A Hundred Measures of Time Read online

  Nammālvār

  A HUNDRED MEASURES OF TIME

  Tiruviruttam

  Translated from the Tamil by Archana Venkatesan

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  A Note on Transliteration

  Praveśam: Entering the World of the Tiruviruttam

  Part I: A Hundred Measures of Time

  Part II: The Measure of Time

  Part III: Periyavāccān Piḷḷai’s Commentary on the Tiruviruttam

  Appendix 1: Index of Characters

  Appendix 2: Index of Motifs and Typology of Verses

  Appendix 3: Indices of Myths, Places and Names

  Footnotes

  Praveśam: Entering the World of the Tiruviruttam

  Appendix 2

  Annotations to Nammālvār’s Tiruviruttam

  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Read more

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  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  A HUNDRED MEASURES OF TIME

  ARCHANA VENKATESAN is associate professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. She has received numerous grants, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies and Fulbright. Her research interests are in the intersection of text and performance in south India, as well as in the translation of early and medieval Tamil poetry into English. She is the author of The Secret Garland: Āṇṭāḷ’s Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoli (2010), and is collaborating with Francis Clooney of Harvard University on an English translation of Nammālvār’s Tiruvāymoli.

  for my teachers

  A Note on Transliteration

  I have transliterated Tamil words according to the conventions of the Tamil Lexicon. Sanskrit-derived Tamil words are generally in their most easily recognizable form—so, Mādhavan instead of Mātavan. Place names that occur in the poems or in the commentary have been transliterated. In all other instances, place names adhere to their most common spelling. Names of contemporary authors and informants are rendered as they choose to spell them in English. I have transliterated the names of all historical personalities.

  Tamil has twelve vowels, which are classified into five short vowels (a, i, u, e, o), five long vowels (ā, ī, ū, ē, ō), and two diphthongs (ai and au). There are eighteen consonants.

  Below is a pronunciation guide.

  Vowels

  a

  pronounced like the u in cut

  ā

  pronounced like the a in father

  i

  pronounced like the i in it

  ī

  pronounced like the ee in feet

  u

  pronounced like the u in put

  ū

  pronounced like the oo in root

  e

  pronounced like the e in set

  ē

  pronounced like the a in rate

  o

  pronounced like the uo in quote

  ō

  pronounced like the o in go

  ai

  pronounced like the ie in pie

  au

  pronounced like the ow in cow

  Consonants

  k (guttural)

  pronounced like the k in kite. Tamil e.g. kal (stone)

  c (palatal)

  pronounced like the ch in chalk. It can also be pronounced as a sibilant, like the s in sieve. Tamil e.g. col (word)

  ṭ (retroflex)

  pronounced like the t in toe. Tamil e.g. vaṇṭu (insect)

  t (dental)

  pronounced like the t in thing. Tamil e.g. vantu (having come)

  p

  pronounced like the p in prop. Tamil e.g. pāl (milk)

  ṅ (nasal paired with k)

  pronounced like the nk in link. Tamil e.g. maṅkai (girl)

  ñ (nasal paired with c)

  pronounced like the gn in gnosis. Tamil e.g. neñcu (heart)

  ṇ (nasal paired with ṭ)

  pronounced like the n in friend. Tamil e.g. vaṇṭu (insect)

  n (nasal paired with t)

  pronounced like the n in now. Tamil e.g. vantu (having come)

  n (alveolar nasal, occurs at the end of Tamil words)

  Also pronounced like the n in now, but with tongue pressed closer to the tongue. Tamil e.g. avan (he)

  m (nasal paired with p)

  pronounced like the m in marriage. Tamil e.g. mayil (peacock)

  y

  pronounced like the y in your. Tamil e.g. yār (who)

  r

  pronounced like the r in your. Tamil e.g. yār (who)

  r

  pronounced like the dr in drill. Tamil e.g. anru (then)

  l

  pronounced like the l in light. Tamil e.g. il>ai (leaf)

  ḷ (retroflex)

  pronounced like the l in blah, but with more emphasis. It is pronounced with the tongue curled back, akin to a kind of gargling sound. Tamil e.g. avaḷ (she)

  v

  pronounced like the v in victory. Tamil e.g. vil (bow)

  l

  No English equivalent. Pronounced as a gentle rolled sound similar to the North American use of the r sound as American. Tamil e.g. elil (beauty)

  PRAVEŚAM

  Entering the World of the Tiruviruttam

  The Tiruviruttam is a compact, hundred-verse poem composed by the remarkable Tamil Vaiṣṇava mystic and poet, Śaṭhakōpan-Nammālvār (c. eighth–ninth century CE).1 Rendered in a series of interlinked verses, the poem maps and traverses a complex emotional terrain. It is framed as a love story that unfolds between an anonymous heroine (talaivi) and her beloved hero (talaivan), while friends, fortune tellers, bees, birds and the poet’s own heart play important supporting roles, acting as messengers, lamenters and audiences in a story everyone knows well. These stock characters are what A.K. Ramanujan referred to in his translation of Nammālvār as ‘returning voices’, pointing out the contiguity of antecedent Tamil Caṅkam poetics and Tamil bhakti poetry.2 Traditional Śrīvaiṣṇava exegesis too recognizes this debt, identifying the Tiruviruttam’s frame as the anyāpadeśārtha or ‘other’ meaning. From this vantage, the anyāpadeśa is the poem’s outer shell, serviceable and necessary, protecting the ripe, mature fruit of esoteric import (svāpadeśārtha) which it encases. Thus the poem can be read either as a beautiful and moving love story, which according to generations of Śrīvaiṣṇava scholars is to miss the point entirely, or as speaking certain fundamental and essential truths about the most pressing existential questions: the nature of life, of birth, of god, of one’s own self. The poet himself oscillates between these two poles: the heroine’s plaintive voice expressing the corporeal and emotive textures of her love for Viṣṇu, while a direct contemplative address reflects on Viṣṇu’s unimaginable, inexpressible grandeur.

  The Tiruviruttam is a quintessential Tamil bhakti poem. The object of love, of desire, of dedication, is god, identified by the poet as Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa. The expression of that love is corporeal, emotional and ecstatic, its expression poetic, abstract and symbolic. Viṣṇu is the divine, omnipresent sovereign and also the intimate, often absent, beloved. The relationship between the poem’s chief participants is one of dependence, like a bard who relies on a generous king’s largesse, and a woman who trusts in the inviolable love of her beloved. The divine king is the poet’s sole refuge and the largesse sought is grace. Tiruviruttam 85 is an apt illustration of the ideology of dependence and subservience that gives Tamil bhakti poetry so much of its emotive force:

  Like a monkey tossing
aside a ruby

  evening falls

  casting aside the golden sun

  O precious gem who measured worlds

  my beloved emerald

  golden one who has no equal

  you’re the sole refuge of your servant’s life.

  Here Viṣṇu is the world-strider, an illustration of his awesome and indisputable supremacy, and the poet assumes a suitably abject position when approaching this supreme deity as the exclusive source and site of refuge. Yet it is the unique intimacy that they share which emboldens Nammālvār to dare such a bold petition. Viṣṇu is his, possessed by him and possessing him. He is his gem, his glittering ruby and, in other verses, his honey, his sweetness, his beloved.

  Even as the Tiruviruttam is representative of the genre of Tamil bhakti poetry, it can be seen as both heir and progenitor in a long and illustrious lineage of Tamil poetry. The poem’s frame, its succinct phrasing, its evocative and striking imagery and the seamless integration of the aesthetic principles of the public (puram) and private (akam) Caṅkam genres reveal its debt to what we know today as the Tamil classical literary traditions. The manipulation of these very principles to craft a narrative of love and loss, of separation and union, places the Tiruviruttam at the forefront of literary innovations that give us later medieval Tamil genres such as the kōvai, the ulā and, as David Shulman suggests, the kalampakam. I discuss these streams of influence in depth in Part II (The Measure of Time) of this book, and therefore refrain from repeating them here. Below, I offer a brief overview of ālvār poetry and Nammālvār’s place within it.

  The Poetry of the Ālvārs

  A.K. Ramanujan titled his landmark translation of selected Nammālvār verses Hymns for the Drowning. It is an allusion to the title ‘ālvār’, ‘those who are immersed’, granted to the twelve pioneering saints of the Śrīvaiṣṇava saṁpradāyas (lineages). The epithet expresses the fluid, emotional and immersive experience that characterizes the poetry of the Tamil Vaiṣṇava tradition. Yet, like Ramanujan’s title, it also plays on the metaphor of the world as an ocean of sorrow in which Viṣṇu and his heavenly Vaikuṇṭha are the sole life-rafts. Āṇṭāḷ, a later contemporary of Nammālvār, says this in Nācciyār Tirumoli 5.4:

  My bones melt and my eyes

  long as spears

  resist even blinking.

  for days now, I am plunged into a sea of distress

  and I ache to attain

  that great boat, Vaikuṇṭha,

  but I cannot see it.

  O kuyil, you too know

  the anguish of separation

  from a beloved.

  Summon the immaculate lord

  whose body is like gold

  whose banner bears Garuḍa

  to me3

  Āṇṭāḷ’s verse evocatively captures the existential crisis at the centre of ālvār poetry. As ecstatics, their experience of Viṣṇu is totalizing and complete, but as human beings the caprices of human birth are inescapable. This crisis expresses itself in their poetry as a dialectic of union and separation; the poet invariably speaks from a position of loss and absence, yet remains with eyes unblinking (see, for instance, Tiruviruttam 97 and 98) ever alert for a vision of the divine beloved.

  The Paripāṭal, an abstract and fragmentary Tamil anthology from the late fourth century CE (?), may be regarded as containing the earliest record of praise and devotion to Māl (Viṣṇu), leading Kamil Zvelebil to claim that it is ‘probably the earliest literary testimony of the bhakti movement in South India, if not in India as a whole’.4 The Paripāṭal, composed in the metre of the same name, originally consisted of seventy poems, but only twenty-two are extant, many of which are fragments. Of these twenty-two, six are dedicated to Tirumāl (the Tamil name for Viṣṇu), eight to Cevvēl (Murukan) and eight to the river Vaikai. Demonstrating the influence of Caṅkam literary conventions and practices, the radically new poems of the Paripāṭal anthology appropriate the themes of love (the private, that is, akam) and heroism (the public, that is, puram) to express the new sensibility of devotion. While love (akam) dominates the mood of the Vaikai poems, the elements of war and heroism (puram) colour those dedicated to the great warrior deities, Cevvēl and Māl. In the Paripāṭal poems, the panegyric, a staple of puram poetry, becomes the favoured mode to produce poetry that is ‘simultaneously devotional and heroic’.5 These early expressions (and literary experiments) of devotionalism often express themselves in oblique, speculative language, a register that is at first glance rather different from the passionate compositions of the later Tamil bhakti poets. But just as the Paripāṭal bears the marks of its literary past, the mutal ālvār—Poykai, Pēy, Pūtam—who probably lived in the late seventh century, demonstrate an unmistakable continuity with the speculative tone and luminous mode of the Paripāṭal. There is high philosophy and even higher praise, all ensconced in deeply felt sentiment, an intricate embroidery of words that creates the very body of god to generate texts for visualization and poems of vision.

  The early ālvārs—Poykai, Pēy, Pūtam and Tirumalicai—usher in a sustained period of poetic innovation and philosophical syncretism over approximately two centuries. Although the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition chooses to remember and revere twelve poets as their pioneering founders, there certainly must have been other contemporary poets and philosophers of a similar persuasion. Indeed, the famous narrative of recovery of the four thousand songs of the ālvārs reflects a reality in which texts, both oral and written, were often lost to the indiscriminate pressures of memory and nature.6 Further, the twelve poets with their distinctive voices and equally distinctive backgrounds signal an emergent sect’s desire to encompass the whole of society. Thus, we can count among the ālvārs robbers, kings, peasants, a woman, a lowly musician and many Brahmins. They embrace a range of poetic possibilities: the passionate love-longing of the woman Āṇṭāḷ, the crooning lullabies of Periyālvār and Kulaśekaran, the abstract philosophical articulations of Nammālvār, his disciple Maturakavi’s moving tribute to his teacher, the ‘untouchable’ musician Tiruppaṇālvār’s exultant, dense descriptions of god’s body, Tirumaṅkai’s virtuosic command of a variety of genres. The twelve ālvārs together represent the coalescence of many voices around the central themes of loving service, ecstatic love, a tightly bound devotional community—all in the celebration of Viṣṇu’s presence in this world, his immanence and his transcendence—and of the mutual dependence between god and devotee.7

  Vaiṣṇava Tamil bhakti poetry is forged in the confluence of multiple streams. Caṅkam poetry provides the aesthetic vocabulary and emotional depth, the Sanskrit epics, Purāṇas and local mythology add texture and grandeur, and the edifice of the Pāñcarātra tradition imbue the poems with esotericism. A.K. Ramanujan and Norman Cutler were right to assert in their seminal essay on the transformation of classical Tamil poetics into the new literary genre of bhakti poetry, that the poets ‘used whatever they had at hand, and changed whatever they used’.8

  Although bhakti poetry has often been characterized as revolutionary in spirit, its egalitarian ethos did not translate into a rejection of Sanskrit scriptural sources. Indeed, the poets’ use of these sources (scriptural or mythological) reveals a complex engagement with the Sanskrit traditions, one that belies simple formulae of rejection or appropriation. Ālvār poetry often evokes the authority of the Vedas, lauding those who master the Vedas, while also arguing the converse, that knowledge of the Vedas is no guarantee for a vision of god. Nammālvār’s poetry offers a typically nuanced articulation of these very ideas (Tiruviruttam 44):

  She Said:

  The texts of philosophy may speak

  of his colour his ornaments his beauty

  his names his forms …

  although they hold aloft

  the bright light of lofty knowledge everywhere

  they still cannot see

  the greatness of my lord.

  Viṣṇu is praised as the [source of] Vedas
(Tiruviruttam 79) and the presence of epithets like Taittiriyan (he who is the Taittirīya Upaniṣad) and Vētan (he who is the Veda) serve to capture the indivisible relationship between Viṣṇu and the Vedas, the foundational texts of Brahminical ritual praxis.9 Though the impulse of bhakti was radical in a number of ways—advocating community, enfolding women and lower castes as part of the group, asserting the efficacy of devotion as an equalizer before god—it also stressed the value of Sanskritic, Brahminical temple-based ritual and liturgical traditions. Thus, while women and lower-caste groups are counted among the twelve ālvār—Nammālvār himself belonged to a landowning lower-caste group (Vēḷḷāla), it was not simply a movement ‘by the lowly, for the lowly’,10 and the choice to compose in Tamil rather than Sanskrit was not a revolutionary act of rebellion but, as the poems of the Paripāṭal demonstrate, one that emerged organically from the rich Tamil literary past.

  It should come as no surprise then that the ālvārs fiercely assert the value of the Tamil tradition, claiming for their works an elevated literary status. The poems’ phala śrutis (closing verses) guarantee the reciter a good life in Vaikuṇṭha or excellent progeny not only because they praise Viṣṇu, but because they do so in the highest, sweetest Tamil. While Nammālvār doesn’t make the claim in the Tiruviruttam, it is oft-repeated in the concluding verses of the Tiruvāymoli. For example:

  Those mastering this ten from the melodious Tamil thousand

  about the dark-bodied lord with large red eyes

  by the one who lives in rich Valuti with its groves filled