Nayanar 4: Ilayankudi Maranar (Ilaiyankuti Manar)

The fourth saint in the list is ‘Ilaiyankuti Manar [Ilayankudi Maranar]’. “Ilaiyanrankuti Maran atiyarkkum atiyen”— ‘I am the servant of the servants of Maran of llaiyankuti, is how Arurar sings. ‘R’ is pronounced as ‘D’ even now, for instance, in Ceylon where ‘ninra’ is pronounced as ‘ninda’ and this line of Arurar seems to have been read as ‘llaiyanda Kudimaran’; and this is the form with its variant ‘llananda Kutimara’ that is found in the Kannada and Sanskrit traditions. Shaivite ascetics were sometimes called Andar’ and this must have been in the mind of the people who misread Arurar’s line like this. ‘Ilaiyanrankuti’ is simply the name of a village, named after ‘Ilaiyan’ as llaiyankuti.

The name Ilaiyankutimaran is found ‘Ilaiyamarangudi Marar’ in the sculptures in the temple at Darasuram. One wonders whether the village itself was called after this great saint. According to the story found in Periyapuranam, after he had lost all he had in his undertaking to offer food to Shaivites, Shiva appeared before him on a rainy night in the form of a Sivabhakta and Marar at the suggestion of his wife brought the com he had sown in his field and used the bamboo rafters of his house as fire-wood for preparing the food.

The word Manan is usually the title of the Pandyas. Cekkilar makes him a Sudra. As officers under the king bear the names of their masters, our saint might have been an officer under the Pandyas if he himself was not a Pandya. In the sculpture at Darasuram, on the left side appears Shiva on a bull with Parvati, representing the final scene of the story. Next to that we find a person seated before a tripod on which is the food served with reverence by a lady, i.e., the wife of Manar. The right side portion depicts a man, that is Manar, bringing a load of corn which his wife is helping to unload on the ground

Nampiyantar mentions the bringing in of the corn sown and the using of rafters of the house as fuel. But he does not refer to the wife of Manar whereas in the story of Cekkilar, and in the sculpture she plays an important part. The Tillai in Tillaivazh Anthanar is applicable to Tirunilakantattuk kuya-vanar also because the latter also is said to belong to Tillai. If this were so, one may not be wrong in taking the expression ‘Illaiye ennata’ as a description of ‘Ilaiyankuti Manan” as well.