by Nammalwar
Periyavāccān Piḷḷai’s Maṇipravāḷa commentary for the Tiruviruttam consists of three major parts:112
1. A Word-Gloss: In some instances this is the first level of interpretation. The gloss itself consists of two parts—where the commentator reorders the words of the poem into prose order and these reordered phrases/words are interrupted by the actual gloss. In Tiruviruttam 1the word tēvar (literally, gods) occurs. Piḷḷai, in accordance with preceding commentarial practice and Śrīvaiṣṇava philosophy, glosses it as nityasūri (eternal/perfect beings) referring to those who dwell with Viṣṇu permanently. Ādi Śeṣa, Garuḍa and Viśvaksena may be said to be the foremost among the nityasūris.
2. A Context and Continuity (Saṅgati): Here the commentator establishes continuity with a previous verse. In a poem like the Tiruviruttam this continuity has to be established along the two parallel lines of anyāpadeśa and svāpadeśa. The section also sometimes provides a brief synopsis of the verse.
3. The Commentary Proper: Here the commentator explicates each phrase (following the word order established in the gloss) and creates a sustained interpretation of the verse. The commentary is characterized by frequent quotations from the poems of the ālvār, and Sanskrit sources such as the Bhagavad Gītā, the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa and the Viṣṇu Purāṇa. The commentator also often uses anecdotes from the lives of significant historical figures like Rāmānuja and Kūrattālvān to elucidate the veracity of his claims. These anecdotes take several forms—a retelling of a story involving their experience of ālvār poetry; an interpretation of a line of ālvār poetry which is cast as a dialogue between them and a student; the quotation of a line attributed to a figure like Rāmānuja. The length of the commentary depends on the significance of individual verses to the commentator’s interpretative agenda.
Despite the rigorous demands of commentarial structure, Periyavāccān Piḷḷai is no stuffy pedant. He is attuned to nuance and to the Tiruviruttam’s ever-shifting centres. He is attentive to how the poem continually displaces meaning through willed ambiguity, which manifests through a confusion of speaking voices or through multiple possible readings of a given verse effected by the manipulation of antāti or other kinds of wordplay. Tiruviruttam 25 is a good example of both elements and typical of Piḷḷai’s approach.
eṅkōl vaḷai mutalā kaṇṇan maṇṇum viṇṇum aḷikkum
ceṅkōl vaḷaivu viḷaivikkumāl tiral cēr amarar
tam kōnuṭaiya tam kōn umpar ellā evarkkum tamkōn
nam kōn ukakkum tulāy en ceyyātu ini nānilattē
She Said:
If my beautiful bangles make Kaṇṇan’s sceptre
which rules earth and sky
bend
what will it not do—that tulasī
dear to the king of valiant gods,
king of the heavens,
our king?
Piḷḷai begins by suggesting that the above verse may be spoken by either the heroine or her friend, reading the verse’s opening phrase, eṅkōl vaḷai, as ‘my beautiful bangles’ (heroine) or as an epithet, ‘she who wears beautiful bangles’ (heroine’s friend). In the commentary for this same verse, attentive to its grammar, Piḷḷai also suggests that it can be read either by taking Kaṇṇan or tulāy (tulasī) as the subject. In the former case, the entire verse is read as a single sentence, while in the second case the āl in the second line (viḷaivikkumāl) is taken as an exclamation of surprise. In this interpretation, the verse splits into two parts.113 For simplicity and to convey how differently the verse reads in the alternative proposition, I have removed all the epithets and reduced the two parts of this latter reading to two straightforward prose sentences:
Kaṇṇan’s sceptre, which rules earth and sky, bent because
of my bangles.
What won’t the tulasī of my lord do now?
Keeping all this in mind—the complementary relationships between commentary and text, the mutual embeddedness of anyāpadeśa and svāpadeśa, the imaginative and sensitive readings that Piḷḷai offers—let us turn to Piḷḷai’s full-length commentary on a single verse of the Tiruviruttam.114 I have chosen verse 68, one with clear akapporuḷ content from the poem’s latter half. It is also a verse translated and discussed by A.K. Ramanujan to draw parallels between the Caṅkam literary tradition and the poetry of Nammālvār, a similarity that Piḷḷai barely mentions in his commentary.115 Piḷḷai’s commentarial style is difficult to translate, so what appears below is a paraphrase of the main part of the commentarial text.116 First the verse in Tamil and then in translation:
malarntē olintila mālaiyum mālai-p-pon vācikaiyum
pulam tōy talai-p-pantal taṇṭu ura nārri-p-porukaṭal cūl
nilam tāviya em perumān tanatu vaikuntam annāy
kalantār varavu etir koṇṭu van konraikaḷ kārttanavē
Her Friend Said:
O girl like Vaikuṇṭha
of the great lord
who spanned this world surrounded by swirling
oceans
the lovely konrai begin to bud
awaiting your lover’s return
they haven’t yet bloomed
into dense garlands of gold
that hang from a thick canopy of leaves.
The Situational Context
This verse falls into a category known in Caṅkam poetics as kālamayakkam (the mixing up of seasons). Although Piḷḷai doesn’t actually use the phrase, it is clear from his exposition that he is well aware of the specific poetic situation that Nammālvār’s verse describes. After union the heroine (talaivi) is separated from her lover (talaivan), who had promised to return by the time the konrai bloomed, a mark of the rainy season. That time has arrived, those flowers have blossomed, but he is yet to return. The heroine, observing these signs, is depressed. Witnessing her suffering, the heroine’s friend (tōli) assures her that it is not ‘that’ time yet. Although the buds of the konrai may have appeared—she cannot deny the direct evidence before her—there is still time for his return, for the buds are yet to bloom.
Anyāpadeśa
The commentary is composed as an imagined dialogue between the talaivi and tōli. It begins with the exposition of the verse’s key opening phrase, malarntē olintila (they have not bloomed). The heroine queries, ‘How can you say that they haven’t bloomed? The time has come when they are blooming everywhere.’ The friend responds, ‘Indeed, but they have not yet bloomed; only their buds have appeared.’
In the verse, the flowers are described as pulam-tōy, which Periyavāccān Piḷḷai interprets as ‘touching the earth’ in his initial word-gloss, but in the thick of the commentary, he expands the phrase to encompass three further readings. First, taking pulam as ‘senses’, he offers that the flowers are so beautiful that they entrance the senses. Next, returning to the original gloss he explains that the konrai tree branches touch the ground because they are weighted down by their blossoming flowers. In the final instance, he interprets the entire phrase—pulam tōy talai-p-pantal taṇṭu ura nārri (hanging from the canopy of leaves / to touch the ground)—in an evocative and imaginative manner, seeing the dense covering of leaves as the tree’s [thousand] eyes. The implication here is that the entire natural world is alive and a witness to the heroine’s unbearable suffering. It is in such moments, subtle and easily missed, that the commentary achieves texture, building anubhava. While Piḷḷai doesn’t reference the Caṅkam poem that Nammālvār’s verse is modelled on (Kuruntokai 66), his interpretation for just this one line of verse indicates that he is well aware of the norms of Caṅkam poetics, where so often the characters’ bodies and their feelings—untamed and untameable as the natural world—are contiguous with the natural world that they inhabit.117
For Piḷḷai, the most significant moment of the poem is the comparison of the heroine (talaivi) to Vaikuṇṭha (vaikuntam annāy). It is in the exposition of this phrase that Piḷḷai really hits his stride. Likening the ta
laivi to Vaikuṇṭha, Viṣṇu’s eternal realm (nitya vibhūti), implies that she too cannot be destroyed. The friend asks rhetorically, ‘Will he [Viṣṇu] allow you to be destroyed?’ But even if she were equated to the impermanent terrestrial plane (līlā vibhūti), which is subject to the cycles of creation and dissolution, he would protect her and prevent her destruction. After all, did he not span the earth and through this action shelter it? The tōli proceeds to say that if the talaivi continues to despair, it only demonstrates that she is unaware of her own worth (that she is like Vaikuṇṭha) and of his form and his nature (svarūpa/svabhāva). It is in his nature to unite with her as Viṣṇu too cannot be separated for long from those he loves. After all, did he not come to her once before?
Then, returning to the central image of the poem—the flowering trees—Piḷḷai (in the voice of the friend) goes on to assert that when even non-sentient beings (acetana) like the trees know to wait for Viṣṇu, how can one like her (implying that she is special) quail in misery in this fashion? The konrai are strong, for they are certain that he will come as promised. They are steadfast in their patient waiting for his arrival. In fact, they are not waiting for the rain, but for him.
Once again, we have here an instance of Piḷḷai’s wonderfully suggestive, oblique commentarial style. In the natural world, the konrai’s buds appear anticipating the rain clouds. But Piḷḷai overturns this by denying that the flowers are awaiting the rains; instead, they too are waiting for Viṣṇu. In this, their waiting is akin to that of the heroine. But it cannot escape even the most casual reader that Viṣṇu’s cool, dark body is the body of the rain clouds and vice versa. In Piḷḷai’s masterful framing of this interpretation, both tree and heroine await the arrival of their beloved, who brings relief/grace that is cool. Again, while there is no evocation of the proper tiṇai in Piḷḷai’s commentary, the idea of steadfast, patient waiting that characterizes the mullai tiṇai—set in the time of rains and signalling domestic happiness—is invoked in the friend’s quiet admonishment and also her assurance that the heroine will be reunited with her beloved.118
Svāpadeśa
Piḷḷai’s svāpadeśa for this verse is short and to the point. The verse celebrates him (Viṣṇu) who because of his virtues and in his wisdom (guṇa-jñānam) protects Vaikuṇṭha (nitya vibhūti) and the earth (līlā vibhūti) after first destroying the latter. In this manner, the bhāgavatas (disciples/devotees) comforted Nammālvār when the rains arrived.
Although the svāpadeśa for this verse is brief, it ably demonstrates how Piḷḷai establishes continuities between svāpadeśa and anyāpadeśa, while setting individual readings in the context of his meta-interpretation. The concordance here of bhāgavata = friend and Nammālvār = heroine remains consistent with the equivalences established in the poem’s opening verses. The argument that the Tiruviruttam celebrates Viṣṇu’s virtues and his wisdom—a point of significance, because the poem ends by declaring that there is no one but the jñāna-p-pirān (master of wisdom)—iterates the anyāpadeśa’s central thesis. The heroine is like Vaikuṇṭha and he will protect her for that is his nature, again an argument made repeatedly and forcefully in the Tiruviruttam, which in its final word identifies jñāna-p-pirān with Varāha, Viṣṇuin his avatāra as the boar (Tiruviruttam 99).
Nonetheless, whether Viṣṇu rescued the earth or ate it up, whether he measured it or protected it, it is also his nature to destroy this līlā vibhūti, the world of saṁsāra, only to renew it again. The larger theological point of course, which Piḷḷai only suggests above but which the poem takes pains to record, is that the talaivi’s/Nammālvār’s gradual destruction, dissolution, erasure is necessary to finally make way for a new self fully awakened to Viṣṇu’s eternal presence within her and in all things. Viewed through this lens, all the instances of repetition and mimicry (whether in the context of revelation or madness—perhaps they are the same?) function as interpretive moments. The girl repeats the names of god as she has been taught. This is madness in her mother’s judgement. We (and the poet) know better. The poet comments on his own experience: I repeat what Māl tells me to, interpreting it as arbitrarily (or so he claims) as the chirp of a lizard. Viṣṇu enjoys the poem as its audience and as its author, and is himself enjoyed by the poet. In the end, the poet cheekily informs us that his (god’s?) words are base and simple. But they say profound things if you know how to read and how to experience the tale. In a typical snake-eating-its-tail involution, the poem becomes a commentary on itself, its own anubhava grantha.
Prior Elopements: The Tiruviruttam in English Translation
A Hundred Measures of Time follows a modest clutch of English-language translations of the Tiruviruttam. I survey and discuss below the most significant of these efforts. My primary concern here is not to evaluate the quality of the translations—many suffer the curse of turgid Indologese, that peculiar Victorian-inflected register that has plagued English-language translations of Indian works—but rather to explore the specific historical moments that produced them. The Tiruviruttam’s difficulty and obscurity has not diminished its appeal, and each of the translations discussed below have sought to find their own way through the thick density of Nammālvār’s poetic universe.
The first effort was undertaken by J.S.M. Hooper (1882–1974), a British Wesleyan Methodist minister who was based in Madras and Nagpur.119 The Tiruviruttam is the last entry in his 1929 anthology Hymns of the Ālvārs. The work was commissioned by J.N. Farquhar (1861–1929) for The Heritage of India Series, which was meant to popularize the regional literary and devotional literatures of India.120 In a private prospectus written in either 1913 or 1914, Farquhar affirmed that The Heritage of India Series must seek out and showcase the best of India so that it may be ‘known, enjoyed and used’ while not shying away from what is perceived of as unhealthy.121 These ideas are reinforced in the Editorial Preface to the Hymns of the Tamil Śaivite Saints (1921) in which the reader is assured that all the books in the series are vetted for their keen scholarship and deep sympathy.122 The Heritage of India series was seen as fulfilling a need, chiefly by offering an alternative to the expensive, technical, scholarly tomes that were already in circulation; an affordable counterpart that would allow every educated Indian access to the treasures of his past.123 As of 1921, Farquhar had already co-edited with Bishop Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah (1874–1945) a bilingual translation of the Tamil Śaiva poets—Hymns of the Tamil Śaivite Saints—for the same series, this one a collaboration between two translators from the United Theological College, Bangalore: Francis Kingsbury and Godfrey E. Phillips (1878–1961).124 Phillips, a member of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and a professor at the United Theological College (founded in 1910 in a joint effort by the LMS and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society), had also been active in seeking cooperation between the various missions.125
As principal of Wesley College, Madras, and steeped in Church-related activity in south India, Hooper was the ideal candidate to undertake the ālvār translation effort. He fit Farquhar’s stringent standards to have missionaries and Indian Christians produce ‘scholarly work that can be trusted, to use the experience they have of the people in interpreting the religions of India’126 while adhering to the three key principles of ‘a. accuracy, b. sympathy and c. uncompromising faithfulness to Christ’.127 In addition, Hooper was active in promoting Christian literature, a project dear to Farquhar through his service on the General Committee of the Indian Literature Fund.128 Although Farquhar claims to have wanted to encourage Indian Christians to participate in his three major publishing endeavours (The Indian Religious Life Series, The Heritage of India Series and The Quest of India Series), the evidence points to the contrary. By the time he left India in 1923, there was only one Indian working for him, F. Kingsbury, one of the translators of the Śaivite hymns.129 In addition, several of the Christian authors of The Heritage of India Series were in some capacity involved in the movement towards Chur
ch union in south India.
It is perhaps for all these reasons, and given the visibility of Hooper in the Church Union Movement, that Farquhar (and V.S. Azariah too) settled on the Wesleyan Methodist minister to translate the ālvār poems as a kind of companion volume to the 1921 Tamil Śaiva poems. Given that as far as we know Hooper did not produce any further work on Tamil religious literature (apart from his overview of Bible translations in Tamil and other Indian vernaculars), it is likely that his engagement with ālvār poetry was more one of contingency than a lifelong affair. In his preface to the Hymns of the Ālvārs, Hooper recognizes as much, admitting that he was urged to take on the project by Farquhar; he also acknowledges two Śrīvaiṣṇava men for their assistance with the manuscript.130 It is hard to assess what Hooper’s Tamil-language competency was, or how deeply he understood the Tamil literary world. The brief 1934 review of Hymns of the Ālvārs in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland finds Hooper’s book to be wanting. This review by F.J. Richards considers four books from The Heritage of India Series and two from The Religious Life of India Series. In it, he compares Hooper’s work unfavourably with H.A. Popley’s lucid survey of Indian music and his translation of the Tirukkuraḷ, which, incidentally, he finds to be a worthy sequel to G.U. Pope’s (1820–1908) translation. While F.J. Richards makes no mention of the general quality of the translation, he finds the information on the dating of the ālvār both incomplete and deficient, and the history of Vaiṣṇavism lacking clarity.131 In this latter assessment, the reviewer is largely correct, although Hooper’s introduction accurately summarizes the major contours of the debates surrounding the dating of the ālvārs, and offers his own judgements.132 The review makes no mention of the tastefully chosen Vaiṣṇava images that grace the opening pages of the book, or that Hooper offers copious notes on each of the poems he chooses to translate. All of this ancillary material enhances the translation, and demonstrates a desire to provide something of a living context to the poems. In his introduction, Hooper describes the annual Mārkali Adhyāyanotsavam in Srirangam and the role of the Araiyars in liturgical recitations of the entire Nālāyira Divya Prabandham.133