Twin Texts: The Canonization of the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam

Most importantly for our purposes, none of the works noted above appear to be indebted to either of the two exemplars of the TVP genre given historical primacy by existing scholarly literature, namely the TVP of Parañcōti and the Sanskrit Hālāsya Māhātmya, allegedly the direct sources for all representations of the “Sacred Games” in the centuries after Nampi. In fact, two of the most interesting of these works, the Cuntara Pāṇṭiyam and the Cokkanātha Caritramu, are sufficiently similar on structural grounds to that of Parañcōti’s TVP to suggest the genuine emergence of a shared template for narrative improvisation. But the works diverge in crucial respects, bringing seriously into question the presupposition that all of the texts could have been adapted unilaterally from a single point of origin. Reactions in the scholarly literature have varied considerably, ranging from that of Harman (1987a), who has emphasized the purely rhetorical role of Sanskrit “originals” in Tamil Purāṇic composition, to those of Jeyechandrun (1985) and Wilden (2014), who virtually assume that Parañcōti translated the Hālāsya Māhātmya directly into Tamil. And yet, to date, I have not once encountered a single citation of the Hālāsya Māhātmya originating earlier than the late seventeenth century.^[1] Internal textual evidence, on the other hand, speaks volumes about this issue, but only when Parañcōti’s TVP and the Hālāsya Māhātmya are brought into dialogue with a much broader spectrum of contemporary literary production. As I argue below, the suspiciously similar contents of Parañcōti’s TVP and the Hālāsya Māhātmya pair them as “twin texts,” so to speak, strongly suggesting at the very least that the Hālāsya Māhātmya could not have been known to any vernacular poets before Parañcōti.

Beyond the Cokkanātha Caritramu’ s inclusion of three of Nampi’s original games, perhaps the work’s most suggestively interstitial feature is its “elision” of the prolific Purāṇic frame narratives that feature prominently in both Parañcōti’s TVP and the HM. While the Cokkanātha Caritramu, much like Nampi’s earlier TVP, undertakes a streamlined narration of each of the sixty-four games, showing no predilection for mythological elaboration, the latter canonical narrative is scattered with mythological backstories and nonnarrative materials—from ancient curses to applied religious observances (vratas) and spontaneous stotras—as one would expect from the texture of a typical Sanskrit Purāṇa. Some of these digressions, such as the apparently irrelevant Somavāravrata chapter in the HM and the stotra sung by Patañjali upon witnessing Śiva’s dance after the sacred marriage in Madurai, feature only in the HM and no other known variants. Most mythological addenda, however, although preserved identically in both Parañcōti’s TVP and the HM, appear in no other early rendering of the “Sacred Games,” including the Cokkanātha Caritramu, which otherwise conforms closely in narrative structure to the later TVP and the HM.^[2] Combined with his inclusion of Nampi’s three original episodes, however, Tiruvēṅgaḷakavi’s apparent unawareness of any of the later Purāṇic frame narratives strongly suggests that he did not have either the HM or Parañcōti’s TVP available as a model when composing the Cokkanātha Caritramu. Moreover, given his deep respect for Sanskritic culture (such as a lengthy digression on the virtues of sixteenth-century Varanasi), heavily Sanskritized vocabulary, and the Purāṇic narrative style employed in his introductory frame, it is highly unlikely that Tiruvēṅkaḷakavi would have neglected entirely these new additions had he indeed “translated” the HM into Telugu.

One prime example of such a mythological excursion, and a fairly controversial one at that, sets the stage for the origin story of the Tamil Caṅkam and is featured prominently in both Parañcōti’s TVP and the HM, a series of narratives that eulogize the prehistoric efflorescence of Tamil literary culture in the city of Madurai. Although this particular narrative is unattested before the TVP and the HM, its distinctive features in the HM have been cited as evidence for both the priority and relative antiquity of that work by scholars of Tamil literary history such as David Shulman (2001). Our story begins with Brahmā and his three wives, who have set out on a pilgrimage to Varanasi to bathe in the Ganges together. Upon their arrival at the sacred river, Sarasvatī’s attention is suddenly diverted by the melodies of a celestial musician of sorts, and she abandons the task at hand in pursuit of the unseen singer. When she returns to rejoin her husband and cowives Gāyatrī and Sāvitrī, Sarasvatī discovers that Brahmā and the others have already completed their ablutions, and Brahmā is distinctly displeased at her unexplained absence at the crucial moment of ritual purification. Angered at her apparent irresponsibility, Brahmā curses her to undergo forty-eight mortal births in recompense for her lapse.

When Sarasvatī, distraught, begs Brahmā to relent, he modifies the curse so that she will be born simultaneously as the poets of the Tamil Caṅkam represented by the forty-eight letters of the alphabet, accompanied by Śiva as the forty-ninth poet, the embodied form of the letter a. In Parañcōti’s words:

When she said, “You who have crossed beyond the travails of the flesh, shall I,
Who am your companion in this rare life, truly be cast into a mortal womb?”
Seeing the lady of the white lotus, in which the bees submerged in its honey, who
Sounded the Vedas, the four-faced leader spoke, in order to soothe her distress:

“Let it be that the forty-eight letters, renowned among the
Fifty-one, known as those beginning with ā and ending with ha,
Having become forty-eight poets, will be incarnated from your body,
With its budding breasts, in the world surrounded by the excavated sea.

Permeating all of the letters appearing as such, enlivening [uyttiṭum] them so that they appear
With various motions [iyakkam],^[3] having acquired a natural form suitable to the
Body [mey] of each of them, the Lord who flows as the primacy belonging to the letter a
Is, indeed, our Lord of the Ālavāy of the Three Tamils, in just such a manner.

Each of them having become a single scholar, adopting a sacred form,
Having ascended to the great jeweled seat of the Caṅkam, and
He, having become the forty-ninth, manifesting erudition to each in their hearts,
They will guard poetic learning with delight,” said the Lotus-Born Lord.^[4]

And as similarly recounted in the HM:

Then, the Speaker of Speech, afraid, bowed and touched
The pair of lotus feet of her husband with her hands, and petitioned him:

“All of this rebuking was done by me out of ignorance.
Forgive me, Ocean of Compassion! Look upon me with your sidelong glance.”

[Brahmā replied:]

“I, petitioned, along with my vehicle again and again by Brāhmī
have given a counter curse to that Bhāratī out of compassion.

The letters from a to sa, consisting of speech, which have come forth from your body,
of clever intellect, will be born together on the earth with different forms.

The all-pervasive Lord Sadāśiva, bearing the form of the letter ha,
Shall become a single lord of poets in the midst of those cleverminded ones.
And the forty-nine the true poets of the Sangham.^[5]

Aside from the often noted confusion about the total number of letters, which may result in part from the ambiguities of cross-linguistic transmission,^[6] the most salient feature of this mythological prehistory is that the Caṅkam poets have been symbolically encoded as the incarnate letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, which together are said to comprise the body of Sarasvatī herself, the power of language. Shulman (2001), for instance, argues that this esoteric imagery provides unambiguous evidence that the HM originated from an older, pan-Sanskritic Śākta theological system,^[7] which was later imperfectly transmitted into the Tamil cultural sphere in Parañcōti’s TVP, resulting in a denuding of the HM’s specifically Sanskritic Śākta vocabulary. It is true, in fact, that this episode, as well as numerous other passages in the HM, are heavily overlaid with Śākta terminology, from the reference to the saṅghaphalaka—the Caṅkam plank, the seat of the poets in the assembly hall—as a vidyāpīṭha or mātṛkāpīṭha< sup>69 to references to a set of navaśaktis, or nine fierce goddesses, who are somewhat less coherently integrated into the overall plot of the Purāṇa.^[8] Unfortunately, none of these terms are truly tradition-specific enough to evince a definitive origin in any pan-Sanskritic tradition of esoteric Śāktism, much less, as Shulman contends, within an unspecified Śākta lineage from the northwest of the Indian subcontinent.

We do, on the other hand, find numerous exact parallels to the Śākta terminology of the HM from within the Tamil Śaiva canon itself, suggesting that we need not look as far afield for their origin as Shulman has contended. In particular, the Tirumantiram, which notoriously preserves numerous remnants of a protoŚrīvidyā esotericism that seems to originate in the Kashmiri Śākta-Śaiva traditions exported to the South, repeatedly invokes the set of fifty-one letters of the alphabet as central elements of its various yantras and other esoteric imagery.

On several occasions, we also find reference to Śiva as embodying the foremost of these syllables, the letter a:

From the beginning she is the life of the fifty-one
Letters that constitute the alphabets.
The bejeweled one is with Śiva
In the cakra of the letters.^[9]

Chambers are twenty-five; each contains two letters;
Letters enclosed are fifty; the commencing letter is A;
Kṣa is the final letter; to the fifty is added Oṃ.
In all, fifty-one letters are inscribed in the chambers.^[10]

Although the Tirumantiram was most likely composed centuries before Parañcōti’s TVP,^[11] as the tenth book of the Tamil Śaiva canon, its imagery understandably maintained widespread popularity among Parañcōti’s contemporaries, even surfacing in publicly available works of Tamil Purāṇic literature. T

he trope of the fifty-one letters, for instance, makes an appearance in the Cuntara Pāṇṭiyam as well, entirely disconnected from any mention of the Caṅkam or its myth of origin:

We bow, to escape the ocean of existence, to the raft that is the pair of feet marked with the cakra
Of that very Cokkaṉ of the beautiful twelve-petaled lotus [dvādaśānta], of which the radiance is ripened
In the void that has come together as Śiva and Śakti, nāda [resonance] and bindu [drop],
Where the various lotuses—whose petals are fifty-one letters—unfold in a single syllable.

Given these striking parallels, the esoteric imagery that may seem to betray an extralocal origin for the Sanskrit HM in fact evokes the flavor of a distinctively Tamil Śākta-Śaivism, leaving little remaining doubt that the HM emerged not from any pan-Indic Sanskrit tradition but directly from the Tamil Śaiva textual culture of the early to mid-second millennium. Although preserving a number of originally Sanskrit features—from the inclusion of the letter kṣa in the alphabet to translocal yogic terminology such as nāda, bindu, and dvādaśānta—the imagery of the Tirumantiram had been adopted and reworked for centuries within the confines of the Tamil Śaiva tradition. Far from blending uneasily with Tamil Śaiva theology as Shulman would have it, the fifty-one letters play a central role in a subtle cosmology that had been accepted centuries earlier into the core repertoire of Tamil Śākta-Śaiva tradition, remaining in circulation through the seventeenth century and beyond.

This being the case, the frame narrative of the Tamil Caṅkam cycle simply cannot indicate an earlier, extra-Tamil origin for the HM. To the contrary, the fact that both the HM and Parañcōti’s TVP preserve such a memorable and idiosyncratic Purāṇic accretion in nearly identical form—one that is attested by no other known variant dating to the sixteenth century—establishes beyond doubt that the circumstances of their composition were directly linked, but within a much more delimited time frame than previously suspected. The twin texts appear to postdate the Cokkanātha Caritramu of the mid-sixteenth century, which closely resembles the later narrative structure but includes none of the Purāṇic accretions and preserves Nampi’s earlier episodes, which were forgotten by later audiences. All evidence considered, the HM was most likely re-Sanskritized directly from Parañcōti’s fabulously successful TVP shortly after its composition in response to demands for a Sanskrit original, although it remains possible that the Sanskrit Purāṇic version was “found”—that is, commissioned—and employed as a model for Parañcōti’s work. In any case, it is beyond a doubt that the Sanskrit HM never circulated in south Indian literary venues before Parañcōti’s TVP had substantially influenced the public culture of Madurai and the temple of Mīnākṣī and Sundareśvara.

Some decades later, however, Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, luminary of the Sanskrit literary society of Madurai, had personally gained access to the HM, a fact that can be gleaned through a careful reading of his own rendition of the “Sacred Games” as a Sanskrit mahākāvya, his Śivalīlārṇava. In the course of the Caṅkam cycle of episodes, after the goddess Sarasvatī had taken incarnation as the forty-eight Caṅkam poets in Madurai, the current Pandian ruler, Campaka Pāṇḍya (so named for his well-known preference for the fragrance of campaka flowers), had encountered a troubling dilemma. During the course of an intimate evening with his newly wed queen, Campaka Pāṇḍya discovered that her hair was endowed with a rather distinctive fragrance and began to contemplate its origin. The king was so troubled by his uncertainty that he promptly announced a prize of a purse of gold coins for any poet who could produce a compelling and eloquent verse explaining whether or not a woman’s hair can produce such a fragrance without the presence of flowers or artificial perfumes.

The prize-winning verse, which Śiva himself composed and entrusted to a young Brahmin bachelor named Tarumi, was widely understood from the earliest attestations of the Caṅkam narratives to be a genuine Caṅkamperiod verse preserved in one of the anthologies, the Kuṟuntokai:

O bee with your hidden wings, you have lived a life in search of honey.
So tell me truly from what you have seen.
Among all the flowers you know, is there one that smells more sweet
Than the hair of this woman with her peacock gait and close-set teeth And ancient eternal love?^[12]

In the course of adapting this episode, the necessity naturally arose for both Nīlakaṇṭha and the author of the HM to translate this verse into Sanskrit, preserving in the process a distinct linguistic texture from the surrounding narration.

Beyond any possible coincidence, however, both the HM and the Śivalīlārṇava employ precisely the same verse,^[13] in āryā meter, as a translation for the Tamil of the second stanza of the Kuṟuntokai:

O bee, you know the fragrances of flowers. Tell me truly today:
What fragrance can compare with the fragrance in the locks of a noble woman’s hair?^[14]

Nīlakaṇṭha’s Śivalīlārṇava (ca. 1625–1650), then, provides a definitive terminus ante quem for the twin canonical renderings of the “Sacred Games,” the HM and Parañcōti’s TVP, which as a conjoined pair may have been composed a mere decade or two before. From a strictly literary historical standpoint, this exercise in dating may appear somewhat inconsequential. From the standpoint of political history, however, the idea that the publicly acclaimed versions of the “Sacred Games” should have originated during this particular period demands a consideration of the narrative’s role in Nāyaka statecraft and in the city of Madurai, a cultural capital rapidly transforming under the influence of the Madurai Nāyaka regime. Following the reign of Viśvanātha Nāyaka (1529–1564), who by the end of his career had achieved de facto independence from the declining Vijayanagara Empire, the religio-political landscape of Madurai took on a newfound importance for the agenda of the Madurai Nāyakas, who may well have found it advantageous to highlight the rich cultural legacy of the ancient Pandian capital at the heart of their kingdom. Given the political, economic, and cultural significance of the south Indian temple complex during this period, the cultural renaissance instituted by the successors of Viśvanātha Nāyaka naturally began with an expansion of the most influential regional temples—particularly the Mīnākṣī-Sundareśvara Temple, the geographical and cultural center of Madurai.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

The earliest citations of the Hālāsya Māhātmya of which I am aware (aside from Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita’s replication of one of its verses, discussed below), occur in the Varṇāśramacandrikā, a late seventeenth-century theological treatise in Sanskrit on the role of caste in the selection of preceptors in the Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta tradition. See below for a discussion of this work.

[2]:

In the single preliminary Telugu-language study of the Cokkanātha Caritramu available today, Raju insists mechanically, providing no evidence or argument, that Tiruvēṅgaḷakavi has simply elided these episodes from his otherwise direct “translation” of the Hālāsya Māhātmya.

[3]:

In Tamil grammatical theory, consonants (mey) are said to attain movement (iyakkam) through the vowels (uyir, from the same root as the verbal participle uyttiṭum used in this verse), particularly the first vowel, the short a: “meyyiṉ iyakkam akaramoṭu civaṇum” Tolkāppiyam 2.13. Hence, this verse homologizes Śiva’s authority over the Caṅkam poets and the city of Madurai with the power of the vowels to enliven the consonants. Ālavāy is another name for Madurai.

[4]:

Parañcōti, TVP 51.8–10: ūṉiṭa rakaṉṟō yuṉṉā ruyirttuṇai yāvē ṉinta / māṉiṭa yōṉip paṭṭu mayaṅkukō veṉṉa vaṇṭu / tēṉiṭai yaḻunti vētañ ceppumveṇ kamalac celvi / tāṉiṭa rakala nōkkic caturmukat talaivaṉ cāṟṟum. mukiḻtaru mulainiṉ meyyā mutaleḻut taimbat toṉṟiṟ / ṟikaḻtaru mākā rāti hākāra mīṟāc ceppip / pukaḻtaru nāṟpat teṭṭu nāṟpatteṇ pulava rāki akaḻtaru kaṭalcūḻ ñālat tavatarit tiṭuva vāka. attaku varuṇa mellā mēṟiniṉ ṟavaṟṟa vaṟṟiṉ / meyttaku taṉmai yeyti vēṟuvē ṟiyakkan tōṉṟa uyttiṭu makārattiṟku mutaṉmaiyā yoḻuku nātar / muttami ḻāla vāyema mutalvaram muṟaiyāṉ maṉṉō. tāmoru pulava rākit tiruvurut tarittuc caṅka / māmaṇip pīṭat tēṟi vaikiyē nāṟpat toṉpa / tāmava rāki yuṇṇiṉ ṟavaravark kaṟivu tōṟṟi / yēmuṟap pulamai kāppā reṉṟṟaṉaṉ kamalap puttēḷ.

[5]:

HM 57.13–17: atha vāgvādinī bhītā bhartuḥ pādāmbujadvayaṃ | natvā spṛṣṭvā ca pāṇibhyāṃ prārthayāmāsa taṃ tadā || mayā cājñānavaśataḥ kṛtaṃ sarvaṃ ca bhartsanam | kṣamasva karuṇāsindho kaṭākṣeṇa vilokya mām || punaḥ punar iti brāhmyā prārthito ‘haṃ savāhanaḥ | pratiśāpaṃ dadau tasyai bhāratyai cānukampayā || tvadaṅgasambhavā varṇā ādisāntāś ca vāṅmayāḥ | janiṣyanti mitho bhinnair ākāraiḥ sudhiyo bhuvi || hakārarūpī bhagavān sarvavyāpī sadāśivaḥ | teṣāṃ ca sudhiyāṃ madhye ‘bhavatv ekaḥ kavīśvaraḥ | āhatyaikonapancāśat saṅghinaḥ śatkavīśvarāḥ ||

[6]:

If anything, the ambiguity regarding the total number of letters would suggest a later provenance for the HM. While the Tirumantiram (see below) unambiguously accepts a total of fifty-one letters, Parañcōti vacillates uncertainly between forty-nine and fifty-one, whereas the HM settles squarely on forty-nine.

[7]:

Shulman localizes the term vidyāpīṭha within a “northern” or “north-west” Śaiva tradition on the basis of a brief allusion to Sanderson’s (1988) “Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions.” In fact, Sanderson’s original point with regard to this term was to distinguish two subsets of the scriptural corpus of the early Bhairava Tantras, the mantrapīṭha and vidyāpīṭha. (Note that the term vidyāpīṭha discussed by Sanderson does not refer to a “seat” or “plank” such as occurs in the HM. See Sanderson [1988, 668–670]). Nevertheless, were we to posit a line of influence from the early Bhairava Tantras extending through the HM, we would be left with an entire millennium of intervening textual history to account for, thus arriving at no useful information concerning the more proximate origins of the HM.

[8]:

HM 1.16: navaratnamayaṃ pīṭhaṃ navaśaktidhruvaṃ mahat | tanmadhye rājate liṅgaṃ śivasya paramātmanaḥ ||

[9]:

Tirumantiram, 4:1219.

[10]:

Tirumantiram, 4:924.

[11]:

The traditional dating of the Tirumantiram, extending back as far as the fifth to seventh century c.e., while accepted by Brooks and some others, is historically inconceivable and incoherent outside of a Tamil nationalist agenda. See Goodall (2004, xxix). A date of the twelfth or thirteenth century is far more plausible. On the transmission of Śaiva and Śākta traditions from Kashmir to the Tamil country in the early second millennium, especially with regard to the Kālī Krama, an allied Śākta school, see Cox (2006).

[12]:

Kuruntokai, trans. M. Shanmugam Pillai and David E. Ludden, 2.

[13]:

The Sanskrit translation runs as follows: jānāsi puṣpagandhān bhramara tvaṃ brūhi tattvato me ‘dya | devyāḥ keśakalāpe tulyo gandhena kiṃ gandhaḥ || In fact, both versions do succeed in preserving a sense of the distinct texture of the Tamil verse, given that the surrounding chapter of the HM is written entirely in anuṣṭubh, and this is the sole āryā verse in the twentieth canto of the Śivalīlārṇava.

[14]:

ŚLA 20.46; HM 58.32.