by Nammalwar
Marking Time, Making Stories: The Structure of the Tiruviruttam
She Said:
The masters of the earth cleave
to the weighty words of the Ṛg Veda
to praise faultlessly
the feet that spanned the worlds
I depressed subdued by fate
simply recite sacred names I’ve learned
like one who can’t eat ripe fruit
and makes do with raw ones.
Tiruviruttam 64
The Tiruviruttam is included in the Iyarpā section of the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham and keeps company with both the earliest and latest of the ālvār compositions.29 The Tiruviruttam follows the four works of Poykai, Pēy, Pūtam and Tirumalicai, and in its placement as the fifth poem of the Iyarpā invokes Nammālvār’s traditional position as the fifth ālvār. So although the entire Divya Prabandham is not organized chronologically but generically, the Iyarpā appears to be attentive to issues of chronology, form and content. Of the Iyarpā’s ten compositions (sometimes eleven, depending on where we include the Rāmānuja Nūrrantāti), six use the antāti format, while the three poems of Tirumaṅkai (Ciriya Tirumaṭal, Periya Tirumaṭal and Tiruvelukūrrirukkai) and the Tiruviruttam play with unusual content. The Iyarpā is the place for the experimental and the novel, whether represented in the ground-breaking poetry of the first three ālvārorinthe poetic innovations of the master poet, Tirumaṅkai.30 The inclusion of Nammālvār’s Tiruviruttam in the Iyarpā is both apt and deliberate, inviting the attentive reader to follow the development of poetic and philosophic ideas germane to the Śrīvaiṣṇava traditions.
The Tiruviruttam’s hundred interlinked verses are composed in the viruttam metre. A metre popular among the Tamil bhakti poets, it appears to have developed out of the old metres such as kali and akaval.31 The word viruttam is derived from the Sanskrit vṛtta, which is used to denote metre in general, specifically those based on the number of syllables as opposed to syllable length and duration. Viruttam is also closely allied with a specific interpretive musical performance style. In performance and indeed in its wide application in Tamil poetry, the viruttam is used to underline the thrust of the narrative.32 Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators’ notes on the meaning of the poem’s title Tiruviruttam are attentive to several interpretive possibilities. Deriving viruttam from vṛtta/vṛttāntam (event; that which occurred; news), they read the Tiruviruttam as reporting the events of Nammālvār’s experience of union with and separation from Viṣṇu. For these commentators, the text is a synopsis of the ideas presented in the Tiruvāymoli, while simultaneously it is the means through which one apprehends Nammālvār’s mystical experience. As there is only one supreme man (Puruśottama), all other sentient beings are inherently female. Therefore, the Tiruviruttam follows the familiar trajectory of a love story between Viṣṇu and his beloved. Within this paradigm, Viṣṇu is the lover and Nammālvār, in his female persona—the Parāṅkuśa Nāyikā—is his beloved. So the Tiruviruttam is interpreted as the record (vṛtta) of the woman’s (tiru) enjoyment of Viṣṇu. Furthermore, as all women are Lakṣmī, it follows that the heroine of Nammālvār’s poem is as beautiful (tiru) and inseparable from Viṣṇu as Lakṣmī (Tiru).
The Tiruviruttam is a beautifully constructed poem. Apart from the viruttam metre, its other formal feature is that of Nammālvār’s favoured antāti, where the last syllable or word of one verse becomes the first word or syllable of the verse that immediately follows it. The antāti effectively links the words and verses together in a cycle, where beginning and end are obscured, and the poem’s nonlinearity opens up endless interpretive possibilities. Such interpretive capaciousness owes itself to the flexibility of the antāti itself—the col-antāti repeats the word; the poruḷ-antāti employs implied meaning; the col(r)-poruḷ antati interlinks through both form and content. Two verses from midway through the Tiruviruttam serve as an excellent illustration of Nammālvār’s use of the antāti. Below I provide the transliterated Tamil text (with the sandhi deconstructed into individual words) and the English translations for the selected verses, Tiruviruttam 56 and 57. The antāti in Tamil is marked in bold.
viyaliṭam uṇṭapirānar viṭutta tiruvaruḷāl
uyal iṭam perru uyantam añcalam tōli ōr taṇ tenral vantu
ayaliṭai yārum arintilar am pūntulāyin in tēn
puyaluṭai nīrmaiyinl taṭavirru en pulankalanē
Tiruviruttam 56
pula-k-kuṇṭala-p-puṇṭarikatta pōr-k-keṇṭai valli onrāl
vilakkkuṇṭu ulākinru vēl vilikkinrana kaaṇṇan kaiyāl
malakkuṅṭu amutam curanta mari kaṭal pōnru avarrāl
kalakkuṇṭa nānru kaṇṭār emmai yrum kalaralarē.
Tiruviruttam 57
She Said:
Beautiful friend don’t be afraid
we survived because of the grace
of the lord who swallowed this wide world
a breeze cool as a rain cloud
came bearing the sweet fragrance of lovely tulasī
it caressed my senses my jewels
but no one else knows.
Tiruviruttam 56
He Said:
Her earrings entrance the senses.
In her lotus-like face her dark eyes dart like keṇṭai
whose war is blocked by a gently curving creeper
such eyes: wide and sharp as spears.
No one can mock me. Those eyes
bewilder me
I am like the ocean with its crashing waves
giving up its nectar
when Kaaṇṇan churned it with his mountain.
Tiruviruttam 57
The antāti between 56 and 57 replicates the sound and the word, but uses both with such inventiveness that the meaning subtly alters. Tiruviruttam 56 ends with pulaṇ kalanē, a compound of two words: pulan (senses) and kalan (ornaments/jewels). Tiruviruttam 57 begins with the phrase pula-k-kuṅṭala(m), where the commentators read pula as a noun (pulan, sense) or as an adjective (as beauty) that qualifies kuṅṭalam (earrings). In the latter case, the meaning is derivative—that which engages the senses (pulan) is beautiful. With clever, implied wordplay as above, the poem is never boring or repetitive, despite the relatively constrictive character of the antāti. On a side note, Nammālvār’s antāti is impossible to translate into English, largely because of his clever use of polyvalent words. Often, as is the case above, one has to expand the translated line to accommodate the polyvalence. So, in the translation, taṭavirru en pulaṇ kalanē in Tiruviruttam 56 becomes ‘caressed my senses, my jewels’ and pula-k-kuṅṭala is rendered as ‘her earrings entrance the senses’.
The antāti in the Tiruviruttam has another significant formal function, serving to bracket out its first and last verses, suggestively using the antāti to construct a framed narrative. Tiruviruttam 1 begins with the famous phrase poy-ninra jñānam (false/illusory knowledge) and ends with ceyyum viṇṇappamē (the made petition/request). Given that this is an antāti, one would reasonably expect Tiruviruttam 2 to start with some syllabic or semantic variation of the first verse’s final phrase, ceyyum viṇṇappamē. Nammālvār does not disappoint, and begins the second verse with the auspicious word celu (abundant), which stands in stark opposition to the abject poy-ninra jñānam that inaugurates the poem. The poem’s final word in Tiruviruttam 100—the last word of the last verse—ends provocatively with poy nilatē (false state), a variation of poy-ninra which begins it, bringing the entire Tiruviruttam full circle.
At first glance, the Tiruviruttam is the tightly strung garland of words that it purports to be, fulfilling the mandate of its end-to-beginning antāti. But Nammālvār is a subtle, careful, deliberate poet, a master of the antāti. So when he deviates even slightly from the manner in which he generally employs the form, it demands our attention. By and large, when Nammālvār uses the antāti, he tends to repeat words or parts of words, either to assert a point or to insert a new one; poy
ninra (1) and poy nilam (100) discussed above are exemplary of this technique. For instance, in the Tiruviruttam, the antāti linking verses 2, 3 and 4 all repeat some variation of the end-word of the preceding verse.33 Thus the second verse’s last word, kulal (curly hair), is mimicked as kulal (flute) in the third verse’s first word; that verse ends with tani neñcam (lonely heart), which is reproduced exactly as the opening phrase of verse 4 (tani neñcam).
This system of repeated words (homonyms or otherwise) is in keeping with how the antāti typically works in all of Nammālvār’s three antāti works: Periya Tiruvantāti, Tiruvāymoli and the Tiruviruttam. Indeed, the opening antātis of the Periya Tiruvantāti and the Tiruvāymoli carefully replicate sound and often the word as well, creating a cascade of tight visual and aural links. In this context then, the subtle, almost unnoticeable, break in the Tiruviruttam’s opening antāti is rendered all the more striking. Rather than using the formula that gets him through the majority of the Tiruvāymoli and the Periya Tiruvantāti, Nammālvār bypasses using the same word or a version of viṇṇappam or ceyyum, and instead chooses simply to replicate visually and aurally just the short first syllable (ce) of ceyyum, the penultimate word of verse 1, while still playing off the similar long vowel sound (viṇṇappamē) that brings the verse to a close. In principle, the antāti has not been violated, but in veering away from a tested and expected formula described above, the poet tricks us into hearing sounds that give the impression of an unbroken link.
Most obviously, the minor (perceived) break in the antāti allows the central action of the poem to begin on an auspicious note with an invocation of abundance (celu) that nicely counteracts the wretched inauspiciousness of falseness and illusion that initiates it. In a sense, it permits the poem to begin twice, negating its false start. In doing so, Nammālvār sets up a frame and the pretext for the love story that permits the poet to make his petition, one that he requests Viṣṇu to listen to in his embodied, true form.34 The deceptive antāti brackets out the main action of the poem even as he can inhabit the bodies and voices of his anonymous characters. It is a delightful sleight of hand that enables the Tiruviruttam to be simultaneously particular and universal. It is Nammālvār’s story, his humble request, a record of his subjective experience. Yet the poem’s nameless, cipher-like speakers become everyman, everywoman who desperately seek the lotus feet of Māl.
The connection between the poem’s first and final verses can thus be seen only to evoke an impression, an approximation of continuity, alluding to the very state—delusion—that begins and ends the Tiruviruttam. The entire dramatic action takes place within the embrace of falseness, of poymai. It is within this womb of illusion, of poy jñānam (false knowledge) and poy nilam (false state) that the poem’s hero and heroine fall in love, suffer, and eventually find a way out. By providing a frame by means of two (false) starts, the poem also signals its two levels of meanings. It is not just about an anonymous, ordinary love affair; that would be an illusion. The viṇṇappam (his poem), although addressed to Viṣṇu to listen graciously, may equally address us, exhorting us to listen with care, and cautioning us to be ever attentive to illusion.
The Tiruvāymoli too takes us on this path, via its seamless antāti but with equally dramatic juxtapositions. The Tiruvāymoli’s first verse, I.1.1, begins auspiciously with the word uyar (high) and ends with the intimate manam (heart-mind). Uyar, expressive of the supremacy and infinity of Viṣṇu’s nature is set beside the intimate vastness of the devotee’s own mind (manam). As Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators since the twelfth century have pointed out, the Tiruvāymoli’s unbroken antāti structure reflects a refined theology, one which articulates god’s paradoxical nature, as one who is transcendent, yet resides in the devotee’s heart-mind (manam).
The Tiruviruttam seeks to say something equally profound not only through the minor break between verses 1 and 2, but also in its constant subversion of the narrative it intends to unfold. Even as the antāti falters just as the poem begins, the story of the mystical love affair is already in full bloom. And as that affair intensifies, hitting the high notes of union and resonating with the keening cries of lamentation, it too falters. The characters—the heroine, the friend, the hero, the mother—are intermittently abandoned, the poem traverses a different path, and the poet speaks directly to us (to god?) as if to reveal the impossibility of his quest. As striking as the broken garland of words that begins the Tiruviruttam is the changeable, sporadically splintering love-frame, which is eventually completely abandoned as the poem approaches its conclusion. In the last ten verses, the poem switches registers with no warning, forsakes the lovelorn heroine and love-struck hero and turns to philosophical ruminations that seem more at home in the Tiruvāymoli. After roaming the dry deserts of loss and separation, we are back where we began, addressing a request to Viṣṇu directly without the artifice of dramatic personae. The quicksilver alterations in register and in voices, the illusory, almost-heard, almost-seen antāti gap in the Tiruviruttam widen into the gulf between reality and falsehood, between this world and Viṣṇu’s heaven, between a world in which Viṣṇu stands before the devotee embodied and one in which the devotee is bereft.
Such persistent adjustments in register, the poem’s raucous multivocality and its studied repetitions all conspire to produce an intentional ambiguity that generates disquiet. It might be said that willed interruption in its many avatāras is the poem’s defining characteristic. Wielded with subtlety and purpose, interruption speaks quietly and powerfully of the ephemeral, broken, unsustainable quality of the (Nammālvār’s) mystical experience. It captures in pitch-perfect harmony the frenzied delight of union and the bewildering sense of loss that inevitably follows.
A Poetry of Interruptions:
Reading the Tiruviruttam
Celestials in the sky
offer you pure perfect garlands anoint you with cool water
worship you with beautiful incense
you vanish by a trick
to scoop up and eat butter
to dance between the two sharp horns
of the humped bull
for the lovely woman of the strong cowherd clan.
Tiruviruttam 21
Despite its formal and thematic structure, the Tiruviruttam is a poem of fits and starts, of repeated beginnings and endings. The poem’s two beginnings (verses 1 and 2), the heroine’s frustrated desire and her fleeting unions with her divine lover Viṣṇu are the most obvious manifestations of such narrative disruptions. The poem’s frequent recourse to specific motifs—the night stretching into an aeon is a favourite—its deliberate rejection of linear narrative action, the confusion between the poem’s many speakers, and so on, are just some of the ways in which the Tiruviruttam enshrines interruption—or, perhaps more appropriately, disruption—as a definitive index of Nammālvār’s experience of Viṣṇu.35 So even while some of these rhetorical techniques are shared by like-minded poets like Āṇṭāḷ and Tirumaṅkai, the Tiruviruttam is singular and remarkable among ālvār poems for the degree to which it concertedly discomfits the reader/listener.
Generations of Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators have attempted in their own unique way to make sense of this baffling poem, guided by the imperatives of emergent Śrīvaiṣṇava theology. In their reading, the poem unfolds along two intertwined tracks of meaning. The first level, known as anyāpadeśa, is the external, the ‘other’, lesser reading, while svāapadeśa refers to the poem’s inner, esoteric meaning. Anyāpadeśa and svāpadeśa are entwined in the poem, śleṣa-like, holding several meanings in balance at once. Yet the Tiruviruttam is littered with verses that deliberately confound the dual anyā/svāpadeśa structure. There are purely svāpadeśa verses, profoundly introspective and meditative, accommodating no other register. There are anyāpadeśa verses such as those spoken in the hero’s voice that obscure its svāpadeśa. Still other times, a purely svāpadeśa verse is injected without warning, upsetting the slow building dialectic of unio
n and separation. Tiruviruttam 21 quoted above is one such example.
Although commentators identify Tiruviruttam 21 as spoken in the heroine’s voice, it is also in fact the poem’s first purely svāpadeśa verse. It follows a verse (Tiruviruttam 20) that recounts a conversation between the heroine’s friend (tōli) and her mother (tāy) about the true cause of the girl’s disease. Mimicking many a foolish, misguided Caṅkam poem-mother, here too she summons Murukan’s priest to exorcise her lovesick daughter. The clever friend intercedes: ‘It is not the Vēlan. Repeat the names of the one who swallowed the seven worlds. Adorn her with his garland’ (Tiruviruttam 20).36 As if taking this counsel to heart, Tiruviruttam 21 begins with a description of ritual services that the celestials offer Viṣṇu in the high heavens. But, more importantly, the verse sets up familiar contrasts between the transcendent and the accessible, between his formlessness and the beauty of his form, between the timelessness of his existence and an adoration of a specific moment in time. The celestials worship a form that is not described, while on earth he is lovingly described—here he is scooping up the butter, there he is dancing and wrestling the seven bulls all for the love of a cowherd woman. Indeed, Tiruviruttam 21 immediately calls up the famous verse from the Tiruvāymoli I.3.1, which highlights Viṣṇu’s accessibility to his devotees:
Accessible to those with love, for others hard to find,
amazing, the lady in the lotus takes pleasure at his feet so
hard for us to gain,
yet because he stole the churned butter, his waist was
bound—what?—
to the grindstone—how vulnerable!37
Śrīvaiṣṇava commentaries write of Nammālvār swooning at this moment in the composition of the Tiruvāymoli, overcome by the image of Viṣṇu, that lord of gods, the one who abides in all things, allowing himself to be bound, to be confined by the love of his devotee. In Tiruviruttam 21, as if in response to the friend’s well-considered advice, the poet evokes this very image of the mercurial lord, who vanishes by a trick to transform into the butter thief and the lover of the cowherd-woman. Periyavāccān Piḷḷai, one of the earliest commentators on this verse, produces a long, detailed interpretation invoking the first three decads of the Tiruvāymoli as a point of reference: in Tiruvāymoli I.1, Viṣṇu is shown in his transcendent form; in I.2 Nammālvār establishes the upāya, the means to attain Viṣṇu; and finally in I.3 he demonstrates that because of his accessibility, most fully realized in the Kṛṣṇa avatāra, Viṣṇu is both the way and the means to the goal of mokṣa.38 The unspoken message is of course that this heroine too will be graced in just such a manner, for that is Viṣṇu’s nature. It will do us well to remember that the motif of the butter thief is invoked a mere five times but always at a crucial juncture in the Tiruviruttam, prompting the poet and his audience towards intimacy with Viṣṇu that the true (or even accidental) devotee can cultivate. And so it is that with Tiruviruttam 22 we revert to the poem’s conceit, and order is seemingly restored. Our familiar characters return, the hero makes consecutive appearances in Tiruviruttam 22 and 23 as if to tighten the bolts of the poem’s narrative machinery. It would seem that a tentative resolution is at hand. While Tiruviruttam 21 disrupts our expectations by introducing an unexpected svāpadeśa verse, it also efficiently serves as a kind of self-commentary, alerting us to the poem’s dual universe, one that mirrors Viṣṇu’s twin realms. We can regard the intervening svāpadeśa verse not so much as an interruption but as a mediation guiding the poem’s theological contours. Regardless of these half-solutions, the two dialogic verses that immediately follow Tiruviruttam 21 throw up a different set of problems, equally difficult to reconcile.