Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies Volume 20 Article 8 January 2007 A Woman's Kind of Love: Female Longing in the Tamil Alvar Poetry Archana Venkatesan Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Venkatesan, Archana (2007) "A Woman's Kind of Love: Female Longing in the Tamil Alvar Poetry," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies: Vol. 20, Article 8. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1383 The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies is a publication of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. The digital version is made available by Digital Commons @ Butler University. For questions about the Journal or the Society, please contact [email protected]. For more information about Digital Commons @ Butler University, please contact [email protected]. Venkatesan: A Woman's Kind of Love: Female Longing in the Tamil Alvar Poetry A Woman's Kind of Love: Female Longing in the Tamil Alvar Poetry Archana Venkatesan St. Lawrence University o clouds, spread like blue cloth across the vast sky-- Has Tirumal my beautiful lord of Venkatam, where cool streams leap-­ come with you? My tears gather and spill between my breasts like waterfalls. He has destroyed my womanhood. How does this bring him pride? Nacciyar Tirumoli 8.11 IN the eighth section of Andal's Nacciyar black mark against the unrepentant divine lover Tirumoli, a woman calls to the clouds and bids is not just her (implied) lost chastity, but the them to take a message of love to her delinquent gradual corrosion of her very self. lover, Vishnu, here figured as the lord of In a similar Tamil Cankam poem (c. 1st CE), Venkatam. In the opening verse of the decad which is/no doubt the inspiration for the above quoted above, she begins by plaintively verse, the talaivi (heroine) has this to sal: questioning the clouds of her . beloved's whereabouts only to eIid with' a bitter complaint When he said about her sullied womanhood-pen-nirmai. "I'll go, I'll go," Bracketed by her eager questions-"has the lord I mistook it of Venkatam come with you"-and her bitter F or all his former complaint-"how does this bring him pride"-is Mock departures the landscape of her body. Her tears are And I said "Fine, waterfalls, her breasts mountains, and just as the Leave my side waterfalls erode the soil from the mountain And go away forever." slopes, her tears erase her womanhood. The ARCHANA VENKATESAN is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. She has a Ph.D. in South Asian Studies with a specialization in Tamil Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests are in textual, performance and visual cultures in South India. She has recently been awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship to conduct research on hereditary ritual perfonners at the Vishnu temple at Alvar Tirunagari. Journal ofHindu-Christian Studies 20 (2007):16-24 Published by Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2007 1 Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Vol. 20 [2007], Art. 8 A Woman's Kind of Love 17 o Mother but one ravaged body-but in the later Our master who supports us­ Srivaishnava commentaria1 traditions, in the Where is he now process of allegoresis the voices of the poet and I wonder her/his imagined persona will seem as one. And following such a lead,. we have a long and The place between my breasts revered scholarly tradition that reads the voices Has filled up with tears, of these female characters of Tamil bhakti And has become a pond poems as univocal. In each of these Tamil a1var Where a black legged poems there is essentially the same woman who White heron feeds. always finds herself in the undesirable position Kuruntokai 325 3 of rejected lover, bemoaning her unfortunate fate. 6 But each voice, (even invented ones) like The most obvious meeting p,oint for both eyes, are the fingerprints of the self and is like these poems is in the final metaphor, where the no other, marked by the peculiar attentions of body of the heroine becomes the landscape the poet that creates her. So this essay is not ravaged by unrequited desire. But while the about the meeting points of a1var poetry and its Cankam poem is predicated on a linguistic Cankam akam antecedents. Rather, I am misunderstanding-what the lover says as a joke concerned with points of departure, especially in (I'll go, I'll go), the beloved takes to be true how two a1var poets- Anda1 and Tirumankai­ (then go), for the woman in Andal's poem the reconfigure the ubiquitous talaivi of the Cankam terrible punishment is a causeless and akam poems to meet the demands of the unwarranted separation. And, while our Cankam emergent Tamil bhakti poetry. heroine is in a sense responsible for her own tragedy, the heroine of Andal's poem is victim Loving God: Meetings and Departures to the whimsy of a cruel and distant god. Ultimately, the sorrow of both women is marked Like the Cankam counterparts, the Tamil by emptiness and erasure-the loss of bhakti poems are peopled with a variety of stock womanhood, the sadistic pecking of the heart, female characters: heroines, mothers, foster­ the fading of beauty. mothers, friends, and fortune-tellers. Often, and Susan Stewart in Poetry and the Fate of the this is· especially true of the two male poets, Senses argues that "poetic making is an Namma1var and Tirumankai, in a kind of anthropomorphic project" where the poet creates Keatsian synaesthasia we hear of the fate of the the figure of the beloved so as to reciprocally talaivi through the eyes of these supporting recognize one's own figure. 4 Through engaging female characters. Nonetheless, mothers, friends the senses-touching, tasting, smelling, and fortune-tellers are but supplementary, the seeing-the beloved becomes the mirror, the supporting cast to the lovelorn talaivi, who opposite, the deceptive image of one's own self. stands at the center of the narrative trajectory. But in these poems it would appear that the Unlike the Cankam poems, the divine hero opposite has happened; the women that inhabit (talaivan) is almost entirely absent, evoked in both these poems (and who stand in for a kind of these bhakti verses in a fragmentary fashion­ 1arger-than-life love) threaten to disappear his lips teasing the heroine in the blossoming of unrecognized by the absent lover. But there is the kovai fruit, the sound of his flute suggesting also another kind of anthropomorphizing at his far away presence. In a sense, the absence work in Andal's poem, where the act of creating that is present in the akam poems as a kind of the "female persona," this voice of longing also subtle undertone, becomes full bodied (although makes the author of the poem. These bhakti it ravages the body of the heroine) in these (alval') poets, like skilled ventriloquists, inhabit Tamil bhakti poems. The god does not deign to the foreign bodies of their fictive women, answer her cries. He offers her no reply, even shaping them and lending them the 'willed voice through insentient things that she might of the body. ",5 mistakenly assume to be his messenger. These In these poems we hear two voices, and see poems are incomplete stories, their happy https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol20/iss1/8 DOI: 10.7825/2164-6279.1383 2 -- Venkatesan: A Woman's Kind of Love: Female Longing in the Tamil Alvar Poetry 18 Archana Venkatesan endings provided only by a much later reading the disruptive melancholy of the akam hagiographic tradition. In the bhakti-akam poem such as the one I began this paper with poems (akapporul), the only named male into a continuous narrative cycle of union and character, Purushottama, that most excellent of separation, the commentaries complete the men, is entirely absent, and silent-only evoked incomplete poems through a delicate albeit in the landscape of memory. Here the archetypal ubiquitous allegoresis: the female lover is the hero of the akam genre is merged with that of dependent soul and th~ longed for beloved is the the benevolent king of the puram ineffable divine. Thus, the akapporul bhakti (exterior/public) poems, who dispenses justice poems become in the hands of the skilled and just rewards to bards. As Norman Cutler and exegete, autobiographical and theological. On AK Ramanujan observe, the akam bhakti poems the one hand, these poems document an are infused with the spirit of the exterior world individual's ecstatic encounter and on the other, of kings and kingship, though bhakti poets who they gesture to the fundamental Srivaishnava compose in this mode, violate a cardinal principle that all souls are ultimately female with principal of akam poetics by naming the god as the only male. 9 The Srivaishnava nameless hero, identified as either yishnu or commentaries succeed in straddling two Shiva. 7 opposing assertions. The female personae It is therefore only logical that when we (talaivis) of these poets are distinctive, plot points of departure between Cankam poetry contoured by the interiority of the poet's and Tamil alvar poetry, it is the dramatic re­ metaphysical process. But these heroines imagining of the hero that captures our attention. (talaivis) also act as a metonymy for the souls of Not only is the divine (transcendent) hero of the all beings; in this latter reading they are akapporul bhakti poems, identified by being doubtless, generic, undifferentiated and shared. imbued with local color, but also differentiated AK Ramanujan in his essay "Where by his intimate engagement with a particular site Mirrors are Windows" presents a model that or with particular narratives.