Introduction

Ktai of Viucitta

lord of Putuvai

city of towering mansions that rise like mountains

sang this garland of sweet Tami
to plead with Kmadeva

with his sugarcane bow and five-flower arrows

to unite her with the lord

who broke the tusk of the elephant

as it screamed in agony,

who ripped apart the beak of the bird
that one dark and lustrous as a gem.

Those who sing this soft song of plea
will remain forever at the feet
of the supreme king of the gods.

Ncciyr Tirumoi 1.10

If one goes by Ktai’s lavish descriptions in her Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, the town of Putuvai was a wealthy metropolitan hub, overflowing with abundance, populated by perfect priests and incomparable mansions. It was a blessed land, mythical in its scope, for it was here that Ka sported and played. Today, Putuvai is identified with rvilliputtr, a dusty town about seventy-five kilometers south of the bustling Tami cultural capital, Maturai. Surrounded by lovely hills, their crests tipped with dark clouds, the rvilliputtr landscape is dominated by an imposing temple tower that rises colorful and majestic, audaciously confronting the neighboring hills. The temple is this otherwise ordinary town’s claim to fame, for it marks the birthplace of the celebrated ninth-century Tami Vaiava poet, Ktai, who a few centuries later was apotheosized into the goddess . It is her remarkable legend, her beautiful love poems, and the temple she shares with her immortal husband, Viu (locally known as Ragamar) that command the landscape and contour the experiences of local devotees and visiting pilgrims alike. It is her caritam—her story—that forms the backdrop against which medieval commentators and contemporary devotees alike express their enjoyments (anubhava) of her two poems. So we begin here, with the story of her miraculous and improbable love for Viu.

Speak Not of Mortal Men: ’s Story

One day Viucitta, a humble, Brahmin garland maker at the Vaapatrayi temple of the reclining Viu at Putuvai, found a lovely baby girl under a sacred tulas plant. A voice from the heavens instructed him to take the little girl home and raise her as his own. Viucitta named the child Ktai and lovingly brought her up, inculcating in his adopted daughter a deep love for Viu. As she grew older, Ktai resolved to marry Viu and no one else. Every morning, she enacted her fantasy as Viu’s divine bride by ignoring the rules of ritual purity and donning the sacred garland meant for him. One morning, Viucitta inadvertently caught her in the act, chastised her for the ritual transgression, and refrained from offering the polluted garland to the deity in the local temple. But to his astonishment, Viu appeared in a dream that same night to reveal his attachment to the special garland that Ktai had first worn, earning her the epithet, cikkouttava—she who gave what she had worn. Still Viucitta remained oblivious to Ktai’s adamant desire to become Viu’s bride, even as she grew more pale and feverish. When her father mentioned marriage, she rejected the very notion saying, “if there is even talk of mortal men . . . I will not live.”1 It was in the throes of her overwhelming passion and the subsequent crushing disappointment that she composed two poems, the Tiruppvai (The Sacred Vow) and Ncciyr Tirumoi (The Woman’s Sacred Words). Viucitta finally comprehended the full scope of her longing and anxiously inquired: “Which of the many forms of Viu do you wish to wed?”

Ktai replied, “Sing their praises to me.”

And so Viucitta began describing all of them in loving detail, but when he described the lord of rragam, he noticed the faraway look in Ktai’s eyes and the sheen of unrequited desire.

He despaired: “How can I fulfill my daughter’s mad desire?”

Once again Ragantha, the lord of rragam appeared in his devotee’s dream and directed him to bring Ktai dressed in full bridal regalia to his temple. Viucitta promptly did as directed and arrived with his daughter in rragam. And there, witnessed by devotees, kings, Viu’s attendants, and her father, Ktai boldly strode into the garbha gha, climbed atop the beautiful image of the reclining Viu, and simply disappeared. From that point on Ktai was known as —she who ruled—for she had won her lord’s heart like no other before her.2

The Historical and Her Place Among the vr

The remarkable legend of recorded in oral and written hagiographies since the eleventh century reveals very little that is historically verifiable about her.3 The sparse biographical information contained in the phala ruti verses (benedictory verses) that close the Tiruppvai and each of the fourteen sections of the Ncciyr Tirumoi offer nothing more than a silhouette of the poet who called herself Ktai.4 She probably lived in a town called Putuvai (lit. New Town) that she also referred to as Villi’s Putuvai5 and which she praised for its beauty and prosperity. She was related in some way to the vr poet Viucitta (commonly referred to as Periyvr), who is identified in the hagiographic traditions as her father. Based on a verse like this,

Viucitta has heard
these words of truth spoken
by the mighty and righteous king
of Tiruvarakam:

“Those who love me
I will love in return.”

If even his words are proved false
what is there left to believe?

Ncciyr Tirumoi 11.10

the rvaiava commentarial literatures on the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi also assert that Viucitta was ’s teacher (crya).6 Viucitta does not mention by name in his composition, the Periyvr Tirumoi, while herself only obliquely alludes to their relationship in the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi by using a generic possessive such as “Viucitta’s lovely Ktai” (Viucittai viya Ktai). However uncertain the exact nature of the relationship between these two, the internal evidence of Viucitta’s Periyvr Tirumoi (Sacred Words of Periyvr) reliably places him in the ninth century, making his contemporary and part of the devotional milieu of the Tami bhakti poets.7

is the only woman of the twelve vr poets (600–900 C.E.), whose devotional poems comprise the Nlyira Divya Prabandham (The Divine Collection of Four Thousand), the Tami canon of the rvaiavas. But ’s position as one of the vr is tenuous, and she is sometimes excluded from this list. By the eleventh century, and dovetailing with the systematic development of rvaiava theology under the direction of Rmnuja (traditional dates, 1017–1137 C.E.), the Nlyira Divya Prabandham became a revealed text, with a place of primacy reserved for Nammvr’s Tiruvymoi (ca. 9th century), which is revered as the Tami Veda. The apotheosis of the Tami canon activated a reciprocal apotheosis of its composers, who by the thirteenth century are transmogrified into various divine emanations (aa) of Viu. Within the parameters of this new scheme, Ktai the poet was recast into the role of the secondary consort Bh Dev, placing her in a position of intimacy with Viu that for the rvaiava theologians and commentators was far superior to that of the other male vr.

By the time of the important rvaiava philosopher, poet, and theologian, Vednta Deika (1268–369 C.E.), lists of the vr begin to omit , indicating her already-contested place as a poet, saint, and goddess, although her two poems (especially the Tiruppvai) continued to occupy a central place in the religious and ritual imagination of the community. By the mid-sixteenth century, the ninth-century poet Ktai is distinctive enough to merit an important temple site dedicated to her, counted as one of the 108 sacred sites (divya dea) of the rvaiavas.⁸ Once a part of the devotional milieu, by the late medieval period in South India she herself has become the recipient of bhakti songs -are composed for her, temples are built in her honor, and endowments are made in her name.

The ambiguity of ’s position as an vr-goddess and the well-integrated position of her texts into the Tami canon are most clearly in evidence at rragam’s annual Adhyayanotsavam (Festival of Recitation) celebrated in the auspicious month of Mrkai (December–January). During this festival, the sacred space known as the “Hall of Thousand Pillars” is imagined to recreate a divine court where Viu, accompanied by his consorts r and Bh, enjoys a liturgical recitation and on occasion dramatic enactments of the entire Nlyira Divya Prabandham. Bronze images of the vr—except —and the cryas are hierarchically placed in the sacred arena for the duration of the Festival of Recitation. ’s marked absence among the vr is explained away because of her eternal presence beside Viu as his secondary consort Bh. As the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi are ritually recited during the first ten days of the Adhyayanotsavam, while ’s image is excluded from Viu’s devoted retinue of poet-saints, this festival enunciates her dual identity as both an vr and a goddess.⁹

and Other Women Poet-Saints of India

Women’s literary compositions in India, particularly in the pre-colonial period, have largely been in the realm of devotional or religious literature. The sixth-century B.C.E. Buddhist Thergth is the earliest compilation of women’s writing in India. In these early poems, the domestic drudgery of a woman’s duties becomes an effective metaphor for life as suffering. The Buddhist nun Mutt makes the point eloquently in the poem below:

So free am I, so gloriously free,
Free from three petty things—
From mortar, from pestle, and from my twisted lord,
Freed from rebirth and death I am,
And all that has held me down
Is hurled away.

(Trans. Uma Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy)¹⁰

In the Tami context, the earliest female poets are contributors to the secular Cakam anthologies (first–third century C.E.). Of the 2,381 Cakam compositions, at least 154 in both the love (akam) and war (puam) genres bear female signatures. Because, like their male counterparts, these women poets composed poems that were strictly governed by the conventions of Cakam poetics, it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to discern a distinctively female voice in this early corpus of secular Tami poetry.

By the beginning of the late fifth century, secular literature and the massive literary accomplishments of Tami Buddhists and Jains gave way to the newly emergent bhakti ethos. One of the earliest participants in this new poetic and religious world was the female bhakti poet and devotee of iva, Kraikklammaiyr (ca. 6th century). Although she was neither a contemporary of , nor a poet with a similar poetic temperament, as the only woman among the sixty-three canonized aiva saints (nyamr), Kraikklammaiyr is often regarded as ’s aiva counterpart. According to her hagiography, her husband, awed by her mystical powers, released Kraikklammaiyr from her obligations to him, thereby enabling her to devote herself completely to iva. Her move away from the normative social order is marked by a radical transformation that remakes her beautiful body into that of a skeletal ghoul. The climactic moment of the hagiography occurs when she climbs sacred Mount Kaila on her hands, so as to refrain from defiling its hallowed ground with her feet. Upon seeing such dedication, iva, lauded as one who has neither beginning nor end, is said to have welcomed Kraikklammaiyr to his celestial abode by addressing as her as “Mother!” As Norman Cutler points out, “Kraikklammaiyr’s story . . . expresses an underlying tension between the saint’s intuitive calling to serve iva and her responsibilities in the social realm.”¹¹ But this tension between social responsibility and service to iva does not dominate the tone or content of Kraikklammaiyr’s Aputatiruvantti, Tiruiraaimaimlai, and the two Tiruvlaku Mtta Tiruppatikams. Instead, like the poems of the earliest vr poets, Kraikklammaiyr’s compositions are uncomplicated in form and even content, but are nonetheless profoundly speculative. A wonderful example is from Aputatiruvantti 61:

I became your slave
even though I couldn’t see you,
and now your image still eludes my eyes—

when people ask me
“how does your lord appear?”
what can I say?

which among all these forms is yours?¹²

(Trans. Norman Cutler)

In contrast, ’s Ncciyr Tirumoi is replete with vociferous rejections of marriage to a mortal, an attitude that eventually becomes the centerpiece of her hagiographic narrative. As ’s story develops, her bold assertions are subsumed into a theological position that implies that only a divine being— as Bh Dev—can achieve something as extraordinary as marriage to Viu.¹³

In an article on women saints in India, A. K. Ramanujan suggests that unlike men, women often have to reject normative family life to pursue their spiritual goals.¹⁴ In some instances, like that of Kraikklammaiyr, the husband or family sanctions such a rejection. In the case of the twelfth-century Kannada poet Mahdevyakka, the transgression of social norms is extreme—she walked naked—and is sanctioned by no one. falls somewhere in between these two figures—her poetry, especially the Ncciyr Tirumoi, is radical for its frank eroticism and disturbing images of violence. But her mythic life, enshrined in the hagiographies, presents a more comfortable picture, where the father aids in securing his daughter’s impossible goal of marriage to Viu.

It is no surprise that the story of ’s love for Viu and her eventual marriage to him has invited parallels to Mr, the sixteenth century North Indian poet-saint. Hagiography tells us that Mr rejected her royal husband and her duties as a daughter-in-law for Ka, the divine lover with whom she eventually merged. Such superficial similarities aside, there are significant differences between these two female poets that nonetheless speak to the difficulty that and Mr present to their respective religious communities. Whereas we are reasonably certain that the poet Ktai composed the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, the same cannot be said of Mr. John Stratton Hawley suggests that “it is much harder in Mira’s case than in that of her male rivals to have any confidence that she actually composed a substantial portion of the poetic corpus attributed to her.”¹⁵ There is a Mr tradition in which poems are composed in her name and are used to embellish the legend of the Mewar princess. The closed and canonical nature of the Nlyira Divya Prabandham disallowed the kind of organic production of poetry for , or any of the vr poets, that is the hallmark of the Mr traditions. There is no evidence of poets appropriating ’s name (or indeed that of any of the other vr) to add to her fairly slim contribution of just 173 verses. But there are plenty of verses in praise of , beginning with the laudatory verses, known as taiyas that are appended to the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi.¹⁶ Undoubtedly, this important distinction between the and Mr traditions has much to do with two very different systems of producing and transmitting knowledge. Nevertheless, it also says something important about the ways in which widely divergent religious communities deal with problematic female poets. In point of fact, it might be said that and Mr are mirror images. The legend of Mr is shocking in its dramatic rejection of wifely and royal duties, while those poems attributed to her are not, even when they allude to the abuses she withstood. Her poems tend to be meditative and enigmatic, and her persona in these poems is as much lover as ascetic.¹⁷ Here is a good example of a poem from the Mr tradition:

My dark one has gone to an alien land.
He’s left me behind,

he’s never returned,

he’s never sent me a single word,

So I’ve stripped off my ornaments,

jewels and adornments,

cut the hair from my head,

And put on holy garments,

all on his account,

seeking him in all four directions.

Mr: unless she meets the Dark One, her Lord,

she doesn’t even want to live.¹⁸

(Trans. John S. Hawley)

On the other hand, ’s poetry, especially the Ncciyr Tirumoi, is transgressive, sensual, and bold. Below is an example from one of the later sections of the Ncciyr Tirumoi:

My breasts seek the gaze of the one

whose beautiful hand lifts the discus.

Bound tightly in a red cloth, their eyes

shy away from the gaze of mere mortals

desiring none other than Govinda.

I cannot live here a moment longer

Please take me to the shores of the Yamun.

Ncciyr Tirumoi 12.4

Thus what cannot be added to or excised from her poetry is mapped on to her story. ’s stories multiply, keeping pace with her growing fame and popularity, and with each new version, this troublesome and vexing female poet becomes more divine, and her love more innocent, asexual, and non-threatening.

’s Garlands of Perfect Tami: The Tiruppvai
and Ncciyr Tirumoi

You were born the son of one woman

and that very night

you became the son of another,
to be nurtured in secret.

O immeasurable lord

When Kasa fearing you
plotted evil things

you foiled his plans
inflamed himand burnt like a fire in his belly.

We have come to beg you:

If you give us the paai-drum

We will sing of your wealth matched only by r.
We will sing of your bravery.

Our sorrows will end.
and we can rejoice.

l r empvy

Tiruppvai 25

You escaped Kasa’s savage net
in the midst of that deep dark night
only to torture the hearts of hapless maidens
stranded here.
Yaod lets you stray, bold and unpunished.
O you who suckled the milk

from the breast of the deceitful demoness

Shameless one
Please return our clothes to us.

Ncciyr Tirumoi 3.9

The Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi are included in the first thousand verses (mutal yiram) of the Nlyira Divya Prabandham. ’s two compositions follow Viucitta’s (Periyvr’s) Tiruppallu and Periyvr Tirumoi. The Tiruppvai consists of thirty eight-line verses in kalippa meter and describes a vow known as the pvai npu.¹⁹ Young, unmarried girls observed this vow during the month of Mrkai (December–January) in order to secure a virtuous husband. In the context of the Tiruppvai, the girls are the cowherd maidens of Ka’s land of sport, yarpi (lit cowherd town), and Ka himself is the desired husband. The Tiruppvai, narrated in an enthusiastic plural voice, is a poem of community and documents a group of girls vigorously rousing each other to join in a festive and joyous communal endeavor. Jointly the girls approach Ka’s house to awaken him and his family. In the poem, ’s Putuvai is transformed into the mythic world of yarpi (Tami for Gokula/Vndvana) and in the commentaries, she herself is understood as being one of the gop girls. The turning point of the poem comes in the penultimate verse (Tiruppvai 29), when the company of girls reject the central symbol of the quest, the enigmatic paai-drum, and instead declare that they only wish to be eternally beholden to Ka. Although the poem employs a plural voice, traditional interpretations insert into it as either as the sole protagonist or as the leader of the group of gops. The Tiruppvai ends on an optimistic note, with a clear sense that the quest has successfully come to fruition.

The Tiruppvai leads seamlessly into the Ncciyr Tirumoi, in that it chronologically and thematically picks up where the former poem ends. The Ncciyr Tirumoi begins in the Tami month of Tai (January–February) and opens with another vow—this one to Kmadeva, the god of desire—undertaken as a solitary endeavor. While friends and companions make intermittent appearances in the poem, the quest in the Ncciyr Tirumoi is largely a lonely and friendless one. The poem balances a full-bodied sensuality with a savage violence, a disquieting admixture that represents a radical departure from the comforting sweetness of the Tiruppvai. The erotic sentiment is not entirely absent from the Tiruppvai; rather, it is ensconced in comfortable images of domesticity—Ka at play with his wife, Nappiai, charming allusions to Ka’s mischievous pranks, and Yaod’s protective indulgence. It may be said that the desire of young gop girls who inhabit the Tiruppvai’s imaginal world has blossomed, but not yet gone to seed. Desire in the Ncciyr Tirumoi on the other hand, is terrible, full-blown and unremitting. The experience of such a desire is essentially an isolating one, where there are neither friends nor companions to alleviate the suffering. If there are companions, be they friends, birds, clouds, or a conch, they are always positioned as antagonists, for the speaker (identified in the commentaries as ) sees herself vying enviously with them for the position of proximity to Viu that she believes rightly belongs to her.

The Ncciyr Tirumoi is further distinguished from the Tiruppvai and other similar poems composed by male poets by ’s use of shifting female voices, a dizzying non-linearity, and a strange, unsettling violence; images of profound sensuality are often jarringly juxtaposed with its violation.²⁰ For instance, late in the Ncciyr Tirumoi, the heroine has this to say:

O bright karuvai blooms and dark ky flowers,
you have assumed the brilliant form of my Tiruml.
Show me how to endure my agony.
The master of Tirumliruñclai,

whose broad shoulders are for r’s pleasure

entered my home and wrested my beautiful bangles.
Is this right?

Ncciyr Tirumoi 9.3

In the above verse, the poet uses conventional poetic tropes to sketch the contours of her/the heroine’s unbearable and unfulfilled love. She sees her beloved everywhere—the dark flowers remind her of his lustrous skin; the crimson blooms of his red lips; the fragrant jasmine of his pearly teeth. But they are unable to provide any succor for her illness, because the lord of Mliruñclai, (literally, the lord of gardens) has not only refused her, but the union he enjoys with his eternal companion r mocks the poet’s (heroine’s) own doomed love. While at first glance this verse might seem unremarkable within the canon of Tami bhakti poetry, the final assertion of physical violation done to her body— “he entered my home and wrested my beautiful bangles”—marks a substantial deviation from the ways in which these familiar bhakti tropes are usually deployed.²¹ Instead, the common motif of the heroine growing pale and thin until her bangles slip off is inflected with a strident note of violence and violation, and the god’s possession is characterized as intrusive and unwelcome.

It may well be argued that in the Ncciyr Tirumoi, violence is ’s dominant means of expressing an impossible desire and the fleeting nature of her encounter with the divine. Violence and violation are seeded throughout the poem, manifesting in unexpected places and in unexpected ways, with each occurrence building on an evocative past reference. First, there is the predicating violation that breeds all else: Viu’s relentless and unsolicited violation of the heroine’s person, and his cruel disregard of his word to her. The god invades the intimate space of her body and her home, overwhelms her despite her fervent and repeated refusals. In Ncciyr Tirumoi 10.9, the heroine says:

O oceans! He entered you, churned you
and stole your nectar from your depths.
Just so, the cunning one entered me
and deprived me of my life.

Such careless violation of the heroine’s person by the divine beloved inevitably leads to the violence she inflicts upon herself, by denying herself food, sleep, and even thought, until she, eventually, and unforgettably, threatens self-mutilation by ripping out her useless breasts by their very roots (Ncciyr Tirumoi 13.8), an act intended to negate her femininity, her sexuality, and her desire. Nestled between these two extremes is the additional violence visited upon her by mothers, birds, and clouds, who wound either through their mocking words that pierce her like swords or with their unheeding disregard for her suffering. In certain decads and even in select verses of the Ncciyr Tirumoi, a number of these mute and callous witnesses to the heroine’s misery come together to create the effect of a great, grand conspiracy designed by the absent beloved to increase her already intolerable torment. In Ncciyr Tirumoi 8.8 she says:

Dark clouds ready for the season of the rains
chant the name of the lord of Vkaam

that one who is valiant in battle.

Tell him, like the lovely leaves that fall in the season of the rains
I waste away through the long endless years
waiting for the day when he finally sends word.

It is perhaps the combination of violence and sensuality that have prompted scholars such as Vidya Dehejia to remark on the uncomfortable and liminal place that the Ncciyr Tirumoi holds within the Tami canon of the rvaiavas. However, it is also these very elements that have made the poem (at least particular sections) ritually, liturgically, and aesthetically significant, and it is in the hagiographic literature that the centrality of the Ncciyr Tirumoi becomes readily apparent.²² Dennis Hudson has convincingly argued that while the Tiruppvai is the more popular text, it is the Ncciyr Tirumoi that contours the legend.²³ Most retellings of ’s story, oral or written, are liberally interspersed with selections from this longer poem, including its more outrageous moments. For the rvaiavas, is distinctive among the vr poets of the Nlyira Divya Prabandham, because as a woman she is considered uniquely qualified to express the peculiar disease of unrequited love for a divine beloved, and it is in the Ncciyr Tirumoi that they claim to hear that voice most clearly.

and the Sixteen Thousand Wives

O great and glorious conch!
Sixteen thousand women watch you
sip the nectar of Mdhava’s lips.
If you do not share that which belongs to all
Why should they not quarrel with you?

Ncciyr Tirumoi 7.9

In both the Tiruppvai and the Ncciyr Tirumoi, identities and points of view—a first-person narrator, the plural voices of a group of questing gop girls, the bird’s-eye view of a third-person perspective—proliferate to comment on the urgency and angst of unrequited love for an immortal beloved. In these moments of spectatorship, the poet makes a concerted effort to draw a line of distinction between herself and Viu’s other consorts—be they r, Bh, or the uniquely Tami consort, Nappiai.²⁴ Tiruppvai 18, where the group of gop girls arrive at Ka’s bedroom door and exhort Nappiai to open the door to them, presents an exemplary instance of the poet’s self-conscious demarcation between devotee and consort.

Daughter-in-law

of Nandagopla,

fierce as a rutting elephant oozing musk

our mighty chief who never flees from his enemies

Nappiai

whose hair fills the air with fragrance

Please open this door.

Listen!
The sound of crowing roosters is everywhere

Listen!
The hosts of kuyil coo
perched in bowers of mtavi creepers

O you with delicate fingers
adept at playing ball—

We are here to sing the fame of your lord.

With your lovely red hands soft as lotus petals
your wrists stacked with beautiful bangles
that clink sweetly

Open this door
and welcome us.

l r empvy

In this verse, the questing girls urge Nappiai to welcome them and aid them in securing their goal. The gop girls express neither jealousy nor rivalry with Nappiai. She is not the girls’ rival, but is a necessary helpmate, one who can aid them in attaining their goal. Even while in a verse that follows (Tiruppvai 19) the girls mildly chastise her for monopolizing Ka’s attention, it is done so from a position of deference, where the aim is to sing the praises of her beloved and thus to be beholden to Ka eternally. The concluding verse of the Tiruppvai conclusively demarcates the distance of the poet from the poetic situation and the characters that inhabit that world. In Tiruppvai 30, the poem’s final benedictory verse (phala ruti verse), Ktai the poet says,

his Ktai

sang a garland of thirty songs in Cakam Tami

about cowherd women with faces bright as the moon

who adorned in beautiful jewels

won the paai-drum . . .

thus making it abundantly clear that the Tiruppvai is not autobiographical and instead describes an imagined reality.

It is virtually impossible to make a similar claim about the Ncciyr Tirumoi, where the boundary between poet and persona is far more permeable.²⁵ In the latter poem, a typical rhetorical posture is as follows:

A long time ago for the maiden of the earth

covered in moss,

he took the shameful form of a boar

dripping water from its filthy body.

The lord of Tiruvarakam, that lustrous one

beguiled me with his words.

Now they can never be dislodged from my heart.

Nccyr Tirumoi 11.8

Here the narrator belligerently recounts Viu’s extravagant efforts to rescue Bh Dev in his avatra as the boar and contrasts it with his utter passivity and disinterest to her pitiable plight. While on the one hand such a rhetorical move differentiates the heroine (identified in the commentaries as ) from the other consorts by showcasing the beloved’s indifference toward her, it also curiously asserts the sameness of the experience of separation. The poet wishes to be the dependent consort only insofar as she too is rescued quickly from the slings and arrows of her unbearable love, because she suffers like any of Viu’s consorts. Yet she equally recognizes the futility of such a desire, for she is in the final equation nothing like them, bound after all by the limitations of her mortality.

Of Vows, Baths, Drums, and Dolls: Central Symbols
in the Tiruppvai

The premise and the pretext of the Tiruppvai is a ritual undertaking by a group of young unmarried maidens of yarpi. The name of the vow, pvai npu, is encapsulated both in the poem’s title and in the refrain, l r empvy, that caps each of its thirty verses. The word pvai is polyvalent—doll, woman, image, girl, and goddess are all in its ambit of suggestion—but in the context of this poem it becomes synonymous with a vow. In the Bhgavata Pura (10th century?), the gops undertake a similar ritual vow to the goddess Ktyyan, where they construct and propitiate her sand image on the banks of the river.²⁶ If one reads the Tiruppvai anachronistically, then pvai might refer to an image or doll, though neither this poem nor the Cakam poems about a comparable vow describe making sand images of the goddess.²⁷ In the Tiruppvai, the word pvai is used to refer directly to a girl (Tiruppvai 13) as well as the vow (Tiruppvai 2), and in the refrain (l r empvy) the word is in the vocative and perhaps can be interpreted as “O our girls.” Given ’s delicate poetic touch and her dexterous play with polyvalent words in both the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, it is quite probable that the poem encapsulates all three meanings of the word pvai—as girl (referring to the girls undertaking the ritual); as a vow (referring to the actual bathing rite); and finally as goddess, referring to Ka’s consort Nappiai who acts as an intermediary in the poem, especially in Tiruppvai 17–19, or as it is suggested in some commentaries, to Kma’s wife Rat, because the Ncciyr Tirumoi opens with a vow to the god of love.²⁸

The central ritual motif of the Tiruppvai is an act of communal bathing in the predawn hours that is alluded to throughout the poem, but is not described.²⁹ It is possible that the vow described in the Tiruppvai may be modeled on a bathing ritual known as tai nral (lit. bathing in the month of Tai) described in several Cakam poems, including an extensive description in Paripal 11. In all of these early poems, young unmarried girls undertake a ritual bath during the month of Tai (January–February).³⁰ While the tai nal is quite likely the inspiration for ’s Tiruppvai, the fact that her poem is situated in the preceding month of Mrkai (December–January), raises some significant questions. Is the tai nal the same as the Mrkai bath of the Tiruppvai, or did adapt the tai nral to reflect an emergent devotional ethos focused on Ka? Norman Cutler (following Raghava Iyengar) argues that a shift in calendrical systems—from a lunar to a solar calendar—caused the tai nral to be moved back into the month of Mrkai, and that the vow was adapted into the new devotional culture.³¹ It is equally likely that simply appropriated a relevant ritual for her poem and framed it within the context of Mrkai, a month that holds a special significance to Vaiavas.³² So whereas young girls in the Cakam poems undertook the tai niral in order to secure a handsome husband or lover, in the Tiruppvai, the longed-for beloved is none other than Ka. Any discussion of the tai nral cannot exclude discussion of the version of the vow described in the Bhgavata Pura. In the Pura’s version, the young gop girls of yari awaken at the crack of dawn in the first month of winter, call out to each other, fashion a sand image of the goddess, and bathe in the Yamun (Bhgavata Pura 10.22, verses 1–7).³³ While it is possible that was inspired by the Bhgavata Pura, for she was clearly aware of Ka mythology, I am inclined to agree with Norman Cutler that it is more probable that the regional Mrkai vow was absorbed into the Bhgavata Pura, perhaps inspired by the popularity of the Tiruppvai.³⁴

In their seminal essay, “From Classicism to Bhakti,” A. K. Ramanujan and Norman Cutler suggest that the reshaping of the king of Cakam puam poetry into that of the larger-than-life figure of the divine hero marked a great shift in the literary ethos of the Tami land. In the case of ’s poem, it is an appropriate antecedent ritual that receives new life.³⁵ Although the Tiruppvai clearly alters the Cakam tai nral, it nonetheless retains the central motif of bathing as a kind of purification and an efficacious means to attain one’s heart’s desire. The girls of the Tiruppvai are required to cleave to all kinds of self-denying ascetic practices: they are obligated to awaken before the crack of dawn, bathe in the cold water, and abstain from particular kinds of food and specific kinds of behavior (Tiruppvai 2). The reward for such dedicated ritual action is impressive, not only for what it promises the girls—Ka, eternal service to him, and the dissolution of all their past transgressions—but also for the community and the world at large: plentiful rain, an abundant harvest, and prosperity for the whole world.

situates the Tiruppvai temporally, spatially, and ritually in the opening verse—it is the cool month of Mrkai, particularly dear to Ka and therefore efficacious to undertake a special kind of vow. We are in the fabulous world of yarpi, where Ka lurks right around the corner ready to spring into mischief. And the young and rambunctious lion cub of Yaod is conflated with the supreme Nryaa, and from this god who is at once accessible and transcendent the eager, the “precious” girls of Gokula are to win a mysterious paai (Tiruppvai 1), a type of drum, but never clarified as such in the poem, and clearly symbolic of some abstract idea.

In the Cakam poems of war, various kinds of drums are sacred objects central to the battle. Each drum was played by a particular group of people. For instance, the muacu, arguably the most important drum, was a royal object, made from the tutelary tree of an enemy and invested with sacred power (Puanu 50). The taumai, a huge war drum, was manipulated by the low-caste Pa just before a battle commenced and was used to summon young men to battle. The paai was a versatile small drum employed to summon men to battle, to broadcast any news, and the belief was that playing it could cause the enemies’ defeat.³⁶ provides neither a description of the paai, nor any details on its use. Nonetheless, it is clear from the contexts in which the word occurs that it is an actual object and not just an abstract concept. Given the communal nature of the poem, it is possible that the poet invokes the paai’s role in summoning people together, attested to in the Cakam corpus, although in the Tiruppvai it is clearly not for a violent purpose. Despite the paai’s primary meaning in the antecedent literature as a sacred royal drum, this is an interpretation that is largely elided in commentaries of the Tiruppvai, where it is conventionally interpreted as a desired objective and eternal loving servitude (kaikarya) to Viu. At the conclusion of the poem, in Tiruppvai 29, the gop girls reject the all-important paai and instead ask to be eternally beholden to Ka.

The Tiruppvai takes its name as much from the ritual event at its center, as it does from the refrain—l r empvy—that closes each of the thirty verses. The aiva poet Mikkavcakar composed a similar poem of twenty verses, the Tiruvempvai, that also concludes with the same refrain. The refrain might thus be a marker of a newly emergent genre that dealt with vows, and specifically the pai vow. The meaning of the phrase l r empy is difficult to discern, partly because of the polyvalence of the word pvai (pvy is the vocative form). In the commentaries to the Tiruppvai, the two words l r are often understood as a merely a meter filler, and thus empty of meaning. However, commentators also suggest that the phrase be interpreted as “consider this well, and perform” (for example, ippai putti pauka). In keeping with its polyvalence, pvy is interpreted variously as “vow” (npu), “girls” (piai), “thoughts” (niaivu), while l is, in this context, understood as “listen” (k), or as “so you may consider this” (niaipyka).³⁷ Thus, the refrain could be translated roughly as “listen, consider this girls/vow.” Norman Cutler renders the refrain as “Accept, Consider our Vow,” which he acknowledges takes a certain liberty with the original. He suggests the above as the most plausible English version, given the shifting contexts and addressees.³⁸ Vidya Dehejia translates the phrase as “Fulfill, O song of our vow,” making a case that because the refrain is common to all kinds of pvai poems—rvaiava, aiva, and Jain—any translation ought to be flexible and broad enough to accommodate the relevant religious contexts.³⁹ While Dehejia presents a persuasive argument, I have left the phrase untranslated for two main reasons. For one, it is quite likely that l r is empty of meaning, and thus cannot be translated. Second, and more importantly, the key word pvai is ambiguous, its many meanings are all equally possible, and the richness of the Tiruppvai emerges from its polyvalence. Guided by a desire to preserve as much of the poems’ inherent playfulness and ambiguity, I have not translated l r empvy.

The Structure of the Tiruppvai

The Tiruppvai is a compact poem, with a narrative that depicts the quest of a group of nameless gop girls. The poem is neatly divided into three distinct sections that trace the girls’ path to Ka, a journey that takes them from the shared public arena of the outside world, to the inner, private chambers of their beloved. The first five verses lay out the details of the vow—when one undertakes it, what it entails, and its expected rewards. In the following set of delightful ten verses, the voices of the various girls coalesce into an indivisible chorus, vigorously rousing their neighborhood friends to join in the quest. The final section is a gradual awakening of Ka and his family, and the poem ends with a sense of accomplishment—that the vow has in fact been successful. The last seven verses of the Tiruppvai may be understood to constitute a fourth division, which involves a lengthy panegyric to Ka.

The Tiruppvai emphasizes the shared and public nature of worship, and this is delineated at length in the “waking up the gops section” (Tiruppvai 6–15). Not only are the sleeping girls roused and pressed to join the sacred quest, but each listener/reader is invited to become a gop who has slept too late and has forgotten how easy it might be to win Ka for herself. The poem and its characters emphasize that although the vow is for Mrkai, the quest for Ka is itself timeless. The poem thus both describes the path to Ka as well as becomes the path to Ka. Eventually when all the girls have assembled, the gops approach Ka in his house to awaken him and his family. The final segment of the poem describes the confident gops boldly entering the god’s inner world, until they are halted at the threshold of his bedroom, where he reclines with his wife Nappiai. The unbreakable intimacy of Ka and Nappiai reflects the girls’ own desire; the paai, the vow, and the bath are merely pretexts to come into his presence, because the real goal of the quest is to be bound to him eternally. This special place however is not reserved for any individual girl, but is to be shared and is requested of both Ka and Nappiai. In fact, in one of the most beautiful verses of the Tiruppvai, the girls say this to the happy couple, gently rebuking a sleeping Nappiai:

The lamps are ablaze.

You laze upon this bed with its stout ivory legs
and five fine qualities
your broad chest draped in garlands of flowers
rests upon the breasts of Nappiai,
her hair entwined
with heavy blossoms.

Please answer us.

O lovely woman with large eyes
darkened with kohl

How much longer
will you prevent him
from rising?

We know,
you cannot bear to be apart

from your beloved

for a single instant

But this does not befit you:
It is unfair.

l r empvy

Tiruppvai 19

Medieval commentaries on this verse belabor the point that it is only via the consort that the devotee can access god, which explains Ka silence in the face of the girls’ entreaties, until they have properly lauded his beloved wife, Nappiai. Yet, the gops’ voice is not diffident, but demanding—who could know better than Nappiai the agony of separation? Her exclusive monopoly of Ka’s attention is therefore all the more unfair to the questing girls. Given the poem’s accent on shared, public worship, this verse can be read as a subtle criticism of Nappiai’s individual enjoyment of Ka. The gops’ gentle journey into the interior space of the god is as much an allegory for the devotee’s journey into the self, where she finds Ka (and Nappiai) asleep in her heart. And when that god finally awakens, he rises majestic as a lion roused from its hibernation—recall how describes him as a young lioncub in the first verse of the Tiruppvai—to sit upon his majestic throne, a just and benevolent king ever-ready to listen to his devotees’ petitions.

With Ka’s awakening, the Tiruppvai once again moves outward and the interior world, marked by the gops’ entry into Ka and Nappiai’s intimate domain, is left behind. Ka, very much in the mold of a Tami king, emerges into the public external realm to enact his role as divine sovereign. The girls repeatedly petition him to fulfill just this role by granting their fondest wishes. The girls plead with Ka to ignore their humble lineage, to forgive their easy familiarity, and grant them their desires and the mysterious paai-drum. This move from the intimate interior world also signals a difference in their attitude to Ka. The boldness is replaced with deference—suddenly, the gops are not asking to share Nappiai’s place; they are instead asking to be entirely dedicated to Ka as his servants. The gops say:

We came at the break of dawn

to worship you
to praise your lotus feet

bright as gold.

Listen to the reason for our prayers:

You were born among simple folk
whose livelihood was tending cows

So you cannot refuse our small services.

Know this Govinda

We have not come here
for the paai-drum

For all time:
for this birth and every birth that follows

We are only yours.
We serve only you.

Direct our every other desire toward you.

l r empvy

Tiruppvai 29

The poem thus ends with a dramatic and unexpected twist—the paai-drum, so central a symbol in the poem, is suddenly rejected as a suitable reward and instead the gops declare that the true object of their ritual vow is and has always been eternal service to Ka. It concludes on a happy note with the gop girls draped in rich silks, happily feasting, their desire apparently realized.

The Structure of the Ncciyr Tirumoi

The Ncciyr Tirumoi is a structurally malleable poem, although it is interpreted in commentaries and rvaiava hagiographies as a linear narrative that documents the story of ’s separation and eventual union with Viu.⁴⁰ In these more conservative readings, the Ncciyr Tirumoi continues the narrative of the Tiruppvai over its fourteen sections, at the end of which reaches her goal—union with Viu. But the poem’s shifting points of view, changes in spatial orientation, and its seemingly abrupt ending challenge such tidy narrative linearity.⁴¹

The opening sections of the Ncciyr Tirumoi traverse terrain common in Tami rvaiava bhakti poetry. It begins with a vow to Kmadeva (Ncciyr Tirumoi 1), followed by two sections that describe the naughty antics of Ka (Ncciyr Tirumoi 2 and 3), eleven verses on divination (Ncciyr Tirumoi 4), and an appeal to a sweet little kuyil bird to act as a messenger to the beloved (Ncciyr Tirumoi 5). The poem then turns exactly at its halfway point, in the sixth section. Here the poet, in the first-person point of view, narrates to her friends a dream of her grand wedding to Viu. Thereafter the poem quickly gathers steam and ratchets its emotional weight and drama as the heroine’s love reaches its fevered pitch in the penultimate decad, and she threatens her callous lover:

I melt. I fray. But he does not care
if I live or die.
If that stealthy thief, that duplicitous Govardhana
should even glance at me
I shall pluck these useless breasts of mine
from their roots
I will fling them at his chest
and staunch the fire scorching me.

Ncciyr Tirumoi 13.8

But the eleven verses that immediately follow and conclude the Ncciyr Tirumoi do not pick up the theme of unfulfilled and unrequited desire or the terrible price it extracts from its sufferers. Instead, the poem ends with a bantering, folksy dialogue that reveals the secret that Ka can be found in Vndvana. The heroine mocks her longed-for beloved and queries his whereabouts to an unknown and unseen audience:

Have you seen him here

that lord who is love
love itself born as a bridegroom
that one who speaks intolerable lies?

We glimpsed him coming to Vndvana

flying high above
shaded from the sun by noble Vinat’s son
whose wings were spread like a canopy.

Ncciyr Tirumoi 14.3

How do we make sense of this rather odd end to the anguished and tragic tone of the poem, keeping in mind that for the most part the heroine’s companions have been represented as being either helpless or apathetic to her plight? On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that the unrelieved tragedy of the Ncciyr Tirumoi is assuaged in this gentle and generally optimistic tone—and this is the approach that the traditional interpreters take, suggesting that the heroine, identified with , is united with her beloved forever. Yet it is also equally apparent (as indicated in the verse above) that union with Ka, while desired, has not been fully realized. The heroine asks where one might find the naughty cowherd, and an answer in the plural (we) provides the answer—Vndvana. The poem concludes ambivalently with the hint of suggestion that Ka may be seen in the mythical land of his childhood sports, and not with a definitive assertion of eternal union.

The final decad brings together two major symbolic streams that run through the Ncciyr Tirumoi—these are the presence of multiple poetic voices and the deft use of terrestrial, mythic, and imaginal spaces. One of the most curious aspects of the poem is the changing register of narrative perspective and the manner in which it is mapped on to specific spaces. The poem begins in the first person, but this perspective is soon discarded in favor of the plural “we” of the gop girls, axiomatic of the Tiruppvai. Soon this vantage too is cast aside, and the first-person point of view returns and dominates the Ncciyr Tirumoi, until both “I” and “we” come together in the poem’s final section (see table 1).

TABLE 1. Voice and Place in the Ncciyr Tirumoi

In contrast to the Ncciyr Tirumoi, the Tiruppvai is presented entirely in the third-person plural and offers different challenges to the permeable boundaries of bhakti poetics that allow the poet to become the speaker of the poem. Though this chorus of gop girl voices runs through the poetic narrative of the shorter poem and the ambiguous ending suggests an imagined poetic reality, the Tiruppvai is nevertheless interpreted as documenting ’s ritual observances. On the face of it, the opening first-person narrative of the Ncciyr Tirumoi (The Song to Kmadeva) mitigates such problems of interpretation as presented in the Tiruppvai, for the veil that separates persona and poet becomes utterly sheer. In contradistinction to the concluding verse of the Tiruppvai, the poet Ktai makes no pretense about who has observed the vow in the final verse of the Ncciyr Tirumoi’s opening song:

Ktai of Viucitta

king of Putuvai

city of towering mansions that rise like mountains

sang this garland of sweet Tami
to plead with Kmadeva

with his sugarcane bow and five-flower arrows

to unite her with the lord. . . .

Ncciyr Tirumoi 1.10

With no personae evoked and no imagined reality in which the action is situated, the Ncciyr Tirumoi thus begins much like any other similar Tami bhakti poem of this period. But the second, third, and fourth sections of the Ncciyr Tirumoi abruptly revert to the choir of young gop girls, who like their counterparts in the Tiruppvai are located in the wonderful and mythical realm of Vndvana. Their child-like voices playfully chastise Ka for breaking their sandcastles and stealing their clothes, while also divining the future of their love for him.⁴² In the poem’s fifth decad, the singular voice reemerges, and remains until the final section, when the gop girls once again make their appearance in Vndvana. ’s alteration between “her” voice and the identity of the gop girls says something significant about the ways in which she uses both female voices and the spaces in which she locates them.

The gop voice is always a collective one and is the counter measure to the individual’s lament that dominates the Ncciyr Tirumoi. The collective gop voice invariably emerges in ’s poetry in the mythic world of Vndvana, where Ka remains close at hand. And even when he chooses to disappear, there are those who share the pain brought by separation. The real and material world of sacred sites is lonely for one such as , and the decads of the Ncciyr Tirumoi express this profound loneliness by reverting to the unmediated voice of the heroine. There are no like-minded companions who can empathize with her suffering, who can make sense of an untamed and reckless love. Instead there are unheeding birds (Ncciyr Tirumoi 5), insentient clouds (Ncciyr Tirumoi 8), and groups of mothers (Ncciyr Tirumoi 10) who are all just helpless spectators of her terrible longing. It is only in the fourteenth section of the poem that both voices (I and we) come together in a dialogue conducted across space and time. While the heroine’s bitter voice raises questions about Ka’s whereabouts, a collective voice replies that he can be found only in Vndvana. It would appear that when the collective voice of the gop girls emerges in the Ncciyr Tirumoi, it is to signify the possibility of union, only realized in a mythic, perhaps imaginal realm. It is a point that the poet herself makes in Ncciyr Tirumoi 12, when she/the heroine demands to be taken to the sites made sacred by Ka’s presence: Mathur, Vndvana, the banks of the Yamun, and Dvrak. One bound to the material world, like the heroine of the Ncciyr Tirumoi, is condemned to a continued and endless separation, and the poem is punctuated with instances of an ephemeral and distant union embodied in the figures of the tormented or questing gop girls of Vndvana. When the heroine does experience that momentary union, it is either when she enters the mythical world of Ka’s play or in the realm of dreams, where she (the heroine/) dreams of her marriage to Viu (Ncciyr Tirumoi 6). In the poignant section that follows, the heroine awakens only to realize that her grand wedding witnessed by the gods was but a cruel deception (Ncciyr Tirumoi 7).

The final section of the Ncciyr Tirumoi makes sense only when we map the use of space and voice in the poem. What hagiographies and commentaries read as conclusive union is in fact rather open-ended and opaque. The only certainty is that the experience of union with Ka is one that is shared and best achieved with a community (like in the Tiruppvai), and it can be fully and permanently realized only in a mythical world. Of course, Vndvana is as much a terrestrial place as rragam, Vkaam, or Tirumliruñclai, yet does not choose to end the Ncciyr Tirumoi in any of these famous sites, particularly rragam, where legend has it she was united with Viu. Rather, in the Ncciyr Tirumoi as in the Tiruppvai, Vndvana/yarpi is a far-away magical land, a place of imagination, where the most impossible desires can be dreamed into fulfillment.

Of Conches and Conch Bangles: Recurring Symbols in the
Ncciyr Tirumoi

The Tiruppvai is anchored by a single central symbol—the paai—but the Ncciyr Tirumoi, true to its more supple structure, employs a variety of symbols that are nimbly layered for maximum emotive and aesthetic impact. Phrases, myths, motifs, and symbols grace the poem, heavy with meaning like the dark rain clouds the poet-heroine sends as her warrior-messengers. Often, achieves this effect by doing one of two things: either using a word or symbol that is inherently polyvalent or by imbuing a word with polyvalence. We see the technique already in evidence in the Tiruppvai in her use of the words pvai (a polyvalent word) and paai (a word imbued with polyvalence). The Ncciyr Tirumoi is replete with instances of ’s verbal dexterity; her clever use of the word caku (conch) to refer to both Viu’s conch and the heroine’s conch bangles is perhaps the most obvious example. One could go so far as to suggest that the caku, like the paai and pvai of the Tiruppvai, is the dominant symbol that holds the Ncciyr Tirumoi together.

The first instance in the Ncciyr Tirumoi where the poet plays with the dual meaning of the word caku occurs in the opening two verses of “The Song to the Kuyil” (Ncciyr Tirumoi 5.1 and 5.2). These two early instances of ’s play on the word caku prefigure the protracted treatment it receives in Ncciyr Tirumoi 7 (The Song to the White Conch) and Ncciyr Tirumoi 11 (The Song for the Conch Bangles).⁴³ The fifth section is addressed to the sweet kuyil bird that the poet-heroine entreats to act as her messenger to a god indifferent to her love. As we will see below, the section’s opening two verses signal a rhetorical gambit that collapses the heroine’s stolen bangles with the distant unattainable conch of Viu. Ncciyr Tirumoi 5 begins with the effect of Viu’s possession and his subsequent abandonment of the heroine, embodied inher loose conch bangles, as a sign of her loneliness. So, we find the heroine lamenting thus in Ncciyr Tirumoi 5.1:

Is it fair that my love

for the eternal Mdhava

dark as the sapphire

greatly famed and beautiful

adorned with his jeweled crown

should cause me to lose my bangles of conch (caku). . .?

In 5.2, the verse that immediately follows, she shifts her focus and offers the reason for the loss of those bangles, which is articulated not just as simple abandonment, but as forced seduction:

My perfect lord

who holds the spotless white conch (caku) in his left hand

refuses to reveal himself to me.
Instead he enters me, tortures me all day. . . .

In this early instance of ’s use of Viu’s conch, she makes no direct mention of its provenance. However, her audience would have been well aware of the story of Viu’s relentless pursuit of the demon Pañccana, who became a conch in the depths of the ocean. When Viu defeated him, he claimed the demon-conch as his special emblem. By thus simply speaking of how the god entered her, and by evoking the conch as Viu’s specific attribute, equates his pursuit of her with his hunt for the demon to the very depths of the ocean. But whereas Viu’s conch becomes his treasured companion, the heroine is eventually abandoned. Herein lies the difference between the two conches that exploits fully in Ncciyr Tirumoi 11. While one is cherished and loved (Viu’s conch), the other, the heroine’s conch bangle, a metonomy for her very self, is rejected and unloved. What merely suggests in the opening two verses of Ncciyr Tirumoi 5 becomes the focus of sumptuous attention in the later sections of the Ncciyr Tirumoi, with a section devoted to each kind of conch: Viu’s special symbol (Ncciyr Tirumoi 7) and the heroine’s conch bangles (Ncciyr Tirumoi 11).

’s “Song to the White Conch” (Ncciyr Tirumoi 7) is unique among the corpus of vr poetry, for it is the only one addressed exclusively to Viu’s conch. In these eleven verses, Viu’s conch becomes the center of attention, where the poet lauds it for its special place of intimacy. The poet marvels that something so ordinary (caku) could become so extraordinary that it deserves its own name (Valampuri, Pñcajanya), and simply on account of its association with her beloved. To signal this dual status, addresses the conch in Ncciyr Tirumoi 7 both by its generic name, caku, and by its proper name as Valampuri or Pñcajanya.⁴⁴ Ncciyr Tirumoi 7 begins in the following way:

Are they fragrant as camphor? Are they fragrant as the lotus?
Or do those coral red lips taste sweet?
I ache to know the taste, the fragrance of the lips

of Mdhava, who broke the tusk of the elephant.

Tell me, O white conch from the deep sea.

Ncciyr Tirumoi 7.1

In the introductory verse of the seventh section, the conch is described simply and generically as the “white conch from the deep sea” (i ve cak). But as the decad unfolds and the circumstances of the conch’s birth revealed, she begins to address it in particular and defining terms, as Pñcajanya (Ncciyr Tirumoi 7.2, 7.8, 7.10), referring to its birth from the demon Pañccana, and Valampuri (7.4), referencing its rarity as a conch which curves to the right (valam) rather than the left. But from the frequency with which she uses caku in this section, it is clear that she favors this word over the proper names Valampuri and Pñcajanya that speak to the conch’s uniqueness. Throughout the seventh section, she uses caku in its vocative form, embellishing it adjectivally as great and beautiful conch (kla peruñcak, 7.3), great conch (peruñcaku, 7.5, 7.6, 7.9), and king among conches (caku araiy, 7.7). ’s preference for the word caku over the more specific Pñcajanya and Valampuri highlights the conch’s initially antagonistic relationship to Viu, and its rather pedestrian genealogy, rather than its sacred character. This is a significant choice, for it sets up the daring claims of the Ncciyr Tirumoi’s eleventh section, devoted entirely to the heroine’s conch bangles (caku).

Ncciyr Tirumoi 11 is the “Song for the Conch Bangles,” and begins:

The conch (caku) he holds in his hand is dear to him.
Aren’t my conch bangles (caku) as dear to me?

Ncciyr Tirumoi 11.1

This entire Tirumoi turns on the twin meanings embedded in the word caku, one of which is derivative. The word caku, connoting bangle, has long been in use, as early as Cakam period literature, because it denotes bangles fashioned from conch shell. And the bangle of course is a common enough trope in Indic literature, employed to signal the woman’s wasting disease of longing. The empty space of the bangle acts as a metonomy for the barrenness of her womanhood, the self-made empty and useless through the heedless cruelty of the lover. But here turns both the mythic and the mundane into something else. In a poetic sleight of hand that juxtaposes Viu’s divine conch and the heroine’s rather ordinary bangles, the simple word caku becomes the window and the mirror that facilitates moving between the ordinary and the extraordinary. It is the juncture where the commonplace (bangle) is imbued with profundity and the sublime with utter ordinariness (the divine conch).

It is the wonderful seventh section in praise of the conch that sets up the daring declarations of the eleventh Tirumoi and allows that window to be thrown open. In Ncciyr Tirumoi 7 the heroine sings enviously of the conch’s singular relationship with Viu. Just as she/the gop girls accuse Nappiai of monopolizing her beloved’s attention in the Tiruppvai, in Ncciyr Tirumoi 7, she berates the Pñcajanya for the same misdeed. But when the conch once again becomes the center of ’s lavish poetic attention in Ncciyr Tirumoi 11, the accusation of ownership is reversed and she reserves her scathing words for Viu alone. After all, it is he who bestowed upon a simple conch the honor of forever being associated with him. Similarly, her conch bangles are imbued with such gravitas because of her futile love for him. He subdued the terrible demon Pañccana (the myth is recounted in Ncciyr Tirumoi 7) with the same single-minded ruthlessness that he loosened the bangles of conch from the heroine’s wrists. In Ncciyr Tirumoi 11, she accuses Viu of hoarding wealth, including his conch and her measly conch bangles, through means both fair and foul. The lord owns the entire world, but is supremely attached to his conch, just as the heroine is attached to her conch bangles, her only wealth. In correlating his conch and her conch bangles, deeming them equally valuable, conjoins the mythic and the mundane and transforms the distant unattainable object into the intimate and familiar.

Enjoying : Commentary, Enjoyment and the King
of Commentators

rvaiava theologians speak of the process of commentary as anubhava (enjoyment) and the commentarial text as an anubhava grantha (text of enjoyment). Composing a commentary is not merely a cerebral act of interpretation, where the poem is made to fit a prefabricated theological agenda. Rather, the commentary is an expression of the commentator’s enjoyment and relish of not just the poem, but also of the vr poet’s enjoyment of god, encoded in his/her composition. The commentary then becomes a means of accessing an vr’s experience of the divine, while also standing witness to the commentator’s own savoring of the divine as it is expressed in an vr poem.⁴⁵ Within such a rubric, doing theology is an aesthetic endeavor, and arguably no one is more skilled or enthusiastic in the exegetical process than Periyavcc Piai, whose enjoyments of ’s Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi form the basis of the notes that accompany my translation.

Periyavcc Piai (b. 1228 C.E.) was the first and only medieval commentator to compose commentaries on all four thousand verses of the Nlyira Divya Prabandham, which earned him the title vykhyna cakravarti or the King of Commentators.⁴⁶ This singular achievement alone is sufficient to set him apart from other medieval commentators, but the historical moment that he composed his work, and the lineage that he represented—he was the student of one of the foremost rvaiava commentators, NamPiai—further compound his importance in the history of rvaiavism. Periyavcc Piai’s writing represents the maturation of rvaiava Maiprava discourse, and as such anticipates some of the internal philosophical differences that eventually lead to a sectarian split within the rvaiava community.⁴⁷

Piai’s commentarial voice is lively and energetic. References to the Vlmki Rmyaa and other scriptural sources sit comfortably beside quotations from the works of the vr and contemporary anecdotal evidence. Piai is a thorough commentator who generates a plethora of imaginative meanings that nonetheless remain consistent with established rvaiava doctrine. He makes liberal use of Sanskrit sources, both to establish equivalency, as well as to provide elucidation. Piai’s great fondness for the Sanskrit Rmyaa manifests in his readiness to quote from it even when the concordance is not readily apparent, or perhaps even appropriate.

I have chosen to focus on Periyavcc Piai’s commentary because he is the only early commentator to write on both the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi. His commentaries on these two poems established the major contours of the commentaries that followed. In particular, Periyavcc Piai established the narrative that linked the two poems together, skillfully melding hagiography with theological discourse. In addition, he wrote at a time of significant flux in the development of rvaiava traditions. His commentaries anticipate the theological schisms that developed over the next two centuries, especially as it pertains to issues of the role of the teacher, and the dependence/independence of the soul in relation to Viu. The mid-thirteenth century also witnessed the gradual apotheosis of the vr poets, and in particular. Piai does not directly argue for ’s status as one of Viu’s divine consorts, but he sets up consistent parallels between her and St that foreshadow her eventual position as Viu’s secondary consort.

The form of Piai’s commentary for the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi does not deviate from those he composed for the other vr poems. The commentary always begins with a lengthy introduction that provides the reasons for the poem’s composition. For instance, he begins the commentary to the Tiruppvai by explaining ’s distinctive qualities as a devotee—that it is natural for a woman to love a man, but difficult for a man to love another man, as was the case with the other vr poets, who had to assume the guise of women in many of their poems. He goes on to explain that boldly strove to awaken Viu and make her demand of him, using the vow as a mere pretext to get close to him. For the Ncciyr Tirumoi, Piai offers a general introduction to the poem and then one for each of the fourteen sections. In addition, he provides detailed explanations for each verse within any given section of the Ncciyr Tirumoi. In short, Piai offers an interpretation for all 173 of ’s verses.

The commentary for any individual verse always begins with a word gloss that can be considered the first level of interpretation. Here, a common word like deva (a god, divine being) may be glossed as nityasri (eternally divine beings, always in service of Viu), inflecting it with a decidedly rvaiava theological slant. For instance, the first occurrence of the word paai in Tiruppvai I may be explained as viruppam (desire), with no mention made of paai as a sacred drum. The word gloss is followed by a phrase-by-phrase interpretation of the verse, where theology rubs shoulders with anecdotes of the delight that rvaiava luminaries like Rmnuja experienced in the compositions of the vr.⁴⁸ In his phrase-by-phrase exegesis, Piai does not lose sight of his narrative thread and is meticulous in establishing narrative continuity, from verse to verse, section to section, and poem to poem. But for all his attention to detail, Piai is not much concerned with identifying a poem’s literary allusions, even when they are readily apparent, and this is particularly true in the Ncciyr Tirumoi, where references to antecedent literary texts like the Tami epic-poem Cilappatikram and the Cakam anthology Kuuntokai are plentiful. Piai simply ignores these in favor of a citation from, or allusion to, a relevant epic or Puric source. When he does quote Tami poetry, it is invariably from the corpus of vr poetry. It is clear from his commentaries to other vr poems, such as Nammvr’s Tiruviruttam, that Piai is aware of Tami’s literary antecedents, so we cannot attribute his deliberate choices to simple ignorance, or an impulse to Sanskritize the vr poems. As I have argued elsewhere, the choice of Sanskrit text over secular or even Jain texts such as the Cilappatikram underscores the rvaiava ideal that a commentary is an anubhava grantha, a text of enjoyment. A commentator such as Piai therefore chooses texts—the Vlmki Rmyaa being chief among them—that heighten the experience of anubhava, both for the author and his audience, rather than those that have great literary value, but no devotional merit.⁴⁹ In the final sum, rvaiava commentary is a form of literary criticism. It is an uninhibited revelry in the immeasurable pleasures of the text, where the vr text and the commentary work in tandem to create a conduit of aesthetic experience that seeks to induce a profound mystical ecstasy.

Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi in Ritual

When one considers the ritual lives of the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, liturgical recitation, either at home or at the temple, are the most common and most widespread. The Tiruppvai occupies a central place in daily rvaiava temple liturgical services. Even if the poem is not recited in its entirety, a few select and important verses such as Tiruppvai 29 are performed at the conclusion of morning daily pjas during the waving of the camphor lamp, or even sometimes during the abhieka (ritual ablutions). The Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi are always performed during the first ten days of the month-long Festival of Recitation in Mrkai (December–January) known as the Adhyayanotsavam. The sixth section (Song of the Wedding Dream) of the Ncciyr Tirumoi, which recounts the heroine’s wedding-dream, is recited during rvaiava Brahmin marriages, where the bride is adorned as . Liturgical recitation of the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi as described above are common and function as part of a larger complex of temple-based recitations of the Nlyira Divya Prabandham. However, at ’s temple in rvilliputtr, both poems in equal measure are the focus of elaborate and extravagant ritual enactments that go far beyond recitation. For instance, the ayana tirukklam (The Depiction of the Attitude of Repose), an alakra (ornamentation) unique to the rvilliputtr temple, recreates Tiruppvai 19.⁵⁰ In this alakra, is imagined in the role of Nappiai, and her consort Ragamar is Ka.

During ’s Annual Bathing Festival at her temple in rvilliputtr (December–January), the Tiruppvai is given special reverence and recited with the same care as the Tiruvymoi in a tradition known as n pu (Daily Song). Sections of the Ncciyr Tirumoi come to the fore in recitations and retellings of ’s story at rvilliputtr, in a ritual of divination, or in special alakras for .⁵¹ It is beyond the scope of this introduction to discuss all of these varied and delightful ritual enjoyments and enactments of ’s Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi. In the section that follows, I present two of the most important of these ritual re-enactments at the rvilliputtr temple. The first deals exclusively with the Tiruppvai and the other draws its inspiration from the Ncciyr Tirumoi.

Bathing in Mrkai: Enacting the Tiruppvai at the rvilliputtr
Temple

Almost at the tail end of the month of Mrkai (mid-January), the rvilliputtr temple celebrates a ten-day festival for called the Mrkai Nra Utsavam (Festival of Ceremonial Bathing in Mrkai).⁵² The festival focuses on the actual act of bathing, an event that the Tiruppvai chose to leave out. In the poem, we heard recount the details of the vow and listened to the gop girls rouse their neighborhood friends to join them in the early morning bathing ritual. Then, the poem shifted to the doorstep of the god. However in this festival, celebrated in present-day rvilliputtr and probably practiced in some form since the mid-seventeenth century, the focus is the actual bathing, which is enacted ritually in an elaborate manner.⁵³

’s daily routine during the Mrkai Nra Utsavam revolves around the bathing ritual (nram) that is bracketed by spectacular adornments (alakra) twice a day. Each festival day follows the same pattern: first the beautifully decorated image of is brought to the gateway of the neighboring Viu temple, where she is imagined to petition Viu for his grace. Once the rituals at the gateway of the Viu temple are concluded, ’s image journeys through the streets of rvilliputtr, with only a small retinue of priests in attendance, stopping along the way at various maapas or halls. After several hours of journeying, the image of reaches her final destination, a maapa located by a large temple tank, where in local lore, is thought to have bathed when she observed the Mrkai vow. At the maapa, an extravagant and lovely ritual known as the eai kppu (Oil Anointment) is performed. This is followed by an elaborate ritual bath (abhieka). The image of is then adorned sumptuously and returned in procession back to the rvilliputtr temple, where she is finally reunited with her divine husband.⁵⁴

’s wandering through rvilliputtr in Mrkai mimics the trajectory of the Tiruppvai, which also begins in the outside world—with waking up the various gop girls—and ends with a gradual entry into the house of the god. The morning procession is thus meant to re-enact the “waking-up-the-girls” section of the Tiruppvai, and in this regard, this festival can be understood as dramatizing the poem’s rhetorical device that transforms the audience of the festival into one of the girls who have slept too late and have thus failed to uphold the strictures of the Mrkai vow. In the Tiruppvai, at the end of the journey is the sight of and promise of divine union in the form of Ka and Nappiai. In the Mrkai festival, and her devotees traverse the same path, repeating the cycle of union and separation from the object of their desire. During the eight days of the festival, is both the gop girl eagerly on a quest and the woman who became a goddess because her desire was so fully realized. As she moves between these personalities, to stand first at Ka’s doorway, and then to go through that doorway, she is at once goddess and devotee, embodying both the quest for him and the fruition of her quest.⁵⁵

Divining with Pearls: Ncciyr Tirumoi and the Araiyar Cvai
at rvilliputtr

The Araiyar Cvai (Service of the Araiyars) is a hereditary ritual performance tradition performed by a patrilineal community of Brahmin men and is unique to the rvaiava community. It survives today in three temples in Tami Nu—rragam, rvilliputtr, and vr Tirunakari. The Araiyar Cvai combines gestural interpretation with liturgical recitation and singing and has long been understood by the performers as embodying a multidimensional interpretation of the Nlyira Divya Prabandham. While the Araiyars are required to perform both daily and festival ritual duties, their most elaborate performances take place in the context of temple festivals, especially during the month of Mrkai. It is in the context of the Adhyayanotsavam (Festival of Recitation) celebrated at the temples of rragam, rvilliputtr, and vr Tirunakari that the Ncciyr Tirumoi becomes an integral part of the Araiyars’ ritual gestural exegesis. During the first ten days of the Festival of Recitation the Araiyar performs a special ritual drama called the muttukkui (Divination with Pearls), where the central texts are the fourth decad of the Ncciyr Tirumoi and Tirumakaiyvr’s longer love poem, the Tiruneuntakam.⁵⁶

The muttukkui is a ritual divination and is peopled with well-known stock characters—the lovelorn heroine, the anxious mother, and the wise fortune-teller. The mother is distraught to find her daughter growing thin, pale, and frail with sickness and summons the soothsayer (kuatti) to divine the cause of the girl’s illness. The fortune-teller settles down to predict the girl’s future, and finally reveals that her love for the “dark-hued lord” will be realized. The Araiyar recites Ncciyr Tirumoi 4.1 and 4.2 when performing the actual divination. Although in Ncciyr Tirumoi 4 it is the gop girls who perform the divination, in rvilliputtr, the heroine of the muttukkui is . She is both the performer of the divination (the heroine performing the divination on her own) and the recipient of the divination (the fortune-teller performing the divination on her behalf).⁵⁷ At the conclusion of the muttukkui, the image of is taken in procession, and the Araiyar recites particular verses from the latter half of the Ncciyr Tirumoi—selections from Ncciyr Tirumoi 7 (Song to the White Conch), 11 (Song for the Conch Bangles), and 13 (Song of Desire). The recitation of these verses from the Ncciyr Tirumoi is unique to rvilliputtr and acknowledges the significance of the latter poem in constructing and celebrating at her temple.⁵⁸

The Other Lives of ’s Poems

’s poems, particularly the Tiruppvai, are vibrantly alive in traditional modes of rvaiava discourse, as well as in more recent imaginings in a wide variety of media. is immensely popular among diaspora Hindus, and has an almost-ubiquitous presence in Hindu temples in the United States, such as those in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Livermore, and Malibu, which have shrines dedicated to rather than Bh Dev. Lavishly illustrated e-books of the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, with commentary in English, and discussions on listservs (such as the “Bhakti List,” on hiatus since 2003) of the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, especially during the month of Mrkai, are common. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these listservs and e-books are published and maintained by diaspora rvaiavas, invariably based in the United States.⁵⁹

While ’s story has always been familiar to South Indians, the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi were in all likelihood well known only to rvaiavas until quite recently. In 1952, Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar (1890–1967 C.E.), a prominent South Indian musician, set the Tiruppvai to Karak music rgas and performed selections at the rvilliputtr temple, and then later during his concerts, usually as a concluding piece.⁶⁰ The Tiruppvai, already a well-known text, soared in popularity, and it continues to be regularly performed in Karak music concerts, especially during the Annual December Music Festival in Chennai.⁶¹

Parallel to the increased popularity of ’s poems in music circles in recent years is the greater visibility of her poems in the newly emergent repertoire of the South Indian neoclassical dance form, Bharatantyam. Rukmini Arundale (1904–1986), one of the pioneers of the new hybrid theatrical form of Bharatantyam “dance-drama,” debuted Andal Charitram (’s Story) in 1961, approximately thirty years after she had founded her dance school and company, Kalakshetra (est. January 1936). Andal Charitram liberally used verses from both the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi to narrate ’s life story and excerpts from Periyvr’s Periyvr Tirumoi and the Sanskrit hagiography, Divyasricaritram, to depict her childhood years. The Kalakshetra Andal Charitram emphasized her devotion and muted the transgressive, violent, and disquieting moments of her mythologized life. The dance-drama continues to be frequently staged during Kalakshetra’s annual December music and dance festival. Its popularity is largely derived from the nonconfrontational and comforting nature of its story. As presented in the Kalakshetra version, is a divine being, whose love for Ka was predestined. Kalakshetra’s new retelling of an old story chose those verses from the Ncciyr Tirumoi such as the “Song of the Wedding-Dream” (Ncciyr Tirumoi 6) and the “Song to the White Conch” (Ncciyr Tirumoi 7) that do not disrupt the representation of as an innocent and asexual young girl. Rather, Andal Charitram like many of its successors strove (and by all accounts succeeded) to create a “soul-satisfying production and an elevating spiritual experience for the audience.”⁶²

Kalakshetra’s Andal Charitram is only one (and possibly one of the earliest) interpretation of ’s poetry in dance that used the poems to narrate her story. Since then, dance-dramas have become increasingly popular both in India and in the diaspora.⁶³ Some focus exclusively on the Ncciyr Tirumoi, like Anita Ratnam’s Naachiyar: Mystic Search for the Divine (2000) that claims to engage with the mature love of this later poem.⁶⁴ Dance-dramas under titles such as Andal Kalyanam (2002, North Carolina) are frequently staged by diaspora communities, often as fundraising for temple building in the United States and elsewhere. Still other versions bring ’s poetry and life into conversation with other female poets like Mr, drawing parallels between the experience of two female poets separated by time, space, and language. One such example is Jayanthi Raman’s Krishna Bhakti (2006, Portland, Oregon), which depicts the story of and Mr using multiple forms of Indian dance including Bharatantyam and Maipuri.⁶⁵ However most of these performances, following Kalakshetra’s lead, are concerned primarily with presenting a dramatic hagiography for a contemporary audience. They tend to read the poems as an autobiography that confirms a well-known story. John Stratton Hawley has argued that representations of Mr (and other problem saints) in Indian comic books such as Amar Chitra Katha tend to domesticate her, where her bhakti (the cause of her rebelliousness) “is made consonant with her fulfillment of a woman’s dharma.”⁶⁶ Something similar happens to in the dance-dramas that aim to celebrate her life. Bharatantyam dance-dramas, like comic books, address an English-educated, middle-class, global audience. Thus ’s ritual transgressions, the disturbing violence, and the frank eroticism of her poems are completely subordinated or erased in the larger cause of devotion, and her position as the god’s wife makes her life worth celebrating within the framework of middle-class mores.

As the only woman among a group of eleven male vr, and as a woman whose mythologized life was radical, is a vexed figure. She is revered as an incarnation of the goddess Bh Dev, and her poems are recited and celebrated. Women in particular are attracted to her, although her life in its rejection of social norms is not emulated. As Vasudha Narayanan has pointed out, is a theological role model because she is one who strives for moka, and in this regard is an exemplar for not just women, but all human beings.⁶⁷ But women in South India have found ways to make their own, and an excellent example is women’s participation in devotional groups known as maali (lit. circle) that focus on . These maalis usually meet once or twice a week in private and also perform in public settings, in music festivals, temples, and on television and radio. One of the most visible of these groups is the appropriately named God Maali (Circle of God), which was formed in 1970 and reorganized in 1982. They perform songs on television, radio, and for various temple functions, and although the women of this group perform the songs of the other vr, their emphasis is on , on her poetry, and her ability as the consort of Viu to act as an effective mediator.⁶⁸ Given that only Brahmin men are allowed to recite the vr songs, including the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, in the context of temple and festival worship, groups such as the God Maali represent a thoroughly modern means for women to participate in public worship and empowering religious activities.

About the Translation

Vidya Dehejia’s and Her Path of Love is the sole academic translation of both the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi. This work, published over a decade ago locates in the milieu of Tami bhakti and introduces her as “Woman, Poet, and Mystic.” The brief introduction discusses the Cakam antecedents of ’s poetry, the rhythm and metrical structures of her verses, and prominent motifs such as the history of the pvai vow. The accompanying notes function to clarify specific myths, particular names, and flora and fauna, but do not explicate the verses or situate them in their ritual, performative, or commentarial contexts. This book is an excellent basic introduction to , but it is also limited by its format and cannot explore any of the aforementioned themes in depth. One of the problems in its approach is that the book posits a dichotomy between the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, saying, “ . . . the Ncciyr Tirumoi is lesser known and is not chanted in temples or at religious festivals.”⁶⁹ But as I have discussed at length in this introduction, both the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi have active ritual and performative lives. While the Tiruppvai is certainly better known and more accessible to a lay, non-rvaiava public, it is the Ncciyr Tirumoi that is central to asserting ’s grand passion for Viu within the oral and written hagiographic traditions. One of my main aims in this translation of ’s two poems is to demonstrate the significance and the interlinked nature of the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi through a detailed discussion of the lives of both poems and the accompanying notes.

Any translation of the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, and indeed any bhakti poem, carries a double burden. The first is what Hank Heifetz referred to as Indologese, the laboring, heavy Victorian diction that hampers the majority of English translations of Indic texts.⁷⁰ The genealogy of Indologese and its impact on South Asian literary studies has subsequently been explored comprehensively by Steven Hopkins in Singing the Body of God⁷¹ and in his sensitive translations of Vednta Deika’s poems in An Ornament for Jewels,⁷² and I refrain from rehearsing those issues here. Suffice it to say, these Indologese translation are often haunted by the desire to convey the weight and the canonicity of the poem with evocations of Shakespearean thou’s and archaic language. In addition, these translations are wedded to Tami syntax, either in terms of word order or in the language’s tendency to stack adverbial and adjectival participles, drop off the endings of nouns, and leave the finite verb until the final line of the verse. In the Tiruppvai, there is no finite verb that ends each verse. Rather an adverbial participle such as makintu (having rejoiced) leads into the refrain, l r empvy, making it impossible to translate into clear English. To adhere to Tami syntax with slavish fidelity is a losing proposition and would undoubtedly create a translation that is not only labored, but also more important, one that is unintelligible.⁷³

The thirty verses of the Tiruppvai are composed in eight concise lines of koccaka kalippa meter, while the Ncciyr Tirumoi employs five different metrical structures in line length ranging from four to eight. I have not endeavored to duplicate either ’s compact metrical and rhythmic style, or the eight-line/four-line verse format of either poem. Instead, I have attempted to convey her lucid imagery, her ability to paint “word-pictures,” and her embedded poetic style through a translation approach that makes visual ’s craft as a poet. Wherever possible, I have retained the order of the lines, metaphors, and images. When I have indented an image and/or metaphor from the body of the verse it is to indicate that it is embedded. For example I translate the final lines of Tiruppvai 8 as follows:

If we sing of him
and we attain the paai-drum

If we go to him,

who ripped open the beak of the bird
who destroyed the terrible wrestlers
that god of gods

he will listen intently and grant us grace.

In my translation, I indent the two lines starting with, “who tore open the beak. . . .” while lining up the final two lines, “He will listen intently and he will give us grace” to convey that both the stacked and embedded qualifiers apply to him,—here, Ka. The above verse also highlights an important choice I have made as a translator. While technical vocabulary and foreign words can hamper a translation, I have chosen to retain those words that do not have a workable English equivalent—this is especially true of the vast range of flora and fauna, birds and animals that make their appearance in ’s poetry. I indicate these terms in italics within the verses themselves and explicate them in the glossary. Sometimes a foreign word becomes self-explanatory within the context of the verse. For instance, a line such as “the cekaunr blossoms have opened their purple lips/and the mpal flowers have closed their dark petals.” despite the strange words, sufficiently conveys that these are two kinds of flowers, one of which blooms during the day, while the other is night blooming. In some cases, I have chosen to use a familiar Indic equivalent over an English word for some Tami words. The most obvious example of this decision is tulas (tuy in Tami). In addition to being cumbersome, to translate tulas/tuy as “sacred basil” is to eject a reader who only knows basil as a fragrant herb used in cooking out of the text. As discussed earlier in the introduction, I have also chosen not to translate words such as paai or the refrain l r empvy for their great rhetorical impact emerges from their ambiguity. In the former case, I half translate paai as paai-drum, so as to suggest that it refers to something both specific and nebulous. The phrase l r empvy is the poem’s refrain and generates a mantra-like quality. I have left it untranslated because it is impossible to have it make grammatical sense while also retaining the inherent ambivalence of the word pvai.

These translation choices lead me to the second concern that has troubled translations of Tami bhakti literature. For centuries, these poems have been read, appreciated, and enjoyed primarily as devotional texts. This approach has translated itself into how academics, whether trained in the Western academy or not, have regarded these poems.⁷⁴ The Tami bhakti poems—and the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi are no exception—are rooted in the idiom of religious literature, and any translation strives to convey the gravity worthy of a text that seeks to convey metaphysical knowledge. Within the context of this worthy endeavor, the literary value of the poem is not only secondary, but also marginal. As early as the great rvaiava theologian Periyavcc Piai one can adduce the tendency to reconfigure what is aesthetically pleasing in a poem, be it the Tiruppvai or the Tiruvymoi. Even though ’s poems brim with allusions to Cakam poems, there is little acknowledgment of this literary past. The literary culture of the Cakam period has negligible relevance for rvaiava theologians, who are redefining aesthetic pleasure in terms of a poem’s efficacy in distilling and producing a devotional affect.⁷⁵

’s poems and the commentaries that accompany them are rich with mythic allusions and are filled with evocative epithets for Viu. I have discussed the significance of some of these divine names in the notes to the poems. Where appropriate, I have also provided a gloss of unfamiliar terms that occur in the commentaries or in the poems in the notes that accompany the relevant verse or section. However, in order to keep the notes as lean as possible, appendix 2 provides a synopsis of the major myths that occur in the Tiruppvai, Ncciyr Tirumoi, and the commentaries, while appendix 3 provides an index of all the myths and Viu’s epithets employed in the two poems. In addition, I have provided a glossary for all un-translated Tami and Sanskrit words that occur in the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi and in the accompanying commentaries.

Within the rvaiava communities, each verse of the Tiruppvai is referred to by its opening line, and not by its number. Similarly, the decads that comprise the Ncciyr Tirumoi are cited by the first line of its first verse, and not by where the Tirumoi occurs in the poem. Therefore, most rvaiava scholars will reference Tiruppvai 27 as krai vellum, rather than by its verse number, while kaa eum, the first line of the penultimate Tirumoi, guides the reader/listener to Ncciyr Tirumoi 13. I have integrated this emic way of citing the text by including the opening phrase of the verse and the relevant number for each of the thirty verses of the Tiruppvai in both the translation and in the notes. For the Ncciyr Tirumoi, I have provided a title for each decad (for example, The Song of Desire), which is not used in the traditional interpretations of the poem. In addition, I have also incorporated the opening Tami phrase of the decad in question (for example, kaa eum) and the translation of that phrase (kaa, my dark lord). To avoid confusion, I have not included the Tami texts, and their translations to headline the notes to each section of the Ncciyr Tirumoi. Instead, they occur under the title for each decad with the relevant Tirumoi number listed beside it, like so: 13. The Song of Desire.

I have not encountered any significant discrepancies in either the published or liturgical versions of the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi. Therefore, my translation choices have not been influenced by the various text and commentary versions that I have consulted over the years. My primary references were the versions of the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi in the Nlyira Divya Prabandham published by the Annangarachariar Press (1972) and by Krishnaswamy Iyengar’s Srinivasa Press.

In these translations of the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, I have attempted versions that are both accurate and poetic. I have been guided by the desire to produce a work that acknowledges equally the literary and the theological. After all, what does it mean to translate a bhakti text in its entirety, given the vibrant lives of these poems in commentary, temple and lay ritual, and contemporary performance traditions of music and dance? My translations are meant to evoke ’s extraordinary poetic virtuosity, the introduction brings the poems alive in their performative dimensions, and the appended notes highlight the art of the commentator and the theological significance of these poems. In the final sum, a translation is an interpretation, whatever claims toward fidelity to the text one might make. The translator, the commentator, the priest, the performer, all have translated these lovely poems into their own special languages, be they of words, ritual, or theology. Here, I have brought in multiple interpretive voices, so that the poet’s words cross over alongside the equally important lives of those words.

Although is revered primarily today as a goddess, it is her poetry—both the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi—apotheosized into revealed texts that is the vehicle of the expression of her spiritual process. often evokes the metaphor of the garland to describe the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi. Sometimes, her verses are garlands of songs (pmlai) and sometimes they are garlands of flowers (pmlai), bound together by a shared symbolic world of a singular savoring of the divine. As the title of the book The Secret Garland implies, the Tiruppvai and Ncciyr Tirumoi, linked through richly layered and detailed imagery, moored by the spectacular interpretive worlds that they have spawned, exemplify a cohesive entity that is at once obvious and enigmatic.