P.S. Sundaram
Andal, the daughter of Periyalvar, is the only woman among the dozen Alvars, Vaishnavite saints of South India whose
date is probably between the 8th and the 10th Century A.D. Friedhelm Hardy, whose book Viraha-Bhakti is a model
of research, places tentatively Andal and her father Periyalvar in the 9th Century.
Legend has it that Andal was found as a baby by Periyalvar under a shrub of basil, the plant sacred to Vishnu. The
Brahmin priest nursed the child as his own daughter. Unknown to her father, she was in the habit of decking herself
with the garlands he had prepared for Vishnu's idol in the temple. When he caught her at this one day and, shocked by
the desecration, took a fresh garland for the God, the latter would not have it as he missed the scent of Andal's body in
it.
[Shrine at Srivilliputtur, above the tulasi plant where Andal was found.]
The girl was so devoted to Vishnu that when the grew up she would marry none but Ranganatha, Vishnu lying on the
serpent in the Srirangam temple. The God appeared in a dream to the temple priests and ordered that Andal should be
sent for from Srivilliputtur in what is now Ramnad District to marry him in the Trichinopoly District. When Andal
stepped out of the palanquin and went into the temple sanctum, she disappeared in a blaze of glory, having joined her
Lord. She is supposed to have been only fifteen at the time.
While the Nalayira Divya Prabandham is the sacred book of the Vaishnavites, Andal's Tiruppavai is a favorite with all
those who know Tamil and look on Margazhi, the month corresponding to December-January, as a particularly
sacred month, to be observed with rising early in the morning and going round singing hymns eulogising both Siva and
Vishnu. In the Nacchiyar Tirumoli Andal rises to the very heights of sacred eroticism, which will recall to a Western
reader the Song of Solomon and the works of Juan of the Cross and Saint Teresa.
Andal's works are remarkable for the life they portray in the Tamil country all those hundreds of years ago. Children in
all ages and all over the world put up castles of sand, but in Andal's time apparently such dolls' houses were put up
invoking Manmatha, the God of Love. The marriage customs observed in Andal's time --- the bridegroom coming in
procession on the night before the wedding, the bride's foot being placed by the groom on the grinding stone, their
going round the sacred fire, and the procession through the streets of the town by the bride and the groom on the night
of the wedding --- are all observed in South India to this day. Andal's song of the dream-wedding is sung even today
in all Vaishnavite weddings. Presumably in Andal's time marriages were contracted not between infants or boys and
girls less than ten years old, but young men and women who could immediately after the marriage live as husband and
wife --- as the ceremonial bath at the end of the day mentioned by Andal is an item not out of the marriage proper of
these days but what in the South is known as the ``nuptial'' marriage --- the celebration of the bride going into the
groom's house to live with him as his wife which, in the days when I was a boy, could come a good ten years after the
first boy-and-girl marriage!
The Tiruppavai, put into the mouths of milkmaids, is meant to rouse lazy lie-abeds to come out and bathe in the cold
morning, so that thus purified they could go into the temple and rouse Krishna sleeping there. The thirty stanzas of it are
both lyrical and dramatic, chiding one particular lie-abed, Krishna's favorite, for not getting up, setting forth the
exploits of the infant Krishna, and how, in the latter half of the poem, appealing to Krishna to wake up and accept the
love of the gopis, the cowherd lasses who will love only him. Apart from the ecstatic poetry of its devotion, the stanzas
give a picture of a rural community of simple cowherds, their hamlet brimming with love and beauty because Krishna
chose to live in it, protected by and protecting his foster parents Nandagopan and Yasoda, loving and loved by their
niece Nappinnai corresponding to Radha in the Gita Govindam. The stress in these stanzas however is more on
devotion than on sexual love, jealousy and lovers' quarrels. The occasion after all is the religious observation of a
sacred month, but observed with singing and jollity, not in sackcloth and ashes.
The Bhagavata Puranam, Book X Chapter 22, describes a ceremonial observance similar to the one described in the
Tiruppavai, but though it is observed by the milkmaids seeking Krishna for their husband, the deity they honour for this
purpose is Katyayani, a form of Parvati. It is now accepted by scholars that the Bhagavata Puranam is much later than
Andal. Andal's only God is Krishna, the greatest of the incarnations of Vishnu. Vishnu himself is frequently mentioned
in the poem, and among his incarnations reference is made most frequently to Vamana-Trivikrama, Rama, Balarama,
and once almost certainly to Narasimha.
The refrain of the Tiruppavai has presented considerable difficulties to translators. If pavai refers to a doll, a figure
made of sand which according to the Bhagavata Puranam was that of Katyayani worshipped by the yong girls seeking
husbands, the refrain could be translated, ``Accept it, Our Lady'', the lady being the goddess. But the poem also prays
for greater fertility in the land caused by timely rain connected with the cloud-hued Krishna. The refrain is used as a
link with the observance of the pavai nonbu to this day in Kerala, a nonbu being a religious penance exactly like the one
celebrated in the Tiruppavai. But from the point of view of appreciating Andal's devotion to Krishna, it may be ignored
and is best left untranslated.
The fourteen poems making up the Nacchiyar Tirumoli cover a wide range from little girls building sand castles to a
woman frustrated in love and calling her lover bitterly to account for having led her on and betrayed her:
If I should meet that Govardhan
Who cares not if she lives or is dead
Who inly melts and is worn out
All for that mischievous bandit's love
I shall pluck my useless breasts
From their roots and fling them
On his chest, and so put out
The raging fire of my love.
But always mingled with this woman's love is Andal's realization that she is after all dealing with God himself, the
consistent-inconsistent, merciful but inscrutable, amenable if at all to prayers, never demands. And so in the last poem,
all passion spent, Krishna the mischievous rogue is thought of as the one with discus and conch, guarded from the sun's
beams by his Garuda, giving his love to all creation, animals as well as boys, men and women, and not just to one girl.
Andal and Sri Rangamannar after kalyanotsavam in Srivilliputtur.
The questions and answers of ``The Woods of Brindavan'' have a startling similarity to those in ``The Ballad of
Walsingham'', where also one in love with the divine searches in vain for the beloved:
As ye came from the Holy Land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came? ...
I have loved her all my youth,
But now am old, as you see:
Love lives not the falling fruit,
Nor the withered tree...
Of womenkind such indeed is the love,
Or the word abused,
Under which many child desires
And conceits are excused.
But true love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning,
Never sick, never dead, never cold,
From itself never turning.
In all her frenzied love of God the devotee does not lose sight of the external world around her --- the clouds, the
birds, the groves full of trees, flowers in their season. Only, all of them are related, or must be made to relate, to her and
her passion. They must carry her message to the Lord, or their indifference makes her mad, or they seem to mock at
her with their own nearer nearness to him, like the conch in his hand or the yellow garment he wears. The fourteen
poems of the Nacchiyar Tirumoli deal with different themes, are in different meters, recall varying poetical conventions
like the game of kudal or the kaikkilai, unrequited love of the Muttollayiram. But a bewitching love binds them together,
giving them a unified and indeed unique sensibility.
>From The Poems of Andal, by P.S. Sundaram. Published by the Ananthacharya Indological Research Institute,
Bombay: 1987.
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