A Hundred Measures of Time

by Nammalwar

  Such awareness of the literary past in the Tiruviruttam is not isolated. Indeed, I will argue below that the very structure of the poem anticipates the rich development of the kōvai genre in the deft hands of Māṇikkavācakar (late ninth century), and as such is itself influenced by the Aiṇkurunūru, one of the last great anthologies of Caṅkam love poetry (In a personal communication, David Shulman suggested that the Tiruviruttam, in its shifting frames, genres, modes, also anticipates the kalampakam, a later medieval genre.) The relatively late Aiṇkurunūru (third century) stands apart for its tight, deliberate organization—five sections of one hundred verses each dedicated to each of the five landscapes and composed by five different poets. Martha Selby argues that the Aiṇkurunūru’s five poets collaborated in service of their patron to produce a single work of five hundred verses meant to be read as such.48 Each of the hundred-verse sections devoted to a specific landscape (tiṇai) is further subdivided into groups of tens, devoted to a specific theme, motif or idea: ten on crabs, ten of Toṇṭi town, ten of the water buffalo, and so on.

  The division of a work into sets of ten is a recognizable organizational feature of Tamil bhakti poetry. The thematic tens of the Aiṇkurunūru can well be regarded as anticipating the patikam form that dominates bhakti poetry. The ≽aiva Tēvārams are set into patikams (literally, sets of ten) centred generally on a particular myth or sacred abode of ≽iva, while its Vaiṣṇava counterpart is the Tirumoli (literally, Sacred Language), which also develops around set motifs, themes or sites.49 Nammālvār’s Tiruvāymoli is itself carefully planned into ten cycles of a hundred songs, which are further segmented into sets of ten that focus on special sites, themes or philosophical ideas. The Tiruviruttam has no such easily discernible structure, no neat sets of ten to guide our readings, except for the poem’s final eleven verses (90–100) that do cohere around the poem’s central motifs—the night, the divine vision, sleeping and wakefulness, and, finally, revelation. Nonetheless, the structure of the Aiṇkurunūru can tell us something of where we place the Tiruviruttam in Tamil literary history and how this might help us make sense of its curious structure.

  The Aiṇkurunūru’s overarching concern is the development of love, but it reverses the traditional order of the tiṇais as articulated in the Tolkāppiyam. That is, the Caṅkam poem begins at the end, with domestic quarrel (marutam) and concludes with patient waiting after marriage (mullai). Martha Selby posits that this new order concerns a desire to conclude it on an auspicious note: ‘In the Aiṇkurunūru, the landscapes move from poems about fracture, jealousy and infidelity and settle finally into verses describing and celebrating domestic romance.’50 From this vantage, the Aiṇkurunūru is concerned not just with a sustained meditation on love but also in developing a narrative around it. Earlier Caṅkam verses (and this can be equally true of the Aiṇkurunūru) are composed as stand-alone pieces, largely independent of those that either follow or precede them. But each verse of the Aiṇkurunūru, through the judicious use of tiṇai, enfolds the entire love narrative into it, suggesting both the couple’s past and the future. Kuriñci verses depicting the bloom of first love and its attendant anxieties equally evoke in their marutam guise the despair of marital love, quarrel and infidelity. What is merely suggestive in Caṅkam anthologies is more fully realized in the Aiṇkurunūru, which I propose paves the way for the development of narrative genres such as the kōvai.51

  As a genre the kōvai unfurls the gradual but strictly governed development of love between a well-suited hero and heroine over four hundred verses. In the kōvai, love matures along specifically mandated poetic moments: the first vision, the questions of the heroine’s antecedents, the first meeting, and so forth. It develops in the nexus of the Tamil poetic and grammatical tradition, as attested to in its exemplary use in Nakkīrar’s famous commentary on Iraiyanār Akapporuḷ (fourth to fifth century). The incomplete Pāṇṭikkōvai, the earliest extant kōvai, forms an integral part of Nakkīrar’s commentary, although only 329 verses of this text have survived. It is by far the most cited work in Nakkīrar’s commentary, its 329 verses dwarfing the fifty citations from classical and late-classical Tamil works. Based on the hero of the poem, the Pāṇṭiya king Neṭumāran, Takahashi dates the Pāṇṭikkōvai to between 670 and 775 CE, and thus Nakkīrar’s commentary to around the eighth century.52 One might reasonably argue that this hundred-year period saw a gradual conceptual shift in Tamil poetics and poetry, one that strung buds of stories into fully blooming narrative garlands.

  Nammālvār’s Tiruviruttam emerges at just this cusp, between the tantalizing suggestions of the Aiṅkurunūru and the full realization of a narrative genre such as the kōvai in the hands of the master ≽aiva poet, Māṇikkavācakar. The adaptation of Caṅkam poetics thus goes well beyond bursting open the categories of akam and puram or in the creative intermingling of the tiṇais. The autobiographical, confessional quality of Tamil bhakti poetry readily lends itself to narrative exposition. To a poet like Nammālvār, heir to a rich literary past, a new genre like the kōvai might well prove attractive, to experiment with possibilities both philosophical and poetic, which necessitate adhering to not just one but two stringent formal elements: the antāti and the kōvai. Lest we forget, the Tiruviruttam is not akōvai—it is not four hundred verses long and it does not follow the prescribed steps from clandestine love to quiet, domestic happiness. Nevertheless, like the kōvai, the poem does attempt to construct a narrative about how one falls in love. Not only are the stock characters summoned in service of an overarching narrative about a mortal/divine love affair, many of the kōvai elements such as those mentioned above are present. With no other organizing principle such as thematic tirumolis to hold it together, the love narrative becomes the poem’s mortar. Even as the ≽rīvaiṣṇava commentators uncover the poem’s svāpadeśa, they readily acknowledge the imperative of the (autobiographical) love story. Of course the Tiruviruttam’s love story does not hold together, and the pretext is eventually abandoned when we are well into the poem. This is in no way a flaw in the poem, for its complexity, its haunting quality emerge from Nammālvār’s extraordinary poetic sensibility and his attempt to remake a largely secular genre into a devotional one. In many ways the Tiruviruttam, even with its deliberately broken, disjunctive narrative can be seen as a proto-kōvai, domesticated to the needs of bhakti poetry; the Tiruviruttam is not just a precursor to the Tiruvāymoli but arguably also paves the way for the Tirukkōvaiyār.53

  The Tiruviruttam and Tirukkōvaiyār may not at first glimpse appear to be a natural, complementary pair.54 Not only is their composition separated by some years, the far longer Tirukkōvaiyār clocking in at four hundred verses adheres with steadfast vigour to the strictures of the kōvai genre, an attempt perhaps to reclaim Tamil poetry for ≽aivism, as Norman Cutler has suggested.55 The narratively nebulous, non-linear Tiruviruttam, addressed to Viṣṇu, stays true to a long tradition of ālvār love poetry, and in its own way participates in the reconfiguring of the Tamil literary past to the imperatives of emergent Tamil bhakti.

  In the Caṅkam poetic traditions the phases of love are divided broadly into two major categories: kaḷavu (secret love) and karpu (marital love). Later Tamil poetic grammars such as Nampiyakapporuḷ (thirteenth century) identify thirty-two moments (kiḷavi) in the movement from love to marriage. Of these, seventeen kiḷavi concern secret love, while the remaining fifteen describe marriage and marital love.56 In keeping with the demands of the kōvai genre, the Tirukkōvaiyār takes us from the first blush of love to the trials of marriage, whereas the Tiruviruttam remains preoccupied primarily with secret love (kaḷavu). The poem rarely takes us beyond love consummated in secret but shared spaces (the forest or the seashore) past the threshold of love domesticated through marriage (karpu).57 Apart from the elopement described in Tiruviruttam 26 and 37, the poem seems set on deferring union. Obstacles to the lovers’ union rarely come in the guise of the courtesan, in petty domestic quarrelling or in the
pursuit of wealth after marriage (the last of these occurs early in the poem in Tiruviruttam 8 and 11, while the first two don’t occur at all). Friedhelm Hardy charts the usage of the various Caṅkam tiṇais in the Tiruviruttam, and concludes that the mullai tiṇai (patient waiting/domestic happiness) dominates the mood of the poem, building on earlier Caṅkam associations of this landscape with Māyōn/Viṣṇu.58

  The presence and place of Viṣṇuinthe Tiruviruttam is, in a sense, straightforward. He is the poem’s hero. It is no coincidence that Nammālvār refers to Viṣṇu in the poem’s opening verse not by name or deed, but by addressing him in the vocative as talaivā: hero, leader. In Tamil poetic terms, he is both the pāṭṭuṭai-t-talaivan (the hero of the poem) as well as the kiḷavi-t-talaivan (hero of the narrative). As the pāṭṭuṭai-t-talaivan he is a puram figure, cast as the patron (‘listen to the petition’, the Tiruviruttam begins), a somewhat removed recipient of the poem’s praises and petitions. It is in this guise that Viṣṇu dominates the last fifteen verses, as the poet’s voice increasingly becomes contiguous with the heroine’s yearnings, demands and pleas for a direct, unmediated access to her king, her lord, her master.59 A verse like this (Tiruviruttam 89) is typical of the tone in the poem’s later section:

  She Said:

  Poison to evil fate sweetest nectar to virtue

  beloved of the goddess whose seat is a lotus

  strapping cowherd who grazed his cows

  thinking nothing of it

  that day measured worlds

  with his two feet

  bull-like lord my master

  when will we be united?

  Viṣṇu who measured the world, her bull-like lord, is also her/his master (emmān), who can just as easily withhold or give grace. Throughout the Tiruviruttam he is pictured as a benevolent (puram) king whose just reign is threatened by his careless disregard for the poor girl’s state—‘your sceptre has bent this one time’ the heroine, her friend and her mother all admonish on separate occasions.60 Yet, not two verses earlier, in Tiruviruttam 87, Tirumāl is the heroine’s longed-for beloved, for all intents the poem’s kiḷavi-t-talaivan. The heroine’s mother laments:

  The Mother Said:

  In a heavy full-throated voice the anril laments.

  In a loud voice waves crash into beautiful salt

  marshes

  hearing this

  she praised the virtues of your brave bird

  Now the world gossips

  saying ‘This is wrong’

  O Tirumāl such is the fate of our precious girl.

  We are in the world of the salt marshes, in the neytal tiṇai, the landscape of anxious, terrible waiting. The whole of the natural world—the monogamous anrils, the heartless waves—speak loudly of the girl’s suffering joining the cacophony of cruel, heedless gossip. Is the girl of this verse contiguous with Nammālvār? The commentators answer in a vociferous affirmative. Is she the same speaker who in verse 89 quoted above refers to Viṣṇu as ‘my master’?61 Here too the commentators respond with an unequivocal agreement. Such doubling is not uncommon in the Tiruviruttam; it is in fact integral to creating experiential depth, an encounter echoed in many voices. It is no surprise then that the hero too is twinned, starring both as the poem’s lover and the poem’s patron. Only Tirumāl can end the girl’s sorrow, because he is her lover (by uniting with her). Only Tirumāl can end Nammālvār’s suffering because he is his king (by giving him grace). But such divisions are artificial, for the Tiruviruttam holds these multiple levels in perfect balance simultaneously. The poem is itself predicated on accepting that Nammālvār is the girl and himself, that Viṣṇu is both master and lover, that the action takes place in public with public demands for grace, and in private with private recollections of remembered union. In the Tiruviruttam, akam and puram, Nammālvār and his talaivi merge just as effectively as the pāṭṭuṭai-t-talaivan and kiḷavi-t-talaivan.62

  In contrast—and this is one of the striking differences between the two poems—the Tirukkōvaiyār scrupulously keeps the pāṭṭuṭai-t-talaivan and kiḷavi-t-talaivan separate. Pērāciriyar, the celebrated thirteenth-century commentator on Tamil grammar and poetics, attended chiefly to the poem’s erotic content, seeing it as a work high in literary achievement. But later ≽aiva Siddhānta commentators reformulated his commentary to accommodate an allegorized theological meaning. As such, the poem’s hero or kiḷavit-talaivan becomes uyir (life/soul/breath), the heroine is Civam (≽iva) the supreme godhead, and the friend (tōli) is aruḷ (grace/mercy). Such allegoresis rests on conceiving the poem as existing simultaneously along two parallel tracks, identified as cirrinpam (the lower love of human affections) and pērinpam (the higher love of spiritual desire).63

  Awkward as such interpretations may be, they still enable the reader to make some sense of ≽iva’s absent presence in the Tirukkōvaiyār. As the poem’s divine patron, ≽iva is always present but remains outside and untouched by the Tirukkōvaiyār’s main action.64 An exemplary case is Tirukkōvaiyār 71 spoken by the heroine’s friend to comment on the lovers’ union:

  Like the crow’s two eyes

  that share a single pupil,

  today these two share one life-breath

  in separate bodies.

  Here at the mountain of the lord

  who combines all things in himself,

  the lord who stays in Ambalam’s great gardens,

  this peacock of a woman and this man

  share joy and pain alike.65

  In this lovely verse that speaks of union, ≽iva as the pāṭṭuṭait-talaivan is invoked to grace the mountain-scape in much the same way that Viṣṇu as Māyōn inhabits the mullai world. Here ≽iva as mountain lord watches over the secret love of the anonymous heroine and her hero, the kiḷavit-talaivan. But ≽iva does not participate in it. He provides the foundation on which such special love can grow; after all, he is the one ‘who combines all things in himself’. He resides out there in the intimacy of the small hall, Tillai’s Cirrampalam, that most sacred of Inner Spaces. He is the heart of their love, nurtured into grace as it ripens between the hero and heroine. Such concentric embedding—≽iva out there but living inside the lovers who themselves are indivisible—is an unmistakable feature of the Tirukkōvaiyār. In David Shulman’s fine distillation, such ‘conflation or interpenetration of categories expresses a motivating tension between the overt eroticism of the poems and its extension or displacement into the divine realm’.66 In the final sum, ≽iva’s poetic distance in the Tirukkōvaiyār expresses the very real, unbridgeable distance experienced by the poet from his beloved god.67

  The Tiruviruttam and Tirukkōvaiyār purposefully set up an interlocking architecture that twins the outer world of mundane human love, the inner space of hidden desire, the people, personae, poets and gods that inhabit these spaces. So it is no surprise that in both poems the heroine is compared to sacred places—to sites like Tillai in the Tirukkōvaiyār and Vaikuṇṭha in the Tiruviruttam. Drawing again on the Caṅkam poetic tradition in which the lushness of a woman’s beauty was oft compared to the prosperity of a great city (Toṇṭi, for instance), these two poems make such similes gesture towards the contiguity of the human and divine realms, of spaces shared by human beings and divinity alike.68 If in the Tirukkōvaiyār the heroine is like Tillai, the most sacred of ≽iva’s terrestrial abodes, in the Tiruviruttam she is likened to Vaikuṇṭha, Viṣṇu’s highest heaven. In the Tiruviruttam,

  She is equal to Vaikuṇṭha

  of the great lord who is fire water ether sky earth.

  Tiruviruttam 66

  while in the Tirukkōvaiyār she is the

  Girl with the shining brow

  beautiful as Tillai,

  home of the lord

  who vanquishes enemies …

  Tirukkōvaiyār 31569

  And adroitly navigating the twin worlds of the human and the divine, what the ≽rīvaiṣṇava commentators refer to as the līlā vibhūt
i (realm of play) and nitya vibhūti (eternal realm), is the human heart-mind (manam), that vast inner core of the poet, the inner space-place where god resides. Nammālvār is quick to make the point early on in the Tiruviruttam:

  She Said:

  Seeing

  the gentle woman dear to the flute-playing cowherd

  Seeing

  goddess earth and Śrī

  inseparable as his shadow

  will it remain there or return to me:

  my lonely heart followed that bird

  of the king whose fiery disc

  scorches like his cool lovely tulasī

  that bird praised by the gods

  that bird whose anger burns like fire.

  Tiruviruttam 3

  while in the Tirukkōvaiyār, Māṇikkavācakar has this to say:

  Did you go to study sweet Tamil verses

  at the academy of Kūṭal,

  high-walled city of the lord

  who dwells in my mind

  and in my heart,

  who stays at Tillai

  where flowing streams are held by dams.

  Tirukkōvaiyār 2070

  Both verses make the same point, albeit differently. In the Tiruviruttam the heart is unreliable, eternally abandoning the heroine to reside permanently with Viṣṇu. This of course depicts the situation perfectly, for she has in fact lost her heart to Viṣṇu. The movement towards union requires that the speaker follow the heart—it is externalized. In the Tirukkōvaiyār, the movement is inward. God is in Tillai, in Kūṭal, in my heart, in my mind.