Andal

The Tiruppavai is thirty verses long and it is heard every year in Tamil Vaishnava households and temples through the month of Margazhi, roughly mid December to mid January, one verse a day before dawn. The frame is a girls' vow: a young woman goes round waking her sleeping friends, one by one, so that they can bathe in the river in the cold early morning and keep the observance together, and the last houses she comes to are the god's.

The poem's power is in the ordinariness of its detail. There are buffaloes, drums, wet courtyards, lamps, a girl who will not get out of bed. The theology is never stated and is everywhere: the vow is for rain and prosperity in the conventional form, and it is plainly for God, and the poet never separates the two. Because it is short, metrical and unforced, it has stayed in oral circulation for eleven centuries without needing a commentary to survive.

Andal's second and longer work, the Nachiyar Tirumoli, is a different matter. It is direct, sensuous and painful, full of the longing of a woman for an absent lover who is also Vishnu, and it includes a sequence in which she sends the clouds and the birds as messengers to him. Sri Vaishnava commentators have read it allegorically for a thousand years. Modern readers have sometimes read it otherwise, and the argument about how to read it has occasionally become a public quarrel in Tamil Nadu.

The traditional life is brief and famous. Periyalvar, a garland maker who strung flowers daily for the god at Srivilliputhur, found an infant girl beneath a tulsi plant in his garden and raised her. She took to wearing the garlands herself before he offered them, admiring herself in a mirror, and when he discovered it he was appalled and threw the day's garland away. The god then refused any garland but hers. She grew up declaring she would marry no mortal, chose Ranganatha of Srirangam, was carried there in procession, walked into the sanctuary, and was not seen again.

The temple institution built on that story is substantial. Srivilliputhur is her town and its temple tower appears on the emblem of Tamil Nadu; Srirangam observes her marriage annually; and she is one of very few figures in the tradition to receive worship as a consort of the deity rather than only as a devotee of one. The garland offered to Vishnu at some temples is still called by her name.

What is historically recoverable is smaller and firm enough: a Tamil poet of the ninth century, composing in a devotional idiom that had women's voices in it already, whose work entered the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the four thousand verse canon that Sri Vaishnavism treats as Tamil Veda. That canonisation is the reason her poems were transmitted intact while most vernacular writing of the period was lost.