by Nammalwar
Razing of Laṅka
36, 77, 92
Pralaya—Swallowing and Eating the Worlds
20, 56, 65, 71, 74, 79, 91
Ayan (Pinching the Head of Brahmā) and Removing Aran’s Curse
86
* * *
Places
* * *
Kaṇṇan’s Celestial City/City in the Sky (Viṇṇāṭu)
9, 11, 16, 23, 57, 58
Veḥkā
26
Vēṅkaṭam/Tiruvēṅkaṭam
8, 10, 15, 31, 60, 67, 81
Tiruvaraṅkam
28
Vaikuṇṭha
30, 47, 50, 55, 66, 68, 75
Udayagiri
82
* * *
Names
* * *
Tirumāl
7, 32, 48, 52, 63, 87, 88, 95, 100
Kaṇṇan
2, 11, 12, 18, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 37, 47, 58, 63
Beloved of Śrī and Bhū
40
Madhusūdanan
49, 59
Dāmodaran
49
Mādhavan
67
Māl
93, 97
* * *
Praveśam: Entering the World of the Tiruviruttam
* The images used here are from—p. xx: ‘Nammālvār’ from Tiruviruttam (Cennapaṭṭaṇamu: Śrīnikētana Mudrākṣaraśālā, c. 1903–04); p. 22: ‘Viṣṇu avatāra Varāha’ and p. 76: ‘Viṣṇu’ both from Śri Vēṅkaṭācala Māhātmya Graṃtha by Śrīrāmakiśōradāsajī Nāmadhēyasya (Cennapurī: Kalāratnākara Mudrākṣaraśālā, c. 1896); and p. 178: ‘Nammālvār’ from Tiruvāymoli (Cennapaaamu: Śrīniktēana Mudrākṣaraśālā, c. 1903–04). My thanks to Davesh Soneji for his aid in transliterating the Telugu script on the copyright pages of these books.
Appendix 2
* In 20 the friend counsels the repetition of the names.
† Verses 48 and 94 are the revelation verses.
‡ In 58 he is compared to a lotus blooming in a swamp.
Annotations to Nammālvār’s Tiruviruttam
Tiruviruttam 1
I have translated the phrase mey ninru kēṭṭu-aruḷāy as ‘stand before me embodied/graciously listen’ taking some liberty with the original. Mey is generally translated as truth or reality, but here I have taken it in its allusive form as embodied. Partly, I have done this to connect the first verse to the penultimate one (99) in which the poet claims to have ‘seen’ the truth. Commentarial tradition suggests two possible ways to read mey ninru—the first suggests that it applies to Viṣṇu as meymaiyōṭu ninru (standing truthfully or in his natural state), and the second that it applies to the viṇṇappam, as in atiyēn ceyyum mey viṇṇappam (the truthful petition/plea of a servant).
Tiruviruttam 2
kayal: Carp (Cyprinus fimbriatus)
Kaṇṇan: The Tamil name for Kṛṣṇa
Tiruviruttam 3
māruta breeze: A type of cool breeze
Tiruviruttam 3
The king whose fiery disc: refers to Viṣṇu’s solar disc
Tiruviruttam 6
The word kaṇṭīr (see) which occurs in the verse’s final line has been omitted and replaced in the translation with an exclamation ‘O!’
Madana: Another name of Kāma, the god of love. Kama after being burned to ashes by Śiva, is born as Pradyumna, the son of Rukmiṇī and Kṛṣṇa.
Tiruviruttam 7
Tirumāl: A Tamil name for Viṣṇu
Tiruviruttam 8
Lifted the tall mountain: Refers to the myth of Kṛṣṇa lifting the Govardhana mountain to protect the cowherds from Indra’s stormy wrath
Tiruviruttam 9
neytal: Indian water lily (Nymphaea lotus alba)
kuvaḷai: Blue water lily
The conceit is that of the neytal as the pupil, while the eye itself is the petal of the lotus. The pearl-like buds of kuvaḷai are her tears.
Tiruviruttam 10
Māyōn: A name of Viṣṇu that evokes his nature as a cunning, elusive trickster
Tiruvēṅkaṭam: An important sacred site in the mountains that is often used to demarcate the northern boundaries of Tamil country. It is also known by the names Tirupati and Tirumalai.
Tiruviruttam 11
Kaṇṇan’s celestial city: Vaikuṇṭha
keṇṭai: A freshwater fish native to Tamil country
Tiruviruttam 20
Vēlan: The priest of Murukan. In Caṅkam poems he is often painted as an ineffectual figure who misdiagnoses the heroine’s lovesickness as possession by Murukan.
Tirviruttam 21
Scoop up and eat the butter: Refers to Kṛṣṇa’s childhood antics as the butter thief
Dance … with the humped bull: Kṛṣṇa defeats the seven bulls to win the hand of the cowherd maiden
Lovely woman of the cowherd clan: Nappinnai, Kṛṣṇa’s cowherd wife in the Tamil tradition
Tiruviruttam 26
Veḥkā: One of the 108 divyadeśas. It is located just outside present-day Kancipuram.
Tiruviruttam 28
Tiruvaraṅkam: The sacred island-site of Srirangam in central Tamil Nadu. As one of the most important of the Tamil Vaiṣṇava sacred sites, it comes to be revered as the Bhūloka Vaikuṇṭha, Viṣṇu’s celestial city on earth.
Tiruviruttam 34
‘This circle destroys me’: This refers to a kind of divination in Tamil country. It generally involves drawing concentric circles with an even number indicating union and an odd number predicting separation. This style of divination is used in Araiyar Cēvai, a ritual performance tradition of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas. It is called muttukkuri (divination with pearls) and is performed at Nammālvār’s temple in Alvar Tirunagari and at Srirangam during the December Festival of Recitation. It is performed three times a year at the Āṇṭāḷ temple in Srivilliputtur—in March after the wedding festival, in August at the conclusion of the temple’s Brahmotsava, and in December as part of the Mārkali Nīraṭṭa Utsavam.
Tiruviruttam 35
Lord who measured the worlds: Refers to the myth of Viṣṇu as Trivikrama. In the myth, he assumes the form of a dwarf and requests three measures of land from the demon-king Bali. Growing to gargantuan proportions, he then spans the earth and the heavens in the first two strides. Having spanned all the worlds, he places the third step on the defeated king’s head.
Tiruviruttam 36
Razes Laṅka’s tall mansions: refers to Rāma’s defeat of the ten-headed demon-king Rāvaṇa in the Rāmāyaṇa
Tiruviruttam 40
Bhū: The goddess earth, and Viṣṇu’s secondary consort
Tiruviruttam 41
The lowly breeze/the cruel breeze: It torments her because of her lovesickness. In the commentary, Piḷḷai says that the breeze which was to be a sustenance and comfort to her torments her instead. She knows it from her childhood because it bothered her even at that time. He offers the analogy of a person who has lived in prison all her life and has no experience of anything different.
Tiruviruttam 45
The large boar fixed his eyes: refers to Viṣṇu’s avatāra as Varāha, the boar, which he assumed in order to rescue the earth.
Tiruviruttam 40–45
These six verses appear almost at the poem’s centre and, as befitting their special place, showcase two central themes in the Tiruviruttam: Viṣṇu’s grace (aruḷ) and his eyes (kaṇ). The latter is figured as Viṣṇu’s eyes (kaṇ) and his merciful act of glancing (nōkku) upon the heroine/poet. In these verses, the woman (Nammālvār) asks for his glance (40) and then begs for his grace (41). In the two verses that immediately follow, Viṣṇu and the heroine/poet engage in an act of mutual seeing. He sees her in 42, she returns the favour, describing the vision in an efflorescence of lotus imagery in verse 43. In verse 44, the grace of this experience is contrasted to the failure of the learned to be able to apprehend Viṣṇu, and the sequence
concludes by returning once again to Viṣṇu’s arresting gaze upon the heroine/poet (45).
Tiruviruttam 46
In this verse the poet alludes to the Narasiṁha avatāra. In the verse, the asura Hiraṇya is evoked with the epithet pon-peyarōn, the golden one. In the translation I have retained the epithet, instead of glossing it with the asura’s name.
Tiruviruttam 51
Māya-p-pirān: Lord of Māya. I have translated it here as elusive lord.
Ocean churned: Refers to Viṣṇu’s kūrma avatāra, when he assumed the form of the tortoise to lift the sinking Mandara mountain on his back so that the gods and demons could churn the ocean to retrieve the elixir of immortality. The churning of the ocean of milk is alluded to again in Tiruviruttam 99.
Tiruviruttam 55
This verse alludes to a famous Caṅkam poem from the anthology Kuruntokai. In Kuruntokai 2 the hero queries the bees about the fragrance of flowers as compared to his beloved’s hair.
In popular lore (as depicted in the Tamil film Tiruviḷaiyāṭal [1965]), this poem was composed by Śiva in response to a challenge issued by the Paṇṭiya king, who wondered if the fragrance of his queen’s hair was natural. The court poet, Nakkīrar, disputed the poem’s grammar, and Śiva burned (and then revived) the poet for his defiance. The story appears for the first time in Parañcōti’s Tiriviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam, c. sixteenth century.
The verse attributed to Iraiyanār is as follows:
He Said:
Pretty-winged bee whose livelihood is searching for pollen
without saying [what I] desire
Speak of what [you’ve] seen!
Are the flowers you know also as fragrant
As the tresses of the young woman with close set teeth
[and] peacock nature, in habitually united intimacy.
(Kuruntokai, trans. Eva Wilden, p. 83)
Tiruviruttam 60
The third line of this verse (kaṭal maṇ ellām vilaiyō en miḷirum kaṇ) presents some problems, which Piḷḷai notes in his commentary. Nañcīyar reads the phrase as describing the beauty of the heroine’s eyes. Bhaṭṭar responds that it is only right that it is so, for she is still a child, and her eyes are innocent with wonder. Therefore, one can see her eyes, which dart and wander observing everything, as she does not cast them down in modesty as would a young woman. Ramanujacarya in his commentary also reads it as a mark of her innocence, but says that her eyes sparkle thinking that the ocean and earth (or the earth circled by the ocean) can be bought for a price.
Tiruviruttam 64
Ṛg Veda: A collection of verses that are considered to be revealed
Tiruviruttam 68
konrai: Indian laburnum (Cassia fistula)
This verse also evokes a parallel to a Caṅkam poem from the Tamil anthology Kuruntokai.
What Her Girlfriend Said:
These fat cassia trees
are gullible:
the season of the rains
that he spoke of
when he went through the stones
of the desert
is not yet here
though these trees
mistaking the untimely rains
have put out
their long arrangements of flowers
on the twigs
as if for a proper monsoon.
Kōvattan (Kuruntokai 66, trans. A.K. Ramanujan, in Interior Landscape, p. 44)
Tiruviruttam 76
āmpal: A water lily (Nymphaea lotus)
Tiruviruttam 78
Naraka: Refers to a demon who abducted several beautiful women and was eventually slain by Kṛṣṇa
Bāṇa: A thousand-armed demon vanquished by Kṛṣṇa. Bāṇa was a great devotee of Śiva. In the story, Kṛṣna’s grandson Aniruddha falls in love with Bāṇa’s daughter, Uṣā.
Tiruviruttam 82
A curious coincidence may be noted here with respect to the mention of the mountains of Udayagiri. The caves excavated by the Guptas in Madhya Pradesh, now known as the Udayagiri Caves, contain a famous image of Varāha (Cave 5), lifting the earth from the sea. This myth is of course of central importance to any reading of the Tiruviruttam.
Tiruviruttam 83
anril: A bird famous for its steadfast love and attachment to its mate
Tiruviruttam 84
The second half of the verse strings together a series of epithets (maṇiyē: gem, muttamē: pearl, māṇikkamē: ruby). I have embellished these with adjectives to gesture to the qualities that the epithet is meant to evoke, while also seeking to evoke the lyrical quality of the same. The word ‘my’ (entan) occurs only once in the verse to directly qualify the verse’s final line: entan maṇikkamē, my ruby. But it may be applied to the other epithets as well.
Tiruviruttam 85
In the translation I have added the word ‘precious’ to qualify gem to keep it consistent with the previous verse where the same word (maṇi) occurs. I have added ‘beloved’ as an adjective to emerald. The commentators gloss the epithet māṇikkam (ruby) as Uttaman, the excellent/perfect one, while the epithet maragatam (emerald) is glossed as one who ends suffering (śramam).
Tiruviruttam 86
Aran: Śiva
Ayan: Brahmā
The verse makes reference to the myth of Śiva as Bhikṣāṭana. Śiva pinched off Brahmā’s fifth head. As punishment, he was forced to wander the worlds carrying Brahmā’s skull as a begging bowl. He wandered the worlds until he reached the city of Varanasi, where he was finally rid of the skull. In some versions of this myth, it is Viṣṇu who directs him to the sacred city.
Tiruviruttam 87
In this verse the girl is addressed in the poem as Tiru. While Tiru is taken to mean Lakṣmī, I have translated it here as ‘precious’, taking the secondary meaning of Tiru/Lakṣmī as wealth and prosperity. Thus, I have rendered the phrase it-itiruvinaiyē (this girl whose deeds/fate is like Tiru) as ‘our precious girl’, to convey the intimacy of the relationship between the speaker (the mother) and the heroine. I have also added the word ‘hearing’ in line 3 of the translation to provide continuity.
Tiruviruttam 88
Meru: The mountain that is the cosmic axis mundi
Tiruviruttam 93
Māl: An old Tamil name for Viṣṇu
Tiruviruttam 98 and 99
I have taken some liberty and translated īnaccol (base, lowly words) as ‘simple words’. In English, simple evokes humility and, to some degree, a sense of self-effacement. Throughout this poem, the idea that god could be so unpretentious as to take the form of a cowherd is central. As the poem tells us repeatedly, the words are indeed simple—he stole butter—but the idea is anything but. After much experimentation I settled on simple, for it brings out all these nuances in English, in a way that base or low simply cannot.
Tiruviruttam 99
Great tree of wishes: Refers to the divine wish-fulfilling tree known as the kalpatāru or, as it is referred to in this verse, as karpakam. It was one of several magical items that emerged when the gods and demons churned the ocean of milk.
Tiruviruttam 100
Kurukūr: The town identified with present-day Alvar Tirunagari in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu
Notes
Entering the World of the Tiruviruttam
1. For an account of Nāmmālvār’s hagiography and for issues pertaining to his date, see ‘The Poet: Śaṭhakōpan-Nammālvār’, in Part II: The Measure of Time.
2. The complete title for the selection in Hymns for the Drowning is ‘Love Poems: Four Returning Voices’. All six verses translated in this section are from the Tiruviruttam (7, 11, 12, 16, 60, 68). Ramanujan, Hymns for the Drowning, pp. 61–66.
3. Venkatesan, The Secret Garland, p. 160.
4. Zvelebil, Tamil Literature, p. 101.
5. Ramanujan and Cutler, ‘From Classicism to Bhakti’, p. 235.
6. In this story, the poems of the ālvārs are lost and are eventually recovered by the Śrīvaiṣṇavas’ fi
rst preceptor, Nāthamuni, who meditates on Nammālvār, seeking his assistance. Nammālvār answers the appeal and first reveals the Tiruvāymoli followed by the rest of his works and those of the other eleven ālvār poets. Nāthamuni collects these songs which number around four thousand into a work that is the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham (The Divine Collection of Four Thousand). The Tamil Śaivas have a similar narrative of loss and recovery as it pertains to the works of the mūvar Appar, Campantar and Cuntarar. However, in this story, their poems are discovered through the intervention of a Cōla monarch and his ministers at the great temple of Chidambaram. The poems are only partially recovered, the manuscripts having been ravaged by white ants. Thus, while the Vaiṣṇava version speaks of a complete recovery of the songs as befitting their status as revealed texts equivalent to the Vedas, the Śaiva tale is one that emphasizes nostalgia and loss and the inability to ever fully recuperate the past.
7. The twelve ālvārs are: Poykai, Pūtam, Pēy, Tirumalicai, Nammālvār, Maturakavi, Kulaśekaran, Periyālvār, Āṇṭaḷ, Toṇṭaraṭippoṭiālvār, Tiruppāṇālvār and Tirumaṅkai. Their works are organized as follows in the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, which is divided into four books of a thousand each. The first thousand consists of the works of Periyālvār, Āṇṭāḷ, Kulaśekaran, Tirumalicai, Toṇṭaratippoṭi, Tiruppāṇālvār, Maturakavi. The second thousand comprises three works by Tirumaṅkai. Poykai, Pēy, Pūtam, Tirumalicai, Nammālvār (three works) and the remaining poems of Tirumaṅkai are included in the third thousand. The final thousand (fourth book) is entirely the Tiruvāymoli by Nammālvār.