood, and a Tamiltradition, which is maintained by non-Brahmin temple servants and monastic authorities. In this context, therewould have been less opportunity for thorough integration of Sanskrit and Tamil elements, such as one finds inSrivaisnavism, because study and transmission of the two traditions took place within separate social spheres. TheSrivaisnava Brahmins who took the Tamil saints and their poetry into their fold also knew Vedic literature, andthus they were in a position to develop a doctrine that would bring the two together. Vedic study, however, was nottraditionally pursued by non-Brahmins; to the contrary, sastraic law denied non-Brahmins access to the Vedas. TheSaiva non-Brahmin groups who have been the transmitters of Tamil Saiva literature therefore tended to regard theTamil element in Saivism as an autonomous domain, even though it did not become the dominant ritual languagein the temple.

Notes

1. According to Nilakanta Sastri, inscriptional evidence reveals that the saints' hymns were incorporated into theritual of certain major temples at least by the tenth century. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Colas (Madras: Universityof Madras, 1954), pp. 637, 639.

2. The origin of this festival is discussed in chapter 2.

3. See chapter 2 for a discussion of the araiyar's role as described in the chronicle of the Srirankam temple.




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4. The informants who provided this information include P. Sarangacharya, araiyar at the Atinatar temple, andother residents of Alvartirunakari.

5. My information concerning the ritual of the Kapalisvarar temple comes primarily from conversations with P. A.S. Rajasekharan, a professional reciter of the Tamil Saiva hymns.

6. See chapter 2.

7. For a concise description of the basic agamic paradigm for deity worship in south Indian temples, see ArjunAppadurai and Carol Breckenridge, "The south Indian temple: authority, honor and redistribution," Contributionsto Indian Sociology, n. s., 10, no. 2 (December 1976): 187-212.

APPENDIX BINDEX OF MYTHOLOGICAL/ICONOGRAPHIC ALLUSIONS AND PROPER NAMES OCCURRING IN THEPOEMS

I. Saiva myths and iconography

(a) Ardhanarisavara (Siva in half-male/half-female form): TC 55; TA I0, 18; AP 9; TT 3.

(b) Burning of Kama: TK 70.

(c) Crescent moon in Siva's hair: ATA 11, 37; TA 9; AP 10.

(d) Destruction of Tirupura (the three demon cities): A TA 37; TVM 1.1.8.

(e) Ganga held in Siva's hair: A TA 11; TK 248.

(f) Mt. Kailasa (Siva's abode): TK 6, 23, 120.

(g) Nandi (bull), Siva's mount and banner: TK 3; TA 5; TT 10.

(h) Nataraja (Siva as lord of the dance): A TA 77; TK 23, 335; TC 43; AP 8.

(i) "Pillar of fire" myth: TK 287; TA 18; AP 6.

(j) Sacred ash: TK 109; TA 9; AP 1, 4, 7.

(k) Siva as fisherman: TA 2.

(l) Siva as horseman: TA 9, 20; AP 7.

(m) Siva holds flame in his hand: TA 17.

(n) Siva's black (blue) throat: A TA 1, 33; TK 102, 324, 341; TA 9.

(o) Siva wears a snake: MuTA 63; TK 11, 178; AP 4.

(p) Siva wears a tiger's (lion's) skin: TK 75; AP 4.

II. Vaisnava myths and iconography

(a) Embryonic Visnu afloat on banyan leaf in primal ocean: TVM 1.9.4.

(b) Gagendra (Visnu's elephant-devotee): MuTA 99.

(c) Garuda (eagle), Visnu's mount and banner: TVM 1.6.10.

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(d) Hayagriva (Visnu's horse incarnation): TVM 2.8.5.

(e) Krsna as a cowherd: MTA 55; TVM 1.5.6, 1.7.3, 1.7.5.

(f) Krsna kills Kuvalaypida (elephant-demon): TVM 1.9.2.

(g) Krsna kills Madhu (Madhusudana): TVM 2.3.1, 2.7.5.

(h) Krsna kills Putana: MTA 11; TVM 1.5.9, 1.6.7, 1.9.5.

(i) Krsna lifts Mt. Govardhana: MTA 86; TVM 2.10.4.




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(j) Krsna steals butter: MTA 92; TVM 1.3.1, 1.5.1, 1.5.8, 2.3.8.

(k) Krsna wins Pinnai as his bride by wrestling seven bulls: TVM 1.5.1, 1.7.8, 1.8.7, 2.5.7, 2.9.10.

(1) Kurma (Visnu's tortoise incarnation): TVM 2.8.5.

(m) Laksmi born from a lotus: TVM 1.3.1, 1.5.9.

(n) Matsya (Visnu's fish incarnation): TVM 2.8.5.

(o) Rama defeats Ravana and conquers Lanka: MTA 35; TVM 1.6.7, 2.4.3, 2.4.10, 2.9.10.

(p) Rama pierces seven Sal trees with a single arrow: TVM 1.5.6, 2.5.7.

(q) Tulasi (sacred basil): MuTA 2, 79; TVM 2.3.9, 2.5.7.

(r) Vaikuntha (Visnu's heaven): TVM 1.5.4.

(s) Vamana (Visnu's dwarf incarnation): MTA 98; ITA 14; TVM 1.3.10, 2.8.7.

(t) Varaha (Visnu's boar incarnation): TVM 1.9.2, 2.8.7.

(u) Visnu's discus, conch, etc.: MTA 1, ITA 67; MuTA 1, 63, 99; TVM 2.3.10, 2.5.1, 2.7.5, 2.10.5.

(v) Visnu sleeps on his snake-bed in the ocean of milk: MTA 55; TVM 1.5.4, 2.5.7; TK 120; TT 1.

(w) Visnu's red-lotus eyes: ITA 90; TVM 2.5.1, 2.7.5, 2.7.9, 2.8.11.

(x) Visnu's three consorts: TVM 1.9.4.

(y) Visnu's three postures: MuTA 94; TVM 2.8.7.

(z) Visnu "swallows" the universe: TVM 1.5.8, 1.8.7, 1.9.4, 2.8.7.

III. Other mythological and iconographic allusions and culture-bound references

(a) Brahma seated on a lotus: TT 1.

(b) Sacred thread (worn by Siva/Visnu): TVM 2.5.1, TA 9.

(c) Seven births: MuTA 2, 79.

(d) Seven worlds: TVM 1.5.1, 1.5.8, 1.8.7, 2.2.11; TT 2.

(e) Three worlds: TVM 1.9.4, 2.8.5.

(f) Trimurti (Brahma, Visnu, and Siva): TVM 1.5.4

IV. Names of Hindu gods appearing in the translations

(a) Aran (Hara): TVM 1.1.8, 1.3.6, 2.8.3; TK 3.

(b) Ari (Hari): TVM 1.3.6.

(c) Ayan (Aja): TVM 1.1.8, 1.3.6, 2.8.3; TC 2; TA 12, 18; AP 6.

(d) Kannan: TVM 1.9.4, 2.2.9, 2.3.9.

(e) Kesava: TVM 1.5.6, 1.9.2.

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(f) Madhava: TVM 1.5.6, 1.6.10, 1.6.11, 2.3.1, 2.7.5.

(g) Mal (Tirumal, Netumal): MTA 61, 70, 92, 98; ITA 90; MuTA 2; TVM 2.8.7, 2.10.3, 2.10.4, 2.10.5; TK 120;TC 2; TA 12, 18; AP 1, 6.

(h) Naranan: ITA 1.

(i) Narasimha: TVM 2.4.1.

(j) Punniyan: MTA 98.

(k) Purantaran: TC 2, 72.

(l) Sri/Tiru: MuTA 1, 2; TVM 1.5.6, 2.7.9, 2.8.3.




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V. Local place names

(a) Alankatu: TAMTP 1, 11.

(b) Annamalai: TA 10.

(c) Arur: TT 1.

(d) Karaikkal: TAMTP 11.

(e) Kurukur: TVM 1.3.11, 1.6.11, 2.2.11, 2.8.11, 2.10.11.

(f) Kutal: TK 20.

(g) Mal's dark grove (Maliruncolai): TVM 2.10.3, 2.10.4, 2.10.5.

(h) Northern Kocamankai (Uttarakocamankai): AP 6; TT 2.

(i) Pantiya country (Pantinatu): TA 10; AP 5; TT 2.

(j) Perunturai: TA 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 18, 20; TT 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10; AP 3.

(k) Potiyil: TK 8.

(l) Puliyur: TK 8.

(m) Tillai/Ambalam: TK 6, 11, 20, 23, 70, 71, 75, 102, 109, 115, 120, 144, 166, 178, 248, 250, 287, 289, 292,304, 315, 324, 335, 341, 343; TC 55; TA 5.

(n) Valuti country (Valutinatu): TVM 2.8.11.

APPENDIX CINDEX OF MOTIFS

With one exception, the motifs listed below emphasize the large thematic territory that is shared by Tamil Vaisnavaand Saiva bhakti traditions. No doubt there are a fair number of motifs that are restricted to the poetry of onebranch of Hinduism or the other, but there is also a whole range of motifs concerning attributes of the deity, thepoet, and the nature of bhakti that the Tamil canons of Vaisnavism and Saivism share in common. I have chosen toemphasize these because all too often Tamil Vaisnavites and Saivites are familiar only with the literature andcustoms favored by their own family traditions, and they fail to perceive that many themes run through theliterature of both branches of Hinduism. This can be attributed partly to a lack of exposure and partly to thespecialized, sectarian-specific languages of exegesis that refract and sometimes restrict people's experience of thesaints' poems. Twentieth-century scholarly literature on the subject of Tamil religious literature usually appears inthe form of either in-depth studies of a single religious tradition or studies that strive for a comprehensive view ofcultural development and consequently confine their observations concerning literature to broad generalizations.

The motifs enumerated here emerged from my own experience with the Tamil bhakti poems. Some may duplicatethemes that are discussed in theological literature, but I did not purposefully attempt to authenticate each motif Ichose by tracing its history in traditional exegesis. This is not intended to be a complete catalogue of the motifsthat appear in the poems of the Tamil saints, nor are the motifs I have identified sacrosanct. But still, I believe that


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the scheme has a firm grounding in the poems and that it elucidates some of the preoccupations of their authors.

The twenty motifs catalogued below are a mixed lot. Sometimes they appear in the poems in the form of formulaicexpressions (e.g., "the lord of the gods," "the lord sweet as honey"). In other instances they may be enacted in apoem although they are not expressed in so many words. (For instance, a poem that speaks of the lord'stranscendence and his astounding deeds in one line and then of his humility in the next, enacts the idea that the lordis simultaneously remote and accessible.) Some of the motifs are actually clusters of related idea units; e.g.,devotion to sensual enjoyment, affection for anyone and anything other than the lord, and dedication to family areall impediments to spiritual fulfillment. And conversely, some motifs spill over into others; for instance, the ideathat the lord breaks the bonds of karma for his devotees and that the lord is a refuge for his devotees are closelyrelated.

This motif index is based upon what is, after all, a small sample of the entire Tamil bhakti corpus. It is just abeginning. The reader will doubtlessly notice other thematic patterns that emerge from these translations, not tospeak of themes that are given greater emphasis by poets who are not directly treated in this study. In this motifindex I offer my own experience of the poems as a guide to other readers. But of course readers are also invited toalert themselves to other ways in which the poems interact with one another.

Motif 1: The lord is the master of gods

Under this motif I have included descriptions of Siva and Visnu as the leader or king of the gods, the lord who issuperior to the gods, and the lord who is worshiped by the gods. These descriptions most commonly appear in theform of a formulaic phrase or epithet, often in apposition with other descriptive phrases or names that isolateparticular aspects of the god's nature. "The gods" are designated by a number of words in these poems such astevar (Sanskrit: deva), amarar (the immortal ones), vanor (they who dwell in the sky), and vinnor (they who dwellin heaven).

Poems: TVM 1.1.8, 1.3.10, 1.3.11, 1.5.1, 1.5.4, 1.5.9, 1.7.4, 1.7.8, 1.9.5, 2.3.1, 2.3.9, 2.8.5; TC 14, 29, 43; TA 10;TK 304.

Motif 2a: The great gods are really one

This motif appears, as far as I can tell, primarily in Vaisnava poems. The two early Vaisnava poems in the sampleaffirm that Visnu and Siva are identical, or at least inseparable. Nammalvar more often speaks of the three murtisas aspects of one supreme god. Sometimes he does not name Visnu in the poem, but merely states that "the lord"or "he" became Brahma and Siva, or that he contains Brahma and Siva. In some of his poems Nammalvar impliesthat Visnu is prior to or superior to the other murtis, but in others the three great gods are grouped together as threemanifestations of one supreme being.

Poems: MTA 98; MuTA 63; TVM 1.1.8, 1.3.6, 1.5.4, 2.8.3.




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Motif 2b: Siva is superior to Indra, Brahma, and/or Visnu

Although I have found a verse by Karaikkalammaiyar (A TA 18, not translated here) that manifests motif 2a, Sivapoets, or at least Manikkavacakar, tend to emphasize Siva's superiority to the other great gods of Hinduism. Inmany instances this claim is couched in an allusion to the ''pillar of fire" myth (see note for TK 287).

Poems: TK 287; TC 2; TA 12, 18; AP 1, 6.

Motif 3: The lord is simultaneously accessible and remote

This motif, which occurs with great frequency in the poems of both Vaisnava and Saiva poets, also receives ampleattention in theological literature. The motif is manifested in a number of ways. A poet may declare that the lord isremote to the faithless but near-at-hand for his devotees, or he may contrast his own intimate relations with thelord and the gods' inability to ever know him. Some poems enact this motif by first describing the lord as anawesome being who performs heroic deeds and then speaking of the simple, natural way he appears for hisdevotees.

Poems: MuTA 81; TVM 1.1.8, 1.3.1, 1.5.1, 1.5.8, 1.7.3, 1.9.2, 1.9.4, 1.9.5; TC 29, 47; TA 2, 12, 16, 18, 20.

Motif 4: The lord encompasses the whole world

The Tamil bhakti poets were fond of the idea that the lord is omnipresent in space and in time. They say that he isthe first cause and the final cause of everything in the world; he encompasses the vastness of the universe andpermeates the tiniest atom; he even exists in the nonexistent. In many of these poems we are told that the lordbecame the five elementsearth, water, fire, wind, and ether. He also exists in every living creature, from thesimplest forms of life to the gods in heaven. The poets construct their characterizations of the lord's universalityfrom elementary ontological categories. Thus in · these poems we can perceive the basic outlines of the poets'world view.

Poems: ATA 20, 77; MTA 61, 92; MuTA 38, 44; TVM 1.1.7, 1.1.10, 1.3.2, 1.5.4, 1.9.5, 2.2.9, 2.3.2, 2.7.5, 2.8.5,2.9.6; TK 71; TC 15, 29, 43; TA 12.

Motif 5: The lord dwells within the devotee

The poet-saint often affirms that the lord dwells in his heart or in his mind, or that he and the lord are inextricablyintermingled. In many poems this motif appears as a kind of "personalization" of the idea that the lord isomnipresent. The lord exists everywhere, but what matters most to the devotee is that the lord is present in his ownbeing. Srivaisnava theologians expressed this idea in their conception of the antaryamin (one who goes within) orharda (one who dwells in the heart) form of Visnu. Sometimes the motif takes on a very physical, erotic coloring.In many verses of Tiruvacakam Manikkavacakar speaks of Siva as the lord who "enters" him, in language that isunabashedly




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erotic. The motif may be expressed as a state of being or, in its erotic manifestation, as an experienced event.

Poems: ATA 11; MuTA 81, 94; TVM 1.7.4, 1.7.5, 1.7.7, 1.7.8, 1.8.7, 1.9.2, 1.9,4, 1.9.5, 2.3.1, 2.7.9; TK 289; TC 26,29, 32, 41, 47; TA 2, 16, 18; AP 3.

Motif 6: The lord is unfathomable

Visnu and Siva are often described as the lord who cannot be seen, the lord who cannot be described, or the lordwho is beyond comprehension. Sometimes the poets say that the mysteries of the lord's nature even defy the acutemental faculties of the gods.

Poems: ATA 61; MuTA 81; TVM 1.1.8, 1.3.6, 1.3.10, 2.3.2, 2.8.7; TK 287; TC 15, 43, 47; TA 18.

Motif 7: The lord destroys karma

Siva and Visnu are both often described as the lord who destroys the karma of his devotees, the lord who frees hisdevotees from their past deeds (vinai), or the lord who saves his devotees from rebirth. Many of the poems conjurean image of salvation as a physical act, for they speak of the lord as one who cuts (aru) his devotees' bonds(parru).

Poems: ATA 16, 37; ITA 67; MuTA 2, 79; TVM 1.3.11, 1.5.6, 1.6.7, 1.6.10, 1.6.11, 1.7.3, 2.3.8, 2.7.9, 2.8.5, 2.10.11;TC 8, 28; TA 5, 12, 14; TT 2, 8.

Motif 8: The lord protects his devotees

The themes of protection and service are two sides of the same coin in the saints' poems. The lord offers protectionand is served by his devotees. In this sense the god/devotee relationship is similar to the relationship between kingand subject or between master and servant. Closely related to this theme is the idea that the lord grants marvelousfavors to his servants. The lord does more than protect his devotees from threatening forces; he cares for them andbrings them positive benefits. For this reason it is a great privilege to be accepted into the lord's service.

Poems: ATA 5; MTA 55; MuTA 99; TVM 1.5.9, 1.7.4, 1.7.5, 2.3.9, 2.5.1, 2.8.5; TK 144, 166, 315, 343; TC 14, 26,28, 32, 43; TA 6, 9, 10, 18, 20.

Motif 9: Sensuous descriptions of the lord

The hymns of the saints are filled with metaphors that liken the lord to brightly colored flowers, brilliant jewels,and the sweetest, most delicate foods. The Vaisnava poets especially favor visual metaphors. They place greatemphasis on the idea that Visnu's physical presence delights the eyes of his beholders. Manikkavacakar is fond ofdescribing Siva as the "sweet lord." His taste-oriented metaphors give a sense of the devotee's experience of Siva'spresence.

Poems: MTA 92; TVM 1.7.3, 2.5.1, 2.7.5, 2.9.10; TC 11, 26, 36, 55, 90; TA 6, 14, 16.




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Motif 10: The lord harmonizes with his devotee

The lord reveals his gracious nature by harmonizing his form with the perceptive powers and the temperament ofhis devotee. The devotee need not tax his imagination to approach the lord; the lord takes the form of hisimagining. This motif, in a sense, is an epistemological complement to the idea that the lord is omnipresent. Hisuniversality encompasses thoughts as well as things. Poems: ATA 33; TVM 1.1.5.

Motif 11: Obstacles to devotion

Sensory pleasures, affection for other human beings, and family responsibilities divert the devotee's attention fromthe lord. The devotee therefore must overcome these obstacles if he hopes to receive the lord's grace.

Poems: ITA 14, 35; TK 115; TC 41; TA 20.

Motif 12: The devotee is concerned for the lord and nothing else

The bhakta is indifferent to everyone and everything but the lord. Compared with his devotion to Visnu or to Siva,nothing else appears valuable to him. The poets also assert that penances and other practices intended to bring meritare irrelevant if one has devotion, and that the distinction between pleasure and pain, heaven and hell has nomeaning for the lord's devotee.

Poems: ATA 11; MTA 11; ITA 35; TVM 2.9.5; TC 2, 72; TA 20.

Motif 13: The pain of separation from the lord

The anguish of separation is as much a part of the bhakta's experience as the joy of union. This motif evolves outof two of the most prevalent formats for devotion in the Tamil poemsthe lover/beloved relationship and the master/servant (or king/subject) relationship. The first often appears in the garb of traditional love poetry and focuses uponthe suffering of the female beloved who languishes in separation from her lover. Nammalvar included many poemsof this type in Tiruvaymoli (see chapter 1). The devotee who aspires to serve the lord is also vulnerable because hemay not be accepted into the select ranks of the lord's servants; or, even if the lord is willing to have him, he mayfind himself unequal to the task. Poems undergirded by this theme often emphasize the devotee's unworthiness.They also speak of the devotee's isolation from the lord's worthy servants who receive the lord's protection. Thesuffering devotee is always portrayed as an utterly helpless figure.

Poems: TVM 2.3.10, 2.7.9; TC 11, 14, 36, 41, 55, 90; TA 17.




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Motif 14: The devotee becomes possessed by the lord

The idea that a devotee's love for the lord can so overwhelm him that he behaves like a madman appears very earlyin the history of Tamil bhakti. Karaikkalammaiyar begged Siva to let her become a "ghost" (pey) so she couldignore the society of men and give herself fully to her devotion. Likewise, Peyalvar's name suggests that hisobsessive preoccupation with Visnu made him behave like a "ghost." The later poets also say that the lord drivesthem mad or that devotion impels them to dance, sing, cry, or even lose consciousness.

Poems: TAMTP 1, 11; TVM 1.6.3, 2.3.9, 2.4,1; TK 324; TA 2,5,17; AP 7, 10.

Motif 15: Bhakti glorifies the devotee

In some poems the saints say that the lord rewards his devotees with power and glory. Juxtaposed with otherprevalent themes in the poems, this motif implies at least two paradoxes. First, there is an implication that oneattains power and glory through humility and renunciation, because the devotee must surrender his will to the lordto prove himself worthy to receive the lord's grace. The second paradox is that the devotee attains the very rewardsthat are supposed to be of no consequence to him. Of course the claim that the devotee is rewarded with the gloriesof heaven can also be interpreted metaphorically: the fruit of devotion is as marvelous as the glories of heaven.

Poems: ITA 90; TVM 1.3.11, 2.8.11; TK 315; TC 28.

Motif 16: The lord is mother and father to the devotee

This motif can be interpreted in two ways, one metaphorical and one literal. The poets may be saying that for hisdevotees, the lord is everything that parents are for their children. But since the poets also stress that the lordliterally is the whole world and every creature in the world, it is also possible to interpret this motif to mean thatthe devotee's actual parents are one of the many manifestations of the lord. Only poems in which the lord is spokenof as the poet's mother and father are listed below. In a much larger number of poems the poets address the lord as"my father."

Poems: TVM 2.3.2; TC 47.

Motif 17: Witty allusions to myth and iconography

The bhakti poets sometimes liked to display their wit by inventing poetic "jokes" involving Visnu's and Siva'smythology and iconography. Usually the poets' witticisms take the form of a direct question to the god, in whichtwo of the god's myths or two aspects of the god's iconography are juxtaposed in a clever, but unconventional way.The early poets especially favored this form, and Nammalvar also gave it some attention.

Poems: ATA 77; MTA 92; TVM 1.5.8.




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Motif 18: God as warrior and king

The heroic, kingly nature of the lord comes through plainly in the Tamil bhakti poems, and this aspect of the lord'scharacter is the central theme of several poetic genres included in the bhakti corpus. In the kovai genre there is a"slot" in each verse that is filled with a laudatory reference to a king and the land he rules. In Manikkavacakar'sTirukkovaiyar this slot is filled with references to Siva and to his abode at Tillai (Chidambaram). (See chapter 4.)Each verse of Tiruttacankam identifies one of the ten "limbs" of Siva's kingdom. Further, both Vaisnava and Saivacanons contain an "awakening hymn'' (Tiruppalliyelucci) adapted from a type of song sung to awaken a king.Poems: MTA 55; TVM 2.5.7; TK (all); TC 15; TA 2, 10, 16; TT (all).

Motif 19: Sacred places

The saints played a seminal role in the cult of sacred places, for the most important temples of Visnu and Siva arelocated at the sites that they celebrated in their hymns. Sometimes the cult of sacred places is linked to the idea thatSiva or Visnu is a king. In these instances, the poets speak of the god's earthly abode as his kingdom or as hiscapital city. Sometimes they make claims for the benefits of making pilgrimages to the places favored by the lord.There are some texts in which every verse includes a reference to a particular abode of the god. Manikkavacakarpraises Chidambaram (known by the name of Tillai or Ambalam) in every verse of Tirukkovaiyar, and Perunturaiin Tiruvammanai, Tiruttacankam, and other verses of Tiruvacakam. The ten verses of verse set 2.10 in Tiruvaymolicelebrate Visnu's temple at Tirumaliruncolai (Mal's dark grove), known today as Alakarkoyil.

Poems: TAMTP 1, 11; TVM 2.10 (all); TK (all); TC 55; TA 2, 5, 9, 10, 18; TT 2, 3, 8; AP 6.

Motif 20: Verses of pure Tamil

The bhakti poets take great pride in the Tamil language. In Srivaisnavism the idea that Tamil is a sacred languageon a par with Sanskrit is given explicit treatment in the doctrine known as ubhayavedanta (twofold Vedanta).Tamil Saivism is, in some ways, even more devoted to the Tamil language, as witnessed by the fact that itsfoundational theological texts, the Saiva Siddhanta sastras, are written in Tamil.

Poems: TAMTP 11; ITA 1, TVM 2.8.11; TA 10.




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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Comacuntaranar, P. V., ed. Tirukkovaiyar Palaiya Uraiyum Putiya Vilakkamum. Madras: South India SaivaSiddhanta Works Publishing Society, 1970.

Purushotama Naidu, B. R., ed. Tiruvaymoli Ittin Tamilakkam (in ten volumes). Madras: University of Madras,1971.

Ramacami, C. A., ed. Patinoran Tirumurai. Madras: The South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society,1971.

Sri, P., ed. Tiruvaymoli Telivurai. Madras: Cekar Press, 1966.

Tantapani Tecikar, C., ed. Tirukkovaiyar unmaivilakkam. Tiruvavatuturai: Tiruvavatuturai Atinam, 1965.

Turaicami, V., ed. Panti Kovai. Madras: Star Publications, 1957.

Varadarajan, G., ed. Tiruvacakam. Madras: Palani Brothers, 1971.

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Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology (with Writing Degree Zero). Translated by A. Lavers and C. Smith.Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

Bharati, Agehananda. The Tantric Tradition. London: Rider and Company, 1965.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Bryant, Kenneth E. Poems to the Child-God: Structures and Strategies in the Poetry of Surdas. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1978.

Buck, David C., trans. Dance, Snake/Dance! A Translation with Comments of the Song of Pampatti-Cittar.Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1976.

Corbett, Edward P. J., ed. Rhetorical Analyses of Literary Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

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Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1975.

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Cutler, Norman. Consider Our Vow: An English Translation of Tiruppavai And Tiruvempavai. Madurai: MuthuPatippakam, 1979.

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Damodaran, G. Acarya Hrdayam: A Critical Study. Tirupati: Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, 1976.

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Dhavamony, Mariasusai. Love of God According to Saiva Siddhanta. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971.

Dimock, Edward C., and Denise Levertov. In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali. New York: AnchorBooks, 1967.

Dimock, Edward C., et al. The Literatures of India: An Introduction. Chicago and London: University of ChicagoPress, 1974.

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Gonda, Jan. Vedic Literature. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1975.

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INDEX

A

Abhaya Kulasekhara: recovery of Saiva poems, 8

Abhinavagupta: and theory of rasa, 58-61;

on fictiveness of Sanskrit drama, 71

Abhinaya. See araiyar

Acarya Hrdayam: theological interpretation of Tiruaymoli, 105;

caste and spiritual hierarchy, 132

Adhyayanotsava: defined, 8;

celebration of, 45, 187, 188, 190;

role of araiyar, 54n

Agastya: allusion to, 181n

Aiyur Mulankilar: poetry, 92n

Akam: defined, 62;

and Sanskrit drama, 65;

compared to bhakti poetry, 68-69, 106;

fictiveness of, 71;

and kovai, 82-83;

landscape imagery, 84;

world view of classical poets, 90-91;

and puram, 62, 91n-92n;

narrative framework of, 103;

Tiruvaymoli and Tirukkovaiyar compared, 103;

use of suggestion as poetic effect, 182n

Akapporul: defined, 32;

examples of, 34;

rhetorical unity of, 37;

Vaisnava interpretation of Nammalvar's poetry, 69, 113;

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narrative framework of Tiruvaymoli, 103-104

Alakarkoyil. See Maliruncolai

Alakiyamanavalaperumal Nayanar: bhakti poetry and Veda, 14n;

theological interpretation of Tiruvaymoli, 105

Allegory: Saiva interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar, 93-94, 98-99, 102, 104-105, 106-107;

Vaisnava interpretation of Tiruvaymoli, 105-106

Alvar: defined, 2, 13n;

intermediary role of, 44;

dating controversy, 54n;

modern temple icons, 188

Alvartirunkari: modern celebration of araiyar cevai, 187-88

Arnabalam: defined, 181n

Antal: as goddess incarnate, 13n;

legend of, 14n-15n;

modern temple ritual, 188, 189. See also Tiruppavai

Antati: defined, 38n

Anubhavagrantha: defined, 43-44;

and meyppatu, 75n

Appar: inclusion in Tirumurai, 48;

divinity of, 49;

and Campantar, 49;

conversion of Pallava kings, 49-50;

modern recitation of poetry, 190. See also Tevaram

Araiyar: defined, 45;

origin of title, 54n;

modern ritual role, 187-88

Arayirappati Guruparamparaprabhavam: as hagiographic source, 122

Ardhanarisvara: female aspect of Siva, 184n

Arikecari Parankuca Maravarman: identified as hero of Pantikkovai, 89

Arputattiruvantati: poetry, 119-21. See also Karaikkalammaiyar

Arruppatai: defined, 91n

Aruku: defined, 185n

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Astabhujan. See Visnu

Atinatar: ritual use of poetry at, 187-90, 192-93

Auvaiyar: puram verse, 64

B

Bali: allusion to, 177n

Bhakti: defined, 1-2;

and literature, 5-7;

as vernacular religious movement, 7-8;

comparison of poetry with Vedic hymns, 9, 10;

view of gods, 51-52;

and Vedic mantra, 52;

brotherhood of saints, 132. See also Poetry, bhakti; Religion; Saivism; Vaisnava

Bhanita: as distinct from phalasruti, 38n

Bhava: defined, 59

Brahma: allusions to, 180n, 185n;

relationship to Siva and Visnu, 183n

Brahmin. See Caste

Brahmotsavas: modem celebration of, 189-90

C

Caivayellappa Navalar: modern recitation of poetry, 191

Campantar: association with temple, 8;

inclusion in Tirumurai, 48;

legendary life history, 49;

divinity, 49;

and Appar, 49;

conversion of Pantiya kings, 49-50;

modern recitation of poetry, 190. See also Tevaram

Cankam: rhetorical structure, 25

Caste: Vellalas, 53n;

Brahmin education and access to Veda, 111, 193;

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superseded by spiritual hierarchy, 132. See also Class

Catakopan. See Nammalvar

Cekkilar: hagiography, 4;

modern recitation, 190. See also Hagiography; Periya Puranam

Ceraman Perumal: and Cuntarar, 49

Cetanar: modern recitation of poetry, 190. See also Tiruppallantu

Chidambaram: recovery of Saiva hymns, 50;

allusions to 181n;

in Tirukkovaiyar, 202

Cilapatikaram: and akam/puram tradition, 92n

Cittars: defined, 14n

Cuntarar: association with temple, 8;

model for Periya Puranam, 13n;


divinity, 49;

and Ceraman Perumal, 49;

modern recitation of poetry, 190, 191. See also Tevaram




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D

Divyasuricarita: as hagiographic source, 41-42, 44, 122

G

Gajendra: allusion to, 178n

Ganga (Ganges): allusion to, 175n

Garudavahana: as hagiographic source, 122

H

Hagiography: Saiva, 4;

as interpretive framework, 68;

use of conventions, 107;

as complement to poems, 113;

hagiographic sources, 117, 122, 148;

expression of Vaisnava themes, 124;

Nammalvar viewed as incarnation of Visvaksena, 132;

vision of Saiva society, 149;

modern recitation of, 190

Hiranyakasipu: allusion to, 180n

I

Iconography: allusions in bhakti poetry, 175n-185n

Ilankiran: example of akam, 85

Iraiyanar: example of akam, 85

Irantam Tiruvantati: poetry, 127-28

Itaikkunrurkilar: puram verse, 64

K

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Kama: allusions to, 181n, 182n

Kanninunciruttampu: praised Nammalvar, 131;

modern recitation of, 189. See also Maturakavi

Kapalisvara: ritual use of poetry at, 187, 190-93

Kapilar: puram verse, 64-65

Karaikkalammaiyar: inclusion in nayanmar, 4, 117;

rhetorical variants in bhakti poetry, 21, 22, 27;

example of phalasruti, 28;

legendary life story, 29, 117-18;

example of puram/bhakti structural parallels, 66;

dating, 118;

poetry, 119-21;

mythological and iconographic allusions in poetry of, 175n-176n;

view of Visnu, 198;

possession as motif, 201. See also Arputattiruvantati; Tiruvalankattu-mutta-tiruppatikam

Kesava. See Krsna

Kovai: characteristics of, 82-83;

and puram, 83;

in Tirukkovaiyar, 85-91;

akam/puram transition, 87;

dating of first use, 88

Koyil Oluku: as temple chronicle, 8;

inclusion of poems in temple ritual, 44-46;

origin and role of araiyar, 54n

Krsna: allusions to, 176n, 177n, 179n, 180n

Kuruntokai: examples of akam, 84, 85, 86

Kuruparamparai pirapavam: dating controversy, 53n

Kutal: allusion to, 181n

Kuvalayapida: allusion to, 180n

L

Lila: as paradigm for bhakti poetry, 10-11

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Literature: and bhakti, 1-2, 5-7;

problem of definition, 57;

Indian theories of, 57-61;

evaluation of through rasa, 60;

Tamil use of stories, 108

M

Madhava. See Krsna

Maliruncolai: allusion to, 180n;

in Tiruvaymoli, 202

Manikkavacakar, 2, 4, 12;

date controversy, 13n, 149;

example of expanded model of poem as verbal event, 21;

rhetorical structure, 29-30;

recurring themes, 39, 40;


divinity, 49;


inclusion of Tirukkovaiyar in Saiva canon, 82;

use of kovai, 85-91;

legendary life story, 148-49, 184n, 185n;

poetry, 150-74;


view of Siva, 198-99;

motif of god as king, 202;

praise of sacred places, 202. See also Tirukkovaiyar; Tiruvacakam

Marutan Ilanakanar: puram verse, 63

Maturakavi: associated with Nammalvar, 13n, 41-43, 45, 131, 132;

role in Vaisnava tradition, 49. See also Kanninunciruttampu

Meyppatu: defined, 61;

and anubhava, 75n

Mocikiranar: puram verse, 64

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Munram Tiruvantati: poetry, 128-30

Mutal Tiruvantati: poetry, 125-27

Mythology: allusions to in Tamil poetry, 23, 175n-185n;

and history in bhakti poetry, 76n;

humor in allusions, 201

N

Nammalvar: dating controversy, 2, 54n, 132;

Visnu as author of poems, 9;

and phalasruti, 28, 29;

rhetorical structure, 32, 35, 36, 37;

poetry, 32-35, 35-36, 133-47;

recurrent themes, 39;

place in Vaisnava tradition, 40-43, 48, 187, 188, 189;

legendary life story, 41-42, 49, 131-32;

and Visvaksena, 53n, 132;

alternative names, 53n, 132;

example of puram/bhakti structural parallels, 67, 68;

Vaisnava interpretation of poems, 69, 113;

view of Visnu, 76n, 92n;

narrative framework of akapporul verses, 103-104;


relationship of Brahma, Siva, and Visnu, 197;

use of love imagery, 200. See also Tiruvaymoli

Nampi Antar Nampi: recovery of Saiva hymns, 8, 50

Nanjiyar: commented on Tiruvaymoli, 41, 44, 46

Narasimha. See Visnu

Nataraja. See Siva




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Page 209

Nathamuni: place in Vaisnava tradition, 40, 50;

and Nammalvar, 44, 53n;

revival of recitation festival, 45

Natyasastra: defined, 58;

analysis of plot, 60-61

Nayanmar: inclusion of poets, 5, 13n, 48

Nayen: defined, 183n

O

Otuvar: role in Saivism, 50, 190-91;

defined, 55n

P

Pantikkovai: first use of kovai, 88;

poetry, 89;

compared with Tirukkovaiyar, 89-90

Pantiyas: in Saiva mythology, 184n

Paramatattan: husband of Karaikkalammaiyar, 117

Parankuca Nayaki: as female expression of Nammalvar, 69

Paraikucan. See Nammalvar

Patikams: defined, 27

Parvati: allusions to, 181n-182n, 184n

Peraciriyar: commented on Tirukkovaiyar, 94-96;

commentary compared to Saiva interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar. 99-102

Periyalvartirumoli: modern recitation of, 189

Periya Puranam, 4;

source of life story of Karaikkalammaiyar, 117;

Manikkavacakar not included, 148;

modern recitation of, 190. See also Cekkilar

Perumal. See Visnu

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Perunturai: allusions to, 184n;

in Tiruvacakam, 202

Peyalvar: status as alvar, 2;

use of ullurai, 23-24;

example of rhetorical variant, 26;

legendary life story, 122-23;

dating, 124;

poetry, 124, 128-30;


possession as motif, 201

Phalasruti: defined, 27;

as genre, 27-29;

examples of, 34-35

Pillaittamil: defined, 91n

Pinnai: allusion to, 179n

Pinpalakiya Perumal Jiyar: as hagiographic source, 53n

Pirapantarn. See prabandha

Poetics: and bhakti poetry, 7, 12-13;

and rasa, 60;

Sanskrit and Tamil, 61-63, 65-66;

bhakti poetry and Western criticism, 70-73;

bhakti poetry compared to rasa, 74-75;

influence of classical tradition on bhakti poetry, 107

Poetry, bhakti: as literary genre, 5-7;

typol-ogy, 11-12;

as verbal event, 20, 21;

and Western literary criticism, 36-37, 70-73;

recurrent themes, 39, 40;

similarity to puram, 66, 68, 69-70;

compared to akam, 68-69;

historicity and fictiveness, 72-73;

audience psychology, 74;

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place of narrative, 102-103;

in modem India, 111-13;

motifs shared in Saiva and Vaisnava traditions, 196-202. See also Bhakti; Religion; Ritual; Saiva; Vaisnava

Poetry, love: poetic phases of love, 75n, 109n-110n;

landscape imagery, 84, 91n;

flower symbolism, 109n. See also akam

Poykaiyalvar: status as alvar, 2;

rhetorical framework, 22-23;

use of shifters, 25;

example of puram/bhakti structural parallels, 66, 67;

legendary life history, 122-23;

poetry, 123, 124, 125-27;

dating, 124;

mythological and iconographic allusions in poetry of, 176n-178n

Prabandha: defined, 81;

characteristics of, 81-82

Pralaya: allusions to, 182n, 183n

Puja: as Saiva ritual, 188, 189, 190, 191

Punitavati. See Karaikkalammaiyar

Punniyan. See Siva

Puram: defined, 62;

compared to akam, 62;

role of listener, 62-63, 65;

examples of rhetorical variants, 63-65;

and bhakti poetry, 66, 68, 69-70;

historicity, 72;

and kovai, 83;

world view of classical poets, 90-91;

separation from akam, 91n-92n

Purananuru: poetry, 92n

Purantaran: allusion to, 183n

Putam. See Putattalvar

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Putattalvar: Jakobsonian diagram of poem by, 20-21;

example of rhetorical variant, 26;


legendary life story, 122-23;

poetry, 123, 127-28;

dating, 124;

mythological and iconographic allusions in poetry of, 176n-178n

R

Rajaraja Cola: recovery of Saiva hymns, 50

Rama: allusions to, 22-23

Ramanuja: promoted recitation of poems in Vaisnava temples, 40

Rasa: as aesthetic theory, 58-61;

defined, 59;

audience response required, 74

Ravana: allusion to, 22-23

Religion: bhakti movement, 1-2;

development of Vaisnava, 40;

modern role of bhakti poetry, 111-13, 187-93. See also Bhakti; Ritual; Saiva; Vaisnava

Ritual: use of bhakti poetry, 7-10, 112;

Vedic sacrifice and temple worship, 52;

and interpretation of bhakti poetry, 70;

modern role of poetry, 187-93

Rsis: composition of poems, 8-9

Rupagoswamin: bhakti theology, 14n

S

Saint. See alvar

Saiva: and Tamil Veda, 7;

ritual use of poetry, 8, 187, 190-93;

compared to Vaisnava,

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Page 210

47-50;

rhetorical model of, 48-49;

recovery of hymns, 50;

inclusion of prabandha poem in canon, 82;

and Tirukkovaiyar, 90;

allegorical interpretation of Tirukkovaiyar, 93-94, 98-99, 102;

interpretation compared to Peraciriyar's commentary on Tirukkovaiyar, 99-102;

oral interpretive tradition, 104;

modern role of bhakti poetry, 112-13;

interpretation of variant poetry, 113-14;

role of Manikkavacakar, 149;

motifs shared with Vaisnava, 196-202;

Tamil as sacred language, 202. See also Siva

Sanskrit: transliteration, ix;

literature and bhakti, 1;

influence on Tamil poetry, 6;

theories of literature, 58;

drama, 60, 61, 65;

poetics, 61-63, 65-66. See also Saiva; Tamil; Vaisnava

Siddhas. See Cittars

Siva: poetry of devotees, 2-4;

addressed in poem, 28, 29;

as theme of Tiruvacakam, 29;

perception of in bhakti poetry, 51-52, 198-99;

and Tirukkovaiyar, 86, 90, 104;

and Manikkavacakar, 148;

allusions to, 175n, 176n, 178n, 180n, 181n-182n, 184n;

relationship to Brahma, and Visnu, 183n;

descriptions of as motif, 197. See also Saiva

Sri: allusion to, 179n

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Srirankam: modern celebration of araiyar cevai, 187-88

Sriranka Nacciyar. See Visnu

Srivilliputtur: modern celebration of araiyar cevai, 187-88

T

Taints: symbolism of in Saiva theology, 185n

Tamil: transliteration, ix;

literary history, 9-10;

manipravala, 40;

theory of literature and bhakti poetry, 58;

poetics, 61-66;

as sacred language, 202

Taniyan: defined, 28

Tevakulattar: example of akam, 84

Tevaram: association with temples, 8;

modern recitation of, 190, 191. See also Appar; Campantar; Cuntarar

Thanjavur: recitation of hymns at, 8

Tinai: defined, 84

Tiru: allusion to, 24

Tiruccatakam. See Tiruvacakam

Tiruirattaimanimalai. See Karaikkalammaiyar

Tirukkovaiyar: inclusion in Saiva canon, 82;

and kovai, 85-91;

poetry, 86, 96-97, 150-60;

and Siva, 86, 104;

compared with Pantikkovai, 89-90;

Saiva interpretation of, 12, 93-94, 98-99, 102, 113-14;

commented on by Peraciriyar, 94-96;

comparison of Saiva interpretation and Peraciriyar's commentary, 99-102;

legend of composition, 104, 148;

colophons, 181n;

motif of god as king, 202;

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praise of sacred places, 202. See also Manikkavacakar

Tirumal. See Visnu

Tirumankai: legendary life story, 45

Tirumurai: inclusion of poets, 48;

recovery of, 50;

loss of Saiva hymns, 55n

Tirumurukarruppatai: variant of arruppatai, 91n

Tirunilakanta Yalppanar: set hymns to music, 191-92

Tiruppallantu: modern recitation of, 190. See also Cetanar

Tiruppavai: modern recitation of, 188, 189. See also Antal

Tiruvacakam: rhetorical structure, 29-30;

poetry, 30-31;

and Tirukkovaiyar, 82;

interpreted as spiritual autobiography, 104;

Siva's recording of, 104, 148;

Saiva interpretation, 113-14;

described, 183n;

modern recitation of, 190;

view of Siva, 198-99;

praise of sacred places, 202. See also Manikkavacakar

Tiruvalankattu-mutta-tiruppatikam: poetry, 121;

described, 176n. See also Karaikkalammaiyar

Tiruvatavurar Puranam: hagiographic source, 148

Tiruvaymoli: and phalasruti, 28, 29;

rhetorical structure, 32, 35, 36;

poetry, 32-35, 35-36, 133-47;

commented on by Nanjiyar, 41, 44, 46;

Visnu as source, 42;

recitation as temple ritual, 45, 190;

narrative framework, 103-104;

Vaisnava interpretation, 105-106;

described, 178n-179n;

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love imagery, 200;

praise of sacred places, 202. See also Nammalvar

Tiruvilaiyatal Puranam: hagiographic source, 148

Tolkappiyam: elements of classical Tamil poetry, 61;

historicity and fictiveness of akam and puram, 72;

chronology and authorship, 75n

Turai: definition and function, 62

U

Ubhayavedanta: Vaisnava doctrine of, 190.See also Veda

Ula: defined, 91n

Ullurai: defined, 23;

example of use, 23-24, 182n;

characteristics of, 87

Umapati Civacariyar: loss of Saiva hymns, 55n

Upangas: defined, 14n

Uttarakocamankai: site of temple, 185n

Uyir: defined, 93




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V

Vaisnava: poetic tradition, 2;

ritual use of poems, 8, 187-90, 192-93;

parallelism with sacred Sanskrit literature, 7, 15n;

development of sect, 40;

rhetorical model, 44;

compared to Saiva, 47-50;

theology, 48;

divine origin of poets, 49;

subsects, 53n;

interpretation of Nammalvar's poems, 69, 105-106;

theological interpretation of saints' poems, 74;

modern role of bhakti poetry, 112-13;

interpretation of variant poetry, 113-14;

themes expressed in hagiography, 124;

place of Nammalvar, 132;

aspects of Visnu, 179n;

motifs shared with Saiva, 196-202;

Tamil as sacred language, 202. See also Visnu

Vamana. See Visnu

Veda: and Tamil poetry, 7-10, 49;

metaphysics of poetry composition, 8-9;

in modern India, 111, 190. See also Caste

Vedangas: defined, 14n

Velan: defined, 183n

Vellalas: caste, 53n

Visnu: poetry Of devotees, 3;

addressed in poem, 22-23, 23-24, 46-47;

as theme of Tiruvaymoli, 32, 36;

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and Nammalvar, 41-43, 76n, 92n, 131-32;

perception of in bhakti poetry, 51-52, 199;

progenitor of parampara, 53n;

aspects of, 54n;

lives of Poykai, Putam, and Pey, 122-23;

allusions to, 176n, 177n, 178n, 179n-180n;

relationship to Brahms and Siva, 183n;

descriptions of as motif, 197. See also Vaisnava

Visvaksena: Nammalvar as incarnation of, 53n, 132Page 212

NORMAN CUTLER is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at theUniversity of Chicago. He is coeditor with Joanne Punzo Waghorne of Gods of Flesh/Gods of Stone: TheEmbodiment of Divinity in India.

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