by Nammalwar
Tiruviruttam 22 and 23 reintroduce the hero (talaivan), who appears for the first time in Tiruviruttam 6 speculating about the heroine’s identity. We know the heroine is already in love with Kaṇṇan (Tiruviruttam 2), her love adorning his feet. By the time we come to Tiruviruttam 22 and 23 a relationship is flourishing between the hero and heroine, although the poem deliberately obfuscates the hero’s relationship to Viṣṇu. The hero as he emerges in these early Tiruviruttam verses is a besotted, bewildered fool, struck dumb by love. In Tiruviruttam 22 and 23 he too arrives as if by a trick, pretending to have lost his way:
The Friend Said:
In your hand you hold a leafy branch
you have no bow with which to hunt
yet you inquire about an elephant
you shot
Sir in this wide world
of that thief who rides the bird
no one speaks such things.
Is it to answer your odd questions
that we are here in this vast grove?
Tiruviruttam 22
To her pointed questions—she has clearly seen through his pretence—the hero responds:
He Said:
I was passing by this grove.
My fate is terrible.
O women, tell me if you guard
my heart or this grove?
O you with eyes the colour
of a beautiful lotus grove
O you who are equal to the gods
who live in Kaaṇṇan’s celestial city!
Is this your nature?
Tiruviruttam 23
The Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators have a long tradition of reading the Tiruviruttam through allegoresis. Each character in the Tiruviruttam becomes something or someone else. The heroine is the soul, the friend is the mediator, the mother counsels patience, and so forth. But the Tiruviruttam’s hero presents a unique problem for the traditional commentator, for he appears in the poem not just as the silent object of the heroine’s desire, as in the Tiruvāymoli, but as an active speaker and actor, who too desires the heroine. Reading the hero as Viṣṇu in the former situation is almost an instinctive move for the Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators. Indeed, the Tiruviruttam encourages such a reading, making it clear from its outset that the object of the heroine’s desire is Viṣṇu: ‘her love (anpu) adorns the feet / of Kaṇṇan dark as heavy rain clouds’ (Tiruviruttam 2). Yet when the hero speaks for the first time in Tiruviruttam 6, despite the precedent set by Rāma’s longing for Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa and Periyavāccān Piḷḷai’s love for that text, the hero is not identified as Viṣṇu. Let us look at Tiruviruttam 6:
He Said:
Who is this girl
eyes broad as arrows
brows curved like bows
whose shy glance retreats from improper things
a gently swaying creeper?
She is death
mastered by the sceptre of the one
who destroys demons
who rides that swift bird
whose son is sweet Madana
Shelter your life in this world.
Periyavāccān Piḷḷai offers both an anyāpadeśa and svāpadeśa reading of the verse.39 In the anyāpadeśa reading, Tiruviruttam 6 is the first introduction of the hero as an active desiring agent, and the mutual love of the hero and heroine. According to classical Tamil love poetics such a verse constitutes the hero’s initial vision of the heroine known as the nalam parāṭṭu (a panegyric to virtues) or the kātci makiltal (joy at the vision). It occurs under the broad category of iyarkaip-puṇarcci which in itself has several sub-stages: kātci (vision), aiyam (doubt), tuṇivu (realizing the heroine’s human identity) and finally kuripparital (recognizing their mutual love).40 Customarily, the hero who finds himself in this situation is stunned by the heroine’s beauty and proceeds to sing her praises. Following the poetic conventions, Periyavāccān Piḷḷai tells us the hero is drawn to the young woman’s modesty evident in the manner in which her eyes withdraw from all improper things and by her creeper-like form, which indicates her dependency.41 These subtle moments in Piḷḷai’s anyāpadeśa reading of the verse set up the brief discussion of its svāpadeśa. The speaker of the poem is no longer Viṣṇu, but assembled bhāgavatas praising Nammālvār whose closed eyes look inward, having drawn away from all that is improper in this world.42 This is of course in keeping with the petition that the poet himself sets out at the poem’s commencement—let us not draw near filthy bodies and illusory thinking. Piḷḷai’s analysis of the hero’s voice in Tiruviruttam 6 guides how he proceeds to interpret these specific verses through the course of the poem. So it is unsurprising that Periyavāccān Piḷḷai offers up the following succinct svāpadeśa summation for the hero’s words in Tiruviruttam 23: the words of the Vaiṣṇavas upon observing Nammālvār’s love for Viṣṇu’s eternal realm (nitya vibhūti). Interpretive gymnastics notwithstanding, the Tiruviruttam’s capacious structure encourages a range of possibilities, allowing both Viṣṇu and Nammālvār to become objects of desire.
Same Day Madness: Endings and Beginnings in the Tiruviruttam
She Said:
The reign of the blazing sun who alone rules the
sky ended.
Cool dark night spreads through the world.
Who can stop the cool breeze that comes bearing
tulasī
to stoke a love that brings only misery?
Who will protect my bangles?
O this aeon ravages me!
Tiruviruttam 13
Time, as metre and as memory, looms large in the Tiruviruttam. Time in its formal guises neatly circumscribes experience through regulated metrical feet, proper head-rhymes and the stern demands of the antāti. The poem’s dialogic moments tantalize with the possibility of narrative linearity, a linearity that sits uncomfortably with the autobiography ≽rīvaiṣṇava commentators seek in the poem. In contradistinction, the poem’s distinctive antāti evokes cyclical time, saṁsāra itself, endless and repetitive time that grasps the speaker/Nammālvār with unrelenting sureness. The significance of time is set out in the very first verse of the Tiruviruttam, which repeats some form of the verb nil (to stay/to stand) once in each of its four lines. In the first two lines the poet uses it (as ninra) to convey a static, habitual rootedness, of being unable to find a way out of the morass of evil deeds, false knowledge and filthy bodies. In the verse’s final two lines, nil in its adjectival and adverbial forms is applied to Viṣṇu, and it immediately invokes movement, action and intervention. Viṣṇu the giver of life is praised as the one who took birth in many wombs. The irony is of course rich. Here is the poet caught in the filth of his own birth, desperately seeking a way out. And there is the god who gives life, takes birth and remains beyond it all. Mediating these two moments, these two worlds of these two beings, is the phrase ini yām urāmai—let us not draw near (all that) henceforth. As the devotee distances himself from an embodied life—no longer, he says—he petitions the god of many births to stand before him in true, embodied form (mey-n-ninru) to listen. The crux of the Tiruviruttam lies here: the poem through both interruption and repetition continually reproduces the discomfort of living in saṁsāra, the sense that you live this life over and over again. Life might appear to follow a linear trajectory, moving in one direction from birth to death, until something disrupts that quiet acceptance, until one suddenly awakens to say: henceforth we stay away from wicked deeds and illusory knowledge.
The Tiruviruttam systematically develops the theme of awakening and coming alive to Viṣṇu’s presence through the clever and judicious use of particular motifs and metaphors. One striking example will make the point sufficiently. As its very title suggests, the Tiruviruttam is concerned with time—the time that we live in this world and the use we make of that time. Ini yām urāmai—no longer this attachment—is the poem’s underlying, implied refrain. But even though desire has awakened, the time spent in this life cannot be arrested. It is through these eyes t
hat we must approach the numerous verses about the night, which are scattered through the poem. The first occurrence is in Tiruviruttam 12 when the heroine says:
My jewel-like lustre fades
a thick dense paleness spreads all over me
the night is an aeon
and everything else is like this
such is the special wealth
bestowed upon my heart
bonded to Kaaṇṇn’s cool lovely tulasī
my lord who wields the sharp disc.
The endless night is a common motif in Indic love poetry, intensifying the loneliness of the abandoned, waiting lover. Sleep eludes her and she can find no solace even in dreams. Instead, she keeps a long, lonely vigil awaiting the errant beloved’s promised return. She is awake. Like those yogis who neither eat nor sleep (Tiruviruttam 66), who avoid even closing their eyes should they miss a single moment of enjoying Viṣṇu’s glorious form (Tiruviruttam 97), she waits and watches, tormented by the night as it returns again and again, each time more terrible and more vicious. Its dense blackness blankets the world, obscures everything and stretches as an aeon, into a thousand aeons. He, on the other hand, slumbers peacefully on the rolling ocean through the aeons that are no more than a blink of an eye to him, almost unmindful of his young lover’s misery, until he comes awake to eat the worlds. Eventually, as the night continues its relentless assault on the helpless heroine, she recognizes something important:
She Said:
O girl with lustrous brow
O girl equal to the earth that he
Madhusūdanan Dāmodaran
great lord
whose tulasī garlands dark bees feed on
eats spits out protects
Listen:
I’ve encountered this swollen night before
but I’ve neither seen nor heard nor known
a night that spreads like this.
Tiruviruttam 49
In a moment of hyper awareness, the heroine recognizes the fatalism at the heart of her impossible situation. The coming of the night is as inevitable as the creation and dissolution of the world, and as long as we live in this world, inhabit this body and are estranged from Viṣṇu, the night is guaranteed to torment us.
The Tiruviruttam’s conclusion finally gets us precisely to this point. In fact, one might argue that Tiruviruttam’s resolution rests in its final decad of verses. In this final ten (and the eleventh, the phala śruti), the text’s major themes, prominent motifs and dominant myths come together as the multiple personae (hero, heroine, friend, etc.) simply dissolve, subsumed into the ringing tones of the poem’s speaker/Nammālvār. In shedding these alternate skins and alternate voices, these artifices, the speaker-poet is suddenly no longer an abandoned, pitiable figure; he is guide and teacher. As such, this last decad acts as a delicate counterpoint to the vexations and privations of desire. If verse 1 tells us to reject the filthy body, verse 90 celebrates that very body as a means to serve Viṣṇu: ‘What a wonder is this body / I received as a reward for my many vows.’ The tormenting night is the villain of the text, remorseless in its pursuit of the day and of the hapless heroine. In verse 93 this very night is dismissed, cut to pieces as though by Rāma’s mighty arrows.
She Said:
The night fled the sun in the morning
the sun dies the night returns
the wicked evening spreads everywhere
Even seeing this no one
bathes in the morning in the pond of knowledge.
their bud-like eyes closed or open
they don’t sing praises of Māl
they don’t think of his dark body.
All it takes is a dip in the ‘pond of knowledge’, to praise Māl, and the darkness of saṁsāra dissipates of its own volition. The thick darkness of the night transmutes into the glittering glory of Māl’s dark form, but only to those willing to see. With open eyes, desire awakened and the body enlivened, the earnest petition of the opening verse transforms into revelation in Tiruviruttam 94. The poet is no more than a blind cow mimicking a lowing herd, reproducing words that he cannot understand, simply the vehicle through which Viṣṇu speaks and acts. As Nammālvār empties himself of his many voices, his many characters, and as his desire awakens, his beloved god dark as night spreads himself everywhere and becomes the only voice that matters. And so it is that when even the great sages and seers cannot understand how the supreme, world-striding Viṣṇu came to eat butter, Nammālvār implies that he understands (Tiruviruttam 98) because he has seen. The yogis may remain sleepless or meditative, but it is the poet who is privy to a vision of the divine form. The poet is careful to remind us of the intimate relationship between waking and seeing: this is the good I saw, he insists as he assures us of the veracity of his experience (Tiruviruttam 99). In the end, the frame dissolves itself and the experiences of the preceding ninety-seven verses are presented as direct apprehension. ‘I say these simple, low words because this is the good I saw.’ Presumably, the petition of the first verse has been fulfilled; Viṣṇu has listened to him in embodied form. No one exists but the master of knowledge (jñāna-p-pirān) who defeats false knowledge just as easily as he dispatched the night.
Birthing a Genre: Tiruviruttam and Tirukkōvaiyār
The Tiruviruttam was not born in a vacuum. Several scholars—A.K. Ramanujan, Norman Cutler, Friedhelm Hardy and Indira Peterson chief among them—have explored the transformation of akam and puram modes of antecedent Caṅkam poetry into Tamil bhakti poetry.43 In doing so, we have grown attentive to specific choices that the new devotional poets made: shifting the object of attention from the king to god, remaking the wandering bard into the itinerant devotee and, most significantly, melding the boundaries of the public world of kingship and ethics with the private realm of love and desire. The mark of the Caṅkam predecessors on these bhakti poets is unmistakable, whether they are recasting beloved tropes (the monsoon clouds or the conch bangles) or alluding to and reshaping specific Caṅkam poems. Nammālvār is himself well aware of his debt to these poets as are his commentators. Tiruviruttam 26 makes the debt explicit:
He Said:
O girl like gold, you crossed this wasteland
that the lovely fierce sun spat out
when he swallowed the four lands
and sucked them dry.
Look! Just beyond Kaaṇṇn’s Veḥkā
where even gods come to pray
lie lovely cool flower gardens rich with honey
that give comfort no matter one’s state.
Nammālvār opens the above verse with the phrase nān-nilam, four lands, which evokes the foundational principle of Tamil poetics—that of the landscapes or tiṇais. Belonging to the category of verse known as nakar kāṭṭal (gesturing to the city), Tiruviruttam 26 depicts a familiar situation. The lovers have eloped, crossed the wasteland, at last glimpsed civilization and the end to their troubles. Ever sensitive to his Caṅkam antecedents, Nammālvār utilizes the appropriate tiṇai, the pālai or wasteland, when he adopts the situation for his Tiruviruttam. While this in itself is not unique—we see our poet demonstrate his literary erudition frequently in the Tiruvāymoli—it is the manner in which he does so in this specific instance that sets Tiruviruttam 26 apart.44 But what might appear at first glance to be an erroneous understanding of akam poetics (speaking of four lands instead of five) in fact reveals the poet’s command of his literary past. In Tiruviruttam 26, the hero speaks of pālai as a land leached of life by a fiery sun. It is an idea expressed in the Tamil Jain epic Cilappatikāram. The poet Ilaṅkō Aṭikaḷ through the voice of a Brahmin interlocutor denies that pālai is a landscape all its own. Instead, the Brahmin says:
You have come with your wife in the season
When the forests and hills have shed their nature,
Lost their fresh looks by taking the form
Of a wasteland, thus causing great hardship.45
These words occur in a section called kāṭu kāṇ kātai (
The Chapter on Seeing the Forest; lines 60–66) when the Tamil epic hero Kōvalan and his wife, Kaṇṇaki, abandon their hometown of Pukār, and encounter a Brahmin en route to the city of Madurai. The idea of pālai as a ‘situational desert’ is not something distinctive to the Cilappatikāram, because according to commentators and the Tolkāppiyam’s Poruḷatikāram, there is no desert per se in Tamil country, and it is the fierce heat of summer that transforms an otherwise lush landscape into a wasteland.46 Nammālvār not only employs the landscape and its attendant situation perfectly (pālai, elopement and the sighting of the city) but also does so by alluding to a moment in the Cilappatikāram that parallels the imagined circumstances of the apparently anonymous hero and heroine of the Tiruviruttam.47 Tiruviruttam 26 is as much about Nammālvar demonstrating his formidable learning as it is about appropriating a Tamil Jain literary work to serve his own ends.