The Tamil Veda of a Sudra Saint (part 1)

[Guest guest]

I will periodically mail excerpts from a paper by Dr. Friedhelm

Hardy, entitled "The Tamil Veda of a Sudra Saint: The Srivaisnava

Interpretation of Nammalvar". Dr. Hardy has done extensive work

on the poetry and milieu of the Alvars and later Srivaisnava

tradition. I have found his work enlightening, and I think the

net will as well. This paper on Nammalvar, the greatest of

Alvars and a great Tamil poet, should be interesting at many

levels.

 

To facilitate easy reading, I will post excerpts of only 50-100

lines each. If you miss any of the postings, please ask me and

I'll mail you a copy. This is the first of many postings.

 

The paper can be found in _Contributions_to_South_Asian_Studies_,

v. 1., Gopal Krishna, editor, Oxford University Press, 1979.

 

[Readers of Usenet will see parallel postings approximately a

day after I mail them out to the bhakti mailing list.]

 

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[...]

 

The present study will investigate the significance of a

particularly powerful symbol which occurs in the Srivaisnava

tradition, figuring as a catalyst of socio-religious tension and

as motivation for its solution in terms of the initial quotation

from the Gita [ix.32]. This symbol evolved out of the

interpretatation which the Srivaisnavas imposed upon a specific

historical person, CaTakOpan (usually called Nammalvar), and his

poetry.

 

This important fountainhead of the Vaisnava movement in the South

composed four collections of songs and poems in Tamil, claiming

that these are the `revelation' of Visnu himself and expressing

in them a novel form of bhakti. Moreover, later hagiographers

regarded him unanimously as a Sudra while at the same time he was

included in the guru-parampara of Ramanuja. The major problems

which all this presented in terms of Hindu `orthodoxy' and also

in terms of other strands within the Srivaisnava tradition are

apparent. Nevertheless, the motivational power of the symbol

which resulted from the solution of these problems has remained

operative over a millenium.

 

The emphasis of the present paper will be on the evolution of

the symbol itself, which means, on the history of the

interpretation of Nammalvar; thus reference to the concrete

social reality, the application of the symbol, will be made only

to the extent necessary to illustrate the interaction of the

religious symbol with social practice. The source-material is

extensive, but the selective picture which is presented in the

following will, I hope, provide a representative impression.

 

The Srivaisnava interpretation of the Alvar can fairly naturally

be differentiated into three separate strands. I have called the

first one `saampradaayika'; it represents the official or

normative line of interpretation. I have subdivided it further

into three sections. First, I trace in outline the hagiographic

developments which produced a `life of Nammalvar' (along with an

iconographic type); secondly, I turn to various mythological

conceptions which place this `life' in a larger context; finally,

the systematic discussion of various Acaryas will be considered.

The second strand contains material of popular and local

inspiration; both in idiom and content it differs considerably

from the `official' version. Thirdly, an approach exploiting the

technique of Sanskrit kaavya poetic style will be illustrated.

 

By spreading the analysis out over such a variegated range of

source-material, insight will be gained not only in the

multi-level mechanism of resolving socio-religious conflicts in

the South Indian Hindu tradition, but also into the process of

`myth-making' around a historical person and a temple complex.

Incidentally, this study will reveal poetic imagination and

association of symbols to be an undercurrent also of theological

thought.