The invention of the Sthalapurāṇa of Madurai

[Full title: Many Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇams: The invention of the Sthalapurāṇa of Madurai]

The literary sphere of the seventeenth-century Tamil region, while situated unambiguously in India’s Vernacular Millennium,^[1] fostered a number of flourishing literary traditions, not least among them a prolific network of cosmopolitan Sanskrit literati. Indeed, in the wake of the fragmentation of the Vijayanagara Empire, the Nāyaka kingdoms of Madurai and Tanjavur, heirs in the Tamil country to its cultural prestige, continued Vijayangara’s liberal patronage of poets writing in both Sanskrit and the vernacular. Operating in such close quarters and competing for patronage and performance opportunities, the poets of the Nāyaka-period literary sphere,^[2] whether writing in Tamil, Telugu, or Sanskrit, necessarily developed an acute awareness of each other’s presence. Such an awareness is often overtly manifested in their literary creations, which show ample evidence of intertextual influence and response.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of these poets held less than favorable opinions of their competitors. Take, for instance, this verse by Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita from his Sanskrit mahākāvya, or classical epic, the Śivalīlārṇava,^[3] or “The Ocean of the Games of Śiva”:

Through the decadence of the Kali Yuga, having strayed from the
Path of suggestion [vyaṅgyapatham] dear to the learned, disregarding scripture,
[Bad poets] have acquired a taste for poetic feats [citra] of word and meaning—
Much like the passion of hicks for vernacular texts.^[4]

Such disapproval of vernacular literature may seem unremarkable coming from Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, descendant of one of India’s most learned Brahmin intellectual families, ranked among the most celebrated Sanskrit poets of the second millennium—were it not for the fact that this statement itself appears in what is in fact an adaptation of a vernacular text, narrating in the form of a Sanskrit epic the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam, the sixty-four “Sacred Games of Śiva” in Madurai. When reembedded in its immediate discursive context, then, Nīlakaṇṭha’s Śivalīlārṇava opens up a number of questions about the role of language choice in a diverse, multilingual society such as south India after the rise of vernacularism. Bronner and Shulman (2006), for instance, raise just such a question in their article, “‘A Cloud Turned Goose’: Sanskrit in the Vernacular Millennium.” Masterfully excavating the multilingual resonances in a number of seventeenth-century works of Sanskrit literature from the Tamil country, Bronner and Shulman demonstrate beyond a doubt that the Sanskrit literary tradition in the South had become thoroughly conversant with, and in some ways dependent upon, the thematic and stylistic conventions of the vernacular. Whether the Śivalīlārṇava was truly intended to harmonize with a preexisting vernacular literary canon, however, deserves a more nuanced consideration.^[5] Indeed, Bronner and Shulman interpret the Śivalīlārṇava as something of a replica of the Tamil original, largely conforming to its intentionality and cultural agenda. By describing the text as a “rendition of an earlier Tamil equivalent,” the authors presume, perhaps inadvertently, that the text’s only intention was to “give voice” to a vernacular world that was preexistent in its entirety—and, by implication, essentially timeless.^[6]

As we shall see, in the process of recasting the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam narrative, the Śivalīlārṇava did incorporate quite a number of cultural allusions familiar primarily to an educated Tamil readership. It is not every day, after all, that we meet with elegant depictions in literary Sanskrit of the founding of the Tamil Caṅkam or of the exploits of the Tamil Śaiva bhakti saints Ñānacampantar and Māṇikkavācakar, which Nīlakaṇṭha faithfully included in his Sanskrit rendition of these sixty-four popular Tamil legends. To view Nīlakaṇṭha, however, as faithfully transcribing a Tamil idiom in Sanskrit would misread the bold and often subversive intent of the text. Indeed, the first canto of the Śivalīlārṇava consists almost entirely of a highly specific literary-theoretical critique of Nīlakaṇṭha’s fellow Sanskrit poets. We find here, for instance, a sarcastic diatribe against much of second-millennium (post-Mammaṭa) trends in poetic practice, such as the nearexclusive reliance on feats of language fashionable in the Nāyaka courts in which the formal properties of poetry are privileged over its content.

Nīlakaṇṭha expresses disdain, for instance, for citra kāvya—pictorial poetry (think Apollinaire in twentieth-century France)—and yamaka, a type of paronomasia that repeats the same sequence of syllables in entirely different words. Indeed, the very suggestion that poetry should be founded upon feats of language rather than the beauty of suggested meaning was anathema to Nīlakaṇṭha:

In the Kṛta Yuga, suggestion [vyañjanā] became incarnate;
In the Treta Yuga, it became subordinated [guṇībabhūva];
In the third age, there were feats of meaning [arthacitra];
And in the fourth age, a profusion of twinning rhymes [yamaka].

Indeed, having ascended to the overlordship of poetry,
The resolute do not delight in mere feats of language [śabdacitra].
Having reached the abode of celestial women in heaven,
How could any one-eyed woman be worth approaching?

Did the creator fill the mouths of the feebleminded with garlic,
And sprinkle bitter neem juice?
If not, from whence comes the putrid odor and acridity
When speech is issuing forth from them?^[7]

In these verses, Nīlakaṇṭha’s polemic can be read intelligibly only within the context of a thoroughly Sanskritic conversation on aesthetics, specifically invoking the authority of the eighth-century literary theorist Ānandavardhana, who made the case in his masterwork, the Dhvanyāloka (The illumination of implicature), that poetry was made beautiful only by the complex interplay of literal and suggested meaning.^[8] As with the entirety of the first canto of the Śivalīlārṇava, this discourse was evidently intended for an audience not only proficient in Sanskrit but also thoroughly versed in the canon of Sanskrit literary theory. How can we make sense of this canto as figuring into a text that ostensibly celebrates the heritage of a distinctively Tamil vernacular culture? Given that such a polemic would have been all but unintelligible to anyone outside the orbit of the cosmopolitan Sanskrit literary tradition, it may not be accurate to claim that the Śivalīlārṇava simply “participated along with” the vernacular in Nīlakaṇṭha’s day and age. To make such a suggestion, as Bronner and Shulman have done, presumes that vernacular literature in general operated out of a unified intentionality—that of “inventing and elaborating... cultural identities.”^[9] And given that Nīlakaṇṭha was a notorious satirist, first-rate literary mind, and public figure in the literary salon and court of Madurai, his own intentionality in composing the Śivalīlārṇava is far from cut-and-dried.

To more fully appreciate what may have motivated Nīlakaṇṭha to compose a unique and interstitial work requires, above all, a nuanced understanding of its enunciatory context—in this case, both the institutional structure of the multilingual literary sphere in which it took part, and the textual history of the Tamil “original,” the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam. The Nāyaka period of south India in particular, a period of rapid social and political transformation, provides us with an ideal arena to explore such questions. A multilingual literary sphere such as this, which fostered multiple vernacular traditions (namely, Tamil and Telugu) with competing sources of institutional sponsorship and patronage, allows us to bracket the Sanskrit-vernacular binary in favor of a model that situates multilingual literary production within its diverse social and institutional settings. It also illuminates the social embeddedness of Sanskrit literary and intellectual discourse, as exemplified by the particular case of Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita. Nīlakaṇṭha’s Śivalīlārṇava is no accident of literary genius outside of time and space, but an active response to the multidimensional social and literary milieu in which his mahākāvya was deliberately articulated.

Just how many Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam s are there? What little scholarship has been devoted to the subject is unequivocal:^[10] there are two TVP s, the lesser-known TVP of Perumpaṟṟapuliyūr Nampi, dated most convincingly to the late thirteenth century, and the celebrated TVP of Parañcōti Muṉivar, belonging most likely to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.^[11] The latter, comprising nearly twice the number of verses found in Nampi’s version, incorporated a number of innovations that distinguish it from its “original” counterpart, substantially reordering of the sequence of games and replacing three of Nampi’s sixty-four episodes with entirely distinct narratives. In addition to these two primary Tamil variants, a single Sanskrit Purāṇic rendering has been attested, the Hālāsya Māhātmya, which, given the radical proliferation of manuscripts transmitted in numerous south Indian scripts, seems to have been transmitted widely across the southern half of the subcontinent since at least the eighteenth century.^[12] In short, given our current knowledge of the TVP’s textual history, previous scholarship on the work(s) has focused nearly exclusively on two issues: a narratological comparison of the two Tamil purāṇam s, and the adjudication of the relative priority of Parañcōti’s TVP and the Hālāsya Māhātmya . The latter, by virtue of its Sanskrit Purāṇic pedigree, is by and large presumed to have preceded the TVP, with very little evidence adduced to support this conclusion.

Our textual archive, however, renders the actual number of Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam s somewhat more ambiguous. Nampi, for his part, nowhere refers to his own work under the title Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam, claiming simply to have “spoken the sixty-four Sacred Games of Cokkaṉ” (cokkaṉ viḷaiyāṭa laṟu pattu nāṉkuñ coṉṉēṉ) contained in the “great purāṇam of Madurai” (māmaturaip purāṇam).^[13] This may come as no surprise given its relatively early date compared to most representatives of the mature talapurāṇam genre, which truly established itself as a fixture of Tamil literary practice around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. More tellingly, however, our earliest-known literary references to Nampi’s purāṇam seem similarly uninterested in designating the work as the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam.

One such work, the Payakaramālai (Skt. Bhayaharamālā), refers to its project of rendering Nampi’s work in a brief garland of sixty-four verses in the following terms:

Rejoicing, I complete reciting all sixty-four of the primordial sports of Our Lord,
Praising Perumpaṟṟapuliyūr Nampi, chief among the Kauṇḍinya Gotra,
Ruling over Celli garlanded with beautiful lotus flowers.

Is it not the case, in the Kappinci land in the region bearing the fertility of rain clouds,
I speak the sixty-four sports of the one garlanded in mountain ebony flowers
Of Nampi of the famous Tillai, ruling over the auspicious southern town of Celli,
Adjoining the place known as Caturvedimangalam of Paraśurāma.^[14]

In short, our literary archive provides us with little evidence to discern whether Nampi’s composition acquired its title from within the tradition or as a result of a superimposition of modern scholarship linking it directly with Parañcōti’s betterknown rendering of the narrative. To break with the arbitrary pairing of the two TVP s, then, permits us to narrow our scope of inquiry from the ahistorical domain of myth criticism, shifting our focus away from purely narratological concerns such as the sequence of episodes in favor of a more socially embedded approach to texts and literary institutions. In fact, our textual archive tells a different story: we meet with no complete retellings of the “Sacred Games” between the lifetime of Nampi and the mid-sixteenth century, after which point we witness a sudden explosion of variant narratives crossing linguistic and social boundaries. The most significant of these pre-Parañcōti variants, in fact, is not in Tamil at all but in Telugu: the Cokkanātha Caritramu (The story of Cokkanātha) of Tiruvēṅgaḷakavi (circa 1540).^[15] This unique work was patronized by the pair of subchieftains Pedda Rāma and Cinna Rāma, who operated out of southern Tamil Nadu in the vicinity of Ramnad, significantly removed from Madurai’s cultural orbit. Nevertheless, the Telugu Cokkanātha Caritramu is arguably the earliest example of a complete translation—or perhaps more accurately “transcreation”—of the full sixty-four sacred games postdating the thirteenth-century Nampi.^[16] Indeed, much like Nampi, as a member of the vernacular literary elite residing at a distance from Madurai itself, Tiruvēṅgaḷakavi held little interest—either regional or rhetorical—in sacralizing the landscape of Madurai.

A number of fairly early works, dating to the first half of the sixteenth century, show an increased fascination with the TVP narrative. The Tiruvuccāttānar Nāṉmaṇimālai of Nociyūr Paḻaṉiyappaṉ Cervaikkārar (Tamil, circa 1527), for instance, while largely concerned with other matters, includes a chapter that condenses Nampi’s ordering of the sacred games into an easily digestible set of verses. Likewise, the Kālahasti Māhātmyamu of Dhurjaṭi (Telugu, circa 1509–1529), authored by a poet traditionally revered as one of eight literary celebrities (aṣṭadiggajulu) of the Vijayanagara court of Kṛṣṇadevarāya, incorporates—possibly for the first time—a cycle of the Tamil Tiruviḷaiyāṭal legends into a Telugu text.^[17] Within the domain of Madurai itself, the Maduraic Cokkanātar Ulā of Purāṇa Tirumalainātar (Tamil, early sixteenth century), belongs to the Ulā genre of Tamil literature, a literary form centered on the motif of the formal public procession of a ruler or deity in a particular locality—in the present instance, Cokkanātar or Sundareśvara of Madurai. While recounting the procession of Sundareśvara through the streets of Madurai, the Cokkanātar Ulā sprinkles allusions to several of the games of Śiva.

By the mid-to late sixteenth century, we begin to encounter a number of complete renditions of the sixty-four games in multiple languages—including the Cokkanātha Caritramu—which thus predate Parañcōti’s own masterpiece but often survive in fragmentary condition with numerous corruptions. Many have been all but forgotten by the scholars of Tamil or Telugu literary history. Take for instance, the Cuntara Pāṇṭiyam (The story of Sundara Pandian) of Aṉatāri (late sixteenth century), a virtually unstudied retelling of the “Sacred Games” in his incarnation as the Pandian ruler Sundareśvara, a work that despite its intriguing digressionary discussions of subtle body yoga and Śākta devotionalism, has only barely survived to this day. How many other authors like Aṉatāri set out to retell the “Sacred Games” only to have the manuscripts of their compositions dismissed by their colleagues or lost to subsequent generations?^[18] We also encounter abortive attempts at alternative talapurāṇam s of Madurai that subsume the “Sacred Games” under an entirely different narrative frame. The Katampavaṉapurāṇam (The purāṇa of the Kadamba Forest) of Vīmanāta Paṇṭitar, for instance claims to narrate the sacred history of the city from an entirely different stream of textual transmission, one that ostensibly was adapted from a Sanskrit work variously referred to as the Kadambavanapurāṇa or, synonymously, the Nīpāraṇyapurāṇa. Previous scholarship has assumed a somewhat earlier date for this work, as it incorporates within a structurally distinct mythological framework a single chapter that catalogues the sacred games according to Nampi’s earlier sequence.

This argument, however, neglects the fact that its author, Vīmanāta Paṇṭitar, refers directly to Parañcōti in the opening verses of the composition, adopting an almost apologetic tone for his audacity in putting forth another contender for Madurai’s official talapurāṇam [talapurāṇa]:

Even after the existence of the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam flourishing suitably with the sixty-four
Told by the great Parañcōti Muṉivar of excellent fame through the grace of Śiva,
I commence to narrate in a manner in eleven chapters with fame known across the earth surrounded by water,
Having recited the story of the Sacred Games of the One Who Is Like a Remedy, through the customs that grace the assembly.^[19]

But precisely what sort of textual culture accompanied the TVP’s rise from obscurity to a place among the literary elite of multiple language communities? Why were these texts written, and was their enunciatory effect the same in Tamil, Sanskrit, and Telugu? In fact, it was not only the languages but also the institutions of literary circulation that had diverged radically in south India by the sixteenth century, leading to the emergence of distinct literary spheres that often intersected but operated out of disparate commitments in the domains of literature, politics, and devotion.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

On the trajectory of the vernacularization of the Indian subcontinent, and the concept of the “Vernacular Millennium,” see Pollock (1998a, 1998b, 2006).

[2]:

The literature of Nāyaka-period South India, although substantially in need of further study, has been treated in a series of essays in Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam’s Symbols of Substance (1992), a study particularly noteworthy in terms of its facility at negotiating the multilingualism (Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu) of the period.

[3]:

The precise date of composition of the Śīvalīlārṇava is unknown. Nīlakaṇṭha’s oeuvre can be dated fairly accurately based on the exact date of composition he provides for his Nīlakaṇṭhavijayacampū: 1637–1638 c.e.

[4]:

ŚLA 1.37: vidvatpriyaṃ vyaṅgyapathaṃ vyatītya śabdārthacitreṣu kaler vilāsāt | prāpto ‘nurāgo nigamān upekṣya bhāṣāprabandheṣv iva pāmarāṇām ||

[5]:

Bronner and Shulman (2006, 6).

[6]:

Bronner and Shulman (2006, 8).

[7]:

ŚLA 1.38–39, 43: kṛte yuge vyañjanayāvatīrṇaṃ tretāyuge saiva guṇībabhūva / āsīt tṛtīye tu yuge ‘rthacitraṃ yuge turīye yamakaprapañcam // diṣṭyādhirūḍhāḥ kavitādhirājyaṃ dhīrā ramante na hi śabdacitre / svarge ‘pi gatvāpsarasāṃ nivāśe kāṇaiva kiṃ kāpi gaveṣaṇīyā // āpūrya vakraṃ laśunair vidhātā kiṃ nimbasāraiḥ kudhiyām asiñcat / na cet kathaṃ vāci tataḥ kṣarantyāṃ sa pūtigandhaḥ sa ca tiktabhāvaḥ.

[8]:

For instance, Dhvanyāloka 3.41–42: pradhānaguṇabhāvābhyāṃ vyaṅgyasyaivaṃ vyavasthite / kāvye ubhe tato ‘nyad yat tac citram abhidhīyate // citraṃ śabdārthabhedena dvividhaṃ ca vyavasthitam / tatra kiṃcic chabdacitraṃ vācyacitram ataḥ param.

[9]:

Bronner and Shulman (2006, 6).

[10]:

Harman, “Two Versions of a Tamil Text,” 1987b; Dessigane et al., La Legende des Jeux de Çiva à Madurai, 1960; Shulman, “First Grammarian, First Poet,” 2001;Wilden, 2014.

[11]:

See below for a more thorough discussion of the dating of these works.

[12]:

Extant manuscripts in Grantha, Malayalam, Telugu, and Kannada script are numerous. Unfortunately I am aware of no dated manuscripts of the text, which is perhaps unsurprising as southern palm-leaf manuscripts are much less frequently dated than contemporary paper Devanagari manuscripts from North India. All of the manuscripts I have examined appear to be of recent origin (eighteenth-and nineteenth-century).

[13]:

Payaṉ mutaliyaṉa, pg. 314, v. 5. There is always the possibility of interpolation with such textual addenda (the equivalent of a phalaśruti in Sanskrit), which would leave even scantier reference to the designation of the text at hand or its status as a Purāṇam.

[14]:

Nūṟcirappuppāyiram: ampatumat tārccalli yāṇṭāṉ kavuṇiyarkō / ṉamperumpaṟ ṟappuliyūr nampiviyan temperumā / ṉātiviḷai yāṭa laṟupattu nāṉkiṉaiyu / mēti muṭittā ṉuvantu. kārvaḷaṅkoṇ maṇṭalattuk kappiñci nāṭṭuraittōṉ / cārparacu rāmac caturvētimaṅkalamāñ cīrtakuteṉ cellinaka rāṇṭāṉcoṟ ṟillainampi / yārpuṉaivāṉ viḷaiyāṭa laṟupattu nāṉkaṉrē. No evidence for the date or authorship of this work is available. The text can be found appended to U. Ve. Caminataiyar’s edition of Nampi’s Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam.

[15]:

To my knowledge the only piece of secondary scholarship to document this work in any detail is the Telugu monograph of Vadhluri Anjaneya Raju (1993), Cokkanātha Caritra: Samagra Pariśīlana. While providing a much-needed introduction to this otherwise neglected work of literature (even within the domain of strictly Telugu literary studies), Raju’s work leaves something to be desired in terms of a critical awareness of literary transmission across linguistic boundaries. Raju asserts repeatedly without citing any evidence that the Cokkanātha Caritramu is a direct translation of the Sanskrit Hālāsya Māhātmya, claiming that the numerous and significant variations from the latter can be explained strictly on the grounds of artistic license and the desire to avoid prolixity.

[16]:

While this is not the occasion for an in-depth engagement with contemporary translation theory and its implications for making sense of South Asian translation practices, it is important to note that “faithful translation” that adheres to preserving as much of the exact meaning and syntactical structure of the original source language in a new medium occurs rather rarely in South Asian discourses, a state of affairs that is often not apparent in the secondary literature. By transcreation, however, I mean to clarify that the new work of literature is a distinctive literary product with its own perspective and agenda that, while preserving something of the spirit and core narrative of the “original,” differs substantively from it in both form and content. In this coinage, transcreations are, at the same time, to be distinguished from adaptations that present themselves as only vaguely inspired by some original source. As we shall see, transcreations demonstrably have a more explicit genealogical relationship with a prior source text.

[17]:

See Shulman and Rao (2002) for an English translation of the portions of the Dhurjaṭi Māhātmyamu that concern the origin of the Tamil Caṅkam.

[18]:

The Cokkanātar Ulā is another example of a text that only barely survived the vicissitudes of history. In his introduction to the edition, U. Ve. Caminataiyar informs us (p. x) that some forty years before its publication, a single manuscript of the Cokkanātar Ulā was located in the home of one Śrī Kālivāṭīcuvar Ōtuvār, and this manuscript copy itself was quite old at the time. No further manuscripts were known to the editor at the time of publication.

[19]:

tiruntupukaḻp parañcōti māmuṉivaṉ civaṉaruḷār ceppu meṇṇeṇ / poruntivaḷar tiruviḷaiyā ṭaṟpurā ṇamumirukkap piṉṉum yāṉīr / taruntaraṇi pukaḻpatiṉō rattiyā yattorvakai cāṟṟap pukkēṉ / maruntaṉaiyāṉ viḷaiyāṭaṟ kataiyōti yavaiaruḷum vaḻakkāṉ maṉṉō.