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A Hundred Measures of Time

Page 5

by Nammalwar


  96

  She Said:

  You created many places of pilgrimage

  You created many religions different from each

  For each of those religions you created gods

  You spread your form everywhere

  You have no equal

  I awaken my desire for you.

  97

  She Said:

  People are born they die

  again and again aeon after aeon

  seeing this don’t they desire its end?

  For those who love him feast their eyes on him

  that ancient Māl worshipped

  by the crowd of unblinking celestials

  who throng around him

  Will their eyes ever close in sleep?

  98

  She Said:

  The sages who don’t sleep, all those others

  who worship him constantly

  wanting to end the pain of endless births

  even the unblinking ones

  can’t understand the simple words

  ‘He ate butter’

  Peerless lord

  of great singular form.

  99

  These may be simple words. But this is the good I’ve seen

  There is only the master of knowledge

  that one who took the form of a boar

  lifted the world submerged in crashing waves.

  Neither for the gods

  who possess the great tree of wishes

  nor for all the others

  is there anyone else.

  100

  Māran who wears as a garland

  the feet of those who recite Tirumāl’s divine names

  that lord of Kurukūr where good people

  praise him

  sang a plea of one hundred verses

  those who master them

  won’t ever be trapped in the quicksand

  of delusory birth its wicked fate

  the misery of this false world.

  Part II

  THE MEASURE OF TIME

  On Reading Nammālvār’s Tiruviruttam

  False wisdom wicked conduct dirty bodies

  let’s not draw near such things now

  To protect life

  you took birth from many wombs

  O master of the unblinking ones

  stand before me embodied

  listen graciously to a servant’s plea.1

  Tiruviruttam 1

  If Śaṭhakōpan-Nammālvār’s monumental Tiruvāymoli begins in a suitably monumental fashion speculating on the unfathomable nature of god, the more modest Tiruviruttam’s opening salvo is muted, humble and direct. The first verse sets forth the devotee’s plea (viṇṇappam) to the supreme deity who, like in the Tiruvāymoli’s first decads, remains unnamed.2 The request so innocently put forth in Tiruviruttam 1 is nothing less than a ravenous savouring of the mutual experience of union. God must heed—nay, graciously listen to—the devotee’s account of the singular ecstasy of divine union. The poem itself is the viṇṇappam, as much a long, beautiful love letter to the divine as it is an abject request for grace. To see god in embodied form is to receive grace. For god to listen to the account of their spectacular love is to receive grace. To love god and to be loved by god is to receive grace. In the Tiruviruttam’s philosophical universe, divine grace is inseparable from divine love, and the absence of that love marks the absence of grace.

  Nammālvār is not unique among bhakti poets in seeing grace and love as the other’s mirror, but the Tiruviruttam stands out for its experimental meditation on these twin principles. The opening and closing verses act as the frame (the viṇṇappam) that encloses the poem’s narrative heart: the developing love affair between an anonymous hero (talaivan) and the heroine (talaivi). It charts the troughs and peaks of this epic love as witnessed by stock characters familiar to anyone who has read Indian love poetry: the hero, the heroine, the mother, friends, messengers and fortune tellers parade through the poem remarking on this treacherous love that has no end. But despite being bound by its formal structure—it is an antāti—and by the narrative logic of a developing love affair, the Tiruviruttam defies easy allegorical concordances. While it may not have achieved the iconic status of the Tiruvāymoli, this complex, provocative poem of hundred verses stands as a testament to the poetic and philosophical brilliance of Nammālvār.

  The Poet: Śaṭhakōpan-Nammālvār

  Māran who wears as a garland

  the feet of those who recite Tirumāl’s divine names

  that lord of Kurukūr where good people praise him

  sang a plea of one hundred verses

  those who master them

  won’t ever be trapped in the quicksand

  of delusory birth its wicked fate

  the misery of this false world.

  Tiruviruttam 100

  The poet Śaṭhakōpan is revered as the most important of the twelve ālvār poets, those twelve foundational figures of the Śrīvaiṣṇava saṁprādayas who lived in the Tamil-speaking regions of south India between the sixth and ninth centuries. He is so beloved to the Śrīvaiṣṇava communities that he comes to be addressed fondly as Nammālvār (Our Ālvār).3 This intimacy in no way diminishes his extraordinary consequence, for he is also venerated as the Śrīvaiṣṇavas’ first ācārya (teacher), and his four compositions are equated to the four Vedas; within this schema, the Tiruviruttam, regarded as his first work, is equated to the Ṛg Veda. In keeping with his exalted place, Nammālvār’s works, in particular the Tiruvāymoli and to a lesser extent the Tiruviruttam, have attracted concentrated study, deep contemplation and innumerable commentaries over the past 900 years.

  Despite Nammālvār’s central place in the development of the Śrīvaiṣṇava traditions, we know virtually nothing of his life. Shrouded in legend and mystery, Nammālvār emerges in the hagiographical literature as a highly evolved sage, the emanation of Viśvaksena, Viṣṇu’s commander-in-chief on earth.4 The story goes:

  Viṣṇu took birth as the child of a devout Vēḷḷāḷa couple, but when the child was born, he neither cried nor spoke nor ate. After ten days of this odd behaviour, the despairing parents took the child to Kurukūr and left him under a tamarind tree. The infant crawled into a groove in the tree and went into a deep, silent meditation that lasted sixteen years. In his sixteenth year, a Brahmin devotee named Maturakavi followed a divine light that led him to the meditating youth. Astonished at the stillness of this boy, Maturakavi cast a stone at him to determine whether he was conscious. When the meditating sixteen-year-old opened his eyes, Maturakavi posed a riddle: ‘If the small thing is born in the belly of a dead thing, what will it eat and where will it lie?’ The boy answered obliquely, ‘It will eat that and it will lie there.’5 Maturakavi was delighted that he had found his teacher at last. The young boy, who was none other than Nammālvār, broke his silence and poured out his intense enjoyment of the divine in four compositions, of which the Tiruviruttam was the first and the Tiruvāymoli the last. As indicated by the final decad of the Tiruvāymoli, Nammālvār attained his heart’s desire and was united with Viṣṇu.6 In ritual performance tradition, Nammālvār’s disappearance from this earth caused such distress to his devotees that Viṣṇu returned him to earth to act as a guide to all beings.7

  While the story of Nammālvār’s encounter with Maturakavi speaks of his singular character among the ālvār poets—a silent seer who contributes more than a quarter of the four thousand verses of the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham—his later intervention in the recovery of the Vaiṣṇava canon expresses his unique place as a mediator par excellence. In this latter story, the Tiruvāymoli has been lost and Nāthamuni (c. tenth century), the first Śrīvaiṣṇava preceptor, seeks to restore this extraordinary composition to the world. He prays to Nammālvār, reciting Maturakavi’s panegyric to his teacher over and over again. Impressed by Nāthamuni’s single-minded devotion, Nammālvār appears before him and reveals the Tiruvāymoli as well
as the composition of the remaining ālvār poets. In this manner, Nammālvār is held to be crucial in reconstituting the lost Divya Prabandham, the Tamil Veda.8

  Such legendary events aside, the historical information on Nammālvār is scant. From the concluding phala śruti verses of his compositions, we know that he referred to himself as Śaṭhakōpan and that he hailed from the town of Kurukūr, a town on the banks of the swift-flowing Thamiraparani. Located in the heart of southern Pāṇṭiya territory, this town was a wealthy place of fertile fields and virtuous Vaiṣṇavas. Although today Kurukūr is a small, sleepy village, Nammālvār portrays it as a grand, fortified city of ancient fame, intimately connected to its Pāṇṭiya legacy, one which he invokes in the phala śruti through the common Pāṇṭiya epithets Māran, Kārimāran and Valuti, which tantalizes us with a plausible connection between him and the region’s Pāṇṭiya rulers. He also describes himself as the king (kōn) of Kurukūr (for example, Tiruvāymoli III.6.11). Maturakavi’s short eleven-verse composition Kaṇṇinun Ciru Tāmpu (The Short Knotted String), in praise of Nammālvār, would appear to support Nammālvār’s claims as a member of the political elite of Kurukūr. Maturakavi lauds Śaṭhakōpan as the lord (nampi) and master (pirān) of Kurukūr, and as Kārimāran, the son of Kāri. This Kāri (Nammālvār’s father) was possibly a Pāṇṭiya functionary in the region.9

  Given the paucity of historically verifiable information, it is no surprise that Nammālvār’s dates are disputed, and scholars place him anywhere between the late seventh and mid-ninth centuries. The Śrīvaiṣṇava saṁpradāyas take the Bhāgavata Purāṇa’s ‘prophecy’ of the coming of the ālvār poets seriously, and use it to date them from 4200 BCE to 2700 BCE, placing their birth at the beginning of the Kali Yuga.10 Alkondavilli Govindacharya, in an attempt to link Nammālvār’s birth with the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and, more specifically, with the life of Kṛṣṇa, reports in his Holy Lives of the Azhvars or the Dravida Saints that Nammālvār was ‘born just 43 days after the exit of Lord Krishna from the stage of this world’.11 As devotion to the ālvārs in general and Nammālvār in particular gathers steam during the time of Rāmānuja (1017–1137 CE, traditional dates), the theory of the aṁśa (emanation) comes to dominate conceptions of the ālvārs’ relationship to Viṣṇu. They are no longer just special, inspired poets, but are now Viṣṇu’s emanations. With this new emergent framework and befitting his status as the chief among the ālvār poets, Nammālvār is seen as a manifestation of Viśvaksena, Viṣṇu’s chief attendant.12

  Traditionally, Nammālvār is the fifth ālvār, a position reflected in Vedānta Deśika’s (1269–1370 CE) list of ten ālvārs—he omits Āṇṭāḷ and Maturakavi.13 But the Rāmānuja Nūrrantāti, a panegyric to the Śrīvaiṣṇavas’ most important ācārya included in the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, appears to place Nammālvār and Maturakavi at the end of the list.14 The Nūrrantāti devotes a verse each to each of the twelve ālvār beginning with Poykaiyālvār in verse 8 and ending with Nammālvār in verse 19. The Rāmānuja Nūrrantāti is concerned with tracing the lineal descent of the Śrīvaiṣṇava saṁpradāya, which continues after Nammālvār down to Nāthamuni (verse20), Yāmunācārya (verse 21), and then eventually Rāmānuja. Nammālvār’s place in the Nūrrantāti may reflect the tradition’s emerging sense of chronology, where he is seen as the last ālvār in order to establish the continuity of the tradition from Nammālvār down to Rāmānuja. This would account for placing Maturakavi ahead of Nammālvār, whom the poem evokes only in the most oblique fashion.

  Earnest efforts to date the ālvār begin in the early twentieth century, and initial academic estimates placed the twelve poet-saints after the period of Rāmānuja, hence mid-twelfth century.15 These dates have long since been dismissed and most scholars agree that the ālvār span a period of about 300 years, from 600 to 900 CE.16 Where Nammālvār falls in this rather broad swathe of time is still a largely unresolved question. Scholars have used the same body of minimal sources—references to two temples sites in the Tiruvāymoli and another inscription from Madurai with the name Māran Kāri—to draw wildly divergent conclusions for Nammālvār’s date.

  An inscription from Anamalai near Madurai describes the excavation of a Viṣṇu shrine sponsored by a Pāṇṭiya minister Māran Kāri also known as Maturakavi.17 The date on the inscription (Kali Year 3871) corresponds to 770 CE and coincides with the reign of the Pāṇṭiya king Parāntaka (also mentioned in the inscription). Gopinatha Rao draws several interesting, albeit somewhat far-fetched, conclusions based on this inscription, and dates Nammālvār to the early ninth century identifying the Parāntaka of the inscription with Jaṭila Parāntaka Neṭuñcaṭaiyan also known as Varaguṇa I (756–815 CE). He proposes that based on the similarity of names, Nammālvār (who refers to himself as Kārimāran) was the son of the minister in this inscription (Māran Kāri). Then, somewhat implausibly, Rao suggests that Śaṭhakōpan’s father was a dynastic minister, serving under Parāṅkuśa Pāṇṭiya (also known as Arikesari Parāṅkuśa Māravaraman, 670–700 CE) and then his great-grandson Parāntaka Varaguṇa Pāṇṭiya. This might explain how Nammālvār comes to be known as Parāṅkuśa, a name that Rao suggests was given by the king’s loyal minister to his son. In this same manner of passing on a family name (Māran [grandfather] → Kāri-Maturakavi [father] → Māran-Parāṅkuśa-Nammālvār [son]), Nammālvār’s disciple is initiated with the name Maturakavi. Such contortionist logic allows Gopinatha Rao to reject the notion that the Maturakavi/Māran Kāri identified in the Anamalai inscription is identical to Nammālvār’s devoted pupil. Given that Nammālvār’s father must have served his two kings in the late eighth century, and his son born sometime during this period, leads Rao to speculate on a date in the early ninth century for the poet.18

  Vaiyapuri Pillai marshals a range of sources to make a case for a late-ninth-century date for Nammālvār. He dates the shrine of Varagunamangai mentioned in the Tiruvāymoli to the mid to late ninth century based on its name (honouring a Pāṇṭiya king named Varaguṇavarman II, 862–885 CE)19 and on corroborative epigraphical information. He assigns Nammālvār a post-800 date, and goes so far as to propose placing him around 870 CE, making him roughly contemporaneous with Periyālvār and Āṇṭāḷ.20 Vaiyapuri Pillai also sees several parallels in the unusual grammatical usages shared between Māṇikkavācakar’s Tiruvācakam and the Tiruvāymoli, and between his Tirukkōvaiyār and the Tiruviruttam. He concludes (on tangential linguistic evidence) that Māṇikkavācakar slightly predates Nammālvār and fairly confidently assigns the Vaiṣṇava poet to post-875 CE.21

  Krishnaswami Aiyangar rejects the late-ninth-century date proposed by Vaiyapuri Pillai (they have a long-standing feud by the time Aiyangar’s Early History of South Indian Vaishnavism is published in 1920) on the basis of inscriptional and philological evidence. In fact, Aiyangar dismisses Nammālvār’s mention of the temple site of Varagunamangai—a keystone of Vaiyapuri Pillai’s dating—as a reliable means to fixing him as a contemporary of the king Varaguṇa Pāṇṭiya (862–885 CE).22 In the end, Aiyangar proposes a somewhat improbable date of the fifth century for Nammālvār based on the fact that ‘bhaktas, both of Vishnu and Śiva were coming into prominence, and when the work of these bhaktas was beginning to tell upon those people that were following the persuasion of the Buddha and the Jina’.23

  Wading in several decades after the intense debate between Pillai and Aiyangar, B.V. Ramanujam refutes many of Rao’s deductions, but ultimately agrees with his dating. He finds Rao’s links between Nammālvār and the king Parāṅkuśa Pāṇṭiya to be tenuous at best. Nammālvār does not refer to himself by the name/title Parāṅkuśa in his works; it is an epithet bestowed upon him much later. Also, it is farfetched to assume that Nammālvār initiated his student with an epithet/name of his father, Maturakavi.24 Nonetheless, Ramanujam finds the inscriptional evidence of the site Varagunamangai and the copper plates of Parāntaka I (756–815 CE) compelling, and agrees with Ra
o’s estimation of an early-ninth-century date for Nammālvār and Maturakavi. His final conclusion is that Nammālvār and Maturakavi are in fact the last of the ālvār poets.25

  The art historian R. Nagaswamy derives a late-eighth-century date for Nammālvār from the epigraphical record of the two temples mentioned in the Tiruvāymoli, Srivaramangalam and Varagunamangai. Both sites are dated to the reign of Varaguṇa I (756–815 CE), that is, Parāntaka I. He corroborates this evidence against the two titles of the Pāṇṭiya king Arikesari Parāṅkuśa Māravarman (650–700 CE), suggesting, like Gopinatha Rao, that Nammālvār’s titles Parāṅkuśa and Māran honour this king.26 He concludes that Nammālvār was possibly born around 745 CE but no later than 780 CE. Nagaswamy’s date would make Nammālvār a contemporary of Tirumaṅkaiyālvār, who is generally dated to the same period on account of his reference to Nandivarman Pallavamalla’s (731–796 CE) Parameśvara Viṇṇakaram temple in Kancipuram, now known as Vaikuntha Perumal temple.

  Friedhelm Hardy infers a seventh- to early-eighth-century date for Nammālvār based on the influence of the first three ālvār, particularly in his use of the antāti form, the sharpening of the use of the akam content in his poetry (something largely absent from the poetry of the earlier ālvār poets), and the greater number of Vaiṣṇava temples mentioned.27 Kamil Zvelebil, on the other hand, guided by Vaiyapuri Pillai’s hypothesis, dates Nammālvār and his disciple Maturakavi as the last of the ālvār poets. He draws his conclusions from the same inscriptional evidence provided by the same two late-eighth/early-ninth-century Viṣṇu shrines of Srivaramangalam and Varagunamangai. Finally, Nammālvār’s close association to Nāthamuni in the Śrīvaiṣṇava hagiographic traditions leads Zvelebil to assign him to the period 880–930 CE.28 Given the dearth of evidence and despite all the rigorous debates, it is unsurprising that we are unable to conclusively date this most important of ālvār poets. At the most, we can reasonably assert that he and his student lived between the mid-eighth and the mid-ninth centuries.

 

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