My Sapphire-hued Lord, My Beloved! Kulacekara Alvar's Perumal Tirumoli.

AuthorClooney, Francis X.

My Sapphire-hued Lord, My Beloved! Kulacekara Alvar's Perumal Tirumoli. By SUGANYA ANANDA-KICHENIN. Collection Indologie, vol. 136. NETamil Series, vol. 2. Pondichery: ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 2018. Pp. xi + 604.

The Divya Prabandham ("The Divine Collection," in Tamil the Nalayira Tivviya Pirapantam) collects the nearly 4,000 verses of the canon of Vaisnava sacred verses in Tamil, the works of the twelves alvars plus the one hundred verses of the Ramanujanurrantati in honor of Ramanuja, the foremost acarya of the tradition. This remarkable body of religious poetry is grounded in the old cahkam poetry of Tamil Nadu, flourished in the seventh to the ninth centuries, and has gradually worked its way into the consciousness of modern scholars and a wider range of readers. Partial translations began appearing as in the early part of the twentieth century, while the last four decades have seen a flood of new work: A. K. Ramanujan's Hymns for the Drowning (1981); Norman Cutler's Consider Our Vow: An English Translation of Tiruppdvai and Tiruvempavai (1979); John Carman and Vasudha Narayanan's The Tamil Veda (1989); Archana Venkatesan's The Secret Garland: Antal's Tiruppdvai and Nacciyar Tirumoli (2010) and A Hundred Measures of Time: Tiruviruttam (2014). Friedhelm Hardy's encyclopedic Viraha Bhakti: The Early History of Krsna Devotion in South India (1983) has proved invaluable context and a plausible story line for the roots of bhakti in the Tamil south, while this reviewer's theological explorations, Seeing through Texts: Doing Theology among the Srivaisnavas of South India (1996) and His Hiding Place Is Darkness: An Exercise in Hindu-Catholic Theopoetics (2013), may be of interest as well. Still, Anandakichenin is right in insisting that the alvars need still more attention, given the beauty of the poetry, its rich cultural and religious meanings, and the impressive body of commentary and consequent literature arising from their songs. She aims to chart the forward path by this scholarly volume of context, text, and translation, fittingly included in the new NETamil Series as its second volume.

Kulacekara Alvar was a ninth-century Vaisnava poet, one of the twelve alvars and, as tradition holds, a local king. Nonetheless, he is also a figure regarding whom details are hard to pin down. Anandakichenin does all she can to narrow down his identity. Though he is often reputed to be from Kerala, Anandakichenin finds the evidence in that...

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