A Hundred Measures of Time

by Nammalwar

  What can I say? Now becoming one with my sweet life,

  he makes me sing sweet songs with my own words

  with his own words the lord of illusion praises himself,

  the one who sings before me, the first of the three forms.91

  With this citation Piḷḷai subtly brings us back to the petition that begins the Tiruviruttam—stand before me embodied—and the poet is now not so much taken over by Viṣṇu as directed by him, reduced to striving to make meaning of what he is taught. He is rendered speechless: ‘What can I say?’ Tiruvāymoli VII.9.2 begins.92 All of this echoes in the only other god-consciousness verse that occurs late in the Tiruviruttam.

  Virtuous Vedic seers

  are blessed to be adorned by

  your dark body your red lotus eyes your feet.

  Like a blind cow mimicking the lowing herd

  so it can return to the city

  I repeat some words.

  What else can this servant say?

  Tiruviruttam 94

  Here is the poet once again in a kind of self-defeating moment. His experience consigned to mimicry, undertaken with neither knowledge nor understanding, it is set against the grand ritual actions of the seers and sages. Certainly, the poet-speaker is well prepared for simple imitation, having practised mindlessly repeating the god’s names and places like a mad thing (Tiruviruttam 20, 60, 71, 83). Having set such a precedent, without quite saying it, he tells us that it is better to be a blind cow than a vaunted sage, it is better to repeat his names and deeds, than lofty Vedic chants. Even if his final words are simple, low, base (the deprecating īnaccol that begins the very important ninety-ninth verse), they emerge from Nammālvār’s direct apprehension. This is the good (nallatu) the poet has seen: there is no one but the master of knowledge, jñāna-p-piran allāl illai. He is all things and all words, words both low and high. He speaks these words, but, equally, they are spoken to him. He stands embodied to listen—we are back where we started—and then, trickster that he is, embodies himself within the devotee to speak of him.

  So now to the poem’s cast of characters we add Viṣṇu himself. As the frame shatters and the petition transforms into lamentation into revelation we are left wondering: who speaks? One answer would be that he speaks through Nammālvār who multiplies his self to speak in his many voices, in his many personae. Immersed in each other, the poet and his deity speak in boisterous multivocality, their many selves porous and permeable to each other. Writing in the context of Sanskrit drama, David Shulman points out that the self expands through disintegration, splitting, viśleṣa. In that state of disengagement the self sees itself as though from a distance (self-reflexivity?), mirroring and doubling itself.93 In the Tiruviruttam, the heroine becomes Nammālvār’s double, and she becomes his mirror. The friend becomes her reflection, the means for the heroine to make sense of the oscillations of desire. The hero and heroine twin each other, a perfectly matched love-struck pair. And Viṣṇu doubles as both hero and patron. Finally, in the moment of possession (god-consciousness), as the boundaries of this polyphonic self are breached, poet and god quite literally become mirrors of the other, the poet content to simply and uncomprehendingly repeat the words he is taught. Immersed as he is in god (an ālvār, after all!), such mirroring enables him to continue to have a relationship with his beloved lord. The vast ‘horizons of encompassment’94 that such possession makes possible permit the god to remain simultaneously inside our poet and outside him, for the poem to thus be petition, lamentation and revelation.

  But there is more to possession in the Tiruviruttam. In both Tiruviruttam 48 and 94, the poet’s (god’s?) words function like a kuri, a sign or mark, and, more generally, divination. The poet himself draws attention to the kuri-like function of the Tiruviruttam by comparing his feeble poetic attempts to making meaning out of the chirp of a lizard, a common means of divination in Tamil Nadu (Tiruviruttam 48).95 Often the telling of kuri occurs through possession, when the deity descends to speak through an agent to resolve illness and conflicts. In Caṅkam poems the disease is lovesickness, a diagnosis the diviner misses without fail. Nammālvār too exploits this trope to full effect as in Tiruviruttam 20, while turning it on its head.

  The Friend Said:

  The great god causes this quiet girl’s disease

  It’s not the disease of the young god

  who demands things to end it.

  O Vēlan, stop now.

  Mother, listen to me

  Repeat the names of the one who swallowed the

  seven worlds

  adorn her with his garland of lovely cool tulasī.

  The friend counsels the mother that this is no disease of possession (at least not the possession of Murukan), and is instead lovesickness for Māl. But is this just lovesickness? Is there not something of possession here, marked by its attendant loss of consciousness and its merging of distinct selves? The fortune teller seems to understand this and in her lone verse responds obliquely:

  This girl whose breasts are covered by cloth

  has the divine disease

  inflicted by the virtue

  of the master of the gods.

  Bring a garland of divine cool lovely tulasī

  or even its leaves its stalk its roots

  or just earth on which it grows

  place it on her.

  Tiruviruttam 53

  Soon thereafter, the heroine herself confirms the true nature of this divine disease (taiva nal nōy) which so consumes her:

  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

  Both Tiruviruttam 20 and 56, verses about the ‘divine disease’, share the same skilful use of the myth of Viṣṇu swallowing/eating the worlds to suggest the intimate relationship between the poet and god, between the heroine and her divine beloved. John Carman and Vasudha Narayanan identify the swallowing of the world as a root metaphor in the Tiruvāymoli, which Nammālvār cleverly associates with union with god.96 Erotically charged, the myth evokes the god and devotee’s mutually voracious appetite for each other. It links to other similarly charged divine gustatory indulgences—the churning of the ocean to yield its nectar, the stealing of the butter. All of these myths are present in the Tiruviruttam. They never appear together, although these three myths are often clustered, suggesting that we are meant to apprehend the implied relationships.97 Eating butter is to eating nectar is to eating the world is to eating the deity. Is it any wonder then that everything seems to be ravenous in the Tiruviruttam? Night devours the day; the moon suckles like a child. The breeze eats the honey-drenched tulasī, the tulasī eats its own honey, and it is this nectar-filled tulasī that is the sole cure for the heroine’s illness. She hungers for union, and without it she starves. She empties out and her bangles slip off. The only thing that can fill her is his presence. In all of its iterations, eating and swallowing (and its inverse, spitting out) invoke not just union but complete pervasion, the ‘horizons of encompassment’.98 Even when speaking in negatives, the implications are clear: once swallowed, he is all things to her, dark fruit, the sea and even the end of days:

  I didn’t say ‘He became the end of days and

  swallowed the seven worlds.’

  I saw a dark fruit

  observed ‘It’s the colour of the sea.’

  My mother then said ‘What impertinence!’

  ‘She speaks of the colour of the one who swallowed

  worlds.’

  Speak to her dear friend. My mother scolds me.

  Tiruviruttam 71

  Bodies of Enjoyment: The Tiruviruttam and Commentary

  Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators, beginning with Periyavāccān Piḷḷai (thir
teenth century), recognize two levels of meaning in the Tiruviruttam. The outer level is the anyāpadeśa (the other meaning) and the svāpadeśa (esoteric meaning) is its secret, inner meaning. In Tamil terms, such ingenious splicing finds expression in the terms cirrinpam (lower or minor love) and pērinpam (higher or major love), concepts that guide the interpretation of poems like the Tirukkōvaiyār. In the Śrīvaiṣṇava context, the allegoresis required to divide and merge a text is refined throughout the long, dense (continuing) history of commentarial activity. The definitive Ācārya Hṛdayam (thirteenth century), primarily concerned with Nammālvār’s Tiruvāymoli, synthesizes prevailing interpretive modes, and provides the tools to decode the anyāpadeśa, allowing one to peer into the poet’s heart as though through clear glass, in an active reading process that Francis Clooney has rightly termed ‘seeing through texts’.99

  A fundamental guiding principle of Śrīvaiṣṇava commentary is the notion of anubhava (enjoyment). Commentary is not meant simply to elucidate and decode; rather, it is meant to induce, mimic and replicate divine savouring. In other words, commentary too is guided by aesthetic concerns and seeks to produce an aesthetic affect. Within this paradigm, Śrīvaiṣṇava commentary is conceived of as an anubhava grantha, a text of enjoyment, a term that understands pleasure (expressed as anubhava) as central to their theological project. Conceptualized as such, a proper commentary succeeds only when it acts as an effective and affective conduit between the ālvār’s savouring of god and the reader/listener. Just as the ālvār is a vessel filled to brimming with god’s presence, to produce a flavourful commentary the ālvār’s experience must inhabit the commentator. Such exegesis becomes a delicately balanced, multi-tiered edifice of enjoyment, recording both the mutual relish of Viṣṇu and the ālvār’s savouring of god and the commentator’s own savouring of both. So how does the Śrīvaiṣṇava commentator go about generating anubhava both within himself and in his audience? How does a commentary proceed? What are the sources he turns to?

  While several ālvār poems are inspired by Caṅkam (akam) verses—the Tiruviruttam is a case in point—Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators rarely reference or cite them. Often this disregard of the earlier largely secular Tamil sources has been taken as evidence of either the commentator’s ignorance or of the fading relevance and circulation of the great Caṅkam works.100 Glancing at the references in the commentaries to poems like the Tiruviruttam amply demonstrates that the Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators were well aware of the literary past, but that they simply chose not to turn to it for their exegetical purposes. Instead, they adroitly employ both Tamil and Sanskrit sources to elucidate ālvār poetry to fulfil newly emergent theological and aesthetic imperatives. While the Sanskrit sources are far-ranging—the Upaniṣads, Purāṇas and the epics loom large—ālvār poetry provides the bulk of their Tamil sources. As all these texts—Sanskrit and Tamil—are seen to embody that elusive quality of anubhava, they are regarded as specifically suited to heightening one’s own experience of the ālvār poem. Let us leave aside the Sanskrit corpus for a moment and examine why Śrīvaiṣṇava commentators privilege ālvār poetry over the citation of relevant Tamil literary sources.101 Most obviously, to the commentator a line from the Tiruvāymoli or one from Tirumaṅkai’s Periya Tirumoli captures accurately the peculiar oscillations of mystical experience in a way that the archetypal love poems of the Caṅkam anthologies simply cannot. Each ālvār becomes a light to another; one anubhava telescopes into another; the Tiruvāymoli weaves into the Tiruviruttam; Nammālvār transforms into Tirumaṅkai, into Parāṅkuśa Nāyikā, into Āṇṭāḷ. In the end, anubhava is produced through a glorious intermingling and a heady intertextuality where all ālvār poems are seen as commentaries and elucidations on each other.102

  A.K. Ramanujan in Hymns for the Drowning theorizes the relationship between Viṣṇu and Nammālvār in the Tiruvāymoli in terms of mutual cannibalism, where ‘the eater is eaten, the container is contained in a metonymy many times over’.103 The Tiruviruttam too is replete with mutual devouring, such that the boundaries between Nammālvār, his many multiplying selves (heroine, friend, mother, self, etc.) and Viṣṇu are not just breached, but dissolved. So many times in the Tiruviruttam we are at a loss to determine who the speaker might be, with the knowledge that Nammālvār stands behind them all, and that behind him stands Viṣṇu, both listening and speaking. In writing about the Tirukkōvaiyār, in many ways the Tiruviruttam’s fraternal twin, David Shulman characterizes such involution as mutual embeddedness, a strategy designed to confound speaker(s) and listener(s) as they push inexorably towards dissolution.104 One can make similar comparisons of mutual cannibalism/mutual embeddedness when we consider what Śrīvaiṣṇava commentary seeks to do. If anubhava is a central goal of commentary, it can only be sufficiently realized by breaking the artificial divides between poet and commentator, poem and commentary. When the commentator calls up the various ālvār and their respective poems to elucidate the work of another, it serves to highlight that they speak in many voices, through many selves of a singular experience. This is not to say that the Śrīvaiṣṇava commentator is indifferent to difference and nuance; rather, the commentary seeks threads of commonality, of echo, of mutual embeddedness where each poet feeds off the other while nonetheless remaining distinct. One might consider here how this notion of embeddedness in commentary finds exemplary expression in the famous story of the meeting of the first three ālvār. Poykai, Pēy and Pūtam encounter each other in a rainstorm when they take shelter in a temple. Once inside, they are pushed, then crushed together by Viṣṇu’s encompassing presence. The boundary of each—they are already fluid and disembodied—dissolves into the other, and then into Viṣṇu.105 In the end, their mutual experience of simultaneous fullness and emptiness results in three similar poems.106

  In Poykai’s words:

  Taking the earth as bowl,

  the vast sea as oil,

  and the burning sun as my lamp,

  I laid this garland of verses

  at the feet of the lord

  who holds a dazzling red wheel

  to keep the ocean of sorrows far away.

  Mutal Tiruvantāti 1107

  Pūtam’s take:

  With love as bowl,

  ardor as oil,

  and a joyful mind as wick,

  I swooned

  and lit a blazing lamp of knowledge

  for Nāraṇan,

  even as I delight in the sage Tamil tongue.

  Iraṇṭām Tiruvantāti 1108

  and Pēy’s exults:

  I lit the lamp of discernment,

  I searched for the lord,

  and caught him in my net—

  then the lord of illusions quietly entered my heart

  and there

  he stands, sits, and reclines

  always without flaw.

  Mūnrām Tiruvantāti 94109

  While Poykai, Pēy and Pūtam may be an obvious example of how mutual embeddedness/cannibalism might work, a Śrīvaiṣṇava commentary is guided by philosophical and aesthetic obligations to identify, construct and cultivate such moments. It is through this process that anubhava occurs.110

  Let us now return to the Tiruviruttam and Periyavāccān Piḷḷai’s commentary to examine how a skilled commentator might seek to nurture anubhava in himself and in his audience. The poem has its inbuilt audience—the mother, the friend, the hero and even the natural world—who engage in a kind of sympathetic anubhava of the heroine’s angst. In the svāpadeśa, the poem’s supporting cast members are Nammālvār’s devotees—bhāgavatas—who comfort him through the ebb and flow of his longing. Their love for Nammālvār reverberates in the love he has for Viṣṇu. Through this vicarious, resonant relish anubhava is born, and it is nurtured into voracious savouring through the productive symbiosis between the poem’s two registers.

  Nammālvār himself signals the Tiruviruttam’s two interpenetrating frames by characterizing the poem as a v
iṇṇappam. Thus bracketed, the love poem (akapporuḷ) quite literally becomes akam (inner), enclosed in the embrace of the poem’s first verse and its final verse, the phala śruti. Yet this inner poem is also just the outer meaning: it is puram. The hidden inner (akam) meaning is secreted into these akam verses of the mundane puram world, embedded as god is embedded in Nammālvār, as Nammālvār is embedded within god. The task of the commentator is to draw together seamlessly the Tiruviruttam’s implicit meaning in the poem’s inner verses. In doing so, the poem’s inner meaning becomes public (after all, that’s the purpose of commentary), while the external shell is interred. To put it simply, akam is to svāpadeśa as puram is to anyāpadeśa, even as the akapporuḷ verses of the Tiruviruttam look to Caṅkam akam poetry for inspiration. To further extend the metaphor of akam and puram, the commentary becomes the poem’s public face mediating its inner worlds. But in the dance of akam and puram, whether within the Tiruviruttam or in how we approach Śrīvaiṣṇava commentary in general, they are not antagonists set against each other. They are complementary, fitting together as a jigsaw, each nestled into the other as svāpadeśa and anyāpadeśa, as poem and commentary.

  There are several important commentaries to the Tiruviruttam as befits Nammālvār’s status as the pre-eminent ālvār, but are far fewer than those composed for his Tiruvāymoli. Below I discuss the Tiruviruttam commentary authored by Periyavāccān Piḷḷai (b. 1128), the student of the formidable scholar Nampiḷḷai, and offer an example of Periyavāccān Piḷḷai’s commentary to a Tiruviruttam verse. I have chosen to focus on Periyavāccān Piḷḷai for several reasons. He is the only medieval commentator to compose commentaries on the entire Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, earning him the title vyākhyāna cakravarti (emperor of commentators). His writing also represents the maturation of Śrīvaiṣṇava Maṇipravāḷa prose discourse, and in many places (in his work on the Tiruviruttam and elsewhere) anticipates the internal philosophical differences that eventually lead several centuries later to a sectarian split. Finally, Piḷḷai’s commentarial voice is lively and energetic. His love for the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa expresses itself through an abundance of allusions to and citations from that text, while he demonstrates his erudition by also quoting liberally from Sanskrit scriptural sources. All of this sits comfortably beside references from the works of the ālvār and contemporary anecdotal evidence. Piḷḷai’s commentarial style is thorough and rigorous. In his Tiruviruttam commentary he takes care to elucidate the anyāpadeśa meaning by identifying the specific poetic situations, with colophonic statements such as ‘the friend comforts the heroine when the rains arrive’.111 He also attempts to establish narrative continuities within the text wherever possible. His commentary, composed in a dialogic style, is imaginative and thick with allusions. It also follows fairly closely the well-established contours that owe as much to literary commentators like Uraiyāciriyar as to philosophers and theologians writing in Sanskrit and Tamil.