Extraordinary Child: Poems from a South Indian Devotional Genre

Chapter Three The Florescence

53 c h a p t e r t h r e e T H E F L O R E S C E N C E The pillaittamil genre began to flourish with the composition of Pakalikkûttar’s Tiruccentûr Pi∏∏aittamil (henceforth TCPT). While several extant earlier texts contain some or almost all of the features characteristic of the pillaittamil genre, TCPT is the first fully articulated devotional pillaittamil and stands at the beginning of a long line of successors.1 Later poets and connoisseurs praised TCPT and measured their own work against it. Pakalikkûttar set out certain poetic strategies for particular paruvams. Later poets built upon, elaborated, ignored, embellished, subtly transformed, and pushed these strategies to their limits. Essentially, Pakalikkûttar’s text established the pillaittamil as a productive genre. It is appropriate, then, that the translations from TCPT (which appear after this introduction to the poem) provide the reader with sample verses from all ten paruvams. In addition, for selected paruvams, several verses are provided . Thus, the reader can appreciate the scope of the paruvams in one of the earliest and still influential pillaittamils. Author and Text Pakalikkûttar grew up in a village in the Ramnad area. Most scholars date his birth sometime after the mid-fourteenth century and his death sometime in the first quarter of the fifteenth century.2 Pakali means arrow, so some legends take this as evidence that the author came from a community of arrow-making blacksmiths, while others explain the name differently.3 According to tradition, Pakalikkûttar, originally a Vai∂»ava devo- pillaittamils for reading 54 tee, suffered terrible stomach pains for a long time. One day an ancestor who had been a devotee of Murukan (son of Ùiva) appeared to him in a dream and asked him to sing a pillaittamil. The poet then saw that sacred ash and a leaf had been bestowed upon him. He awoke to find a palm leaf beside him upon which to compose poetry. After prayer to Lord Murukan cured his illness, he composed his pillaittamil to the deity as manifested at the Tiruccentur shrine.4 A center of pilgrimage in the Tirunelveli District, Tiruccentur lies by the seashore near the Mannar Straits, between India and Sri Lanka. Evidence suggests that the shrine to Murukan there is quite old (some claim as early as second century), and ninth-century inscriptions attest to the site’s importance from that period.5 A place of great natural beauty, Tiruccentur provided Pakalikkûttar with a whole set of seaside imagery (waves, sands, shore, pearls, conches), which he incorporated into his poem as part of his praise for Murukan’s shrine. Research into the dissemination of TCPT demonstrates its enduring popularity. Manuscript versions are many, and its reprint history is impressively continuous from the time that we began to have systematic records about its printing history in Tamilnadu. Publication data indicate that in the first three-quarters of this century, it was a favorite text to publish and distribute freely as an act of religious merit on special occasions in the Ùaivite monasteries of the Thanjavur area. More recently the Saiva Siddhanta Publishing Works Society (henceforth SISS) has reprinted the poem a number of times.6 Legend and customary usage also attest to the esteem in which this pillaittamil was held. According to legend, Lord Murukan found the poem that Pakalikkûttar sang to him so beautiful that the deity gave the poet a golden necklace. There is a widespread Tamil saying that means “The pillaittamil of Pakalikkûttar is great Tamil [poetry].”7 When connoisseurs wanted to praise a later pillaittamil poet, they would often refer to him as similar to Pakalikkûttar (see chapter 6, where a nineteenth-century poet is given that honor), indicating that TCPT constituted a benchmark for later pillaittamil writers. Pakalikk ûttar’s text became, in effect, the pattern for later generations of pillaittamils that flourished over the centuries. Since almost all pillaittamils possess at least one hundred verses, it would be impossible to translate an entire pillaittamil in this volume and still have room to show the myriad ways that various poets from the florescence 55 different ideological communities have composed within the genre. Still, by selective sequential sampling, the reader can experience the process of moving through the paruvams of a pillaittamil. This chapter ’s translations are arranged to make that possible by...