Nammalvar

The Āḻv�rs

Prof. A. Srinivasa Raghavan • October 1, 1974

The great Hindu revival that took place in Tamil Nadu between the fifth and the ninth centuries A.D. ¹ saw the emergence of Tamil as a powerful instrument that carried the old faith to the masses and at the same time served as a resplendent medium of expression to the bhakti or love of God that was the chief characteristic of its resurgence. Buddhism and Jainism that had spread earlier in the South had shown the way by their use of Tamil as the language of religious propaganda, and also of poetic expression in the two Tamil epics MaṇimÄ“kalai and SilappadikÄ�ram; Hinduism followed, not so much because the Buddhist and Jain had done it before, but as a consequence of the fervour that animated a few saintly souls and found natural expression in their mother-tongue. The Hinduism that revived took two main directions, and the two movements crystallised in course of time into what were later identified as two distinct faiths, each one of which claimed absolute validity, leading much later to the theological wrangles and acrimonious controversies that generally follow an era of genuine spiritual uplift. To this period of Hindu religious expansion belong the NÄ�yaṉmÄ�rs and the ĀḻvÄ�rs,² the NÄ�yaṉmÄ�rs representing Åšaivam and the ĀḻvÄ�rs serving as the poetic voice of Vaiṣṇavam.

The Āḻv�rs are twelve in number. Eleven of them have sung of God and one, Madhurakavi, of his spiritual preceptor, Namm�ḻv�r. The chronological order in which they appeared, as accepted by the R�m�nuja school of Vaiṣṇavam, is still a matter of controversy and historical research. Tradition places them roughly between 4200 and 2700 B.C. Historical, linguistic and literary research however, assigns to them a period from the fifth or the sixth to the ninth century A.D.

Details of their lives and the dates of their birth and death are lost in the mists of time. The months and the stars under which they were born are given in some accounts. Vaiṣṇava tradition places NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r as the fifth among the ĀḻvÄ�rs in order of birth but gives him the foremost place in sanctity and hails him as "Kulapati".³ It considers all the other ĀḻvÄ�rs as limbs and NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r as the body and has raised him to a place of worship as one who intercedes with God for saving the souls of men. NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r (literally "Our ĀḻvÄ�r") is the name by which he is generally known now and is an indication of the reverence in which the Vaiṣṇava world holds him.

Voluminous commentaries in maṇipravÄ�ḷa, a mixture of Sanskrit and Tamil, have been written on NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r's works and elaborate and learned attempts have been made to link all that he has written with the theology of ÅšrÄ« RÄ�mÄ�nuja.⁴ These commentaries are a marvel of scholarship and theological acumen. They are not insensitive to the essentially human in NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r and to the poetry in which it finds expression. The commentators, though their vigilant eye is on theology, do often bring out the suggestions and overtones of the poetry in a manner that an aesthete might well envy. Nevertheless, their main purpose is theological.

And they start on the basis that Namm�ḻv�r is a saint, not a man who struggled towards Reality but a realised soul even from birth, an avat�ra or descent of one of the aspects of God. They believe that he is the incarnation of Śenai Mudaliy�r, the Chief of Hosts of the Lord. It is also said that he is the avat�ra of God himself. If this is accepted, the yearning and the travail that Namm�ḻv�r's works record, seem strange for if he was born a realised soul, and was aware as such of the purpose of his descent from God, where is the need for all the agony of the seeking that breaks out from him? One of the explanations given is that though in himself he was in touch with God, he put on voluntarily the predicament of the human spirit in bondage and worked out the various stages of the way of liberation for the world to see and follow. In other words, all the experiences in the long journey to the Real that find a place in Namm�ḻv�r's works are to be considered as presentations by a saint who descended to the human condition by divine dispensation, of all the struggles of man in his march to Reality as though they were his, though they were not. Viewed thus, all Namm�ḻv�r's works are a piece of drama portraying the progress of a soul to the Ultimate.

This may be true. But one cannot explain away the intensity that is NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r's poetry in terms of drama and vicarious or imagined experience. We may well consider NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r's life as a being as well as a becoming. His being a man did not militate, though it stood in the way for a time, against his final vision of God. If we accept this line of thought, we will see NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r's works as the first personal singular in all its trials, failures and achievements, in its despair and hope, and final merging with what transcends the individual personal, what transforms it from its questing self-ness into a Å›eá¹£a, a willing and perfect instrument that has no will except that of God. To approach NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r's work in this way is not to lessen his saintliness but to realise in full the evolution of a saint from a man, the flooding in of Reality into apparently unavailing human hands. Herein lies NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r's true greatness, the special reach of his poetry, that they are a testament not merely of his saintliness but also of human destiny. NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r's passion left the earth to lose itself in the sky, it is true, but it started from here and expressed itself only through the language of the earth.⁵ To deny this is to forget that for all its symbolism which makes for dramatic form its purÄ�ṇic imagery and its philosophic thought, NammÄ�ḻvÄ�r's work is a lyric cry. This book is an attempt to interpret it as such.