Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints
416
Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints
416Paperback(New Edition)
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Overview
Indira Peterson highlights the Tevaram as a seminal text in Tamil cultural history, a synthesis of pan-Indian and Tamil civilization, as well as a distinctly Tamil expression of the love of song, sacred landscape, and ceremonial religion. Her discussion of this work draws on her pioneering research into the performance of the hymns and their relation to the art and ritual of the South Indian temple.
Originally published in 1989.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691609263 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Library of Asian Translations , #973 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Poems to Siva
The Hymns of the Tamil Saints
By Indira Viswanathan Peterson
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06767-4
CHAPTER 1
The Study of the Tevaram
The poems translated in this book are Tamil hymns of devotion to the Hindu god Siva. The poets, Tirunanacampantar (popularly known as Campantar or Nanacampantar), Tirunavukkaracar (Appar), and Cuntaramurtti (Cuntarar), lived between the sixth and eighth centuries A.D. in the Tamil linguistic-cultural region of India. They are celebrated as the principal saint-leaders or Nayanar ("leader, master") of the Tamil Saiva sect (see illus. 1). The collection of the three saints' hymns, entitled the Tevaram, serves as the primary scripture for Tamil Saivas.
To study the Tevaram is to study more than a text. In understanding the meanings and contexts of the saints' hymns we move closer to an understanding of the religion, world view, and values of the people of Tamilnadu, where nearly every village has a temple to Siva and every temple is linked to the lives and songs of the saints. The Tevaram also guides us into the world of classical Tamil civilization, for it is heir to the rich and sophisticated tradition of classical Tamil poetry, while the melodic setting of the hymns gives us clues to the ancient musical system of the Tamils.
The Tamil regional cults of the worship of Siva and Visnu, which arose and flourished between the fifth and ninth centuries A.D. and later grew into the Tamil Saiva and Vaisnava sects, were among the first cults devoted to bhakti, a popular religion of emotional devotion to a personal God, which eventually permeated the Hindu tradition in all its aspects. The hymns of the Nayanars and the Alvars, the early Tamil Saiva and Vaisnava saints, may be credited with many "firsts": they are the first literary expression of emotional bhakti; the first sizable corpus of full-fledged "religious" poems in Tamil; and the first Hindu sectarian scripture in a vernacular language. The Tevaram claims distinction in other ways as well, particularly in the ease with which it straddles diverse categories in Indian religion, literature, and culture: "Sanskritic" and vernacular domains; classical and popular literature; universal and local themes in bhakti and the Hindu religious tradition; scripture and popular song; written and oral texts; the celebration of tradition and the poetry of an innovative movement; and personal and communal religion. In Part One I have sought to present the text in its multidimensional richness, to locate it in as many of its contexts as possible. I have tried not only to inform the reader in regard to the religious settings and significance of the saints' hymns but also to give a sense of the ways in which Tamil Saivas experience these religious poems. In the process, I have explored the broader issue of the role of sacred texts, and of poetry in particular, in Tamil bhakti.
Among the regional languages of India, Tamil alone had an early classical civilization, religion, and literature of its own, quite distinct from the Indo-Aryan heritage of Sanskrit and brahmanism. Although the indigenous Dravidian civilization of the Tamils was progressively "Sanskritized" by early contact with the brahmanical civilization of the North, it retained its distinctive character even as late as the period of the Tamil Saiva saints. As the first literary expressions of a popular and regional religious culture in Hinduism, the Tevaram hymns reflected many features of Tamil culture, and differed in many respects from the authoritative sacred texts of the Great Tradition, composed in Sanskrit, the classical language of the brahmanical civilization. At the same time, they provided a powerful new synthesis of the values of brahmanical Hinduism and those of the indigenous Tamil civilization, affirming, celebrating, and transforming both traditions.
The Tevaram is not only the document and expression of an important moment, a turning point in the history of Hinduism and of Tamil regional culture, but a broader cultural phenomenon, one that has been "a great living, moving force" in the lives of the Tamils. Like other formative or fundamental religious texts, the Tevaram has transcended and transformed its literary, religious, and cultural contexts, itself becoming an important, continuing context for Tamil Saiva religiosity. In its capacity as the scripture of the Tamil Saiva sect, this text has had a life of its own and has functioned as a symbol and motivator of sectarian and communal identity. Indeed, crossing the boundary of the strictly "religious," it has played an important part in shaping the ethnic-national consciousness of the Tamils as a whole. The study of the Tevaram calls for a synchronic as well as a diachronic approach: the former, in order to study the poems in their "historical moment" and to trace their career through the history of Tamil Saivism; the latter, in order to understand the great symbolic value of the Tevaram for practicing Tamil Saivas today.
The bhakti lyrics of the Nayanars differ in many respects from the poetry of the saints of later bhakti cults in other regions of India. Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar have more in common with their Tamil Vaisnava counterparts and the later Tamil Saiva saint Manikkavacakar, but there are significant differences here as well. The importance of the Tevaram for the study of bhakti can hardly be stressed enough. Yet the slim volume of selected translations offered by Kingsbury and Phillips in 1921 remains the only translation available to the English-speaking world. The size and specialized nature of Dorai Rangaswamy's study of Cuntarar and his poems prevent it from becoming an accessible introduction to the hymns of the three saints. The Tevaram needs to be translated and described in context at least in order to clarify the history of bhakti religion and literature. As the poetry of exemplary "leaders" whose lives and ideas have been, and continue to be, a powerful influence on the Tamils, the hymns of the Nayanars ought to be made accessible to all who are interested in Indian civilization. This introductory essay and the translations that follow in Part Two represent my contributions toward that goal.
CHAPTER 2The Making of the Tevaram: The Text and Its Context
At the time of the rise of Tamil bhakti, the Tamil linguistic-cultural area covered most of peninsular India south of the hill of Venkatam, and roughly corresponded to the region made up of the three Tamil kingdoms of the Cankam classical age, ruled by the Pantiya (Pandya), Cola, and Cera kings. In this region, such basic elements of brahmanical Hinduism as the Vedas and Vedic sacrifice, the Vedic-brahmanical gods, and the veneration of brahmins as specialists in the sacred had already become part of Tamil religion and culture; at the same time, aspects of the earlier indigenous religion played an important part in the shaping of Tamil Saivism and Vaisnavism. Buddhism and Jainism, the great "heterodox" religions of India, had also come early to the South and flourished in the Tamil region.
The age of the three ancient Tamil kingdoms came to an end around the third century A.D. Little is known about the history of the region in the three centuries that followed, except the rise of the Pallavas, a non-Tamil dynasty that ruled from the city of Kanchipuram. The Pallava Mahendravarman I (seventh century) was the first ruler powerful enough to be able to establish a measure of stability in Tamil India. Poet, artist, and builder of the first rock-cut temples in South India, Mahendravarman was a great patron of the arts and local cultural activity. However, like the imperial Guptas of the North, the Pallava ruler identified more with the Great Tradition connoted by Sanskrit, the enduring language and symbol of pan-Indian civilization, than with the "local" classical tradition of the Tamils. Buddhism and Jainism were the dominant religions in Mahendravarman's kingdom. According to tradition, the king himself practiced Jainism until his friend, the saint Appar, persuaded him to convert to Saivism. It was in this atmosphere that the Tamil Saiva and Vaisnava bhakti movements blossomed.
Bhakti was a popular religion of intimate relationship with a gracious God, and the new bhakti devotionalism was characterized by ecstatic modes of expression. Under the leadership of poet-saints who sang songs of passionate and total devotion for their God not in Sanskrit but in Tamil, their mother tongue, people from every segment of Tamil society gathered to form devotional communities that cut across caste, sex, and other hierarchies of orthodox Hinduism. In all these respects the early Tamil bhakti cults were models for the regional bhakti movements that followed them. The Tamil movement is better characterized, however, as a movement toward communal solidarity than as an expression of social protest. Although many later bhakti movements arose primarily as reactions against the Hindu "orthodoxy" and the established forms and practices of brahmanical Hinduism, the early Tamil bhakti cults saw themselves as the champions of the Hindu tradition and, more important, of a Tamil Hindu religion, one that was truly harmonious and continuous with the Tamil religious and cultural past. It is clear from the hymns of the Nayanars and Alvars that the "enemy" was not brahmanical Hinduism, or Sanskritic religious modes, but Buddhism and Jainism, which were seen as alien to Tamil culture, defined by the new cults as an intrinsically Hindu culture.
Campantar devotes a verse in each of his hymns to invective against Buddhist and Jain monks, and Appar rails against the Jains who had led him away from Saivism. The lives and poems of these two saints indicate a shift in the role of Jainism and Buddhism in the Tamil region. The two heterodox religions had been in the mainstream of Tamil culture in the early centuries of the Christian era. Jain and Buddhist authors and thinkers had made great contributions to Tamil literature. Ilankovatikal, the author of the Tamil national epic Cilappatikaram, was a Jain monk. This fifth-century author celebrated the land of the three Tamil kingdoms and portrayed the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist religions as coexisting harmoniously in the Tamil region. Less than two hundred years later, Campantar condemns the Jain and Buddhist monks of his time as corrupt rogues who speak neither good Tamil nor the Sanskrit language but mutilate both, babbling in the Prakrit dialects; and he speaks with deep revulsion of the Jain ascetic practices of nudity, tonsure, and abstaining from bathing and cleaning the teeth. Burton Stein has convincingly argued that such hostility reflects the ethos of a newly formed cultural and ideological alliance between the brahmins and peasants of the Tamil plains region. It is also likely that the bhakti saints were reacting to groups of Jain and Buddhist monks who had recently arrived in the Tamil country from the Kannada and Telugu areas in the northern part of the peninsula, and who were truly strangers to the Tamil language and culture. The hagiographical accounts, and some of the Tevaram hymns themselves, suggest that the bhakti cult leaders had to compete with powerful Jain and Buddhist monks to gain and retain royal support for their religion. Finally, though it can be argued that the ascetic temper of the two heterodox religions was largely confined to the monastic life and that they were closer to the Hindu bhakti cults in lay practice, there is nothing in early Jain and Buddhist devotional religion that comes close to the sensuous, often erotic, aestheticism of early Tamil bhakti, its exaltation of the personal, ecstatic experience of God, and its exuberant expression of love. These bhakti characteristics were uniquely bound, on the one hand, with ritual religion and on the other, with the classical culture and aesthetic of the Tamils. The mythology and cultural contexts of the Hindu gods were more congenial to the spirit of a new personal religion in the framework of Tamil civilization than Buddhism and Jainism could be. The bhakti saints' aversion to the two heterodox religions was based as much on aesthetic as on doctrinal grounds.
The importance given to the temple and ritual worship in the Tevaram hymns highlights the most striking feature of early Tamil bhakti. Many later bhakti sects protested against or detached themselves from image, temple, and ritual worship. By contrast, the Tamil cults were closely associated with the teaching and ethos of the large body of ritualistic literature called the Agamas and Tantras, which developed along with the spread of theism, image worship, and temple worship in Hinduism. From the age of the poet-saints to the present, the temple or shrine has occupied a central position in the literature and practice of Tamil Saivism and Vaisnavism. The Saiva Agamas give detailed expositions of ritual practice in connection with temple worship; they also provide a comprehensive description of devotional acts in a fourfold system that is relevant to our understanding of early Tamil devotional religion as described in the Tevaram and forms the framework of Tamil Saiva philosophy as later formulated by the Saiva Siddhanta. The literature of the Agamas is an important link between the exoteric and esoteric aspects of Tamil bhakti. It is this Agamic flavor that sets the religion of the Nayanars and Vaisnava Alvars apart from the devotionalism of even the more traditionalist of the later bhakti saints in other regions of India.
Tirumurai: The Canonization of theTevaram
In the Tevaram hymns we have the earliest literary evidence of a vigorous popular Tamil bhakti cult centering on Siva. The poet-saints portray Siva as the bhakti God whose grace ends his devotees' karma. We hear of Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar traveling with fellow devotees from all castes and walks of life to worship and sing of Siva at the many shrines that dotted the Tamil countryside, especially along the banks of the river Kaveri. Kings who had been seduced by "the false doctrines of the heretic Jain and Buddhist monks" are rescued and brought back into the fold of "Tamil" religion, thanks to our poets, who defeat their opponents in public debate and establish the superiority of Saivism over all other creeds. We get glimpses of the lives of the three saints as well as of other Saiva devotees, who "dance, weep, worship him, sing his [the Lord's] feet." Above all, we get a vivid impression of a growing Tamil Saiva community whose members are united by their passionate love for Siva and his shrines.
Even within the Tamil Saiva literary tradition, the Tevaram songs are distinguished by their pervasive orientation to shrines and sacred places. The poet-saints dedicated nearly every one of their hymns to a temple of Siva. Together, Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar sang hymns to Siva as the god of shrines situated in 274 sacred places (pati, talam). Of these, 269 are South Indian shrines the saints visited in their pilgrimages; the remaining shrines belong to the Himalayan regions in the North, which are associated with the pan-Indian myths of Siva. The Nayanars concentrated their travels in the Cola country (Colanatu), singing hymns at 190 shrines in this segment of the Tamil region; the rest are distributed among the regional divisions of Pantinatu (14 shrines), Tontainatu (32), Natunatu (22), Konkunatu (7), and the Cera area, later known as Malainatu (1). Two hymns are devoted to shrines in the northern part of the island of Sri Lanka (Ilam), and one to Tirukkokarnam in the Tulu country. By unifying the many sacred places of Siva through a network of pilgrimages and hymns, the three saints created a Saiva "sacred geography" for the Tamil land.
The history of Tamil Saivism in the three hundred years following the activity of the poet-saints is literally carved in stone and inscribed on copperplates and palm leaves. This was the great age of Tamil Saivism as the "official" religion of the Tamils, and of the completion and compilation of the canonical texts of Tamil Saivism. The Pallava successors of Mahendravarman I and the Tamil Colas who consolidated their power in the Tamil region in the tenth century were great patrons of the Tamil bhakti groups. The Colas, in particular, favored Saivism and gave royal support to the institutions and practice of Tamil Saivism. In their time, the agricultural region watered by the river Kaveri, the birthplace of Tamil Saiva bhakti and the area once ruled by the Cola kings in the Cankam age, again became the political heartland of the Tamil land, and the great Saiva temple and cult centers of Tiruvarur and Tillai (Chidambaram) in the Kaveri Delta replaced Pallava Kanchipuram as centers of political as well as sacred power. The political map of the Tamil region was now identical with the sacred-cultural map outlined by the early saints through their pilgrimages.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poems to Siva by Indira Viswanathan Peterson. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAP, pg. ix
- PREFACE, pg. xi
- A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, pg. xiv
- GUIDE TO TAMIL PRONUNCIATION, pg. xv
- PART ONE. Introduction: Poetry and Religion in the Songs of the Tamil Śaiva Saints, pg. 1
- PART TWO. An Anthology of Hymns from the Tēvāram, pg. 93
- APPENDIXES, pg. 337
- GLOSSARY, pg. 349
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 357
- INDEX OF POEMS, pg. 367
- GENERAL INDEX, pg. 371