A Hundred Measures of Time

by Nammalwar

  Different as the Tiruviruttam and Tirukkōvaiyār may be, they are interpenetrating works, complements and mirrors of each other. Setting up dizzying involutions—heroine is the city of the lord who lives in her heart, a heart that periodically leaves her—the two poems constantly defeat the reader, disallowing simple concordances, forever deferring resolution. Margaret Trawick’s observation in relation to the Tirukkōvaiyār—‘the horizon is everywhere, including the place where we stand now’71—could just as easily describe the Tiruviruttam.

  The Voices of Lament: Three Female Voices in the Tiruviruttam

  Her Friend Said:

  When that woman born from the lotus

  her eyes cool as rain rose

  from the white waves of the roaring dark sea

  climbed on to his serpent bed

  the maiden of the earth lamented loudly in the sky

  her tears poured as rivers

  flowing down her breasts, these mountains,

  She cried ‘Tirumāl is cruel.’

  Tiruviruttam 52

  The female voice dominates the Tiruviruttam. Speaking as heroine, friend, mother, fortune teller, this range of voices perceptively and insistently comments on the nature of a difficult, ill-fated love. In their strident voices, Nammālvār’s women chastise, bemoan, curse, comfort, confide, weep, cry, console and lament. Their dramatic, striking speech deliberately draws attention to themselves and to their suffering: the mother loses her daughter to love; the daughter loses her heart to the absent god; the friend, a twin to the heroine, wastes away in sympathy. As the poem progresses, the female voices meld together, bound by the shared suffering of loss until they fully disappear by verse 88, absorbed, it would seem, into the singular voice of the speaker-poet. The appearance and disappearance of female voices is not peculiar to the Tiruviruttam. Āṇṭāḷ’s Nācciyār Tirumoli uses the collective female voice of the gopīs of Āyarpāṭi to potent effect. They weave in and out of the poem at strategic moments until it becomes clear (particularly if you take the Nācciyār Tirumoli in concert with the Tiruppāvai) that union with Kṛṣṇaisto be found and savoured in the magical world of Vrindavan.72 After all, in the Nācciyār Tirumoli Āṇṭāḷ leaves us at exactly the right place—in Vrindavan—to draw this conclusion. In the Tiruvāymoli, Nammālvār speaks in the female persona in approximately twenty-five decads, so a quarter of the text. The guise is so much a part of him that the ≽rīvaiṣṇavas particularize it as the Parāṅkuśa Nāyikā. There are even elaborate alaṅkāras (adornments) during the Annual Festival of Recitation in December when the image of Nammālvār is dressed as a woman or, more specifically, as the Parāṅkuśa Nāyikā. In such figurations, Nammālvār’s heroine is not just an alter ego, another artificially forged self, but the truest voice of his deepest longing.

  In typically self-reflexive fashion, the ≽rīvaiṣṇava saṁpradāya has a long, rich history of trying to understand the purpose of the heroine/talaivi and her female companions in Nammālvār. The Ācārya Hṛdayam (The Heart of the Teacher), a thirteenth-century Maṇipravāḷa work, justifiably stands at the pinnacle of these engagements. Composed by Alakiya Maṇavāḷa Perumāḷ Nāyanār, a scion of the famous Vaṭakkuttiruvīti Piḷḷai, author of the authoritative īṭu commentary on the Tiruvāymoli, the Ācārya Hṛdayam offers a succinct contemplation of Nammālvār’s poetry and its philosophy in 234 sūtras (referred to as cūrṇikai).73 In many of these cūrṇikai, Nāyanār maps the development and use of the female voice.74 The following famous cūrṇikai is typical of his style and his ability to distil the essence of generations of traditional thinking. In cūrṇikai 118, he says:

  Jñānattil tam pēccu; prēmattil peṇ pēccu

  In jñāna he speaks in his voice; in love, in a woman’s

  voice.

  In order to understand how Nāyanār comes to this point, we must place the cūrṇikai in context. Cūrṇikai 115 describes how union and separation nurture jñāna (wisdom, knowledge, discernment) and bhakti respectively. That is, jñāna indexes a state of saṁśleṣa, or union. Here, tight in the embrace of god who resides in one’s own heart, he sees him in his mind’s eye and thus enjoys him. Yet this is not a state that is sustained or, more accurately, cannot be sustained. Cūrṇikai 116 then offers the correlation between union and separation saying, ‘ivarrāl varum saṁśleṣa viśleṣaṅkaḷākirana’ (what emerges from this is known as saṁśleṣa and viśleṣa). And soon, the ālvār finds himself in a state of separation as though waking from a dream. It is in such a state, in viśleṣa—disengagement—that the female voice emerges. In cūrṇikai 119, the question is raised as to how words spoken in clarity (teḷivu) and in bewilderment (kalakkam), that is, in a state of saṁśleṣa and viśleṣa respectively, can be regarded as equally authoritative. Cūrṇikai 120 provides the definitive answer by asserting that whether he (Nammālvār) uses the masculine (aṭiyōm) or the feminine (aṭicciyōm), it is still his voice because his nature as a dependent (pāratantriya) remains unchanged. In the final analysis, it is the oscillations between saṁśleṣa and viśleṣa, between jñāna and bhakti that enable the cultivation of both wisdom and devotion.75

  The Ācārya Hṛdayam’s sensitive understanding of the female voice is one way to approach the appearance and disappearance of female voices in the Tiruviruttam. In fact, everything that occurs in the poem after verse 87 indicates that full, immersive, abnegating union is the order of the day, a union that does not require the expressive, lamenting female voice. So, the speaker-poet can quite sensibly say that:

  When we see all that is like him

  when we see his emblems his form

  we stand entranced.

  Tiruviruttam 88

  yet verses like this continue to intrude:

  Poison to evil fate sweetest nectar to virtue …

  bull-like lord my master

  when will we be united?

  Tiruviruttam 89

  In the end, though, it would appear that the poised, philosophical voice wins in the Tiruviruttam; it concludes with the speaker-poet energetically exhorting fellow devotees to follow his lead as he ‘awakens his desire’ for Viṣṇu even as his helpless, confused female (and male) characters are left behind.

  Although Nāyanār’s lovely distillation provides us with one way of approaching the clamouring voices of the women in the Tiruviruttam, it opens up many more questions. Nāyanār and his fellow commentators are primarily concerned with why the female characters show up (answer: because of separation). There is little interest in how Nammālvār’s female characters act and speak. What do they hope to achieve when they express a longing born of separation? Rather than see their words as emerging from the confusion and bewilderment (kalakkam) of painful separation, I propose that we read them as clear, thoughtful, passionate contemplations on the nature of such an experience. It is in the women’s voices, more specifically in their lamenting voices, that the poem produces its willed, intentional ambiguities.

  Laments mark separation, and generally that most final, inevitable of separations, death. Thick with vocatives, laments give expression to what Steven Hopkins has termed ‘the vivid life of minute particulars’.76 They enshrine a stubborn refusal to forget, to make the past matter in the present, and to draw attention to what (and who) is left behind.77 It is no surprise then that lament songs in Tamil are called oppu, literally comparison, a means of cultivating a sympathetic understanding.78 For example, here is a literary oppu from the great Tamil anthology of war poems, the Puranānuru. It is composed by King Pāri’s daughters (1–3 CE) after he had fallen in battle. They say:

  That day in that white moonlight

  we had our father

  enemies hadn’t taken our hill.

  This day in this white moonlight

  kings with victory drums have taken our hill

  and we have no father.

  Puranānuru 112

  This exquisite, hard-hitting verse encapsulates so much that is centr
al to the Tamil lament. They are predicated on a feeling of lack, or kurai, that is itself built on an inadequacy, born from evaluation and comparison, of the living past in the frozen present.79 So, we are back to oppu. Pāri’s daughters had a father, now they have no father. They had a home, now they have no home. But implied in all of this is that someone else still has a father; someone else has a home—their home. In this frozen, unmoving moment of permanent, irreversible separation, it is the vivid particulars of the past that throb and tumble with life. Laments voice a stubborn refusal to forget just as clearly as they offer up unabashed critiques—of the present, of social order, of unjust rule, of oppressive hierarchies; and as women cry, weep and wail in real life or in poetry, their laments act as an ethical witness: their petition to be heard, their suffering to be acknowledged.80

  Given that the Tiruviruttam styles itself as a viṇṇappam, a petition, it can be read as one long lament: a lament against this life of saṁsāra that thrives in the swamps of false knowledge and filthy bodies. It rails against the very injustice of a present life only made possible because of a morass of inescapable past deeds. The poem is as much a plea as it is a lament (pulampal), making this identification clearly in verse 86:

  You who hold aloft disc and conch as weapons

  stole butter then cried

  when the cowherd woman bound you with ropes.

  My lord what’s left to say in my lament?81

  The dissenting voices of the Tiruviruttam—all female—call attention to this desperate present life, petitioning Viṣṇu for his immediate intervention, to appear before her fully embodied, and most importantly to listen.82 But in the Tiruviruttam’s universe the past is not all bad, for it marks the moments of union, fleeting though they may have been. As the heroine longs for reunion, the petition-lament takes on a different kind of urgency. In oppu, the female voices chorus

  A past of blissful union telescopes into the miserable present:

  where is he?

  She wastes away from lovesickness: where is he?

  If even the geese and herons are united with their mates, why is

  she alone: where is he?

  Such pointed questions and statements flow through the Tiruviruttam critiquing, shaming, eliciting sympathy: heroine, mother, friend all in oppu. Their tears flow freely, especially her tears, obscuring what she wants to see even as it sharpens the vision of the inner eye.83 Conversely, she sees too much—the beauty of his eyes everywhere—and so too follows the despair. If she can see him, he must be outside of her, apart from her, separate. Our heroine can exult

  Gleaming like a large lake of lotuses

  on a dark vast mountain—

  lord of this world bound by surging oceans

  lord of the sky lord of the virtuous

  that dark lord

  my lord

  I see the beauty of his eyes everywhere.

  Tiruviruttam 39

  Only to immediately lament to her beautifully adorned mothers that

  the beautiful bull-like sun hides behind the mountain

  dark night spreads everywhere

  like a herd of elephants….

  O mothers, when will he glance at me?

  Tiruviruttam 40

  The vision is bifocal, turned both inwards and outwards, hearkening to the past and the present at once. The lament holds this bifocality in suspension as it urges towards dissolution, liquefaction. Her friend might say:

  At this time in this city

  the cool breeze abandons its nature

  forgets everything breathes fire.

  Is it to ruin the lustre of the girl

  whose broad eyes spill tears like rain?

  She weeps for cool lovely tulasī

  from the one dark as rain clouds

  whose sceptre has bowed

  this one time.

  Tiruviruttam 5

  the mother might echo the sentiment:

  The disease—its nature is deception—

  makes her eyes broad as one’s palm

  seem like darting fish in a vast ocean.

  Her heart is fixed on the honey-drenched tulasī

  of the one who lifted the mountain

  to protect his flock from the rain

  that one who rides the bird.

  What will happen to her beautiful bangles now?

  Tiruviruttam 24

  and the heroine finds an echo, an oppu in the mournful evening:

  Having lost the sun

  the west wails cradling the moon at her waist

  like a child, its mouth wet with milk

  Such is the evening.

  Those who love the tulasī

  of the lord who measured worlds

  have no relief

  from the caress of the cold northern breeze.

  Tiruviruttam 35

  Oppu, comparison, sympathy are born from consonance, a consonance with others, with the landscape, between the past and the present. But sympathy, that precious virtue, is nurtured within a self that can dissolve, that is wet with emotion, with tears, what Tamils call the ‘īramānā manam’, the moist heart, the aqueous, acquiescent self: unbounded, fluid, malleable, ever flowing.84 Is it any surprise then that the Tiruviruttam (as so many bhakti poems) is full of crying, where that īram—wetness—pours forth, unable to remain contained within the rigid contours of bodies? She cries, the clouds weep their tears as if in concert, and the cloud-hued lord is an absent presence. She cries a storm of tears, but that lord who lifted a mountain remains unmoved. He sends the breeze drenched with his tulasī instead: an absent presence. As tears, as clouds, as the honey dripping from tulasī, as milk staining the mouth of a suckling child, moistness leaks forth, bursting the banks of self and shores. It is the stuff of the lament, the stuff of oppu. As our heroine dissolves and disappears, nothing remains but water: she, melting and liquid, and god’s own aqueous self:

  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.

  Tiruviruttam 99

  One Voice among Many: Revelation in the Tiruviruttam

  Little worms that live in a wound

  do what they do.

  What do they know of the world?

  I learned these songs from that cunning Tirumāl

  who uses me to sing of himself.

  It’s like people making meaning

  from the chirp of a lizard.

  Tiruviruttam 48

  Sandwiched between two verses of desperate longing, one spoken by the mother (Tiruviruttam 47) and one by the heroine (Tiruviruttam 49), appears this curious verse. The viṇṇappam which sets up the Tiruviruttam as an address to god has transmuted into an address by god. Nammālvār steps out of the frame, out of the female body to make space for the embodied presence of the deity. Correspondingly, the god enters the frame and embeds himself in the most inner of spaces, the devotee’s heart-mind-self. In this centre of interiority, the space that enables an unconstructed expansion of self, the poet expands to become not just another thing, but an everything.85 He is now an instrument, a vehicle, a medium through which god authors himself. For Hardy, this provides a rationale for the ālvār’s poetry that exists outside of himself, one made possible on account of the Tiruviruttam’s reliance on the symbolic structures of its Caṅkam-style characters, and which enable such instrumentality.86

  The commentators of course have a differing perspective, and verses like this in the Tiruviruttam and Tiruvāymoli are what Francis Clooney has referred to as moments of god-identity or god-consciousness.87 In the Tiruvāymoli, a striking instance of ‘god-consciousness’ is articulated in V.6, which follows a decad that describes the heroine’s long, endless night of desp
air. In these ten verses the helpless mother tries to explain her daughter’s strange claims—‘I created Land and Sea’—to an invisible audience. The poet-heroine encompassed by god in turn encompasses the world, but it is an experience that remains inaccessible and opaque to everyone else.88 God-identity in the Tiruvāymoli is not simply imitative, a persona that the heroine assumes like the gopīs of Vrindavan to alleviate suffering. Here her entire being is pervaded by god’s presence in a self-obliterating possession.89 Paradoxically, this ephemeral instance of god-consciousness occurs at the girl’s nadir, when the anxieties of separation threaten to overwhelm her. Clooney’s careful reading of the Tiruvāymoli commentators leads him to conclude accurately that separation activates such fierce concentration on the inner self that (s)he finds ‘her true ātman within the ātman’.90

  It is in a similar context that the Tiruviruttam’s first instance of god-consciousness makes itself known. The heroine’s mother is concerned for her survival—can she survive another night, another onslaught of the breeze? Can she live in this terrible world? This is the stage that the poet sets for us in the Tiruviruttam and one that Periyavāccān Piḷḷai deftly directs us through. He tells us that as Nammālvār grieves for a pointless life on this terrestrial realm, Viṣṇu responds that it is to sing of him as he would in Vaikuṇṭha that he lives here in the world of play, the līlā vibhūti. To prove this very point, cunning, playful Viṣṇu takes Nammālvār over (visayīkarittu) to sing and enjoy his own form (svarūpa-rūpa), his virtues (guṇa) and his vibhūtis (realms). As we have already seen, such moments of intermittent takeover are not unusual in Nammālvār (or in bhakti poetry in general). Despite the situational similarity between V.6 and Tiruviruttam 47–48, Periyavāccān Piḷḷai does not direct us to a decad like V.6 to explore this particular instance of god-consciousness. Instead, he provides us with an apt parallel from Tiruvāymoli VII.9, a decad in which Nammālvār speaks again of Viṣṇu singing of himself through the poet. From this rich ten verses full of textured descriptions of Viṣṇu’s uncompromising takeover, Piḷḷai chooses to cite a single phrase: en mun collum, he who sings in front of me, from VII.9.2. Let us see this verse in its entirety: