Singing the Body of God: The Hymns of Vedantadesika in Their South Indian Tradition.

• Author: Monius, Anne E.
• Position: Book review

Singing the Body of God: The Hymns of Vedantadesika in Their South Indian Tradition. By STEVEN PAUL HOPKINS. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. Pp. xx + 344. $80.

This volume marks a significant contribution to the study of pre-modern South Indian literary and devotional cultures, in looking beyond the usual dichotomies of Sanskrit versus Tamil, local versus trans-regional. Focusing on a sampling of the poetic work of the fourteenth-century polyglot Srivaisnava scholar and theologian, Vedantadesika (traditional dates 1268-1369), Singing the Body of God examines with complex sophistication Desika's devotional poetry to Visnu in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Maharastri Prakrit, arguing persuasively that such poems can be fully understood and appreciated only in conversation with each other and in the context of wider currents in South Indian devotional and intellectual life.

Noting that Vedantadesika's work has largely been ignored by Euro-American scholarship, in its biases both against sectarian composition as true "literature" and, in contrast, against Sanskrit as a true language of bhakti or 'devotion', Hopkins offers up detailed analyses of six major poems: one each in Tamil and Sanskrit to Visnu as Varadaraja enshrined in the cosmopolitan city of Kancipuram; three works, in Tamil, Sanskrit, and Prakrit, to the beloved form of Visnu as Devanayaka at Tiruvahindrapuram (near modern-day Katalur / Cuddalore); and a dhyanastotra or Sanskrit hymn of praise describing from toe to head the lovely form of Visnu as Lord Ranganatha enshrined at Srirangam. Hopkins reads each poetic work in the context of Vedantadesika's other works of poetry and prose, as well as against the backdrop of wider intellectual and literary developments within the Srivaisnava community. In reading Sanskrit alongside Tamil and Prakrit, Hopkins argues for the resonances among all three, with the hymns to Varadaraja in both Tamil and Sanskrit, for example, exhibiting something of the classical Tamil themes of puram--'outer' or heroic poetry--and the poems to Devanayaka expressing the classical Tamil modes of akam--'inner' or love motifs--alongside Sanskrit evocations of srnga-rarasa, the 'flavor' of the 'erotic'. Throughout Hopkins focuses, borrowing C. S. Peirce via A. K. Ramanujan, on the "iconicity" of Vedantadesika's poetic works, wherein verbal image or icon evokes an emotional register in conjunction with the physical, visually accessible image of the lord enshrined in...