The Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam in Seventeenth-century Madurai

[Full title: From Text to Public Religious Culture: The Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam in Seventeenth-century Madurai]

In the introduction to his edition of the Cokkanātar Ulā, U. Ve. Caminataiyar, father of the modern renaissance in Tamil literary studies, recounts a popular anecdote concerning how the text’s author, Purāṇa Tirumalainātar, came to receive his rather peculiar nom de plume.^[1] Far better known for his other surviving composition, the Citampara Purāṇam, Tirumalainātar is said to have been petitioned by the elders and devotees of the Cidambaram Śaiva community to translate the surviving Sanskrit scriptural canon recounting the sacred history of Cidambaram into Tamil. Not having access to a suitable Sanskrit original, our would-be translator set off for the mountain country (malaināṭu), where he discovered a single, incomplete manuscript of the Sanskrit Cidambara Purāṇa and proceeded to translate the extant portion into the form of an equivalent Tamil talapurāṇam. Although Tirumalainātar remained grievously disappointed at being unable to locate the entire Sanskrit original, the temple priests were so gratified by his efforts and the quality of his final product that they appended the prefix “Purāṇa” to his title in commemoration of the Citampara Purāṇam.

While we sadly lack any documentary evidence to confirm that sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Tamil poets actively sought out Sanskrit manuscripts on which to anchor the authority of their Tamil compositions, more recent accounts confirm that such was common practice in the nineteenth century.

For instance, a similar anecdote recorded by U. Ve. Caminataiyar outlines the process by which his own teacher, Minatcicuntara Pillai, renowned scholar of Tamil literature, set out to produce a Tamil talapurāṇam of Kumbakonam at the request of local monastic authorities:

At that time Civakurunātapiḷḷai, who was the taḥṣīldār [collector] in Kumpakoṇam, and other Śaiva dignitaries thought, “Let us ask this master poet to compose the purāṇa of Kumpakoṇam in Tamil verse.” At their request, he [Tiricirapuram Mīṉāṭcīcuntaram Piḷḷai] came to Kumpakoṇam from Tiruvāvaṭutuṟai in 1865 and took up residence with his retinue in the building of the Tiruvāvaṭutuṟai mutt in Peṭṭai Street. He first had the Kumpakoṇam purāṇa translated from Sanskrit into Tamil prose; in this he was aided by Maṇṭapam Nārāyaṇa Cāstirikaḷ Mutaliyār, a scholar of the Caṅkarācāriyar Mutt. Afterward he began to compose the purāṇa in verse form. He would compose the verses orally, and from time to time one of his pupils, Tirumaṅkalakkuṭi Ceṣaiyaṅkār, would write them down. Short parts of the purāṇa used to be prepared each day in the morning and given their first formal recitation in the afternoon in the maṇḍapa in the front of the shrine of Ādikumbheśvara [Śiva at Kumpakoṇam]. Many came to take pleasure in the recitation....

When the araṅkeṟṟam [debut] of the Kumpakoṇam purāṇa was completed, the dignitaries of that city gave him a shawl, a silk upper garment, [other] garments and gifts, and two thousand rupees collected from the public. They had the manuscript of the purāṇa mounted upon an elephant and taken around the town instate. Then several of the dignitaries purchased and donated a covered palanquin, made Piḷḷai sit in it, and carried it themselves for some distance. Thus they demonstrated the love they felt for the Tamil language and the custom of olden times.^[2]

What is the significance, then, of Minatcicuntara Pillai’s story to our understanding of public religious culture in seventeenth-century Madurai? What we witness in this vignette is nothing less than the creation of public canon, narrated from the perspective of onlookers who witnessed the debut of his Tamil Purāṇam and accepted its legends as an authoritative précis of Kumbakonam’s sacred legacy. For Pillai as well as for the seventeenth-century Parañcōti, the birth of a talapurāṇam was a social affair, imbricated with the monastic and temple institutions where the text was composed, debuted before a public audience, and commemorated by local elites with the bestowing of ritual honors. It is a process that takes place in time and space, fusing new meaning onto the sites it commemorates, which become legible for future generations of devotees. Space itself, in temple and monastic complexes, becomes entextualized with the emergent public canon—what previous generations of scholars have described as “sacred space.” And yet, this sacred space is anything but the hermetically sealed “sacred,” set apart from the phenomenal experience of the mundane realm. It remains, rather, a public space—a site for the reproduction of public religious culture, available for response, reenactment, and contestation.

Indeed, religious spaces across the Tamil country were in the midst of a radical reentextualization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the materiality of religious sites itself was transformed through massive temple-building campaigns, and the newly refurbished temple complexes were indexed with fresh mythological narratives. Succinctly, we witness a remarkable upsurge both in the production and renovation of Hindu temples and in the composition of talapurāṇams in Tamil to invest them with canonical meaning. In excavating the history of the talapurāṇam genre, David Shulman (1976) notes that the vast majority of these texts lack the pedigree of the Tamil classics but were composed, primarily, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the very moment when the Nāyaka regents of the Tamil country were renewing their alliance with sacerdotal power by endowing new temple building projects at the heart of their domains. The Madurai Mīnākṣī-Sundareśvara Temple is no exception: after the succession of Viśvanātha Nāyaka to the throne of Madurai in the mid-sixteenth century, the early generations of Nāyaka rulers set to remapping the sacred landscape at the center of Madurai, transforming the architectural visage of the temple with the addition of new temple towers (gopurams) and pavilions (maṇḍapams), but imprinting it with signifiers of an entirely new mythology: namely, the sixty-four “Sacred Games of Śiva” in Madurai.

Broadly speaking, the expansion of the Mīnākṣī-Sundareśvara Temple under the Madurai Nāyakas took place in three principal phases.^[3] Between 1570 and 1600, the temple attained its present shape with the construction of the external wall and four gopurams of the outermost third prākāra along with the four gopurams of the second prākāra. Subsequently, the early decades of the seventeenth century witnessed further accretions, such as the Thousand-Pillared Pavilion (Āyirakkāl Maṇṭapam). The remaining structural innovations that grace the temple today were commissioned during the reign of Tirumalai Nāyaka (1623–1659), whose efforts earned him a reputation as the chief architect behind the entire program of temple expansion. Tirumalai Nāyaka’s innovations include the Putu Maṇṭapam, or “New Maṇḍapa,” an external festival pavilion adjacent to the eastern side of the temple complex, and the towering Rāya Gōpuram, which although never completed was intended to upstage all similar temple gopurams across the southern half of the subcontinent.

The early Nāyakas did not restrict themselves, however, to expanding the physical edifice of the temple complex. Beginning around the early seventeenth century—that is, during the latter two phases of temple renovation—the Madurai Nāyakas began to enrich the symbolic face of the Mīnākṣī-Sundareśvara Temple as well with sculptural and pictorial representations drawn from unprecedented literary sources, particularly the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam.^[4] In fact, no such image can be reliably dated to prior phases of temple construction.^[5] In short, the early to mid-seventeenth century witnessed an explosion of interest in graphic as well as performative portrayals of the “Sacred Games” throughout the Madurai temple complex. Sculptural depictions of four of the games were displayed in the early seventeenth-century Āyirakkāl Maṇṭapam, and six in Tirumalai Nāyaka’s Putu Maṇṭapam shortly thereafter. The seventeenth century also witnessed the first complete sequence of mural paintings—a genre of representation popular in Nāyaka-period temple art—of all sixty-four sacred games, displayed quite prominently alongside the Golden Lotus Tank (poṟṟāmaraik-kuḷam) in front of the shrine of Mīnākṣī, the ritual heart of the temple. Moreover, an intriguing detail of the “Sacred Games” statuary reveals that the temple improvements took place simultaneously with, rather than subsequent to, the codification of the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam itself. In both the Āyirakkāl Maṇṭapam and the Putu Maṇṭapam, a statue appears depicting a game in which Śiva as a tiger feeds a deer, a legend that appears in early versions of the “Sacred Games” but which has been elided in Parañcōti’s TVP and the Hālāsya Māhātmya. The publicization of the “Sacred Games,” in short, was part and parcel of its canonization; it is very likely that Parañcōti composed his masterpiece while the statues were being erected, or afterward, and his work certainly had not been fully accepted as canon by the time of the construction of the Putu Maṇṭapam around 1630.

Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, as the TVP began to enter the visual landscape of the Madurai temple, Tirumalai Nāyaka instituted a series of calendrical festivals showcasing several of the “Sacred Games” in public performance. In terms of the codification of public religious culture, however, Tirumalai Nāyaka’s most influential innovation was the Putu Maṇṭapam itself, designed to host many of the temple’s festivals outside of the temple walls, externalizing a previously internal, delimited space that may not have been physically accessible to residents of Madurai in numerous caste communities. Indeed, these new calendrical festivals captured the attention of the temple’s ritual officiants when describing the contributions of Tirumalai Nāyaka to the Madurai temple complex.

The Stāṉikarvaralāṟu, one of our most detailed sources of the temple’s history, chronicles the changing ritual duties within various factions of the temple priesthood over the centuries and, in the process, draws particular attention to the new centrality accorded to the performances of the sacred games under the leadership of Tirumalai Nāyaka:

Lord Tirumalai Nāyaka, having great devotion to Mīnākṣī and Sundareśvara, on a day in which the goddess became pleased, established an endowment under the arbitration of Ayya Dīkṣita, instructing that the sacred games be conducted in the manner established by the Purāṇas at the hands of the temple priests as follows: for Sadāśiva Bhaṭṭa, the Game of Chopping the Body, the Selling of Bangles, Carrying Earth for Sweetmeat; and for Kulaśekhara Bhaṭṭa, the Bestowing of the Purse [of gold coins], the Game of Turning Horses into Foxes,^[6] the Raising up of the Elephant; and several other games divided evenly. Having granted an endowment ordering that several games be accomplished at the hands of the subordinates, he had them conducted such that happiness would arise at witnessing the spectacle.^[7]

Spectacle, in fact, is just what the “Sacred Games” had become by the midseventeenth century, as visual and performative media rendered the narratives of Śiva’s miraculous exploits immediately accessible to a diverse and even nonliterate public. Among the numerous games reenacted in public ceremonies, however, it was the Sacred Marriage of Śiva and Mīnākṣī that would leave the most visible imprint on Madurai’s public religious culture. Tirumalai Nāyaka’s most radical adjustment to the festival calendar was, undoubtedly, to unite the wedding of Madurai’s divine couple with the overwhelmingly popular Cittirai Festival—in which the city’s resident Vaiṣṇava deity, Aḻakar, made his annual procession to the river Vaikai, pausing in his journey to bestow temple honors on the dominant caste groups of the Madurai region. According to prior legend, Aḻakar had journeyed from his temple home several miles outside of town to the middle of the Vaikai River for the express purpose of liberating the sage Muṇḍaka from a curse that entrapped him in the body of a frog, an act of grace that Madurai’s Vaiṣṇava residents had previously commemorated each year in the month of Cittirai (April/May). When the annual Cittirai Festival was conjoined with the Sacred Marriage, Viṣṇu as Aḻakar, whom the “Sacred Games” represented as the brother of Mīnākṣī, was understood to be entrusted with the task of performing the marriage rites for Śiva and his bride. As local legend has it, Aḻakar reaches the center of the river Vaikai only to realize that the marriage has already taken place without him, and in retaliation he grudgingly returns to his temple without setting eyes upon the divine couple, pausing along the way to spend the night with his paramour, a Muslim courtesan.

By re-creating the Cittirai Festival, then, Tirumalai Nāyaka managed to draw unprecedented attention to the legend that best encapsulates the royal heritage of Madurai, whose kings are the descendants of Śiva and Mīnākṣī themselves. Simultaneously, he positioned Madurai’s most popular religious festival as a virtually unprecedented site for social and religious integration, creating a festival space that accommodated the interests of diverse caste communities, from Smārta Brahmins to the Kaḷḷar devotees of Lord Aḻakar, and blended the theologies of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava devotionalism. Other favorites among the sixty-four games must have also quickly entered the repertoire of Madurai’s residents, as by and large the same games depicted in temple statuary—publicly available year round as sites of memory—were dramatized yearly with festival processions and even mimetic reenactments of Śiva’s divine interventions.^[8] Indeed, each of the minor festivals enacting Śiva’s sacred games, managed by representatives of rival priestly families of the Madurai temple, provided substantive incentive among elite families to compete for the attention of a wider public.

FIGURE 4. A temple priest prepares a festival image to commemorate the sacred game in which Śiva grants liberation to a crane.

Facilitated by Tirumalai Nāyaka’s royal interventions, then, an increasingly popular literary motif rapidly achieved widespread circulation far beyond the literary domain. That the TVP legends did, in fact, circulate is evident from the rapidity with which sequences of the sacred games began to appear in temple mural paintings across the Tamil region, demonstrating the broad appeal the narratives had achieved even outside of their domain of immediate reference, Madurai, the city in which the miracles were originally enacted.^[9] Similar mural sequences, for instance, mirroring the sixty-four panels emblazoned on the Madurai temple outside the Golden Lotus Tank, had appeared in the Naṭarāja Temple of Cidambaram by the late seventeenth century and in the Bṛhadīśvara Temple in Tanjavur by the eighteenth century. Likewise, the “Sacred Games” soon became a common fixture of the material culture of religion in Madurai and beyond, replicated on temple carts across the region, festival textiles for chariots (tērcilai), and miniature paintings. Succinctly, the “Sacred Games of Śiva” were legible, for the majority of Madurai’s seventeenth-century residents, not from the text of the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam but from the material culture of the Mīnākṣī-Sundareśvara Temple and from participation in the collective reenactments of the legends in temple festivals. In the words of Kim Knott (2005, 43) on the production of religious space, the enactment of the “Sacred Games” does not “take place,” but “makes place,” encoding the temple’s visual facade with religious significance proper to multiple distinct communities.

What, then, does religious space—what the classical history of religions has referred to as “sacred space”—have to do with public religious culture, with the religious values or frames of reference cultivated by individuals from diverse social and sectarian backgrounds across the city of Madurai? Looking at the temple as public space—a space in which publics move, a space in which publics are created—is a crucial step in transcending both Western and modernist presuppositions that would unproblematically equate religion with the private sphere, the internal domain of affect or belief. Discounting the truly interior spaces of ritual worship, such as the garbhagṛhas, or inner “wombs” of the temple accessible only to trained priests, the temple pavilions (maṇḍapas) in which festivals are performed serve as physical sites for public gatherings and enactments of shared religious sensibilities. A temple in south India, it must be remembered, is constantly bustling with crowds in motion. Indeed, much of the physical space of the Madurai temple, as with the majority of sacred sites across south Asia, incorporates what the Western imagination has understood as nonreligious public space, from shopping complexes to casual gatherings for social conversation. As a result, the images inscribed on such a space, whether murals or statuary, create an ideal readership of visual media by cultivating a collective public frame of reference. Such images, in other words, are nothing less than social agents, exerting an active influence on the human agents who move through spaces inflected by their signifying capacity.^[10]

To understand how new religious concepts and values come to be publicly accessible, or come to constitute a cornerstone of a particular public culture, then, depends fundamentally on theorizing the public as inhabiting a particular space, constituted in no small part by the visual signifiers that inhabit that space. Space, in its very materiality, as recent theorists have recognized, is by its very nature a socially imbricated category. Indeed, the materialist turn in religious studies and the humanities at large has become sensitive to space not simply as the Kantian precondition for human cognition but as a site for the signification and contestation of cultural values. From the vantage point of early seventeenth-century Madurai, space—both within the temple and throughout the city at large—was in the process of being overlaid with new conceptual resonance. With the visual inscription of the “Sacred Games of Śiva” in temple art and architecture, devotees of Mīnākṣī who traversed the temple halls and circumambulated the Golden Lotus Tank were now confronted with contested claims as to the significance of their spatial practice—that is, their lived engagement with socially significant spaces. But at this particular juncture in history, the “Sacred Games” did not yet fully belong to what Henri Lefebvre (1992, 33) would call “representations of space”—that is, the normative and fully articulated conventions for how temple space ought to be interpreted. To the contrary, the public space of the Madurai temple complex can best be characterized as “representational space”—a lived space of public contestation, capable of being contested by counterhegemonic interest groups who aim to overlay shared space with localized layers of meaning.

By the late seventeenth century, the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal Purāṇam had become a household name, and yet the legends were able to permeate the religious ecology of Madurai without disrupting its delicate balance—that is, by appealing to the diverse religious publics of Madurai, whether Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava, whether Smārta, Vēḷāḷa, or Kaḷḷar. The temple itself, then, did not homogenize the publics of Madurai, separated as they were by the boundaries of caste, language, and sect, but facilitated the overlaying and intersection of parallel public spheres. Its explosion into literary fashion, as we have seen, took place across multiple literary publics, facilitated by media of performance and patronage centered on the temple site itself. Likewise, its departure from the textual form and entry into public culture was a process mediated by a transference of shared meaning from the written word to visual and performative text. What took place during this period in Madurai was not merely the birth of a narrative, or even the birth of a religious canon, but the entextualization of public space. The “Sacred Games of Śiva” were not simply encoded in the memory of a collective populace but were canonized in physical public space, accessible in that they can be read, reinterpreted, and reenacted over time. The temple became not a space outside of time but a nexus for the temporal and spatial encoding of meaning, a space in which people moved through and performed meaning—a spatial nexus for the overlaying of multiple parallel publics.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

See Cokkanātar Ulā, xiii (nūlāciriyar varalāṟu). Unfortunately, U. Ve. Caminataiyar does not cite a source for this anecdote, but as his early employment—as well as that of his chief instructor in Tamil literature, Minatcicuntara Pillai—was carried out through the facilities of the Tamil Śaiva maṭam s, the narrative was likely passed down orally. See Cutler (2003) for the institutional context of Tamil literary education in the nineteenth century.

[2]:

Cited in Shulman (1980, 37–38).

[3]:

Branfoot (2000).

[4]:

See Jeyechandrun (1985) for a thorough treatment of the phases of temple construction and approximate dates of all temple improvements from the second Pandian empire onward. Although Jeyechandrun’s analysis deserves critical scrutiny in places, his encyclopedic work is foundational to our understanding of the history of the MīnākṣīSundareśvara temple and its role in the changing cultural and political landscape of Madurai over the centuries.

[5]:

Jeyechandrun (1985) notes a sequence of stucco figures depicting forty-seven of the sixty-four sacred games, currently located around the outer compound wall of the Sundareśvara shrine. While he dates these figures rather boldly to the twelfth or thirteenth centuries purely on the basis of the date of the Sundareśvara shrine itself, he acknowledges that they appear to have undergone substantial renovation. Thus the physical characteristics of the figures can furnish no concrete evidence in support of such an early date, nor do we have any grounds for affirming that these figures were original to the Sundareśvara shrine.

[6]:

Among the sixty-four games, one concerns the role of the saint Māṇikkavācakar in transforming foxes into horses, and another concerns the transformation of the horses back into foxes.

[7]:

Stāṉikarvaralāṟu, pgs. 270–271: karttākkaḷ tirumalaiccavuriyayyar avarkaḷ mīṉāṭcī cuntarēcuvararkaḷiṭattil nirambavum paktiyuṇṭāki ammaṉ piracaṉṉam āki viḷaiyāṭukiṟa nāḷaiyil, ayyar tīṭcitar cāmācikattil purāṇa cittamāy irukkiṟa tiruviḷaiyāṭalai stāṉītarkaḷ mūlamāy naṭappivikkac collik kaṭṭaḷaiyiṭṭatāvatu: catācivappaṭṭarkku aṅkam veṭṭukiṟa līlaiyum, vaḷaiyal viṟpatum piṭṭukku maṇ cumappatum kulacēkarappaṭṭarkku poṟkiḻiyaṟuppatum, kutirai kayiṟu mārukiṟa tiruviḷaiyāṭalum yāṉaiyēṟṟamum, maṟṟa līlaikaḷ ciṟṟutu pērpātiyākavum; ciritu līlaikaḷ parijanaṅkaḷaikkoṇṭu ceytuvarac colliyum kaṭṭaḷaiyiṭṭum kaṇkāṭcikaḷ pārttuc cantōṣamāyintappaṭi naṭantuvarukiṟatu.

[8]:

The most popular of the sacred games, depicted in both statuary and festival performance, include the following: Taṭātakaip pirāṭṭiyār (Incarnation of Taṭātakai), Tirumaṇam (Sacred marriage), Kallāṉaikkuk karumparuttiyatu (Feeding the stone elephant sugarcane), Aṅkam veṭṭiṉatu (Cutting the limbs [of Cittaṉ]), Karikkuruvikku upatēcam ceytatu (Teaching the blackbird), Naripariyākkiyatu (Foxes become horses), Maṇcumantatu (Carrying earth [in exchange for sweetmeats]), and Camaṇaraik kaḻuvēṟṟiyatu (Mounting the Jains on stakes), Parañcōti, nos. 4, 5, 21, 27, 47, 59, 61, and 63, respectively.

[9]:

Starting in the late seventeenth century and gaining momentum throughout the eighteenth century, numerous major as well as minor temple complexes throughout the Tamil region begin to display individual and complete-sequence mural paintings and sculptural reliefs of the “Sacred Games.” The dissertation research of Amy Ruth Holt (2007) documents a series of sculptural images of the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal legends at the Naṭarāja temple in Cidambaram, the construction style and iconography of which, she contends, would date to the mid-seventeenth century (see 151–155). A complete series of Tiruviḷaiyāṭal murals now adorns the outer wall of the Bṛhadīśvara temple in Tanjavur; local authorities speculate the series dated to the reign of Serfoji II. A study by Jean Deloche (2011) documents a number of Tiruviḷaiyāṭal mural panels at the Nārumpūnātacāmi temple in Tiruppudaimarudur, Tirunelveli district. Three Śaiva temples from the immediate vicinity of Madurai, in Tiruvappudaiyar, Tiruppuvanam, and Tiruvideham, which are typically thought to date from the Nāyaka period, contain Tiruviḷaiyāṭal mural paintings. In addition, dissertation work of Anna Seastrand (2013) also documents the appearance of Tiruviḷaiyāṭal imagery at a number of temple sites.

Further evidence for the widespread popularity of the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal theme outside of Madurai includes other surviving examples of material culture from the period, including manuscript illuminations and book covers such as those preserved at the Tanjavur Maharaja Serfoji’s Sarasvati Mahal Library in Tanjavur (a similar series exists in the Government Museum in Chennai, although I have not been able to obtain photographs), temple chariot carvings dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Tamil region (Kalidos 1985, 1988a, 1988b), and chariot textiles with images of the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal episodes.

[10]:

The agency of images is perhaps most productively treated in the theoretical literature of New Materialism (e.g., Braidotti 1994), which presumes a monistic ontology that declines to differentiate the human as agent and the inanimate as object.