Songs of Experience: The Poetics of Tamil Devotion.

• Author: Hart, George L.

Norman Cutler's book takes its title not so much from Blake's series of poems, with which the Tamil works he treats have little in common, as from his contention that the Tamil Saiva and Vaisnava hymns involve an "experience" (or enjoyment, as he suggests on page 43) of God by both the poet and the poet's audience. As he says (p. 13), just as savoring a rasa is the poetic goal of the audience of Sanskrit drama, experiencing God through poetry is the goal for the Tamil devotee. Throughout the book, he works out the consequences of this view,

often with considerable and striking insight.

The book is in two main sections. The first is commentary and analysis, treating the poems from a number of rhetorical and other perspectives. The second consists of Cutler's translations of poems he has selected from both Saiva and Vaisnava traditions. The first selection (chs. 1-3) is further divided into two parts, the first of which treats the "typical" or standard type of Tamil bhakti poem, while the second (chs. 4-5) is concerned with the Tirukkcovaiyar, a work by Manikavacakar that is clearly devotional but does not fit the standard form.

In the first chapter, Cutler lays the groundwork for his later arguments. He shows how the poems involve a triangle consisting of the poet, God, and the audience, and analyzes poems in which this configuration is manifested in various different ways. He shows how various rhetorical strategies are employed in Manikkavacakar's Tiruccatakam and Nammalvar's Tiruvaymoli.

In the second chapter, Cutler goes on to consider how devotees experience the hymns. I found this chapter somewhat weak - Cutler's discussion of how the poems are experienced seems rather one-sided, relying excessively on the scholastic traditions. No doubt these are interesting and important, and they form a part of the experience of the hymns, but I think Cutler has neglected some important areas. Quoting K. K. A. Venkatachari, he points out that Visnu is said to "enjoy" the recitation of the Tamil poems. But surely there is much more to it than this. It seems to me that the poems serve to legitimize and empower the deity much as the early poems of the bards (on which Nammalvar's poems are modeled) served to empower the king. On page 51, Cutler says that the hymns "engender divinity in the devotee." This strikes me as a bit simplistic - surely the poems are used in quite complex ways, often just for enjoyment or to create an auspicious atmosphere (much...