Until One Is Immersed: A Journey through Early Tamil Devotional Poetry

For many years, I have been reading the poetry of the Ālvārs, Vaisnava saints of South India. These ālvārs— by one etymology, the chieftains or lords, by another, those wholly immersed in God—were poet saints of the sixth to ninth centuries. There were 12 of them, including high caste, low caste, a king, and an untouchable. There is one woman among them, Āntāl, herself the adopted daughter of another of the ālvārs. Together, they composed 24 works of over 3,500 verses, forming what is reverently called the Divya Prabandham (Sacred Canon, Holy Book). Some of the works are more philosophical, a majority devotional, often in great degrees of intensity. Some take up the motif of the lover and beloved, he and she intensely longing for one another, as do God and the human self.

In all these songs, God is Nārāyaṇa (Visnu), one of the great gods dominant in Hindu traditions for the last several thousand years, along with Śiva, and several great goddesses, such as Mahādevī and Kālī. Nārāyaṇa’s consort is Śrī Laksmī, most often in Tamil named simply Tiru, the beneficent one, source of prosperity and well-being. In some verses, Nārāyaṇa may be praised too as Rāma or Kṛṣṇa, or the doer of divine feats such as saving the world from a cosmic deluge or, initially in the form of a dwarf, striding across earth, air, and the heavens in three great strides. The gods worship at his feet, pour water into his hands or onto his feet in due worship, and so the world is born, blessed, and saved.

At this writing, I am completing for publication five works of the earliest ālvārs: 100 Linked Verses (Mutal Tiruvantāti) by Poykai Ālvār; 100 Linked Verses (Irantām Tiruvantāti) by Pūt Ālvār; 100 Verses (Munrām Tiruvantāti) by Pēy Ālvār; 96 Linked Verses beginning with “Four-faced God” (Nānmukan Tiruvantāti) by Tirumalicai Pirān; and 87 Great Linked Verses (Periya Tiruvantāti) by Nammālvār (Śatakōpan). Themes are common to all five works, and the form of early medieval Tamil is largely constant.

All these songs are in antāti style: anta (end)-ādi (beginning), such that the last word or sound of one verse is taken over as the first word or sound of the next. Meaning is established not primarily by the advancing of an argument over many verses, but by the repetition of small insights again and again. By antāti, the verses are bound in the order we find them. They are not meant to be sampled by looking here or there, though, of course the reader can do as they are so moved. These lyric verses, linked end to beginning, need to be heard—read, memorized, recited—in just this order. One has to read through them, and when done, start over again, going round and round until one is immersed in the poetry, remembering the words and images, stories and desires of each ālvār, making their verses one’s own.

Here, I offer 15 verses from my forthcoming translation by the third poet-saint, Pēy Ālvār, by his title a “demon” (pēy), who is enthralled by God. Uttamur Viraraghavachariar, the most brilliant among the twentieth- century traditional commentators on these songs, introduces the verses I have chosen by saying that the first ālvār, Poykai, pondered love; the second, Pūt, in contemplation achieved an in-between state that was just like seeing God. But Pēy sings his direct, complete experience of God, actual vision, sung over and again in 100 verses. Here I offer the reader the first 15 verses as a taste of his poetry, insight, vision, and love. They are meant to be read, re-read—aloud—and savored, that they might come alive even in our time and place.