The Divya Prabandham, more fully the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, meaning the four thousand divine verses, is the foundational collection of Tamil Vaishnava devotional poetry, composed by twelve poet saints known as the Alvars across roughly the sixth to ninth centuries. The Alvars, whose name is traditionally read as meaning those immersed in devotion, came from varied social backgrounds, and the collection includes among its most celebrated contributors Andal, its only female poet, whose hymns express devotion to Vishnu in the voice of a bride longing for her divine bridegroom.
Like the Tamil Shaiva poets of the same devotional era, the Alvars composed in Tamil rather than Sanskrit and addressed Vishnu and his forms, including Krishna, through intensely personal emotional registers, and their hymns similarly name specific temple sites associated with Vishnu across South India, giving the collection a comparable role as both devotional literature and sacred geography.
Andal's contribution in particular has drawn sustained scholarly and devotional attention, since her hymns cast devotion to Vishnu in bridal imagery voiced by a woman, a distinctive register within the wider Alvar corpus, and she is venerated in Sri Vaishnava practice today as herself an incarnation associated with the earth goddess Bhudevi.