Interpreting Devotion

The Poetry and Legacy of a Female Bhakti Saint of India

Karen Pechilis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138948419
• eBook ISBN: 9781136507045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

Devotion is a category of expression in many of the world's religious traditions. This book looks at issues involved in academically interpreting religious devotion, as well as exploring the interpretations of religious devotion made by a sixth century poet, a twelfth century biographer, and present-day festival publics.

The book focuses on the female poet-saint K?raikk?l Ammaiy?r, whose poetry is devotional in nature. It discusses the biography written on the poet six centuries after her lifetime, and suggests ways of interpreting K?raikk?l Ammaiy?r's poetry without using the categories and events promoted by her biographer, in order to engage her own thoughts as they are communicated through the poetry attributed to her. In the same way that the biographer made the poet 'speak' to his present day, the book looks at how festivals held today make both the poetry and the biography relevant to the present day.

By discussing how poetry, story and festival provide distinctive yet overlapping interpretations of the saint, this book reveals the selections and priorities of interpreters in the making of a living tradition. It is an accessible contribution to students and scholars of religion, Indian history and women's studies.

1 Gestures of interpretation

This is a book about interpreting religious devotion. Devotion is a category of expression in many of the world’s religious traditions. The term generally conveys a person’s profound emotional and mental commitment to a sacred being, which is expressed in conscientious and purposeful activities. In my first book on religious devotion, The Embodiment of Bhakti, I argued that, given bhakti’s emphasis on motivated action, we should understand the term more properly as “participation.”¹ As a relationship between the human and the divine that is imagined by humankind, bhakti (devotion) is a primary site for the intersection of wonder and self-expression, which stimulates an exquisitely participatory impetus, especially in the arts and letters.

There are four gestures of interpretation in this book, each made by a different agent for different purposes. The one that frames this entire project is my own academic interpretation, the purpose of which is to contribute ideas to the academic community about understanding religious devotion. In this first chapter, I take up issues of the academic interpretation of religious devotion, including gender, history, and language. The other chapters of this book explore the interpretations of religious devotion made by a sixth-century poet, a twelfth-century biographer, and present-day festival publics.

All of the interpreters are linked by their focus on a poet known as Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār. She is the centerpiece of this study, without whom it would not have been possible. Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār is an important poet from classical Indian tradition. Her poetry is included in a canon; she has been publicly recognized as a saint since the twelfth century; and she is understood today as having initiated new genres of poetic creativity. On the basis of her poetry in the Tamil language, most scholars date her to ca. 550 CE. Her poetry is devotional (bhakti) in nature, tracing her distinctive human perspective on the divine, Lord Śiva. She is thus considerably earlier than other Hindu Indian female poets who have become known to English speakers through translations, including Mīrābāī (sixteenth century; Rajasthan), Mahādēviyakka (twelfth century; Karnataka), and Āṇṭāl (tenth century; Tamilnadu).² The unifying thread among these diverse female poets is their promotion of a bhakti (“devotion,” “participation”) perspective, which means that their poetry is religious in nature since it has the primary aim of tracing a relationship between the poet and God. Since their poetry posits a relationship, it both glorifies God and reveals the poet’s own concerns that contextualize her praise of and desire for God. As a classical term, bhakti describes the human love for God, and not God’s love for humankind; thus, bhakti poetry, while it reaches for the divine, is thoroughly grounded in human experience. Chronologically, Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār stands at the beginning of Indian traditions of female and male saints who wrote bhakti poetry in regional languages.

Some six centuries after her lifetime, a court minister named Cēkkiḻār wrote an authoritative biography about her that formed a chapter in a sizable volume that included biographies of sixty-two other named persons whose devotion to Lord Śiva was deemed exemplary. This biographical text played a major role in establishing these personages as saints in Tamil Śiva-bhakti tradition. In the text, Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār is one of only three named women, and she alone is a female author; six males are also represented as authors.³ These saints’ compositions were later collected and placed, along with works by twenty other authors, into a canon of texts in glorification of Śiva, known as the Tirumuṟai, with the biographical volume serving as the twelfth and final book of the canon.

The biographical volume, known as the Periya Purāṇam (“Great Traditional Story”), is positioned as the culminating volume of the canon, and its location mirrors its influence in mediating public knowledge of the saints.⁴ The stories are lively, the Tamil in which they are written is graceful, and the volume is a celebrated example of a classical Tamil epic or a “great narrative poem”; for all of these reasons, the text has wide currency in Tamil culture past and present.⁵ In the case of the three major male saint-poets in the tradition, named Campantar, Appar, and Cuntarar, their lengthy biographies contextualize their composition and performance of their hymns in pilgrimages across the lands of the state now known as Tamilnadu. This knowledge complements the experience audiences have when they hear their hymns performed at temples today by special temple singers known as ōṭuvārs.

In contrast, the biographical story of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār is well known to Tamils today, but her poetry is not. The two poems by Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār that were traditionally set to music as hymns are only very rarely performed: These are known as Tiruvālaṅkāṭṭut Tiruppatikam (“Sacred Decade of Verses on [the place named] Tiruvālaṅkāṭu”; there are two decades so entitled). This lack is particularly interesting since it is well known among musicians that Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār specifically mentions musical tunes and instruments in one of the verses, and is thus a valuable source, along with the epic Cilappatikāram (ca. fifth century) for the history of Tamil classical music. Her other two poems, Aṟputat Tiruvantāti (“Sacred Linked Verses on Wonder”) and Tiruviraṭṭai Maṇimālai (“Sacred Garland of Double Gems”) are also not well known, although the latter in particular represents a new direction for poetic meters.⁶ What we can say is that her poetry is known for these traits to specialists in literature and music; the biographical story of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār very much overshadows her own compositions in the public imagination.

A main concern of the first part of this book (Chapters 1 to 3), then, is to suggest ways of interpreting her poetry without using the categories and events promoted by her biographer, in order to engage her own thoughts as they are communicated through the poetry attributed to her and to foreground her status as a major classical poet of Tamil and Indian tradition. This chapter provides historical, textual, and thematic information about her poems in order to prepare the reader for her or his own encounter with selected poems in the second chapter of this book, and with the entirety of the corpus attributed to the saint in the first appendix to this book. Subsequent chapters of this book will interpret her poems in more thematic detail; analyze Cēkkiḻār’s interpretive representation of her in a biography; and consider current interpretations of the saint through biography and ritual at two annual festivals held in her honor in the present day.⁷

This chapter provides context for the interpretations, including translations and discussions, that take place in this book. It is expected that a translator will be knowledgable on the cultural context of that which she or he is interpreting, and that she or he will share relevant aspects of that cultural context with her or his reader. In the case of this book, this cultural context comprises both historical–religious and scholarly methodological milieus. The historical–religious context has to do with the production of the poems attributed to Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār and their interpretation in Indian tradition. In terms of this historical–religious cultural context, two points are especially important. The first is that knowledge of the history of the period in which Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār composed her poetry is most fully accessible to us through literary sources; thus, this chapter presents the literary history of her era, the sixth century, and the time period preceding it, as well as later texts that explicitly reference the poet or her works. Indeed, the poet herself appears interested in literary history rather than political history. The second point is that Śiva-bhakti compositions included in the Śaiva canon (the canon is called the Tirumuṟai) are not accompanied by historical (pre-nineteenth-century) written traditional commentary, as are parallel Viṣṇu-bhakti compositions.⁸ The historical traditional commentaries written on Viṣṇu-bhakti compositions discussed the diction, meaning, and implications of each poetic verse of a text, often allegorizing the poetry.⁹ Part of my argument here is that, while historical written commentaries such as these do not appear to have been performed on Siva-bhakti compositions such as the poetry of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, this does not mean that her poems were not subject to interpretation; rather, the interpretation of her poems took and continues to take place in other important modes, including medieval biography and present-day festival performances. The biography and festivals serve as a sort of commentary on her poems in the special sense that they interpret the devotional subjectivity the poet represents in her work without a focus on explicating specific verses of her poetry. In the present day, commentaries have been written that discuss each verse of her poems in the traditional style, and I have drawn on these in my translations. While there is no critical edition of the poems attributed to Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, there is a consensus on the number and nature of verses attributed to her in both traditional and scholarly communities. Lastly, in terms of the scholarly methodological context, the important point is that I am writing for an audience who wishes to join me in engaging these poems through critical academic scholarship.

Distinctive interpretive stances

The overall focus of this book is to study selected important moments in the making of a religious tradition over time. The moments that I emphasize – poetry, biography, festival – can all be characterized as public and as explicitly religious in motivation, which distinguishes my selections from other possible ones, such as the representation of the story of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār in children’s schoolbooks or in film.¹⁰ Significant also is that the poetry and the biography were canonized in the tradition; it is unusual for both the utterance (in this case, the poetry) and the narrative that was subsequently developed around it (in this case, the biography), to be preserved and accessible as two distinctive entities, much less canonized together as in the case of the Tamil Śiva-bhakti tradition. As Jonathan Z. Smith has shown, interpreters are crucial to the livelihood of tradition, especially if the tradition is canonized, for something that is fixed and unchanging (a canon) needs a mechanism (an interpreter) in order to make it “speak” to the present day.¹¹ Just as the biographer made the poet “speak” to his present day, the festivals held today make both the poetry and the biography “speak” to the present day; thus, Tamil Śiva-bhakti tradition affords us an important opportunity to study the nature and significance of interpretive gestures in religious tradition, as this book contributes to making that tradition “speak” to academic study in the present day.

I foreground interpretation in this study because it is the human work of understanding that provides a red thread through the many different versions of the devotion (bhakti) of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, from her interpretation of herself and her god Śiva in her poetry, to the author of the biography’s interpretation of her life, to the festivals that interpret the significance of her devotion to Śiva, to my own study that interprets her poetry and subsequent discourses about her (textual and performative) in the past and present as significant for the academic study of religion. Whether or not there was an historical person named Puṉitavatiyār (“the pure one”), as her biographer claims was her birth name, who became a poet known by the saint name Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār (“the mother/lady/saint from the town of Kāraikkāl”), is a matter as uncertain as it is for the study of many people who lived in the remote past, since our present-day methods of historicity were certainly not practiced then. It is of special concern in this regard that the poetry attributed to the saint does not mention the biographical details portrayed by her biographer, and thus we do not at present have any corroboration for his representation. With this said, my project studies the representations of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār – poet, saint, patron of place, academic subject – that are prominent in past and present, the existence of which are not a matter of conjecture but are instantiated through poetry, biography, festival, and scholarship.

On one level, there is a commonality between my project and that of the poet, her biographer, and festival publics today: We are all engaged in acts of interpretation, and we create records of our attempts to understand and communicate our understanding, in the various forms of poetry, narrative, performance, and expository writing. Recognizing the similarity of our engagement in understanding and communication – the human work of creating knowledge – is an important demonstration of our common humanity. The act of interpretation – in which the acting subject traces her point of view to others – is common to all.

In practice, to interpret is to self, for selection is primary in interpretation and that act of selection shapes and reveals something about ourselves. An interpretation is composed of “contingent human preferences,” to borrow Bruce Lincoln’s phrase, and it traces “a self-determined history of attention,” to borrow Philip Fisher’s.¹² Hans-Georg Gadamer’s image of “horizons” of meaning, in which the different stances of author and interpret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and acknowledgments
• A note on transliteration
• 1. Gestures of interpretation
• 2. The poet’s voice
• 3. The poet’s vision
• 4. The biographer’s view
• 5. A public’s vantage
• 6. Concluding thoughts
• Appendix 1. The poems of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār in translation
• Appendix 2. Cēkkilār’s biography of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār in translation1
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index