Who is Andal?

(After reading the “Romance of Andal” by Sri J. Parthasarathy in the June issue of the ‘Triveni’, C. R. wrote the following to us in the course of a letter. As the interpretation offered by C. R. is not widely known, we are publishing it with his kind permission.

C. R., however claims no originality–and wishes it to be known that an “esteemed friend” brought this possible interpretation to his notice–Associate Editor, Triveni.)

Andal was not any real girl or foster-daughter of Perialwar. It was a creation of his poetic mind and he wrote verses as if they were spoken by this child of his imagination. Perialwar modified the usual mode of Bhakta poetry in which religious experiences are cast in the figure of a love-sick girl’s anguish. We are all familiar with this rather common trick in which the saint speaks the language of a love-lorn maid. Perialwar varied this by creating a ‘daughter’ who was drawn to the great Sweet-heart and was absorbed by Him. The enlightened self of the man on whom falls Divine Grace is the ‘daughter’ whom he finds and brings up with care and affection. She is at first shy and secretive (as people generally are with their first religious experiences). That is the legend of the wearing of the garland in private. The world never approves of desertion from social work. Marrying the Eternal Bridegroom is desertion of the world. All Bhaktas enjoy the ecstacy of the love-passion so thoroughly that they would fain continue in that state rather than reach realisation and be absorbed. This is the ‘bereavement’ when Andal joins her Lord. The person loses his individual dynamic joy when samadhi is reached. The critical faculty struggles against the intuition grace that takes one to God. Perialwar made Andal for the latter and reserved himself as ‘father’ to symbolise the doubts and the griefs of the former.

The literature attributed to Andal is thus probably just Perialwar’s–a chapter corresponding to the Lover’s episodes in the other saints’ compositions. But so effective and popular was this Andal chapter that she became in tradition a real person and an additional saint. A figure of poetry was vitalised into a separate legend–so effectively that perhaps now this sort of interpretation would be put down as heresy. As if it were more pious to keep an additional saint going than to make Perialwar both himself and his daughter!