ANNE E.

MONIUS

LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST:

ŚAIVAS AND JAINS IN MEDIEVAL SOUTH INDIA

‘There is now and there has always been something about violence’.
Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty

‘Who does not admire a hero?’

Kampan, Irāmavatāram
¯

The stories of the sixty-three saints of the Hindu god Śiva told in the Tamil-
speaking corner of southeastern India are striking for their vivid depictions
of violence done in the name of love for the lord. In the twelfth-century
Tamil hagiographic text known as the Tirutton..tarpurān.am, ‘The Ancient
Strory of the Holy Servants’, or more simply, the Periyapurān.am, ‘The
Great Story’,1 limbs fly, blood flows, and bodies fall to the ground as
the saints or nāyanmār (literally ‘leaders’)2 express their profound devo-
tion to their god.¯ The child saint, Can.t.ēcurar, cuts off his father’s feet
(v. 1261); Kan.n.appar gouges out his own eye to heal the bleeding wound
on a Śiva image (v. 827). Cirutton.t.ar gleefully kills and cooks his son
¯ ascetic (vv. 3727–3730), while Kōtpuli
at the request of a visiting Śaiva .
slaughters his entire family – including an infant – for the crime of eating
rice reserved for Śiva in a time of great famine (vv. 4146–4148). Non-
believers are relieved of their tongues (vv. 4046–4047), wives are maimed
and disfigured (v. 4024), and the nāyanmār subject their own bodily
¯

Research for this project was generously funded by an American Council of Learned
Societies ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship and a Fulbright-
Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship.
1 The Periyapurānam has been published in a number of editions over the last century.
.
All references to the text in this essay refer to Cēkkilār (1999).
¯
2 The term nāyanmār (or, more precisely, the honorific singular nāyanār) is applied
¯ ¯
only to Śiva in the Periyapurān.am, not to his devotees. Nāyanār is first used to describe at
¯
least three of the most important saints in the Tamil Śaiva tradition only in the thirteenth
century, in an inscription dated to the tenth regnal year of the Cōla king, Rājendra III (1256
CE); see Vamadeva (1995: 3–4) and Nagaswamy (1989: 226). ¯

Journal of Indian Philosophy 32: 113–172, 2004.

© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
114 ANNE E. MONIUS

appendages to the sickle,3 the grinding stone,4 and the flame.5 Indeed, of
the sixty-three saints whose stories are told in the Periyapurān.am,6 roughly
one-third7 commit some heinous crime of violence as an expression of love
(Tamil anpu) for Śiva.
¯
The normative moral codes broken in each of these stories are among
the most sacredly held in Hindu culture, as fathers murder sons, sons maim
fathers, chaste wives suffer amputation, innocent babes are stuck down by
the sword, and the cherished ties of home and family are severed or trans-
formed forever. Unlike the lives of the later medieval saints of North India
narrated in such hagiographic texts as the Hindi Bhaktamāl studied by
Hawley (1987b), the violent ruptures wrought by the Tamil nāyanmār are
not always healed. Whereas the virtues of the Hindi-speaking saints ¯ find
a place in more conventional notions of dharma or ethics, and everything
often seems to turn out ‘all right’ in the end, many of the victims of the
Tamil saints’ violent impulses are emphatically not restored by Śiva.8 In
the complex of Hindu traditions often characterized, in the post-Gandhian
era, by firm commitments to ahiṁsā (literally ‘non-harming’) and vege-
tarianism, the violent love of Śiva’s Tamil-speaking saints stand quite apart
from other exemplars of Hindu bhakti or ‘devotion’.9

3 As in the story of Arivāttāyar, who, exhausted, drops his offerings intended for Śiva
..
and, in utter despair at having ruined the lord’s food, begins to saw at his neck with a sickle
(v. 923).
4 As in the story of Mūrtti, who, denied access to sandalwood by an evil Jain king,
begins to grind his own arm against a stone (vv. 992–993).
5 As in the story of Kanampullar, who burns his own hair in the temple lamps when he
.
can no longer afford anything else (v. 4066).
6 The Periyapurānam actually narrates the stories of seventy-one saints or ‘leaders’ of
.
the community; eight of these, however, are collective groups without much personality or
character, from ‘the brahmins who live in Tillai’ (tillai vāl antan.ar) to ‘those who depend
on [the lord’s] feet beyond [the Tamil region]’ (appālum at¯ ic cārntār).
.
7 There is, quite surprisingly, no scholarly agreement as to how many of the nāyanmār
¯
actually commit a violent act. Vamadeva (1995: 97–98) limits her analysis to violence
that relates directly to love (anpu) for Śiva and provides a list of only twenty acts of
¯
‘violent love’ in the Periyapurān.am; she also mentions six other acts of violence in the
Periyapurān.am, but does not include them in her analysis (pp. 30–31). Hudson (1989: 40,
note 9) outlines a typology of violence that includes twenty-four among the saints. Yocum
(1988: 7) adds several more incidents of violence, and details a list of thirty violent acts in
the Periyapurān.am.
8 A disproportionate number of these hapless victims are women; see discussion below.
9 Hardy (1995: 34), for example, cites a number of North Indian saints whose lives are
tinged with violence, from the story of a humble potter whose meditation on Vis.n.u is so
profound that he fails to notice his small son being crushed by the clay to the tale of the
wife of Tukārām ranting at Vis.n.u to provide her with necessary household items. Such
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 115

Indeed, the violence of the Periyapurān.am has been a source of contro-

versy and discomfort for Tamil-speaking Śaivas – no less scholars of
South Indian religious and literary history – for much of the past nine
hundred years. Despite the incorporation of the text in the daily Śaiva
devotional recitation known as the pañcapurān. am,10 despite the common
assumption among Śaivas that the Periyapurān. am presents a genuine
history of the great leaders of their community,11 and despite the great
frequency of lectures on and public readings from the text throughout
Tamilnadu today,12 Tamils have struggled to come to terms with the seem-
ingly grave moral breaches of their most revered religious figures. On the
one hand, a Marxist-oriented Śaiva religious leader such as Kunrakkut.i
¯¯
At.ikal.ār finds value in the service to temple and community championed
by saint Tirunāvukkaracar, also known affectionately in the tradition as
Appar or ‘father’ (Ryerson, 1983: 183–184). On the other hand, many
scholars from within the Tamil Śaiva community have noted the discomfort
modern Śaivas feel, particularly those ‘among the educated classes’, at
the Periyapurān. am’s ‘apparent . . . sacrific[ing of] moral principles’ in its
depiction of the nāyanmār ‘commit[ing] the vilest of crimes’ (Ponniah,
1952: 51). Others have ¯ attempted to weave the violence into a nationa-
list rhetoric of the ‘soldiers of Siva’ championing a nation-state without
tolerance for ‘soft-minded milksops . . . who, sooner or later, would cause
its spiritual death’ (Ramachandran, 1990: xx). Indeed, for a number of
scholars of South Indian religious history, the cruelty of the nāyanmār
finds chilling echoes in the violence perpetrated by the Tamil-speaking, ¯
and largely Śaiva, LTTE in modern Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan-born scholar
Vamadeva, for example, wonders whether the nāyanmār simply represent
one historical example of violence that is endemic¯to Tamil culture, with

narratives, however, although displaying a certain chutzpah toward the divine on the part
of the saint, lack the single-minded intensity to the nāyanmārs’ acts of violence.
¯
10 The pañcapurān am refers to five Tamil devotional texts
. from the canonical collection
known as the Tirumurai, recited at the end of pūjā to (worship of) Śiva, performed by the
¯
non-brahmin ōtuvar or temple singer. The first text is taken from the first seven bools of
poetic hymns known collectively as the Tēvāram, the second from a ninth-century hymn
attributed to the saint, Mān.ikkavācakar, and known as the Tiruvācakam, the third from the
Tiruvicaippā hymns found in the ninth canonical volume, the fourth from Cētanār’s Tirup-
pallān..tu in the same volume, and the fifth from the Periyapurān.am. For a brief discussion
of the use of Tamil canonical texts in the daily worship rites of the Kapālı̄śvarar temple in
Chennai, see Cutler (1987: 190–192).
11 Note, for example, Peterson’s (1994) comment that ‘the PP remains the standard
Tamil source for the lives of the Nāyanārs’ (p. 196).
12 While living in Chennai in 2001, ¯
I noted daily advertisements for lectures on the
Periyapurān.am in the local English- and Tamil-language daily newspapers, The Hindu and
Tı̄nattanti.
¯
116 ANNE E. MONIUS

the saints ‘just a link between . . . generations’ who express that horrifying
tendency differently (1995: v). Yocum likewise likens the ‘tough bhakti’
of the saints to ‘Rambo on the Kaveri’13 and claims that reading of the
atrocities committed by Tamil Tiger guerillas ‘has called to mind images
of the Periyapurān.am’ (1988: 7).
How is one to understand the violence perpetrated by the saints of Śiva
in the name of religious love for the lord? How can images of wives and
mothers maimed, of children killed, be understood as expressing compel-
ling religious values? This essay examines the ‘problem’ of violence in
the Periyapurān.am and argues that the seeming paradox of divine love
and human cruelty can fully be understood only by attending carefully
to the twelfth-century South Indian literary milieu in which the text
was composed. As van Kooij (1999) points out in his recent volume
on violence and non-violence in South Asian cultures, ‘violence is a
relative concept’ (p. 251), culturally constructed in historically particu-
larized ways. Gommans’ (1999) article, in the same volume, for example,
addresses the horror expressed by a young prince of seventeenth-century
Golkonda upon receiving a graphic Dutch painting of a battle and notes
the disjuncture between European and Indian perceptions of ‘the proper
arena in which the use of excessive violence was permitted’ (p. 288).
The Periyapurān.am, despite its controversial content, is remembered by
Tamil scholars as a great kāvya or ornate poetic work, as a hagiographical
treatise that is highly literary, carefully structured, its sentiments expressed
in nuanced and subtle forms. This essay argues that, given these literary
qualities of the text, the violence in the Periyapurān.am cannot be under-
stood apart from the literary culture in which it was composed, a literary
culture that had long sustained sophisticated debates and exchanges
among competing sectarian communities through the medium of narrative
literature.

1. THE TEXT

The Periyapurān.am, attributed to an author known as Cēkkilār, constitutes

the twelfth and final text of the Tirumurai, the canon ¯of the Tamil-
¯ the hymns of the three most
speaking Śaiva community that also includes:
prolific poets among the nāyanmār (Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar);
hymns of several other saints, ¯the most important of whom is the ninth-
century poet, Mān.ikkavācakar; and a rather esoteric philosophical text
13 A reference to the Kāveri River that flows through the heart of the modern state of
Tamilnadu.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 117

known as the Tirumantiram.14 As a text that represents Tamil Śaiva tradi-

tion ‘self-consciously reflecting upon itself’ (Peterson, 1983: 341), the
Periyapurān. am ‘truly completes’ (Peterson, 1983: 340) the canon, and,
in the modern era, has been published in a number of editions,15 retold
in children’s books and temple pamphlets, and even dramatized on film.16
Unfortunately, no tradition of commentary accompanies the text until the
modern period, leaving us with little by way of direct historical evidence
of pre-modern audience reception.
The Periyapurān.am itself reveals little of its author, Cēkkilār; dating
of the text and identification of its author have rested largely¯ on what
Cēkkilār has to say about his royal patron, one Anapāyan, and a fourteenth-
century ¯ narrative of Cēkkilār’s life attributed to the great
¯ philosopher and
¯
consolidator of the Tamil school of Śaivism known as the Śaiva Siddhānta,
Umāpati Civācāriyār. Umāpati’s Cēkkilārpurān.am (‘The Great Story of
¯
Cēkkilār’), also known as the Tirutton..tarpurān . avaralāru (‘The History of
the Tirutton..tarpurān.am’), identifies Cēkkilār as the ¯scion of a wealthy
¯
Vēl.ān or Vēl.āl.an (agricultural) family from ¯ Kunrattūr, a suburb of the
modern city of Chennai (vv. 11–13). While serving¯ ¯as minister to the Cōla
¯ ¯
king, Cēkkilār composed the Periyapurān.am, according to Umāpati, in ¯
¯
order to wean his royal patron away from an interest in the Tamil Jain
work known as the Cintāman.i (vv. 20–21).17 Upon its completion, the
Periyapurān. am was hailed as a fifth Veda, engraved on copper plates, and
placed at the feet of Śiva in the golden hall of the great temple at Citam-
param. Cēkkilār names his royal patron, Anapāyan, eleven times in the
¯
text of the Periyapurān ¯
. am, as the Cōl¯a king who covered in gold the roof
of Śiva’s temple at Citamparam (vv. 8, 1218), as a fearless king of right-
eous scepter (v. 22), as a great protector of his Tamil realm (v. 85), and as
the privileged inheritor of a glorious Cōla lineage (v. 1218). Although the
precise identity of Anapāyan has been a ¯matter of some scholarly debate, a
¯
consensus now exists that identifies Cēkkilār’s royal patron with the Cōla
monarch Kulōttuṅka II (1133–1150 CE) (Zvelebil, ¯ 1995: 131–132). ¯

14 For a discussion of the canonization of the Tamil Śaiva poetic corpus, see Peterson
(1989: 16–17) and Prentiss (1999: 143–144).
15 See Zvelebil (1995: 547–548) for a partial list of published editions and partial trans-
lations. Nambi Arooran (1977: 20–21) also provides a short history of the early printing of
the Periyapurān.am.
16 Film portrayals of the lives of individual nāyanār began with the release of
¯
‘Siruthonda Nayanar’ in 1935; see http://www.intamm.com/movies/movielist/movielist.
htm.
17 The full name of the extant Tamil text to which Umāpati refers is the Cı̄vakacintāmani,
.
‘Cı̄vakan, the Wish-Fulfilling Gem’. This aspect of Umāpati’s story will be taken up for
detailed ¯discussion below.
118 ANNE E. MONIUS

In his opening verses, Cēkkilār claims merely to expand upon the lives
of Śiva’s most devoted servants ¯ found in three earlier sources: (1) the
Tirutton..tattokai (‘Collection of Holy Servants’), attributed to the eighth-
century poet-saint Cuntaramūrtti (or simply Cuntarar), the first work to list
the saints of Śiva by name (vv. 47–48);18 (2) the Tirutton..tar Tiruvantāti
(‘Holy Verses in Antāti From about the Holy Servants’), attributed to
the tenth-century poet and anthologizer of the Śaiva canon, Nampi Ān.t.ār
Nampi (v. 49); and (3) the complete oral narration of the lives of the saints
given by the great sage, Upamanyu (v. 47), summarized briefly by Cēkkilār
in relation to Cuntarar in the previous twenty-three verses of the text and ¯
claimed as the source for the Periyapurān.am’s ‘expansion’ (viri) of the first
two texts. The Periyapurān.am, as discussed below, rather freely interprets
much of the sparse information provided by Cuntarar and Nampi Ān.t.ār
Nampi, and here claims the authority of Upamanyu to do so. Both the
allegiance to the Tirutton..tattokai and Upamanyu’s story of Cuntarar in
heaven before his rebirth on earth clearly signal Cuntarar to be the central
character in the Periyapurān.am text. After Upamanyu’s story and invoca-
tions to lord, land, king, and assembly of devotees, the Periyapurān.am
begins with the early life of Cuntarar, weaves significant episodes in his
life throughout the stories of other saints, and ends with Cuntarar’s ultimate
ascension to Śiva’s holy Mount Kailāsa. Cēkkilār follows Cuntarar’s list in
ordering his lives of the saints, and the remaining¯ eleven books of the text
are grouped according to the first line of each of Cuntarar’s stanzas. The
Periyapurān. am is, in this sense, primarily the story of Cuntarar, with the
remaining narratives carefully crafted around this central tale.
In addition to the texts that Cēkkilār cites as his primary sources, it is
clear that the Periyapurān.am, if the ¯twelfth-century dating can be taken
as reliable, was composed in a cultural milieu in which the poet-saints
of Śiva – particularly the first three, Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar –
were increasingly revered as beings worthy of veneration, their hymns
significant components of cycles of ritual worship in important temple
centers patronized by powerful Cōla kings. Epigraphical evidence attests
to the increasing importance of the ¯ recitation of the Tiruppatiyam, the
19
hymns of the first three saints, in Śaiva temples by the middle of the
ninth century; recitation of the hymns and worship of consecrated images
of the poets appear to have been formally instituted and regularized in
the great Br.hadı̄śvara temple at Tañcāvūr during the reign of Rājarāja
I (985–1014 CE) (Nagaswamy, 1989: 215–228). A ninth-century frieze

18 For a full translation of the hymn into English, see Peterson (1989: 331–336) and
Shulman (1990: 239–248).
19 Later known collectively as the Tēvāram.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 119

narrating the story of the hunter-devotee, Kan.n.appar, has been located

at Tirukkālukkunram (Lockwood, 1982: 95–96). The Amr.taghateśvara
¯
temple at Mēlaikkat ¯ ¯ ampūr, built or rebuilt during the reign of Kulōttuṅka I
.
(1070–1120 CE), depicts ‘scenes from the lives of the Tamil saints . . . in
bas-relief on the plinth’, including the stories of Kan.n.appar and Can.t.ēcurar
(Balasubrahmanyam, 1979: 123; see also Meister, 1983: 296–298). In
short, by the twelfth century (when the Periyapurān. am was composed),
worship of the saints of Śiva and recitation of the hymns of the poets
among them already constituted a significant element in Śaiva temple
practice.
After the mid-twelfth century and the appearance of Cēkkilār’s text,
however, worship of the sixty-three nāyanmār (both collectively ¯ and
¯
individually) and recitation of their poetry grows exponentially, as do
inscriptional references to both Cēkkilār and his text. According to
Rajamanickam (1964: 211–213), an inscription ¯ from the ninth year of
Rājādhirāja II’s reign (1166–1182 CE) refers to the public recitation of the
Periyapurān. am before the king during a major annual temple festival;20
during the reign of Kulōttuṅka III (1178–1218 CE), an inscription from
the Tañcāvūr district records an endowment for the worship of the three
Tēvāram poets and Cēkkilār (Nagaswamy, 1989: 227; Annual Report,
1952: 33, no. 239). The number ¯ of references to festivals celebrated in
honor of the saints also increases dramatically (Nagaswamy, 1989: 239–
246). The Airāvateśvara temple constructed at Tārācūram during the reign
of Kulōttuṅka II’s successor, Rājarāja II (1133–1150 CE), narrates the
stories of all sixty-three of the nāyanmār, seemingly in close accord with
¯
the text of the Periyapurān.am, in a series of friezes on the outermost wall
of the shrine.21 In the centuries following Cēkkilār, the stories of the sixty-
three saints are told and retold in Telugu (Somanātha, ¯ 1990) and Sanskrit
(Upamanyu, 1931), a tradition that continues to this day.
The Periyapurān. am is composed in the ‘most frequent meter of Tam[il]
medieval poetry’ (Zvelebil, 1995: 777), viruttam, and estimates of its
proper length range from 4253 quatrains22 to 4286.23 The text is divided

20 The text in the inscription is not called the Periyapurānam, but rather the Śrı̄ Purāna
. .
of one Āl.ut.aiya Nampi; Rajamanickam (1964) convincingly argues that the title refers
to the Periyapurān.am of Cēkkilār (pp. 211–213). For the full text of the inscription, see
South-Indian Inscriptions (1925:¯ 494).
21 For an exhaustive study of the Airāvateśvara temple and the Amman (goddess) temple
that stands alongside it, see l’Hernault, et al. (1987). ¯
22 As claimed by Umāpati (v. 53).
23 As in the edition of the Śaiva reformer, Ārumuka Nāvalar, roughly a century ago;
for a discussion of the discrepancies among various ¯ contemporary editions, see Vamadeva
(1995: 95).
120 ANNE E. MONIUS

into two parts or kān..tam and thirteen carukkam or chapters, with the
first and last addressing the life of Cuntarar and the middle eleven each
comprised of stories of five to eight individual saints. As a purān.a, the
Periyapurān. am is thus quite unique in its emphasis on human devotees
of the lord rather than on the deeds of the god himself, as is typical of
the earlier Sanskrit Mahāpurān. as. So distant is the text from the Sanskrit
genre, in fact, that Shulman (1980) claims that calling Cēkkilār’s work
a true purān.a is a ‘misnomer’, with the text assigned ‘to this¯ class [of
texts] only by virtue of [its] name’ (p. 29). Indeed, beyond issues of inter-
polation and genre, there exists little scholarly consensus on the literary
merits of the Periyapurān. am. For some it constitutes a ‘masterpiece’ of
Tamil literature (Peterson, 1994: 96; Nambi Arooran, 1977: 13) and ‘a
great Kāvya’ (Rajamanickam, 1964: 257) – even in its ‘simple, lively
style’ (Zvelebil, 1974: 176) – a Tamil ‘national epos’ (Zvelebil, 1973: 186)
and the ‘crown of Śaivite literature’ (Zvelebil, 1973: 187), while others
bemoan its ‘prolix and often obscure’ diction (Nilakanta Sastri, 1945: 40)
and ‘sever, pedantic’ tone (Shulman, 1985: 247) that renders Kampan’s
elegant Irāmāvatāram the true jewel fo twelfth-century Tamil literature ¯
(Shulman, 1993: 19).
Even if little scholarly consensus exists regarding the literary merits of
the Periyapurān.am, all scholars of Tamil literature have noted the extent
to which many of Cēkkilār’s characters indulge in gory violence. Consider
the following description ¯ of the saint Ēnātinātar’s confrontation with the
army of his enemy, Aticūran: ¯
¯
Rivers of blood flowed.
Bodies, their flesh pierced, crumpled.
The clashing soldiers were cut and fell about.
Bowels spilled out from punctured bodies.
Vultures of frightening [countenance] swarmed about, as drums, severed from their leather
straps, rolled.
[Thus] the two armies faced and fought each other fiercely on the battlefield. (v. 626)
While the eye-gouging Kan.n.appar and the leg-slashing Can.t.ēcurar are
well-known to the earliest of the poet-saints, Appar, Campantar, and
Cuntarar,24 Cēkkilār self-consciously expands and exaggerates the level
of violence found¯ in his source texts. Cuntarar refers explicitly to only
three acts of violence in his Tirutton..tattokai: to ‘Lord Can.t.i’ (can..tip
perumān; Can.t.ēcurar) ‘who chopped his father’s foot with [his] axe’
¯

24 Vamadeva (1995: 72–76) counts no fewer than thirteen references to Kannappar’s

..
story in the Tēvāram and twenty-two references to Can.t.ēcurar.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 121

(tātai tāl. maluvināl erinta);25 to Kalikkampan, who ‘who cut off a hand’
(kai tat.inta);¯26 and
¯ to ¯ Nampi Munaiyatuvān¯ ‘whose spear cuts [flesh]’
.
(araik kon..ta vēl). Nampi Ān.t.ār ¯Nampi, in
27 ¯ his tenth-century elabora-
¯
tion of Cuntarar’s work, the Tirutton..tar Tiruvantāti, increases the level of
gore, narrating briefly fourteen episodes of violence (Nampi Ān.t.ār Nambi,
1995b); elsewhere, in a separate hymn of praise to Campantar, Nampi
narrates for the first time in Tamil the story of the child-saint impaling
eight thousand Jain monks on stakes in the city of Maturai (Nampi Ān.t.ār
Nampi, 1995a).28 While the stories of Kan.n.appar and Can.t.ēcurar obvi-
ously predate even the Tēvāram, and violent activity on the part of the
saints is not unknown to Nampi Ān.t.ār Nampi, Cēkkilār expands that vision
of the axe-wielding saint to new and rather stunning ¯ heights. This vision
of violent devotion is further placed concretely, in the introduction to the
Periyapurān. am, within the context of the righteous rule of Cōla kings.
In addition to praising Anapāyan for his patronage of the great¯ temple
at Citamparam (v. 8) and honoring ¯ his patron’s glorious Cōla lineage
(vv. 98–135), Cēkkilār locates his hagiographic narratives in the¯discourse
¯
of kingship, even reminding his readers of their official obligations to pay
taxes (v. 76)!29

2. THE ACADEMIC RESPONSE

As noted above, the violent imagery of the Periyapurān.am has long baffled
scholars of Tamil literature, who have found little in the literature of Hindu
bhakti to explain such bloodshed or imbue it with religious meaning. While
25 VII-39. This and all following references to the poetry of Appar, Campantar, and
Cuntarar are drawn from Tēvāram (1984–1991). Note that Cuntarar devotes more words
to Can.t.ēcurar than to any other servant of Śiva.
26 The Periyapurānam expands this epithet to narrate the story of Kalikkampan’s
.
displeasure at his wife’s hesitation in washing the feet of a Śaiva ascetic who had once ¯
been their servant.
27 The Periyapurānam expands this epithet to the story of a mercenary soldier who hires
.
himself out for battle and donates all his spoils of war to worthy Śaiva devotees.
28 Note that even Cēkkilār shies away from this scene of grisly violence, appearing ‘to
be uncomfortable with the ¯idea of Campantar’s complicity in such a gruesome punishment
as impalement’ (Peterson, 1998: 181). In the Periyapurān.am (vv. 2756–2760), it is the
king of Maturai who orders the death of the Jains, not the child-saint who ‘bears [them] no
enmity’ (ikal ilar).
29 The verse adds ‘paying taxes due the government’ (aracu kol katankal ārri to the
. . ¯ . ¯¯
traditional list of citizens’ duties listed in the fifth-century Tamil work on ethics, the
Tirukkural.; the Kural. list includes five duties of hospitality to one’s ancestors, the gods,
¯ ¯
guests, relatives, and oneself (Tirukkural., v. 43).
¯
122 ANNE E. MONIUS

there exists no scholarly consensus on how to interpret the violence of the

nāyanmār, certainly many have noted the Śaiva saints’ seeming penchant
¯
for blood.
Vamadeva (1995) has produced the most sustained study of the
Periyapurān. am’s violence, and her work, while not an exhaustive treat-
ment of the subject, covers most of the significant interpretive themes that
emerge from scholarship on the text. Most prevalent is that violent action
serves as a metaphor for the single-minded intensity of devotion demanded
by Śiva. Coining a new Tamil phrase, vannanpu, literally ‘violent love’,
¯¯ ¯
to describe the lives of the nāyanmār, Vamadeva contends that ‘violence
¯
has to be perceived as an affirmation of anpu [love] for Śiva’ (p. 35), the
¯
manifestation of an automatic, reflexive action born of the frustration of
interrupted service to the lord. In a similar vein, Hudson (1989) deems
the single-minded focus of the Śaiva devotee ‘fanatical’ (p. 377), Hardy
(1995) represents the saint on the verge of violent eruption as ‘the person
“with a bee in his bonnet” ’ (p. 341), while Shulman (2001) speaks of
‘an ideal carried to its limit’ (p. 79). For Yocum (1972–1977) the violent
deeds of the nāyanmār represent an attitude of ‘total surrender to Śiva in
¯
all his unpredictability’ (p. 70). The violence of the Periyapurān. am, in
other words, represents the single-minded devotion of the elect few who
embody the highest ideals of bhakti: a life in which nothing else matters
save service to Śiva, in which the ties that bind one to a life with the lord
are stronger than those of family and community The violent actions of
the saints are in no way meant to represent the lives or values of ordinary
people in the everyday world, but rather ideals of selfless devotion toward
which one can, and must, strive. The story of Can.t.ēcurar, in this reading,
is not a call to chop off the legs of one’s father, but rather to serve the lord
with unwavering focus, attention, and true love.
Vamadeva (1995) further elucidates the nature of the Periyapurān. am’s
violence by tracing its roots to earlier Tamil literary texts, suggesting that
the cult of Śiva portrayed by Cēkkilār has ancient and uniquely Tamil
¯
roots in the classical or ‘Caṅkam’ literary culture of southern India that
depicts powerful links between love and violence, milk and blood, life
and death. In the heroic Caṅkam poetry dating from the early centuries
of the Common Era, Vamadeva notes, violence is ‘an essential quality
of a hero’ (p. 2). Cēkkilār ‘project[s] [the] kingly role of the ancient and
mediaeval Tamil country’ ¯ onto the lives and deeds of the nāyanmār (p. 12).
In sharp contrast to the elegant and ritually ‘clean’ worship ¯ prescribed
in the Sanskrit Āgamas (see Davis, 1991), the anpu or love of the Śaiva
saints is likened to blood sacrifice by Peterson ¯(1994), with ‘themes of
blood, violence and sacrifice’ representing a ‘continuation of ancient Tamil
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 123

concepts’ (p. 221). Hudson (1989), whose analysis of the Periyapurān.am

rests heavily on the interpretation of the nineteenth-century Śaiva reformer,
Ārumuka Nāvalar,30 likens the text to an extended commentary on the
¯
Sanskrit Bhagavadgı̄tā, a Tamil rumination of sorts on the processes by
which a devotee remains active in the world while offering the fruits of
all activity to the lord (p. 376). Within that context, he further argues
that the violent love of the saints mirrors Śiva’s own propensity toward
violence (p. 385) and is expressed in ways consistent with ‘the ancient
Tamil belief that in blood and death the sacred power that regenerates life
reveals itself’ (p. 390). Shulman (1993: 18–47) and Hart (1980: 219–220),
in their analyses of the story of Cirutton.t.ar’s gruesome sacrifice of his own
son, both see echoes of earlier Tamil¯ poetic ideals of blood, war, sacri-
fice, and love. Violence, through this interpretive lens, is an expression of
ancient Tamil cultural values within the new religious framework of bhakti,
devotion to Śiva.
In short, scholarly opinion remains divided over the religious import of
the saint who cuts off his father’s legs or the ‘leader’ who cooks up his son
into a tasty curry, and certainly the interpretations outlined briefly above
fall somewhat short of explaining fully the ethos of the Periyapurān.am and
its enduring popularity among Tamil-speaking Śaivas.31 If the violence of
Kōt.puli or Kan.n.appar is merely symbolic of the single-minded intensity
of devotion demanded by lord Śiva, then one must wonder why the pan-
Indian hagiographic literature of Hindu bhakti is not more rife with violent
imagery. Other saints, in other communities in the Tamil-speaking region
and in other parts of India, flout the prescriptions of dharma, from Ān.t.āl.’s
and Mı̄rābāı̄’s steadfast refusals to marry any husband other than their
beloved lord Kr.s.n.a to Kabı̄r’s endless railing against brahminic ritual, but
few are the stories to rival the stream of blood generated by the zealous
adoration of Śiva’s Tamil saints. If the violent deeds of the nāyanmār
represent the resurrection of ancient Tamil poetic ideals that wed ¯ the
themes of love and violence, then the question must be raised as to why
this sudden resurgence of heroic blood sacrifice should take place at the
height of Cōla power, in an era of temple-building, of the consolidation of
Āgamic forms ¯ of worship, and of burgeoning authority of Śaiva matam or
.
monastic establishments. Why harken back to the bloodlust of yore, to the

30 For more on Ārumuka Nāvalar, see Hudson (1992).

31 Yocum (1988)¯ remarks that it is precisely the ‘awesome self-destruction or self-
sacrifice’ of the nāyanmār that is ‘the most puzzling aspect to my mind of sainthood among
the Tamil Śaivas’ (p.¯13).
124 ANNE E. MONIUS

classical poetic ideals of ‘inner’ (akam) love and ‘outer’ (puram) heroism
in a century of unprecedented peace within the Cōla realm?32 ¯
¯
If the images of blood in the name of religious devotion are striking
in the Periyapurān.am, equally remarkable is the almost total lack of
commentary on the lives of the saints from within the Tamil-speaking
Śaiva community itself, at least until the modem era. As noted above,
no commentarial tradition on Cēkkilār’s composition exists to hint at
pre-modern historical reception of the¯ text; the few comments scattered
throughout the Tamil literature of the Śaiva Siddhānta are terse, seldom
providing anything by way of moral comment on the activities of the saints.
The one exception to the rule above is a short text of one hundred quat-
rains in ven.pā meter attributed to Tirukkat.avūr Uyyavanta Tēvanāyanār
and dated to 1178 CE, the Tirukkal.irrupat.iyār.33 Included as the second ¯
¯ ¯
of the fourteen canonical works of Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta philosophy, the
Tirukkal.irrupat.iyār, whose title literally translates to ‘That Which was
Placed on ¯ ¯ the Step by an Elephant’,34 has been little studied, despite its
canonical status, and is often conceived as an extended commentary on
the first of the canonical texts, the Tiruvuntiyār attributed to Tiruviyalūr
Uyyavanta Tēvanāyanār and dated to 1148 CE (another equally under-
studied work of the¯ Śaiva Siddhānta). The Tirukkal.irrupat.iyār, in
describing the nature of lord Śiva, the human soul, and the¯ ¯path of devo-
tion, draws many examples from the lives of the nāyanmār, although it is
impossible to know whether or not Uyyavanta Tēvanāyan ¯ ār has the text of
the Periyapurān.am specifically in mind. Certainly he knows ¯ of the cruel
deeds of many among the saints, for he classifies the ways of devotion as
two-fold:
In this excellent world, effort is of two kinds:
gentle action (melvinai) and harsh action (velvinai);
both are the dharma¯ of Śiva. ¯
Praise them both, in order to dispel the karma of birth. (v. 16)

After explaining the ‘gentle’ activities as those forms of worshiping Śiva

which are ‘easy for us’ (namakkum el.i) (v. 17), Uyyavanta Tēvanāyanār
¯
then provides examples of ‘harsh’ acts of devotion to Śiva, drawing directly
32 The irony of the resurgence of literary violence in an era of remarkable peace is taken
up for further discussion below.
33 References to the text refer to the edition found in Meykantacāttiram (1994).
..
34 Śaiva Siddhānta tradition maintains that the work was initially rejected by the scho-
larly community. The author left his text as an offering to Śiva on the steps leading up to
the main shrine at Citamparam; a stone elephant, standing to one side, lifted up the text
and placed it before the image of the dancing Śiva. This divine acceptance of the text thus
led both to its incorporation into the philosophical canon and to its rather peculiar title
(Siddhalingaiah, 1979: 85–86).
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 125

upon the life stories of some of the most violent saints found in the
Periyapurān. am:
I have classified as harsh activity
the terrible deed of killing
without pity and cooking [his son] with [his] own hands
for the Bhairava [ascetic] who grants boons. (v. 18)35

Not seeing it as a fault or a grievous crime,

the lord witnessed [Can.t.ēcurar] cutting off his father’s two feet,
and bestowed on him the [lord’s own] garland. (v. 19)

How are we able to narrate [the deeds of]

he who slipped into [a fissure in] the field and,
because of this holy [mis]step,
began to saw at his neck, in order to feed the lord? (v. 20)36

For Uyyavanta Tēvanāyanār, then, the ways of ‘harsh’ devotion are some-
what mysterious, beyond¯ the ken of the ordinary, ‘terrible’, certainly not
‘easy for us’ to emulate or understand, an admirable but perhaps distant
ideal for those who follow the path of ‘gentle’ action. The author further
notes that the path of harsh devotion is marked by a turn inward, away
from the material world, a life in which the only thing that matters is the
inner state of complete surrender to the lord:
Through the stone, the fissure, the shining sword, the grinding stone,
and the gaming board, they transformed themselves through the inner path (akamārkkam),
not through the path joined [to the world] (sakamārkkam). (v. 50)37

In this rare commentary from within the tradition itself, the violent deeds
of the nāyanmār are marked as dharma, morally correct in every way,
conducive to¯ life in the presence of Śiva, yet little more is said. Modern
Tamil scholars, commenting on the Periyapurān.am, have simply noted
the division into ‘gentle’ and ‘harsh’ modes of devotion made in the
Tirukkal.irrupat.iyār and moved on to other topics (Ponniah, 1952: 28;
Āramuka¯ ¯Nāvalar, quoted in Hudson, 1989: 380–381). A text roughly
¯
contemporaneous with the Periyapurān.am that exists now only in frag-
ments, the Tillai ulā, refers to the Śiva’s request for Cirutton.t.ar’s son not
¯
35 This is an obvious reference to the story of Ciruttontar.
..
¯
36 The reference here is obviously to Arivāttāyar,
.. who, in the Periyapurān.am, attempts
to kill himself with a sickle after falling and spilling his offerings of food for Śiva.
37 Here the stone refers to Cākkiyar, an erstwhile Buddhist who throws stones at a Śiva
liṅga to express his devotion. The fissure refers, as above, to Arivāt.t.āyar. The ‘shining
sword’ is wielded in devotion by a number of saints, including Ēyarkōnkalikkāmar and
¯ when deprived
Kōt.puli, slayer of his entire family. Mūrtti resorts to grinding his own flesh
of sandalwood for worship by evil Jains. Mūrkka is the unrepentant gambler who offers
the fruits of his dicing to Śiva and his devotees.
126 ANNE E. MONIUS

merely as harsh but as a ‘heinous sin’ (pātakam) (Shulman, 1993: 39–

40; Dorai Rangaswarny, 1990: 1011–1012), perhaps indicating a variety of
attitudes toward the more violent activities of the saints in the Cōla court.
¯
Yet none of these explanations of the violence found in the Periyapurān . am
are entirely satisfying, nor do they explain Cēkkilār’s twelfth-century
propensity to exaggerate what little violence exists in¯ earlier hagiograph-
ical literature. Why do these particular forms of gruesome devotion rise to
the fore? What is Cēkkilār suggesting about the nature of Śaiva devotion
¯
through these startling images?

3. TAKING UMĀPATI SERIOUSLY

One additional piece of literary evidence regarding the nāyanmār perhaps

sheds new light on their curious proclivity toward violence: ¯ a story told
by the fourteenth-century Śaiva philosopher mentioned above, Umāpati
Civācāriyār, a brief comment noted in many studies of Tamil Śaivism and
the Periyapurān.am (Shulman, 1993: 19; Hudson, 1989: 373–374; Prentiss,
1999: 117; Davis, 1998: 217; Stein, 1985: 323) but explored in depth by
none. In his Cēkkilārpurān.am cited previously, Umāpati maintains that
Cēkkilār composed¯ the Periyapurān.am in order to lure his royal patron,
¯ , away from a profound interest in the Tamil Jain narrative
Anapāyan
known as¯ the Cı̄vakacintāman. i. Having noticed the king’s interest in the
Jain text, Cēkkilār tells the Cōla monarch (val.avan):
¯ ¯ ¯
This book of the Jams (caman.ar) is false.
You must guard and protect [your] next life.
[This book’s qualities] are insensible.
The stories of Śiva’s [devotees], flowing with abundance,
benefit both this life and the next life. (v. 21)
Is there anything to be gained by taking Umāpati’s declaration of
authorial intent seriously, by investigating further its interpretive possi-
bilities in regard to the violence exercised by so many of the nāyanmār?
¯
Certainly it requires no great literary insight to locate many instances in
which the Periyapurān. am rails explicitly against the Jains, particularly
Jain ascetics; the text is full of anti-Jain invective, and Yocum (1988:
11) notes that eight of the sixty-three saints of Śiva directly confront
and defeat members of the Jain community. Appar, for example, spends
much of his adult life regretting viscerally his misspent youth as a Jain
ascetic; Campantar bests the Jains of Maturai in a variety of contests and
debates. Mūrtti subjects his own flesh to the grinding stone when a despic-
able Jain king deprives him of sandalwood to offer Śiva, while hapless
Jains are vanquished by soldiers in the story of Tan.t.i At.ikal.. Indeed, as
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 127

Peterson (1998: 164) notes, Jains have long served as useful foils for the
construction of Tamil Śaiva identity, beginning with the poetry of Appar:
He is the cosmos, the blue-necked One,
who destroyed the arrogant and fat Jains,
lacking in both virtue and clothing.38
Taking seriously Umāpati’s assertion regarding Cēkkilār’s intent, the
remainder of this essay will consider the ways in which ¯ interpreting
the Periyapurān.am as a response to the Cı̄vakacintāman. i may shed new
light on the text, particularly on the narratives of violence interwoven
throughout. Assuming that the Periyapurān.am provides a case study of
sorts for the Śaiva-Jain model of ‘productive encounter’ proposed by Davis
(1998), it will conclude by arguing that the focal points of contention
between these two Tamil texts lie not in matters of doctrine or ritual prac-
tice, but with aesthetics, with distinct and competing views of the manner
in which aesthetic experience can lead one to transcend quotidian norms
and values.

4. THE CĪVAKACINTĀMAN
.I

The Cı̄vakacintāman. i is the product of a Jain literary culture with a long

history in the Tamil-speaking region. From the earliest of the Tamil Brāhmı̄
inscriptions39 to the so-called ‘didactic’ works of the early centuries of the
Common Era,40 long narrative works such as the Nı̄lakēci,41 and important
treatises on grammar and poetic theory,42 Jain authors writing in Tamil
made significant contributions to South Indian literary culture through at
least the fourteenth century. Such literary activity attests to a long and
influential Jain presence in the Tamil-speaking South, a presence also
recorded in a large corpus of inscriptions, temples, and images.43 The
38 Tēvāram V-58; translation from Prentiss (1999: 72). Note that Jain literature is
likewise full of anti-Śaiva rhetoric in several languages; see Handiqui (1968).
39 These inscriptions, clustered around the modem city of Maturai, attest to a Jain
presence in the Tamil region from at least the second century BCE (Mahadevan, 1970:
12–14).
40 Such as the collection of moral teachings known as the Nālatiyār, said to have been
.
composed by eight thousand Jain monks and presented to the king of Maturai (Pope, 1984).
41 The tenth-century story of a deity serving the fierce goddess Kālı̄ who is converted
to Jainism and tours the Tamil countryside, defeating various non-Jains in debate (Chakra-
varti, 1984).
42 Such as the influential tenth-century treatise on prosody, the Yāpparuṅkalam, attri-
buted to Amitacākarar (Amitacākarar, 1998).
43 The history of the Jain presence in the Tamil-speaking region of southern India
warrants far more scholarly attention than it has received to date. For an introduction to the
128 ANNE E. MONIUS

Cı̄vakacintāman. i (‘Cı̄vakan, the Wish-Fulfilling Gem’), attributed to Tirut-

takkatēvar, said to be a Jain¯ monk living in the city of Vañci,44 is generally
dated to the early tenth century (Zvelebil, 1995: 169–171) and reinter-
prets the story of Jı̄vandhara found in earlier Sanskrit sources.45 Written
in viruttam meter and 3,145 verses long, tradition holds that the text was
composed on a dare of sorts. The poets of Maturai challenged Tirut-
takkatēvar, saying that while Jains were skilled in the poetics expressive of
renunciation, none knew how to praise the sentiments of love; convinced
he could master the poetic art of love, the young Jain monk composed
the Cı̄vakacintāman.i and presented it in the court of Maturai, much to the
delight of the king.46
The Cı̄vakacintāman. i is also known as the Man.anūl, ‘The Book of
Marriages’,47 for each of its thirteen chapters (ilampakam) describes the
hero, Cı̄vakan, as he marries yet another beautiful young girl. Even his final
renunciation ¯is likened to a marriage of sorts to omniscience, personified
as a woman. The narrative begins with King Caccantan foolishly handing
over his kingdom to his minister that he might enjoy the ¯ company of his
wife more fully. The minister kills the king, but, before Caccantan dies,
he sends his pregnant queen, Vicayai, away on a flying machine shaped ¯
like a peacock. She gives birth to Cı̄vakan on a cremation ground and
abandons him there; a merchant finds the¯ infant and raises him as his
own. Cı̄vakan eventually learns the truth of his birth, but continues to live
¯
as the merchant’s son. A succession of amorous exploits on the part of
the hero follows; at the end of each chapter, Cı̄vakan weds the charming
girl who gives each ilampakam its name. His first wife, ¯ Kōvintai, he wins
by returning the king’s stolen cattle; his second wife, Kāntaruvatattai, he
secures after a singing contest and a furious battle. Kēmacari’s heart is won
at first sight, and Curamañcari’s hand is won through trickery as Cı̄vakan,
disguised as an old brahmin, laughs and jokes and compels the girl to break ¯
her vow of never looking upon a man. Eventually, Cı̄vakan defeats the evil
minister who murdered his father and stole his kingdom,¯ and ascends to

history of Tamil Jainism, see Desai (1957), Chakravarti (1974), Champakalakshmi (1978),
Ekambaranathan (1988), and Orr (1998, 1999).
44 See the fourteenth-century commentary on verse 3143 by Naccinārkkiniyar in Tirut-
¯ Cı̄vakacintāman
takkatēvar (1986: 1518–1519). All further references to the text of the ¯
.i
are taken from this edition.
45 Such as the ninth-century Uttarapurāna of Gunabhadra. For a detailed discussion
. .
of the ways in which Tiruttakktēvar’s text differs from its Sanskrit antecedents, see
Vijayalakshmy (1981: 51–77).
46 See Cāminātaiyar’s introduction to the edition of the Cı̄vakacintāmani cited above,
.
17–19. The origin of this story is unknown, and Cāminātaiyar merely cites ‘tradition’.
47 Ibid., p. 20.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 129

the throne himself. Amid much love-play with his wives, one day Cı̄vakan
witnesses a male monkey seducing a female in front of his mate; when the¯
male monkey offers his mate a bit of fruit to beg her forgiveness, the fruit
is snatched away by a palace guard. The scene thrusts Cı̄vakan into a state
¯
of despair and disgust with the world, and he renounces all before the Jina
Mahāvı̄ra.48
As a long and beautifully poetic narrative attributed to a Jain author,
the Cı̄vakacintāman.i seems a bit out of place in a tradition known for
its commitment to ascetic restraint, even among members of the lay
community. Not only does this ‘Book of Marriages’ focus on the wedded
bliss of Cı̄vakan cavorting with his many wives, but the text is extremely
explicit, almost¯painfully graphic, in sexual imagery and double entendre,
not to mention vivid depictions of the gruesome horrors of the crema-
tion ground (place of the hero’s birth) and the battlefield (where Cı̄vakan
defeats many a foe, particularly the evil minister). Cı̄vakan’s sexual antics¯
with his many wives are described in shockingly wild ¯terms, in sharp
contrast to the more nuanced subtleties characteristic of earlier classical
Tamil love poetry; the Tamil telling of the hero’s story is full of explicit
detail not found in its Sanskrit antecedents either.49 Consider, for example,
the description of the hero and his wife Patumai:
His garlands ripped, the saffron on him was ruined, his chaplet was charred – because
of the enthusiasm of intercourse her girdles broke, her beautiful anklets cried out and the
honeybees were scared off as the young couple made love. (v. 1349)50

Love-making is vigorously and pointedly described with gusto, the poetry

full of sly humor and hidden meanings. In describing the love games of
the hero with his wife Curamañcari, for example, Tiruttakkatēvar plays
on the phrase kumari āt.a, which can mean both ‘to bathe in the the
Kumari River’ and ‘to lie down [sexually] with a virgin’ (v. 2020).51 The
vividness of the sexual imagery has proven troubling, even embarrassing,
for commentators pre-modern and modern alike. The fourteenth-century
commentator on the Cı̄vakacintāman. i, Naccinārkkiniyar, offers little by
¯
way of explanation or elaboration. Modern scholars, ¯ such as Vijayalak-
shmy (1981), interpret the sexual imagery ‘as sugar coating to his religious
pill’ (p. 48), revising only slightly the opinion of earlier Tamil interpreters
such as the Jesudesans (1961; quoted in Zvelebil, 1974: 138, note 24),
48 A brief synopsis of the story can be found in Zvelebil (1995: 170), Vijayalakshmy
(1981: 54–69), and Ryan (1985: 100–112).
49 For example, the story of Jı̄vandhara found in Gunabhadra’s Uttarapurāna
. .
(Gun.abhadra, 1968: 494–528).
50 Translation adapted from Ryan (1998: 67).
51 This particular double entendre is discussed in brief by Zvelebil (1974: 138, note 23).
130 ANNE E. MONIUS

who maintain that the text offers ‘terribly dangerous stimulation to the
senses’ and should, in fact, be ‘banned for the young’ (p. 148)! Indeed, it
does seem hard to reconcile the content and style of the text, replete as it
is with sex and violence, with the Tamil Jain community’s tradition that
Tiruttakkatēvar was a Digambara ascetic.
Yet, as Ryan’s (1998) work on the Cı̄vakacintāman.i persuasively
argues, this excess of images of love and sex, in the context of Indic tradi-
tions of aesthetic reception as rasa, the heightened experience or ‘flavor’
of emotion, serves not to elevate the ‘flavor’ of śr.ṅgāra, ‘the erotic’, but
to denigrate it.52 Compared to the subtle nuances of classical Tamil love
poetry, Ryan argues, the graphic descriptions of Tiruttakkatēvar strike
one as coarse, a bit ‘over the top’, rendering any image of sexual love
dangerous, even ridiculous. Women’s genitals, for example, are referred
to directly in the text of the Cı̄vakacintāman. i over one hundred times,
using a Tamil phrase, akul, that appears in all previous classical Tamil love
poetry only one hundred twenty-six times. Women’s eyes, usually a focal
point for enthusiastic and loving description by Tamil poets, are eighty-
eight times likened to spears in the Cı̄vakacintāman. i (Ryan, 1998: 74).
References to women’s breasts most often employ the multivalent Tamil
adjective vem, meaning ‘desirable’, but also ‘hot’ and ‘cruel’ (p. 75). All
of this, argues Ryan, amounts to condemnation ‘by excess’ (p. 74), as
Tiruttakkatēvar ‘skilfully manage[s] to extend, stretch, and then explode
the subtle love imagery’ of classical Tamil love poetry ‘until it yield[s] . . . a
lascivious and frightening sexuality which [can]not but offend’ (p. 79). The
‘cumulative effect’ (p. 79) upon the reader, over more than three thousand
verses, of such unbridled cynicism and disdain poetically concealed is a
‘skillfully poisonous parody’ (p. 81) of the Tamil love tradition. The scene
of Cı̄vakan’s turn toward omniscience – the witnessing of an adulterous
¯
monkey attempting to reconcile with his mate, only to have his peace-
offering of fruit knocked away by a guard – merely serves to underscore the
text’s disdain for the hero’s previous life of love conquests. The monkey
at sexual play teaches the hero of the transitory nature of life and its ethos
of suffering; Cı̄vakan’s love exploits are not deemed worthy of a human
counter-example, ¯
The Cı̄vakacintāman. i’s condemnation by excess extends not only to
the themes of love and sexuality, but to the violent escapades of warriors

52 For a discussion of the basics of Sanskrit rasa theory, see Gerow (1977). The closest
Tamil equivalent to rasa, termed meyppāt.u, literally ‘arising from the body’, is discussed
in the fourth- or fifth-century treatise on Tamil grammar and poetics, the Tolkāppiyam; for
a comparison of the Tamil concept with its Sanskrit counterparts, see Selby (2000: 21–25,
31–33).
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 131

and kings as well. Tamil classical poetry is replete with images of war
and violence in its puram (literally, ‘outer’) or heroic mode, and the
¯ transforms such nuanced classical poetics into
Cı̄vakacintāman. i similarly
graphic depictions of war through excess. The following Caṅkam poem,
for example, typifies the classical treatment of violence and the human
anguish wrought by war:
If I think I’ll receive an elephant and go home,
all the elephants like hills on which glowing clouds
are caught have been shot full of arrows and have died . . . .
You who labor with the plow of your sword so that men
are stacked like hay! On the broad, savage field where
those who have come in need, stripped of joy, grieve,
for there is nothing to bring away, I sang and beat out sharp rhythms
on the clear eye of my . . . drum. (Puranānūru v. 368)53
¯ ¯ ¯
Alongside such subtle, even haunting images of war, the Cı̄vakacin-
tāman.i’s description of the battlefield’s ‘deluge of blood’ makes a mockery
of the violence of war:
As though to say that this was the level of the deluge of blood from the pale bodies, the
goblins with irregular, elephant-toenail like teeth joined their palms in obeisance on top of
their heads and danced, singing of what had been given. The small jackals on the elephants
called out laughing. Eagles and kites lay down, sides splitting with laughter. (v. 804)54

As in the case of Ryan’s treatment of the erotic excesses in the Cı̄vakacin-

tāman.i, one might argue that the excesses of violence yield similar fruit: a
disdain for the blood of the battlefield, for the responsibilities of kingship,
an ennui that culminates in Cı̄vakan’s eventual withdrawal from the plea-
sures of both women and the sword.¯ Tiruttakkatēvar, in short, satirizes the
classical or Caṅkam poetic conventions of both love and war.
In fact, within the rubric of aesthetic reception and appreciation of text
noted above, the pan-Indic theory of rasa, asethetic ‘flavor’, and its Tamil
analogy, meyppāt.u, the Cı̄vakacintāman.i would appear to emphasize the
rasa of bı̄bhatsa,‘disgust’, the meyppāt.u of il.ivaral.55 Although several
scholars of Sanskrit poetics have noted that there is nothing uniquely
53 Translation from Hart and Heifetz (1999: 210).
54 Translation from Ryan (1985: 168).
55 According to the classical Tamil treatise on grammar and poetics, the Tolkāppiyam
(v. 250), il.ivaral or ‘the disgusting’ is evoked by scenes of old age, disease, pain, and low
social status. The commentator on the verse, Il.ampūran.ar, cites several poetic examples,
including the following couplet from the fifth-century ethical work, Tirukkural., on menmai
¯ ¯
or low status (Tolkāppiyam, v. 8):
When one is cursed with want,
even one’s own mother looks at [one] as a stranger.
132 ANNE E. MONIUS

Jain about the aesthetic model of Jain rasa theoreticians (Warder, 1999:
342–347; Kulkarni, 1983: 180–183; Tubb, 1998: 53–66), Abhinavagupta,
the great tenth-century Sanskrit literary critic, notes that disgust, along
with vı̄ra, ‘the heroic’, culminates in śānta, ‘the quiescent’, the apex
of rasa experience for Abhinavagupta (Masson and Patwardhan, 1969:
142). Indeed, śānta is enumerated as the ninth, and most important, of
rasa experiences in a second-century canonical Jain work in Prakrit, the
An.uogaddāra Sutta (Warder, 1999: 343), and Cı̄vakan’s final renunciation
at the feet of the Jina Mahāvı̄ra would suggest that ¯śānta is, in fact, the
aesthetic experience given pride of place in Tiruttakkatēvar’s work.
The Cı̄vakacintāman. i’s evocation of ennui or disgust arises from a
literary culture in which satire – particularly satire whose source lies
in particular religious commitments – had already emerged as a highly
developed art form. The oldest extant Sanskrit prahasanas, or ‘farces’, for
example – the Mattavilāsa-prahasana or ‘The Farce of Drunken Sport’
and the Bhagavadajjukam-prahasana, ‘The Farce of the Saint-Courtesan’
– are attributed to the seventh-century Pallava monarch who ruled from
Kāñcı̄puram, Mahendravarman I (Lockwood & Bhat, 1994). Each makes
raucous fun of various religious figures; in ‘The Farce of Drunken Sport’,
for example, a drunken Śaiva ascetic and his equally inebriated wife
search for his lost skull-bowl and accuse an equally silly Buddhist monk
of stealing it.56 The Man.imēkalai, a Tamil Buddhist text that predates
the Cı̄vakacintāman. i by at least several centuries, includes many satirical
images of non-Buddhist characters, including a Jain monk who lumbers
along ‘like an elephant in distress’ (Cāttanār, 1981: iii.90), a Śaiva ascetic
who ‘fights with his shadow’ like a ‘madman’ ¯ (vv. iii.l03–115), and an
uncouth chieftain surrounded by ‘dried white bones, the stench of flesh,
and vats of boiling toddy’ (vv. xvi.66–67). Many texts from medieval Tamil
literary culture are remembered traditionally in pairs, with the later posing
a direct – and often directly satirical – response to the earlier, from the
Man.imēkalai as a response to the earlier, Jain-influenced Cilappatikāram
to the lost Buddhist Kuntalakēci and its Jain refutation, the ninth-century
Nı̄lakēci (Monius, 2001: 60–77). The Cı̄vakacintāman. i, in other words,
was composed in a literary culture already familiar with satire and literary
denigration in at least two languages.
How does Tiruttakkatēvar’s stance on the love-play of his hero make
sense within a Jain context, as well as within the larger literary community
in Tamil-speaking South India dominated by non-Jains? Above and beyond

56 The Buddhist monk, Nāgasena, is said to yearn for the ‘unexpurgated, original texts’
of the Buddha that permit drinking and the enjoyment of women (Lockwood & Bhat, 1994:
66).
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 133

the obvious Jain narrative tendency toward extolling sensual restraint and
asceticism, it requires no great leap of the imagination to assume that
the Jain poet, by ridiculing human love in its many mental and phys-
ical aspects, also seeks to denigrate non-Jain religious tendencies that
focus specifically on love – on the evocation of the rasa of śr.ṅgāra,
‘the erotic’ – namely Hindu devotionalism or bhakti. By the era of the
Cı̄vakacintāman. i’s composition, Tamil literary culture had created new
genres of devotional literature centered on the deities Vis.n.u and Śiva, much
of it addressed to the lord as lover. Whereas Tiruttakkatēvar undermines
the classical literary tradition, the bhakti poets employ the love themes
of earlier texts to forge a new ‘poetry of connections’ (Ramanujan, 1981:
166), a first-person plea to the lord for union with him, often expressed,
particularly among the Vais.n.ava poets, in explicitly erotic terms.57 The
themes of landscape, mood, and secular love prevalent in the classical
Caṅkam corpus are used, in the poetry of Hindu devotionalism, to describe
human yearning for union with the lord, to capture the profoundly phys-
ical and mental aspects of human love and transfer them to the realm of
devotee and divine (Ramanujan, 1981: 126–169). In denying the value of
human love, Tiruttakkatēvar strikes at the emotional core of Hindu bhakti,
its positive valuation of the physical body and mind that can know and
experience love on many complex levels.
This is not to suggest, however, that Tamil-speaking Jains in general,
or even Tiruttakkatēvar in particular, did not themselves engage in any of
the practices of pan-Indic ‘devotion’, including the erection of elaborate
temples, the consecration of images in metal and stone, and the composi-
57 Consider, for example, the erotic anguish of the ninth-century female devotee of
Kr.s.n.a, Ān.t.āl.:
My soul melts in anguish –
he cares not
if I live or die.
If I see the lord of Govardhana
that looting thief,
that plunderer,
I shall pluck
by their roots
these useless breasts,
I shall fling them
at his chest,
I shall cool
the raging fire
within me.
In Nālāyira Tivyap Pirapantam (1993: 272–273); translation from Dehejia (1990: 125–
126).
134 ANNE E. MONIUS

tion of songs and poetry to be used during the rites of worship. As Orr’s
(1998, 1999, 2000) recent work amply demonstrates, for example, Tamil-
speaking Jain women (and men) were intimately involved in the complex
rituals lives of temples large and small throughout South India, with lay
women participating most actively as donors throughout the medieval
period. Tiruttakkatēvar himself puts several songs of praise to the Jinas in
the mouth of his hero,58 and Cı̄vakan spends much of his time, in between
his amorous pursuit of women and¯ the wielding of his sword, visiting
various Jain temples and holy sites. Yet what is meant by ‘devotion’ in
the Jain context is, of course, somewhat different than that of the Śaivas
or Vais.n.avas. In the rite of pūjā, ritual offerings before an image of the
deity or the Jina, the Hindu presents food or flowers to be blessed and
then taken back as prasāda, holy remains that will invigorate the life and
soul of the worshiper until next he or she makes offerings to the lord. In
the Jain context, however, as Babb (1998) has argued, where transubstan-
tiation of the material substance offered is impossible and the Jina stands
unmoved, even unaware, of the lay Jain’s offering, the rites of pūjā imply
not ‘giving to’ but ‘giving up’, an opportunity for the layperson to engage
for a discrete time in the renunciatory activity of the true ascetic (p. 150).
If one imagines, with Cort (2002), a ‘continuum’ of devotional activity
present in all Indic religious traditions – where the Tamil bhakti poet-
saints tend toward an embracing of ‘frenzied possession’ – Jain notions
of devotion occupy the opposite end of the spectrum, advocating a spirit
of ‘sober veneration’ of the Jinas who represent the ideal of ascetic renun-
ciation (p. 85). The practices of devotion – worship of images in temples
– are no less present in Jainism than in every other Indic tradition, but
the emotional context in which such rituals are understood to be effective
differs markedly from the Hindu devotional poets’ ecstatic search for union
with the lord.
The fact of Jain devotional practice and its obvious importance to
Tamil-speaking Jains throughout the medieval period render the Cı̄va-
kacintāman. i’s denigration of love and sex all the more nuanced and
complex. To return to the language of rasa, of aesthetic reception and
58 As at v. 1242:

Oh you who created the primeval Veda!

Oh you who submit to a pouring rain of flowers!
Oh you who know the path of right!
Oh you who possess knowledge beyond compare!
Oh you called Lord!
May you unbind the worldly bonds of those who
worship your lotus feet in this punishing ocean of births.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 135

appreciation, Tiruttakkatēvar’s narrative suggests nothing less than a re-

ordering of the list of nine rasas, demoting śr.ṅgāra, ‘the erotic’, that
begins most brahminical lists, and substituting instead bı̄bhatsa, ‘the
disgusting’, as it paves the way for Cı̄vakan’s final experience of śānta,
the poised, detached equanimity that heralds¯the dawning of omniscience.
Jain ritual practices, no less the hymns praising the Jinas that issue forth
from the hero’s mouth, are directed toward the ideal detachment, the ideal
śānta, of the Jinas.
In the twelfth-century Cōla court of Kulōttuṅka II where Cēkkilār
is traditionally believed to have¯ composed his Periyapurān.am, Tirut- ¯
takkatēvar’s Cı̄vakacintāman. i represented nothing peculiar in the literary
discourse of the proper cultivation of śānta as a response to the realities of
human life. The themes of love and violence – and the appropriately moral
responses to the human facts of sexuality and aggression – constituted a
significant core of poetic narratives that, by Cēkkilār’s day, spanned several
¯
genres and crossed sectarian boundaries. Tiruttakkatēvar’s technique of
employing erotic and violent excess to make his religious point aestheti-
cally is, in fact, one well established across a variety of poetic genres by
the mid-twelfth century.
South Indian literary culture in the centuries before the composi-
tion of the Periyapurān.am produced a number of Jain ‘romances’ in
Sanskrit; indeed, the majority of Sanskrit romance narratives composed
in the tenth and eleventh centuries were authored by Jains (Handiqui,
1968: 53). Peterson (1998: 179) speculates, for example, that the Cin-
tāman.i cited by Umāpati might be a text other than Tiruttakkatēvar’s
Tamil version of the Cı̄vakan story; while she points to the tenth-century
¯
Kannada version of the Uttarapurān . a, Cāmun.d.arāya’s Tris.as..tilaks.an.a-
mahāpurān. a, (Gnanamurthy, 1966: 33) ties a Sanskrit version of the
Cı̄vakan/Jı̄vandhara narrative to the Cōla court: the Ks.atracūd.āman.i attri-
buted to¯ Vādhı̄basiṁha.59 When Vādhı̄ba’s
¯ narrative is compared to other
versions of Jı̄vandhara’s story, its considerable escalation of violence
becomes obvious. While the Ks.atracūd.āman.i, most likely composed after
the Tamil Cı̄vakacintāman. i, is at pains to ensure that ‘all the sensuous-

59 ‘It may be this Cōla king’s admiration for the Cintāmani story written by Vādhı̄ba
.
Simha that is referred to¯ in Cēkkilār Purān.am’. The dating of this text and the identity of
¯
its author have been matters of considerable scholarly disagreement. Hultzsch (1914), for
example, assigns the text to the tenth century (pp. 697–698), while Venkatasubbiah (1928)
argues for a slightly later, early eleventh-century dating (pp. 156–160). The early eleventh-
century date is also favored by Winternitz (1999: 515). The text was first published in
the early twentieth century (Vādhı̄basiṁha Sūri, 1903). I am indebted to John Cort of
Denison University for his assistance in tracking down references to this text (personal
communication, November 28, 2001).
136 ANNE E. MONIUS

ness [of the earlier Tamil text] [is] overshadowed by the morals which
[it] emphasise[s] in the last half of every verse’ (Gnanamurthy, 1966:
33), the number of violent episodes that directly involve the hero of
the story increases exponentially. In this Sanskrit version, for example,
Jı̄vanadhara/Cı̄vakan wages a bloody war against cattle thieves, no less
¯
against the evil minister who usurped his own father’s kingdom.
In the literary culture of Cēkkilār’s day, the wry treatment of war
through literary excess had come to ¯ full fruition in the new genre of
Tamil court literature known as paran.i, ‘whose hero is a warrior who
has killed 700 or 1000 elephants on [the] battlefield, a war-poem par
excellence, and poetic expression of gruesomeness and horror’ (Zvelebil,
1995: 524). Best known among the paran.i works are the Kaliṅkattupparan. i
attributed to Cayaṅkon.t.ar, which narrates the Cōla conquest of Kaliṅka
(Sanskrit Kaliṅga) during the reign of Kulōttuṅka ¯I (1070–1120 CE), and
the Takkayākapparan. i attributed to the great Cōla court poet, Ot.t.akkūttar,
which tells the famous story of Daks.a’s sacrifice. ¯ In addition to these two
twelfth-century texts, literary references attest to a number of paran.i works
now lost (Zvelebil, 1992: 63–64). What to make of the content of a text
such as the Kaliṅkattupparan. i – its staid narration of the genealogy of its
royal patron, dark descriptions of the goddess of war, graphic (and often
humorous) scenes of ghouls feasting on the corpses of soldiers fallen in
battle – is unclear, and the few scholars who have examined this genre
reach little agreement as to its proper interpretation. Kanakasabhai Pillai
(1890), one of the earliest Tamil scholars to analyze the text in English,
views its wild descriptions as ‘far-fetched and extravagant similes . . .
in which oriental poets delight’, its battle scenes, language and cadence
‘appropriate to the grandeur of [its martial] theme’ (p. 329). While noting
the way in which the cadence of the verses mimics the sounds of battle,
Zvelebil (1974: 211) interprets the paran.i literature largely as a natural
development from earlier heroic genres (pp. 117–118, 207–213). Shulman
(1985: 276–292), however, has seen the potential for humor in the text, in
the macabre feast of the ghouls on the bloody battlefield, in the rhythmic
echoing of the sounds of battle, in ‘the common note of a grisly humorous
excess’ (p. 279) whose humor Shulman ultimately ties to a larger vision of
‘king and clown’ in South Indian literary and intellectual history.60
It is the potential for humor in the paran.i genre – Shulman’s sugges-
tion that the descriptions of battles and feasting ghouls point perhaps to
something like irony – that is of interest here. As in the Cı̄vakacintāman. i
discussed above, literary excess of image, sound, and word constitutes
a significant authorial technique in the Kaliṅkattupparan. i. Consider, for
60 A full discussion of the merits of Shulman’s thesis lies beyond the scope of this essay.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 137

example, the following two stanzas, in which the ‘gruesome job’ of the
ghouls is expressed through a ‘horribly suggestive rhythm, which reflect[s]
marvellously the eagerness, the hunger, the perverse joy of the demons’
(Zvelebil, 1974: 210):
The blood, the blood of the Kaliṅgas,
to enjoy, to enjoy Kaliṅgam,
kill the tender bodies,
kill the tender bodies!
To eat and drink,
rejoicing at refreshing [our] bellies with food;
rise up, oh hosts of demons,
rise up, rise up, oh hosts of demons! (vv. 302–303)

It is hard not to read irony into such a poetic description, a condemnation

of war rather than an embracing of battle and valor in the classical heroic
genre. ‘Hyperbole’, in the case of Sanskrit literature, as Siegel (1987)
notes, ‘demands either awe or laughter’ (p. 40); scenes of battle – with
‘elephants . . . whose wounds gushed blood’ (Kaliṅkattupparan. i, v. 456)
and where the defeated slink away pretending to be Jinas, Hindu pilgrims,
Buddhists, or wandering bards (vv. 466–469) – like the ghoulish imagery
above, abound in comic hyperbole.
If the Kaliṅkattupparan. i shares with the Cı̄vakacintāman. i the literary
techniques of excess, the two also display a biting irony in their treatment
of women. Like the perverse use of female eye imagery in the Jain text
noted above, the paran.i also likens a lady’s eyes – often in classical Tamil
an emblem of her beauty – to deadly weapons:
[Your] great eyes, like spears,
pierce the breasts of young men
and rip open wounds . . . (v. 56)

Women are portrayed with a kind of biting irony – as when a woman

chides her fallen husband for biting his otherwise perfect lips in the
throes of a violent death (v. 483) – and one wonders if such descriptions
might not, in fact, bear much in common in terms of technique with the
Cı̄vakacintāman. i. In the Takkayākapparan. i, Daks.a, the principal character,
takes on the head of a goat after suffering Śiva’s fury of decapitation
(Zvelebil, 1974: 212–213), suggesting again that perhaps such texts are
to be read as poking fun at, or questioning the value of, the classical poetic
presentations of war and female sexuality.
If the paran.i genre can be read as undermining, or at least calling into
question, the heroic praise of the violence of battle, another new and more
productive genre of Tamil literature, the ulā, continues along the same
lines, focusing on the issues attending female sexuality. With more than
138 ANNE E. MONIUS

seventy extant examples in Tamil, the ulā was obviously a popular genre;
set in a common poetic meter known as kal.iven.pā, such a poem describes
the king as he processes through the streets, focusing primarily upon the
women of various ages along the way and the manner in which they fall in
love with him, each according to her current stage of life (Zvelebil, 1995:
719). Ot.t.akkūttar, author of the Takkayākapparan. i and court-poet to three
successive Cōla kings (Vikkiraman, Kulōttuṅka II [Cēkkilār’s patron], and
¯
Rājarāja II), composed ¯
the most famous ¯ studies in the
of these processional
psychology of female love, the Mūvarulā or ‘Ulā of the Three’, referring
to each of his royal patrons. So graphic are the depictions of the mature
women in passionate love that commentators from the fourteenth century
onward regard the female characters as ‘common women’ or prostitutes
(Shulman, 1985: 312). What is important here, in the context of setting
the stage for interpreting the violent imagery of the Periyapuraān. am, is
that the king, surrounded by women literally falling at his feet, remains
utterly dispassionate, unmoved by even the most obviously sexual displays
of interest on the part of his audience. Equally important for the purposes
of this study is the condemnation, by at least one important processional
poem, the Tillai ulā,61 of the violence demanded of Cirutton.t.ar by Śiva.
¯
The text maintains that Śiva performed a ‘great evil’ (pātakam) in asking
the father to serve up his own son for dinner (Dorai Rangaswamy, 1990:
1011–1012; Shulman, 1993: 39–40).
Leaving aside the question of the overall ‘meaning’ of either the paran.i
or ulā texts as a whole, it is certainly clear that, in twelfth-century South
Indian literary culture, the issues of violence, war, heroism, and female
sexuality were being re-thought, re-evaluated, and re-imagined. While
the Cı̄vakacintāman. i evokes in its audience revulsion or disgust for the
sexually graphic scenes it plays over and over again, the paran.i litera-
ture features ghouls feasting rapturously on the corpses of fallen soldiers,
while the ulā poems portray a king unmoved by the paroxysms of passion
he evokes while processing through his royal city. All of this literature
emerges, no less, in what appears to have been an era of unprecedented
peace and prosperity in the Cōla realm, a century of relative freedom from
bloodshed that extended from¯ the last half of the reign of Vikkiraman
through the rule of Rājarāja II (Nilakanta Sastri, 1984: 349–351).62 The¯

61 The Tillai ulā survives only in fragments, published by the mid-twentieth century in
a journal known as Tamilppolil; this incomplete edition was unavailable to me.
¯ ¯
62 Given the spotty historical record in pre-modem South Asia, one must always be
cautious in arguing from lack of evidence. One must also ask whether or not the lack of
inscriptional evidence of battle documents historical reality, or whether epigraphical style
simply shifted to portray the monarch in a more peaceful, benevolent manner.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 139

themes and the literary techniques employed by Tiruttakkatēvar in his Jain

condemnation of human sexuality and love in the early tenth century find
wider voice in a variety of new literary genres by the mid-twelfth century,
creating a literary ethos of ironic – even humorous – dismissal of the old
Caṅkam poetic values of love and war.

5. JAIN HEROES AND ŚAIVA SAINTS

Given this reading of the Cı̄vakacintāman. i as well as of poetic genres

newly emergent in the reign of Cēkkilār’s royal patron, how might the
¯
Periyapurān. am be understood as a ‘response’, as a reaction to the earlier
Jain text? If Umāpati’s claim that Cēkkilār composed his text to woo
his royal patron away from an interest in¯Jainism is correct, how is the
Periyapurān. am best understood as a productive endeavor in that direction?
At the level of form, of poetic structure and narrative framework,
the Cı̄vakacintāman.i establishes a set of conventions for long ‘epic’
narratives that all subsequent medieval Tamil narrative works, from the
Periyapurān. am to Kampan’s Irāmāvatāram, follow. The Cintāman.i, for
¯
example, is the first narrative poem to employ the meter (viruttam)
commonly used by the great poet-saints of Śiva and Vis.n.u and favored
by Cēkkilār as well. The Jain text is the first in Tamil to employ the
¯
literary device known as avaiyat.akkam, the author’s expression of modesty
regarding the faults of the composition to follow; Cēkkilār follows Tirut-
takkatēvar’s lead by likening his feeble attempt to capture ¯ in words the
glories of the saints to ‘a dog of great avarice, [trying to] drink up the great
expanse of ocean’ (Periyapurān. am, v. 6). Just as the Jain author begins his
long story with elegant descriptions of the bounty of the Tamil countryside,
the grandeur of the royal city, and the virtue of the ruling monarch, so, too,
does Cēkkilār preface his long set of hagiographical narratives with the
same glorious¯ praise of the Cōla country, the capital city, and his royal
patron. ¯
Moving beyond this relatively superficial, formal ‘influence’ that the
Cı̄vakacintāman. i exerts not only upon the Periyapurān.am but upon all
subsequent Tamil poetic narratives, the Periyapurān.am arguably does
nothing less than attempt to recover the idea of love, the aesthetic
experience that literary depiction of love evokes, from the wastebin of
sarcasm constructed so subtly by Tiruttakkatēvar. In response to the
Cı̄vakacintāman. i and perhaps to a host of other Tamil literary composi-
tions of the Cōla era that similarly dismiss love and war (as discussed
¯
above), the Periyapurān . am recovers love or an ¯
pu as a worthy human
experience of religious import, not simply by harkening back to older
140 ANNE E. MONIUS

classical depictions of love, but by imagining new expressions of love

through the cultivation of a new kind of rasa aesthetic: love mixed with
vı̄ra, the ‘heroic’. In so reconstituting the literary notion of loving devotion,
Cēkkilār champions a new definition of love, of anpu, of bhakti for the
lord that ¯
¯ befits a king (such as his royal patron, Kullōttuṅka II) who must
act decisively in the world. Against the backdrop of the Jain denigration
of erotic love and the amorous exploits of Cı̄vakan, as well as the ironic
¯
depictions of battle and female sexuality in the contemporaneous paran.i
and ulā genres, the violence of the Periyapurān. am serves an important
heuristic role in this project of recovering love as an important religious
and literary value.
As Ledbetter (1996), in his study of violence in modern Euro-American
fiction, suggestively notes, the moment of violence in a text, the scene of
violence done to the human body ‘that disrupts the text’s “master plot” ’,
often ‘provides transforming moments of ethical importance’ (p. 9). Unlike
the Cı̄vakacintāman. i or the paran.i depictions of sexual lust and battle that
seek to evoke revulsion or disgust in their reader through sheer excess,
the Periyapurān. am’s use of violent imagery is far subtler, meant, in fact,
in Ledbetter’s terms, to shock the reader or listening audience. More than
once in the Periyapurān. am, Cēkkilār’s characters express shocked dismay
at the violent deeds of the bhaktas; ¯ the king in the story of Eripattar, for
example, simply cannot believe the scene of the bhakta’s slaughter ¯ and
remarks: ‘He is the servant of the one who dances in the hall [Śiva]. He
is not the killer’ (v. 585). The Periyapurān.am – a story full of emotion,
full of commentary on the value of human emotion – does not employ the
literary techniques of excess to evoke disgust or revulsion in its audience.
Emotion, particularly the emotional experiences of love and heroism, sung
in a new key and with new religious sensibilities, are valued in Cēkkilār’s
¯
text as human experiences of great soteriological import. It is on this level
– on the issue of the relative value of various rasa or heightened emotional
experiences – that the Periyapurān. am most directly engages the earlier
Cı̄vakacintāman. i and other literary works that similarly undermine the
value of love and heroism in battle. If Tiruttakkatēvar’s text seeks to evoke
a revulsion for the worldly life that culminates in the experience of śānta,
‘the quiescent’, then the Periyapurān.am argues that the emotional life
constitutes a central element in any human being’s religious life; Cēkkilār
subtly constructs a vision of love tinged with heroism against the Jain ¯
literary contention that love and battle have no place in the life of a king –
or any other living being – in search of liberation.
Even before Cēkkilār begins to recount the glorious deeds of the saints
of Śiva, he presents ¯his audience with the story of a human king that
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 141

encapsulates the themes of love and violence, self-inflicted suffering and

redemption, to come. The story of the progenitor of the Cōla dynasty, King
Manunı̄ticōl an (vv. 98–135), constitutes a paradigm of sorts ¯ for each of the
¯ ¯ ¯
nāyanār tales to follow. In this, perhaps the most emotionally wrenching
story¯ in the entire text, the king’s son, ‘abounding in the exalted virtues
coveted by his rare father . . . [and] like a young sun’ (v. 104), inadvertently
crushes a young calf to death under the wheels of his chariot.63 While the
guilt-ridden prince seeks redemption through brahminic performance of
Vedic rituals, the mother cow, distraught with grief, stumbles to the palace,
where she summons the king by ringing a bell with her horns. The king,
feeling ‘as if his head had taken up the harsh poison of all the sorrow that
had befallen the cow’ (v. 117), rages at his ministers who advise the ritual
expiation for cow-slaughter prescribed in the Vedic law books: ‘Will [such
ritual penance] cure the illness of the cow crying from grief at the loss of
her young calf’ (v. 120)? Explaining further the hypocrisy that would be
evident to all if he let his own son escape a death-sentence freely meted out
to other murderers, King Manunı̄ticōlan demands that he must suffer as the
wronged mother cow has suffered ¯ ¯ ¯ issues a terrible death-warrant for
and
his own son; when his minister prefers suicide to carrying out the king’s
wishes, the king himself crushes his son to death under the wheels of his
own royal chariot. As all weep in agony, Lord Śiva appears and restores all
to life again: the calf, the minister, and the young prince. King and mother
cow alike rejoice.
In what way does this short and poignant story anticipate the longer
and more complex hagiographical narratives to come? First, the story
highlights the prominence of the father-son relationship, a bond starkly
and often wrenchingly emotional, demanding, precious yet difficult. As
will be discussed further below, the father-son relationship is paradigmatic
throughout the Periyapurān.am, with Śiva clearly cast in a paternal role
rather than that of lover or king. Another theme to emerge from this story
that resonates with the hagiographic narratives to follow is, as Shulman
(1993) rightly describes it, a profoundly emotional, and perhaps uniquely
Tamil, insistence on the external manifestation of emotion; as Shulman
describes the king’s profound experience of empathy with the grieving
mother cow, ‘having internalized the emotion initially, he is still driven
in the direction of a concrete externalization in action’ (p. 14). Unlike his
ministers, who insist that he follow the letter of brahminic law in meting
out punishment to his son, the king demands that attention be paid to
the emotional spirit of the law; the only proper punishment will be one
63 Shulman (1993: 10–17) discusses this narrative within the larger framework of his
examination of biblical and Indian aqedah stories.
142 ANNE E. MONIUS

that evokes the same emotionally draining response in the king that the
mother cow has suffered. Emotion has its own logic, its own demands;
such demands, as Shulman notes, must be met through decisive action.
In this context, the violent death of the prince at his own father’s hands
bespeaks both emotional commitment and depth: the king’s empathy with
the grieving mother wronged manifests itself in a terrible deed, an action
made all the more terrible by the father’s profound love for his son.64 The
story, like the larger narrative frame in which it lies embedded, is essen-
tially about emotion, about the value and difficulties of emotional bonds,
of love and empathy, and the high cost of each to those brave enough
to embrace them. The power of the king’s love and empathy command
the attention of Śiva, who, as above, restores the fallen to life. The story
of King Manunı̄ticōl an, in short, celebrates the transformative power of
human – and¯humane¯ –¯ feelings of empathy and love by merging the two in
the figure of a heroic Cōla king. In the language of Indic literary-aesthetic
theory, karun.a (empathy¯or pathos) and śr.ṅgāra (or anpu, ‘love’ in Tamil)
merge with vı̄ra, the ‘heroic’, in this short prequel to¯the narratives of the
saints. In recapturing the value of the deeply emotional – and actively
motivating – forces of love and empathy, in merging those forces with
images of the heroic warrior, the Periyapurān. am launches its most compel-
ling response to the earlier Jain Cı̄vakacintāman. i. Love, empathy, and the
heroic – as rasa or meyppāt.u and as ways of engaging the world actively
and humanely – constitute the very core of the religious life. Rather than
cultivating disgust for the ties that bind human beings to each other and
the world, the Periyapurān.am argues for a reshaping of those bonds, a
tempering and redirecting of love and empathy through evocation of vı̄ra,
‘the heroic’, courageously externalized action.
Love as anpu in the Periyapurān.am is not the same love so ridiculed
in the earlier¯ Jain narrative. If the Periyapurān. am can best be under-
stood as a creative response to the Cı̄vakacintāman. i, foremost among its
responsive tasks is the redefinition of literary and aesthetic love. In the
Periyapurān. am, love as śr.ṅgāra is entirely stripped of eros, freed from
any connotation of bodily lust or sexual appetites. This vision of love
physically expressed but in a completely non-sexual or a-sexual way stands
quite in contrast to earlier depictions of Śiva in Tamil devotional poetry.
While Śiva never quite exudes the sexual power of a young Kr.s.n.a wooing
women from their marital beds with the intoxicating power of his flute, in
the poetry of Appar, Cuntarar, and Campantar, Śiva is nonetheless often
portrayed in strikingly sexual terms, as fiery lover to his consort, as a
64 See Periyapurānam, v. 104, where the young prince is described as ‘coveted by his
.
rare father who rejoiced greatly in love’ (arum peral tantai mikka ul.am makil kātal kūra).
¯ ¯
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 143

wandering beggar of enchanting beauty, as a virile young warrior atop

his martial bull. One of the most frequent references to Śiva in sexu-
ally alluring form in this early devotional poetry is to his appearance as
Bhiks.āt.ana, the beggar who wanders the earth with his skull-bowl followed
by a mangy dog. Yet, in Tamil verse, he is no ordinary beggar; so mesmeri-
zing is his beauty that women’s garments slip spontaneously from their
bodies as he walks by. Appar sings, assuming the voice of such a young
girl:
Listen, my friend,
yesterday
in broad daylight
I’m sure I saw
a holy one,
as he gazed at me
my garments slipped . . .
If I see him again
I shall press my body
against his body
[and] never let him go.65

Campantar vividly evokes the sexual yearning of a young woman who

adores Śiva in physical terms:
‘O god with matted hair’! she cries.
‘You are my sole refuge’! she cries.
‘Bull rider’! she cries, and faints in awe.
O Lord of Marukal
where the blue lily blooms in field waters,
is it fair
to make this woman waste from love’s disease?66

Such images of the sexually alluring Bhiks.āt.ana and the virile young
warrior making young women swoon are nowhere to be found in the
Periyapurān. am. As the story of King Manunı̄ticōlan suggests, Śiva in
Cēkkilār’s literary vision plays a paternal ¯role, that¯ ¯of a father always
¯
loving, at times playful and demanding, but always moved by a ‘son’s’
displays of love. Śiva ‘loves’ only in a fatherly, and never sexual, way; like
a good father, he spends much of his time in the background, allowing his
human devotees to take center stage. In the story of the hunter, Kan.n.appar,
for example, a narrative that dwells on the anpu of its hero more than any
¯
other, Śiva does not appear until the ninety-fifth verse; in most stories, he
appears only in the final verses of the narrative, ready to reward the saint
for his display of devotion. Śiva is most commonly referred to with epithets
65 Tēvāram VI-45.8; translation from Dehejia (1988: 110–111).
66 Tēvāram, II–18.1; translation from Peterson (1989: 248).
144 ANNE E. MONIUS

and phrases that speak to his paternal, cosmic, or martial qualities, rather
than to his form as enchanting mendicant; he is most often referred to as
‘he who dances in the [golden] hall [of the temple at Citamparam]’ (ampal-
attu āt.uvān), as ‘he whose half is a woman’ (mātu or pākanār), as ‘he
¯
who is unknown to Vis.n.u and Brahmā’ (mālum ayanukkum ¯ariyār), and
¯
as ‘the lord who rides the martial bull’ (poru vit.aip pākar mannum), often
arriving on the final scene with his consort beside him (evoking ¯ ¯ an image
of heroism and battle readiness, stripped of any hints of sexuality). Śiva
literally assumes the role of father to a number of his devotees, including
Campantar (whose father leaves him at a temple entrance while he bathes),
Can.t.ēcurar (who cuts of the legs of his biological father and is formally
adopted by Śiva), and Kōt.puli (who kills his entire family for the crime
of eating rice reserved for Śiva). In the stories of the Periyapurān.am, Śiva
emerges as a wholly paternal figure, demanding and accepting love that is
genuine, acted out through sometimes heinous violence, but never tinged
with even the slightest hint of sexuality.
Against the backdrop of the Cı̄vakacintāman. i and its cultivation of
disgust or ennui for human sexuality and the amorous escapades of its
hero, Cēkkilār’s portrayal of marital relations becomes quite significant.
Many among ¯ the nāyanmār are householders, married to spouses who may
or may not share their¯ husbands’ deep commitments to loving Śiva. Yet
relations between man and wife appear to be utterly chaste throughout
the text; nowhere does the reader witness even a hint of a physical rela-
tionship, except for the occasional appearance of a child. While women
are often described with the suggestive phrase pētaiyāl., literally ‘ignorant
ones’ or ‘simpletons’, they are anything but the sexual temptresses of the
Cı̄vakacintāman. i or the ulā literature. Even within the bonds of marriage,
strict chastity is observed between Nı̄lakan.t.ar and his wife as they grab
the ends of a bamboo pole to enter the temple tank together, rather than
physically grasping each other’s hand (v. 396). Kāraikkālammaiyār, born
beautifully resplendent like an avatāram (incarnation) of the goddess of
wealth and beauty, Laks.mı̄ (tirumat.antai avatarittāl. ) (v. 1723), imme-
diately loses, in a graphically physical way, all the sexual allure of
her once-beautiful form when she encounters Śiva, becoming so grimly
skeletal that onlookers run away in fear (vv. 1771–1775).
Not only is love non-sexual in the Periyapurān.am, stripped of the eroti-
cism of the Cı̄vakacintāman. i and Appar’s vision of the enchanting beggar,
but it is also infused with a sentiment or energy quite absent in those
earlier works: the transformative, martially dynamic aesthetic of vı̄ra, ‘the
heroic’, a heroism in turn tempered by its new associations with love and
empathy. Quite ironically, Cēkkilār’s evocation of the poetic sentiment
¯
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 145

of vı̄ra is quite in keeping with Jain literary-aesthetic theory. In one of

the few obvious departures of Jain literary theoreticians from brahminical
paradigms of rasa, the second-century An.uogaddāra inverts the first two
elements in the standard lists of emotional ‘flavors’, favoring vı̄ra as the
first rasa over śr.ṅgāra, the ‘erotic’ (Kulkarni, 1983: 180; Warder, 1999:
343). Numerous among the nāyanmār are called vı̄rar, ‘heroic ones’,
including Iyarpakai, whose boundless ¯ love for Śiva erupts into violent
¯
excess, littering the battlefield with those who would have him ignore
Śiva’s command (v. 425).
Nowhere do these themes of love and violence, emotion and heroism,
come together more clearly against the backdrop of the Cı̄vakacintāman. i
than in the story of the child-saint, Can.t.ēcurar, who amputates the legs
of his father and wins as a result the rights of Śiva’s own adopted son. As
above, Can.t.ēcurar’s violent attack upon his human father is identified, in at
least one Tamil source roughly contemporaneous with the composition of
the Periyapurān.am, as an evil deed of heinous proportions.67 Can.t.ēcurar,
or Can.d.a/Can.d.eśa/Can.d.eśvara (literally, ‘the fierce one’) as he is known
in Sanskrit, also plays an important role in the mythology of the Sanskrit
Āgamas and the rituals of Śaiva temple worship they describe.68 Can.d.a,
described in the Kāmikāgama (4.525) as ‘an angry emanation of Para-
maśiva’ (quoted in Davis, 1991: 156), is the only being powerful enough
to consume the nirmālya, the utterly pure remains of the food offered to
the Śiva liṅga in daily temple worship; these ritual ‘leftovers’ are offered
to Can.d.a at his shrine, to the northeast of the central liṅga. The Āgamas
describe Can.d.a’s family life, assign him a wife, and dwell at some length
on his receiving of Śiva’s glorious grace.69 As an emanation of Śiva’s
highest form (Paramaśiva) and his most immediate subordinate in the
temple, inscriptional evidence suggests that Can.d.a functioned as an inter-
mediary between the lord and his human devotees, with all royal donations
to temples made directly to Can.d.a (acting as a sort of supervising temple
authority) rather than to Śiva himself.70

67 I.e., in the Tillai ulā cited above.

68 For further discussion of the role of Canda in Āgamic temple worship, see Af Edholrn
..
(1984), Smith (1996: 209–210), Diehl (1956: 111, 134, 137, 142), Davis (1991: 155–157),
Dorai Rangaswamy (1990: 523–525, 963–967), and Rajamanickam (1964: 35–36, 178).
69 A striking visual image of this Candeśānugrahamūrti, literally ‘the image of
..
grace [coming] down to Can.d.eśa’, can be found on the northeast wall of the
Gaṅgaikon.d.acolapuram temple built by Rājarāja’s son, Rājendra I, circa 1020–1030.
70 In an inscription from Kāñcı̄puram, Cantēcurar is named the ādidāsa or ‘first servant’
..
of Śiva who donates substantial wealth to a local village; see South-Indian Inscriptions
(1890: 115–116). An inscription from the time of Kulōttuṅka III ‘registers the exchange
of lands belonging [to various] temples . . . The exchange was effected in the names of
146 ANNE E. MONIUS

Cēkkilār’s portrayal of Can.t.ēcurar as a nāyanār could not depart

¯
more significantly from that of the Āgamas. Can.d.¯a, the ‘fierce one’, is
transformed in the Tamil text into a precocious child of seven named
Vicāra Carumanār, conceived through the power of his mother’s austerities
¯
(v. 1221),71 learned in all Vedic and Āgamic lore, his mind forever fixed on
the feet of Śiva ‘who performs the dance that possesses us’ (v. 1226). In a
scene reminiscent of King Manunı̄ticōlan ’s compassion for the cow killed
by his son, one day Vicāra Caruman¯ ¯
ār encounters a herdsman mercilessly
¯
beating a cow who has recently given birth. He restrains the herdsman,
lectures the young man on the sacrality of cows in general, and resolves
to tend the herd himself, thinking that ‘there is no religious duty superior
to guarding this herd of cows with their calves’ (v. 1233). The herd flou-
rishes under the loving care of ‘the little calf of the Vedas’ (ciriya maraik
¯
kanru) (v. 1240), and they begin to produce veritable rivers of milk. ¯
Vicāra,
¯¯
possessed by an urge to worship Śiva, constructs a liṅga of sand and
bathes it with the now plentiful pots of milk given by the happy cows. A
stranger who fails to understand the import of Vicāra’s activities happens
by; he reports to the brahmin owners of the cows that the precious milk
required for their own Vedic rites is being dumped on the sands of the
riverbank. Incensed, the brahmins approach Vicāra’s father and demand
that he put a stop to such an outrage. The boy’s father watches Vicāra
performing his pūjā, and, enraged by the seeming waste of good milk,
emerges from the bushes and kicks over one of his son’s pots. In a scene of
devastating violence rapidly and dispassionately depicted, displaying none
of the techniques of literary excess employed by earlier Jain writers or the
paran.i authors, Vicāra picks up a nearby stick and, ‘as it became an axe, he
appropriately hacked off and scattered [his own] father’s legs’ (v. 1261).
Śiva arrives atop his bull and, in an unprecedented show of fatherly love,
embraces Vicāra and announces, ‘From now on I am your father’ (v. 1264).
Śiva renames the child Can.t.ı̄can, bequeaths to him his own eating bowl,
garment, and garland, and restores ¯ life and limb to the boy’s fallen earthly
father while the heavens rejoice. ‘Who can comprehend this situation?’
writes Cēkkilār in the final lines of the narrative, ‘Whatever is done by the
devotees who¯ give love to the one without end, that is austerity, is it not?
Let us praise it’ (v. 1269)!
Many aspects of this narrative are striking, but most significant for the
current discussion of violence and its meanings in the Periyapurān. am is

Śrı̄ Sēnāpati Ālvār and Chan.d.ēśvara on behalf of the gods . . .’ (South Indian Temple
Inscriptions, 1955:¯ 1239).
71 ‘She performed austerities in order to receive a son who would be a helpmate to the
world’ (ulakil tun.aip putalvar perru vil.aṅkum tavam ceytāl.).
¯¯
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 147

the story’s emphasis on innocence, childishness, and the love between

father and son. The married Can.d.i of the Āgamas is here stripped of
all sexuality, rendered a prepubescent child conceived not through sexual
intercourse but via the austerities of his mother. In a bucolic setting of cattle
and pasture that calls to mind the escapades of that other cow-herding
boy, Kr.s.n.a, nowhere does Cēkkilār hint of the sexual play that so domi-
¯ knowledge is knowledge of Veda and
nates Kr.s.n.a’s stories; Can.t.ēcurar’s
Āgama, of Śiva and the ritual ministrations that most please him. Irony
and humor, applied in the Cı̄vakacintāman. i and the paran.i literature to
sexuality and violence, are here reserved for the boy’s earthly father who
quivers in fear at the accusations of his fellow brahmins against his son
and placates them with an obseqious, ‘Oh brahmins of abundant greatness,
you must forgive that which has happened’ (v. 1253)! Pathetic are the
ensuing scenes of the father crouching in the bushes and spying on his
young son, in sharp contrast to the gracious embrace of Can.t.ēcurar’s ‘true’
father, Śiva. Can.t.ēcurar’s story, couched in the non-sexual love of father
and son, exudes an innocence, a childlike sense of playfulness.
Indeed, it is in the context of a child’s innocent play that Can.t.ēcurar’s
act of violence must be understood. This relatively short narrative of
fifty-nine verses is full of images of play, both linguistic and ritual.
While Cēkkilār often indulges in word-play and double entendre in the
¯ nowhere does he celebrate the play of language so slyly
Periyapurān. am,
as he does in this story. The pathetic images of Can.t.ēcurar’s earthly father
slinking from bush to bush, for example, are made all the more pathetically
humorous by the author’s use of the term marai, literally ‘that which is
hidden’, most often used in this text to refer¯ to the Vedic tradition and
those who practice it. The father is described as the marai mutiyōn, the
one ‘matured in Vedic knowledge’ or, alternatively, ‘the one ¯ matured¯in the
art of concealment’, as he climbs a tree and conceals (maraintu) himself
from his young son (v. 1254). In the act of spying he is again ¯ described
as maraiyōn, the ‘concealed’ or ‘Vedic’ one (v. 1255). In a rather wicked
play on¯ the¯ word tunai, which means either ‘pair’ or ‘to cut’, Cantēcurar
. ..
‘falls in the shade of [Śiva’s] two feet’ or ‘in the shade of [his father’s]
cut feet’ (v. 1264).72 Building on this verbal play, Cēkkilār refers to the
ritual worship of the child who knows the Vedas and Āgamas ¯ as ‘play’:
‘[He] began the precious pūjā according to the play (vil.aiyāt..tāl) of the
established rules, his heart one with truth’ (v. 1257).
It is in this context of lovingly devoted ritual play that Can.t.ēcurar hacks
off his father’s feet that ‘he knew [only] as an impediment to his pūjā’

72 tunait tāl nilal kı̄l viluntavar.

. . ¯ ¯ ¯
148 ANNE E. MONIUS

(v. 1262),73 like a child absorbed in a game swatting away an irritating

fly. Through the decidedly non-erotic, non-sexual bonds of love likened
literally, in this story, to those between father and son, the innocent child,
through his love, is transformed for an instant into an axe-wielding warrior,
protecting his beloved liṅga of sand and pots of milk from anyone who
threatens to disturb them. The violence of Can.t.ēcurar’s action is couched
in the discourse of play, of a game interrupted; the father is, in the end,
restored to life in the world of Śiva (civalōkam) along with the rest of his
family (v. 1268). The innocent and precocious child’s unconscious – and,
in any other context, unconscionable – act of violence moves Śiva himself
to open displays of fatherly affection, again reminiscent of the martially
compassionate focus that drives Manunı̄ticōlan and demands the attention
of the lord. Violence, in the story of ¯ Cantēcurar,
¯ ¯ simply constitutes part
..
of an innocent child’s play of love, the reflexive reaction to a game inter-
rupted, a game whose ultimate end lies in bringing together devotee and
god, child and father.
Another of Cēkkilār’s most violent stories, one equally steeped in the
¯
pastoral imagery of forest and mountainside that calls to mind the stories
of Kr.s.n.a’s adolescent escapades, is the tale of Kan.n.appar, the unlettered
hunter who sacrifices his own eye to heal a bleeding wound on a Śiva
image. Like the story of Can.t.ēcurar above, Kan.n.appar’s narrative act
of self-mutilation is couched in the terms of impromptu ritual play, of
the expression of heartfelt and innocent love suddenly threatened. In a
literary move that perhaps seeks to rehabilitate the uncouth and unkempt
hunters whom Cı̄vakan encounters in his wanderings,74 Kan.n.appar, origi-
nally named Tin.n.an, ‘the¯ powerful one’, is born, through the grace of Lord
Murukan (v. 661), ¯amid a wild yet strikingly beautiful forest to a father
of great ¯austerities performed in past lives (v. 657). The parallels drawn
to the young Kr.s.n.a’s antics are striking throughout the long description
of Tin.n.an’s happy childhood. Cēkkilār dwells at length on the emotional
¯ ¯
73 ‘As that [stick-turned-axe] that chopped became a weapon to remove the impediment
to the worship, the son who had cut off the two feet of his fallen father removed what he
knew [only] as an impediment to his pūjā and entered into worship as before’ (erinta atuvē
¯
arccanaiyin it.aiyūru akarrum pat.ai āka marinta tātai iru tāl.um tun.itta maintar pūcanaiyil
¯ ¯ ¯ ¯¯ ¯ ¯
arinta it.aiyūru akarrinarāy mun pōl aruccittit.ap pukalum).
¯74 ¯ ¯¯ ¯ ¯
Tiruttakkatēvar provides the following description of a vet.ar or hunter whom Cı̄vakan
encounters in the forest: ¯

He resembled a piece of dark darkness that had been fed with black. He had a sunken chest
from seizing and plucking lizards from deep holes in the ground. He resembled a bear with
flourishing hair. He did not know of betel leaf for his mouth. He had the voice of a ram.
(v. 1230)
Translation from Ryan (1985: 178–179).
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 149

bonds between doting parents and mischievous child and on the mother’s
loving efforts to stem the tears brought on by paternal punishment. Like
young Kr.s.n.a gleefully kicking down the sandcastles of his village play-
mates in the poetry of his ninth-century Tamil devotee, Ān.t.āl.,75 Tin.n.an,
‘with his small foot like a tender shoot scattered the playhouses built by ¯
the girls of the hunter tribe’ (v. 673). After Tin.n.an is made chief of his
tribe and leads the band of village bowmen on the ¯ hunt, the stream of
hunters moving through the dense forest is likened, in a direct allusion to
the mythic lands of Kr.s.n.a, to ‘the river Yamunā of deep waters and great
dark currents, entering into the great ocean of billowing waves’ (v. 722).
One day, while avidly pursuing a boar into the forest, Tin.n.an happens upon
¯
an image of Śiva; not realizing who or what the god represents, the hunter
in nonetheless overcome by love for the deity ‘due to his storehouse of
austerities performed in previous lives’ (munpu cey tavattin ı̄t..tam) (v. 751).
With an almost maternal concern for the ¯well-being of ¯the lord, Tin.n.an
resolves to serve the image and sets about securing daily offerings of meat,¯
water, and fragrant forest flowers. A brahmin trained in Vedic ritual sees
the offerings left by the uneducated hunter and is horrified at the thought of
impure meat and other substances placed before the lord; Śiva appears to
the brahmin in a dream, however, and commands him to watch a true test of
Tin.n.an’s devotion. While the concealed brahmin looks on in amazement,
¯
a despairing Tin.n.an, in a swift phrase of violence, gouges out his own eye
to heal the gushing¯wound on the eye of his beloved image (v. 827).76 The
image’s other eye begins to bleed and, just as Tin.n.an raises his arrow to
¯
75 Well known among Tamil-speaking Vaisnavas, for example, is the following verse
..
from Ān.t.āl.’s Nācciyār Tirumoli (p. 234):
¯
You dark as the rain clouds,
your charming ways
and sweet words
enchant us,
bind us like a spell.
In truth your face
is a magic mantra.
We are but urchins,
we shall not retort and hurt you,
You of the lotus eyes,
do not break our sandcastles.

Translation from Dehejia (1990: 80).

76 ‘Standing before [the image of the lord] with great joy in his heart, [he] took out
his own eye with an arrow, held it, and applied it to the [bleeding] eye of the First One’
(matarttu elum ul..lat tōt.u makilntu mun iruntu tam kan. mutal caram at.uttu vāṅki mutalvar
tam kan.n.il¯appa). ¯ ¯
150 ANNE E. MONIUS

gouge out his own remaining eye, Śiva cries out for him to stop, calling
him ‘Kan.n.appa’, literally ‘dear one of the eye’ (v. 832).
In addition to the allusions to Kr.s.n.a’s rather sexually explicit mytho-
logy noted above, not only is Tin.n.an’s/Kan.n.appar’s love or anpu for Śiva
¯
completely stripped of eroticism, imbued ¯
instead with an overwhelming
maternal love expressed through the offering of food and comfort to
the image, but Tin.n.an himself is repeatedly described in royal terms of
¯
grandeur, his tribal chieftainship likened to the reign of a great monarch.
While the hunters encountered in the Jain Cı̄vakacintāman. i, as noted
above, are anything but royal, depicted as uncouth and slovenly sinners,
Tin.n.an as ‘the powerful one’ is most often described as regal, his hunt for
¯ likened to battle. His ‘strength like that of a victorious male lion
wild boar
of fiery eyes’ (cem kan. vayam kōl. ari ēru an.n.a tin.mai) (v. 705), Tin.n.an
wears the anklets of the hero (vı̄rak kal¯al) (v. 711) and is several times¯
referred to as ‘the heroic one’ (vı̄rar or¯ vı̄ranār). Those who accompany
him on the hunt carry ‘their bows and nets ¯ of war’ (pōr valaic cilai)
(v. 719). This king of the hunters, the bold leader of the ‘battle’ of the hunt,
performs the ultimate sacrifice of the warrior: he turns his weapon upon
himself. The simple love of the untutored young hunter is thus wedded
to a martial character of inherent nobility; kingly deportment, rigorous
engagement in the world, meets simple, overpowering, and maternalistic
love in the story of Kan.n.appar.
Yet Cēkkilār’s depiction of Kan.n.appar’s self-sacrifice could not be
more different¯ from the depictions of battle and violence in the Jain
Cı̄vakacintāman. i and the bloodletting of the paran.i literature. Cēkkilār
certainly employs the techniques of excess used so masterfully by earlier ¯
writers, but he does so only to describe the butchery of the hunt he deems
both ‘murderous’ (kolai puri) and ‘cruel’ (kot.i). As in the Jain descriptions
of Cı̄vakan’s battles and the paran.is’ carnival of the grotesque, Cēkkilār
¯ carnage of the hunt in strikingly similar terms of excess: ¯
describes the
The legs, mid-sections, and heads of the stags were all severed;
the elk died, their intestines flowing down the arrows [that pierced them].
Their bodies penetrated by arrows, wild cattle shivered in distress;
many deer, their bodies severed by the arrows of the chieftains, leaped up and fell down.

Before wild buffaloes who ran past in panic, the napes of their necks ripped open by fierce
arrows as red fire [blood] and still more arrows rained down on them,
great wild boar passed, their heads held high, and it was as if tigers seized them in their
ferocious teeth with an anger that bubbled over. (vv. 728–729)

While Cēkkilār thus lingers over the gore of the hunt, cultivating in his
audience an ¯ethos of disgust for the senseless butchery of beautiful and
noble animals, the self-mutilation of his hero, as in the case of Can.t.ēcurar’s
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 151

violent episode above, is quickly passed over in a short phrase, couched

in far longer depictions of Kan.n.appar’s innocent and complete love that
leads to utter empathy (as in the case of King Manunı̄ticōlan) with the
pain of the wounded image. Unlike the bloody gore¯ of the ¯warriors ¯ who
offer their heads to Kālı̄ on the battlefields of the paran.i literature (as at
Kaliṅkattupparan. i, v. 111), Kan.n.appar’s act of self-sacrifice is a swift act
of great healing power: ‘Standing before [the lord] with great joy in his
heart, [Tin.n.an] took out his own eye with an arrow, held it, and applied it
to the eye of the¯ First One’ (v. 827).
Although the above discussion provides only two examples of the
contexts in which Cēkkilār couches the violence of the saints, the stories
of Can.t.ēcurar and Kan.¯n.appar are among the most well known and
oft-depicted in South Indian literature and temple iconography. Both
are narratives of child-like innocence and love, power and play; so
extraordinary, in fact, is the power of Kan.n.appar’s story that Cēkkilār
claims that merely by narrating it he will ‘annihilate [his own] bad karma’ ¯
(v. 790). Both stories resonate with references to another child wielding
tremendous powers through play – Kr.s.n.a – and emphasize that even
love for Śiva manifest through violence to others or through bloody self-
mutilation must be understood in the context of play. Using the metaphor
of play that is as old as the Brahmasūtras to indicate the divine’s imma-
nence yet ultimate transcendence,77 Cēkkilār takes great care to distinguish
this sort of devotional or divine play from ¯ the love-frolicking of the Jain
Cı̄vakacintāman. i or the ghoulish play of Kālı̄ and her demonic retinue
in the Kaliṅkattupparan. i. Whereas Cı̄vakan’s stunningly beautiful mother,
¯
with her wide eyes, red lips, and heaving breasts, is said to be ‘ambrosia for
the king [Cı̄vakan’s father]’ (vēntarku amutāy) and the ‘cause of his play’
¯ of Cantēcurar lies in the actions of
¯ (v. 8), the ‘play’
(vil.aiyāt.utarku ētu)
¯ ..
ritual worship, in honoring his liṅga of sand with loving devotion. Whereas
the warriors of the ferocious goddess Kālı̄ sever their own heads in sacri-
ficial offering and then engage in a joyous dance of ‘play’ (vil.aiyāt.u)
(Kaliṅkattupparan. i, v. 113), Kan.n.appar’s self-sacrifice is born of tender
love and affection, a maternal urge to nurture and heal. The erotic and
violent play of adults is here transformed into the innocent and loving play
of children, even in its most violent manifestations.
Indeed, the loving play of the nāyanmār and its seemingly inherent
potential for violence makes sense only ¯ in the broader context of love
for Śiva that is salvific, in the arena of a divine presence whose action

77 See Brahmasūtra 2.1.33, the so-called lı̄lāsūtra or ‘verse of play’: lokavat tu

lı̄lākaivalyam, ‘play only, as in the world’. The sūtra is discussed by Goodwin (1998:
3–23).
152 ANNE E. MONIUS

in the world is itself often likened to play. Shulman (1993) notes the
manner in which the Periyapurān.am’s unique blending of ‘terror, mercy,
[and] play’ results in the ‘transformation [of] awareness’ (p. 34), and
this brand of play tinged with terror and ultimate mercy is everywhere
evident throughout Cēkkilār’s text. Śiva himself often ‘plays’ as a master
of disguise, appearing at ¯Cuntarar’s wedding with a deed of servitude to
pluck the young prince away from his waiting bride (vv. 174–211), only
to toy with the saint, again in the guise of an aged brahmin, by brushing
his feet against Cuntarar’s head (vv. 231–233). Śiva revels in the antics of
his devotees/playmates, whether that play includes the violent amputation
of legs that interfere with ritual play or the gentle enjoyment of stones
thrown in great love at the liṅga by the saint Cākkiyar, an enjoyment of
violence likened by Cēkkilār to the glee of children (il.am putalvarkku
inpamē ) at the occasional ¯teasing, pulling, and tweaking of their parents
¯ 3650). Śiva enjoys the violent ‘play’ of the battlefield (amar vilaiyāttil)
(v. . ..
where his heroic (vı̄rar) devotee, Iyarpakai, slaughters his own kinsmen
¯
as they attempt to interfere in his service to the lord (vv. 424–425). Like
an indulgent parent watching the rough-and-tumble games of his son, Śiva
enjoys even the most heinously violent moves of his devotees in the game
of love between lord and saint. The rivers of blood on the battlefield are
of no more cosmic or moral import than rivulets of water trickling through
a sandbox in the arena of lı̄lā, where Śiva serves simultaneously as lord,
referee, and playmate.
Indeed, all of the Śaiva texts composed in Tamil during the twelfth
century emphasize this theologically complex and productive notion of
lord as player, including the first of the canonical philosophical works
that would, in later centuries, define the school known as Śaiva Siddhānta.
Like the second of these philosophical treatises, the Tirukkal.irrupat.iyār
(discussed above), the Tiruvuntiyār (attributed to Tiruviyalūr ¯Uyyavanta
¯
Tēvanāyanār and dated to 1148 CE),78 has been dismissed by modem
¯
Śaiva scholars as ‘minor’ (Ponniah, 1952: 24) for its ‘practically nil’ philo-
sophical content (p. 27). Yet, even through its very form, the Tiruvuntiyār
develops a theology of Śiva as personal lord specifically engaged with his
devotees through the rubric of cosmic love-play. The refrain at the end
of the second and third lines of each stanza that gives the text its name
– untı̄ para, ‘rise up and fly’! – has been the source of some scholarly
confusion,¯ 79 but the phrase and structure of each stanza suggest a song-

78 References to the text refer to the edition found in Meykantacāttiram (1994).

..
79 Periyālvār, the great Vaisnava poet-saint of the late eighth or early ninth century,
..
¯
devotes eleven verses to enjoining his audience to praise the grace and beauty of the
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 153

form sung by young women playing a game perhaps akin to shuttlecock.80

Using the language of ‘melting’ (uruki) and ‘attachment’ (parru), the poet
presents a dynamic image of lord and devotee at play in the¯ ¯sea of ever-
changing forms, inviting the devotee to break free of worldly bondage and
soar toward the lord’s abode (v. 5):
He is both one (ēkanum) and not one (anēkanum).
¯
He becomes our master ¯ and¯ fly!
(nātan) – rise up
¯
He grasps us – rise up and fly! 81

Here and throughout the Tiruvuntiyār, all activities of Śiva are rendered in
the context of game-song, voicing a theological commitment to a vision of
divine power exercised through play that does not survive within the Śaiva
Siddhānta philosophical system. The great fourteenth-century scholar and
consolidator of the Śaiva Siddhānta school, Umāpati Civācāriyār, himself
author of eight of the fourteen canonical works, clearly limits the scope
child Kr.s.n.a: ‘Singing of the strength of our lord, fly! Singing the praises of our lord, fly’!
(Nālāyirativyappirapantam, 1993: 150):
en nātan vanmaiyaip pāt.ip para
¯ pirān
¯ van ¯
¯ maiyaip pātip par
em . a
¯ ¯ ¯
Moving closer to the Śaiva world of the Tiruvuntiyār, Mān.ikkavācakar’s ninth-century
Tiruvācakam devotes twenty verses to the unti genre in praise of Śiva’s miraculous and
fearful exploits, focusing especially on his destruction of the three heavenly cities and the
decapitation of his father-in-law, Daks.a:
[His] bow bent, the battle commenced,
and the three cities were vanquished – rise up and fly!
They went up in flames and burned together – rise up and fly!
From Mān.ikkavācakar (1971: 344):
val.aintatu villu vil.aintatu pūcal
ul.aintana mup puram untı̄ para
¯
oruṅku¯ut.an ventavāru untı̄ para
¯ ¯ ¯
The Tiruvuntiyār mimics precisely the refrain of Mān.ikkavācakar’s unti song, but the
subject matter shifts significantly from Śiva’s heroic exploits to the nature of the human
condition vis-à-vis the lord. Pope (1995) translates the phrase untı̄ para as ‘fly away, Unthı̄’
¯
or ‘fly aloft, Unthı̄’, Subramania (1912) translates the phrase as ‘rise and fly’. Dhavamony
(1971) interprets the phrase and the poetic meter as one ‘which children employ when
singing to the butterfly’ (p. 175).
80 In this reading of the phrase, the title would mean ‘those who play the holy unti game’.
According to the ninth-century Tamil lexicon known as the Piṅkalanikan..tu, unti refers to ‘a
game of Indian women somewhat akin to the English game of battled ore and shuttlecock’
(Tamil Lexicon, 1982: 417).
81
ēkanum āki anēkanum ānavan
¯ ¯ ¯ ¯ ¯
nātanum ānān enru untı̄ para
¯ ¯ ¯ ¯¯ ¯
nammaiyē ān..tān enru untı̄ para
¯ ¯¯ ¯
154 ANNE E. MONIUS

of divine play envisioned in the Tiruvuntiyār two centuries earlier; in his

Civappirakācam, Umāpati ‘declares that all five classes of divine activities
recognized in the system of Śaiva Siddhānta must be understood to spring
from God’s gracious concern for the deliverance of souls, and that it is not
permissible to say that Śiva’s acts of creation, preservation, destruction,
and so forth, are his sports’ (Hein, 1995: 18).
Yet in the Tiruvuntiyār, as in the Periyapurān. am, play encompasses
and defines seemingly all of Śiva’s activities in the world, from his first
arrival in the world of form (cakal.amāy vanta tenru untı̄ para: ‘Assuming
form, he came and appeared – rise up and fly’ ¯[p. ¯ 1]!) to his
¯ severing of
the fetters that bind his devotees to the world (parrai aruppar enru untı̄
para: ‘He cuts away attachments – rise up and fly’¯ ¯[p. 15]!).
¯ The¯ ¯play of
¯
the lord – like the ritual play of Can.t.ēcurar that ends in violence or the
bloody sword of Iyarpakai on the playing field of battle – is difficult to
understand; as Shulman ¯ (1985) notes, ‘when Śiva is your playmate, you
can never play by the rules, or even truly understand them’ (p. 5). Indeed,
the anguish of the devotee in search of a vision of Śiva, the striving of
each of the nāyanmār to catch a glimpse of the lord is ‘in a sense . . .
¯ [play]’, for ‘our torments are his amusements’ (p. 45).
the god’s vil.aiyāt.al
The extraordinary actions of devotees such as Can.t.ēcurar and Iyarpakai
make sense only within the theological context of divine-activity-as-play, ¯ a
context in which distinctions between subject and object, game and player,
morality and immorality, good and evil, are ultimately blurred.82 All is play
in the world of Śiva, and normative forms of moral discourse no longer
apply.
Yet the love borne by Can.t.ēcurar and Kan.n.appar and expressed through
the violent ‘play’ of amputation and self-mutilation is a love tempered by,
wholly defined by, its association with tapas (Tamil tavam), the power
wrought by severe ascetic practice. Far from the love-‘games’ of Cı̄vakan
and his many consorts, love in the Periyapurān.am is all-encompassing,¯
emotionally overwhelming, a motivating agent in and of itself, but one
crafted in the fires of the renunciatory practices of meditation and self-
denial. While nowhere does the text mention the institutional frameworks
for medieval South Indian asceticism – there are no mat.has (Tamil mat.am)
82 As Spariosu (1989: 2–3) remarks in his study of play as a philosophical category
newly reborn in Euro-American discourse:
On this view, play appears as a contingency-free, self-enclosed realm that nevertheless
manifests itself only in and through the phenomenal world. And it may be precisely this
amphibolous nature of play that accounts for its centrality in contemporary thought, where
it has become an expedient way of mending the age-old split between subject and object,
if not a universal remedy for all our metaphysical and practical problems.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 155

or monasteries, no ācāryas or teachers, no rites of dı̄ks.ā or initiation83

– virtually all acts of violence are prefaced with references to tapas
performed in previous lifetimes. Unlike the medieval Cōla ulā or proces-
sional poems discussed above, in which the king remains¯ aloof from the
love-displays of his female subjects and walks away seemingly unaffected
(Shulman, 1985: 312–324; Ali, 1996: 183–215), no devotee of Śiva – not
even the most powerful king, the most innocent child, or the most uncouth
and barbaric hunter – can remain unmoved by a vision of the lord. Even
Kan.n.appar, utterly innocent of the name or nature of Śiva, is utterly over-
come by anpu or love at the sight of a stone liṅga in the wilderness. Yet
such love, ¯even in the case of the unlettered hunter, is made possible by the
tapas of former lives.
The emphasis that the Periyapurān.am places on tapas as generating a
fiery heat or power must be understood against not only the backdrop of
the Jain Cı̄vakacintāman. i but also in relation to older Śaiva critiques of
Jains precisely because of their emphasis on renunciation and self-denial.
As Peterson (1998) notes in her study of the first three Śaiva poets, ‘Jain
asceticism is a major target of the Śaiva critique’ (p. 170). In the poetry
of Appar (whose self-reflexive poetic comments suggest that he was once
himself a Jain renunciant) and Campantar in particular, Jain teachings and
lifestyle habits are ridiculed for their pointless severity, impugned in harsh
tones for an absurdly irrational focus that ultimately does nothing to lead
one toward Śiva. As Appar, the ex-Jain, sings:
A shaven monk, I stood by the words
of the base, ignorant Jains.
I was a hypocrite, running away
and bolting the door
at the sight of lotus-eyed young women.
A miserable sinner
who did not know the Lord of Arur
who saved my soul and possessed me
I was one who starves to death,
begging for food in a deserted town.84

In this context, the Periyapurān.am does nothing less than attempt to

rehabilitate the notion of tapas/tavam, making it a prerequisite of sorts
for the full and overwhelming experience of anpu that leads one to Śiva.
¯
83 Given the fact that inscriptional evidence suggests the presence of numerous
Śaiva monasteries with significant links to royal centers of power by the time of the
Periyapurān.am’s composition, this silence on the part of the text proves interesting. Does
the lack of reference to monastery and initiating teacher suggest that the text in some
way means to counter their ever-expanding influence in the Tamil-speaking South? Such a
question lies beyond the scope of this article and will be the subject of a forthcoming essay.
84 Tēvāram IV-5.8; translation from Peterson (1998: 169–170).
156 ANNE E. MONIUS

Kan.n.appar’s story in particular highlights the central, if backgrounded,

role that tapas plays in setting the stage for the salvific emotional experi-
ence of love for the lord. Kan.n.appar himself is anything but the wandering
Jain ascetic of earlier Śaiva poetry; his is an idyllic world of forest, play,
and hunt. Only eight verses into the story of the hunter beloved of Śiva,
however, the audience learns that Kan.n.appar’s father, Nākan, is more than
simply a ferocious king of the jungle; former austerities and ¯ bad karma
have rendered him a mighty and cruel leader of unspecified potential:
Even though he [Nākan] had performed asceticism (tavam) in previous [births],
because of a subsequent¯ birth he lived a life of sin without virtue.
He lived well-established in cruelty.
He was one of great skill with the bow.
He was like an angry and ferocious lion. (v. 657)
The power of that previous tapas/tavam propels Nākan and his wife to
¯
seek help from the heroic warrior god, Murukan, in conceiving a son. The
¯
guileless Kan.n.appar, as a young chieftain hunting boar, is overwhelmed
by a profound love, a feeling he does not fully comprehend, upon seeing
the holy mountain of Śiva. The ability of this untutored hunter, his spear
bloody from the kill of the hunt, to feel tender sympathy for a lord whom
he does not know and has not yet seen is attributed in the text to the power
of austerities performed in former lives:
He bore a love that became joy without end,
[due to] his storehouse of austerities performed previously, (munpu cey tavattin ı̄t..tam),
and he was overwhelmed by a limitless love. ¯ ¯
Seeing the mountain of the Benevolent One and filled with great love, his bones melted
(enpu nekku uruki), while a tremendous desire arose within him (v. 751).
¯
Kan.n.appar’s ability to be moved by the sight of Śiva’s holy mountain rests
on the ‘storehouse’ (ı̄t..tam) of tapas done previously. Anpu or love, far
from being an emotionally unstable or merely sentimental ¯ experience, is
powered here by the work of asceticism. Love in the Periyapurān.am, even
love in the context of divine play, is a far cry from the fickle bodily urges
of Cı̄vakan and his wives. This love made possible and strong through
¯
former austerities continues, in the case of this particular character, with
the unthinking impulse to self-mutilation to save the bleeding image of the
lord; so moved is Śiva by this display of heroic, powerful love that ‘he
could endure [it] no longer’ (tarittilar) (v. 831), and he stays the hand of
his devotee before a second eye is lost.
The destructive violence of the child-saint, Can.t.ēcurar, is similarly
couched in terms of love fired in the furnace of austerities performed
in former lives. While the child’s love for Śiva is, as discussed above,
stripped of the sexuality of the adult Cı̄vakan, Can.t.ēcurar’s act of violence
¯
toward his father results directly from an unblinking love made possible
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 157

by previous tapas, here defined as unending performance of ritually loving

worship of the liṅga:

[Although still] playing [as a child], through the unending succession of worship [rites]
performed there previously [in former lives], and with an ever-expanding love,
[Can.t.ēcurar], under the ātti trees on the banks of sand on the Man.n.i River, built with sand
the holy body of the one who rides the red-eyed bull and constructed a temple, surrounded
by tall kōpurams, as well as a shrine to Śiva. (v. 1242)

Like Kan.n.appar, the child Can.t.ēcurar has no direct knowledge of Śiva in

his present birth, no direct training in ritual worship in the temple setting.
What turns his heart from the cows he guards so tenderly to love for the
lord is this storehouse of rigorous worship and self-discipline. Anpu for
Śiva is rendered unshakably strong through the power gained across ¯ many
lifetimes.
Yet in these two brief references to tavam or tapas, and in the many such
references scattered through the Periyapurān.am, the category of tapas
remains quite empty of content. What sort of worship did Can.t.ēcurar do in
previous lives? What was the nature of Kan.n.appar’s and Nākan’s renuncia-
tory practice? How did such practices render each character strong ¯ in this
life? For how many lifetimes were such practices necessary before bearing
fruit in the present existence? Not only does the audience find no answers
to such questions, but the text allows no room even to raise them. The focus
of the Periyapurān.am remains throughout the external expression, through
acts of devotion, of the love made possible through internal processes of
self-discipline that the audience does not witness first-hand. What matters
most to Cēkkilār is not the content of tapas but its ultimate role in forging
a new vision of ¯ devotional love, replacing the torrid depictions of sexual
love and its sentiments ridiculed in texts such as the Cı̄vakacintāman. i with
a heroic, martial love purified and made strong by self-discipline exercised
over many lifetimes.
This vision of tapas suffused with love, and of love built on the
foundations of self-denying austerities, challenges the vision of love and
asceticism found in the Jain Cı̄vakacintāman. i in yet another way: by trans-
forming the love wrought by tapas into a community-building enterprise,
in sharp contrast to the world-renouncing ethos of Jain literary presenta-
tions of tapas. Tapas in the Periyapurān.am is constitutive of worldly
community, the very basis upon which Śiva’s earthly gathering of loving
devotees thrives. In the Jain Cı̄vakacintāman. i, the central character, having
grown disillusioned with his world of luxury and women, leaves society
behind in search of a wholly individual liberation. His final ‘battle’ –
against the karmic forces that ensnare his body – ends in victory, and
Cı̄vakan undertakes his final ‘marriage’ vows to knowledge personified,
¯
158 ANNE E. MONIUS

the ‘woman of liberating knowledge’ (kēvala mat.antai) (v. 3117). Tapas is

a solo activity, liberation the ultimate in individual human achievement.
Yet tapas/tavam, as reconstituted by the Periyapurān. am in a milieu
suffused with profound emotional attachment to a personal lord, serves
to forge human community, to rearrange human relationships around
the central figure of Śiva. As Hawley (1987a) and others have noted in
examining other Hindu hagiographic traditions, this love tempered by
austerities in the Periyapurān.am forges new human bonds, creating an
‘extended sacral family’ (p. xix) that replaces – in the case of several
of the most violent nāyanmār – the normative family circle. Kōt.puli, for
example, who slaughters¯ all his living relatives, is granted a vision of his
family transformed in the world of Śiva:
In that way, the Lord Śiva stood before the devotee and said:
‘With the sword in your hand,
you have cut away the fetters (pācam) of your family;
entering into the world above the golden world [of the gods],
they will reach us.
Oh glorious one! You come to us even now’!
Commanding [him thus], [the lord] graciously disappeared. (v. 4149)

Here and in the other instances of saintly violence and mutilation, Śiva
restores the worthy to life, rearranging and reinvigorating familial bonds
of affection with an intense love for the divine and the promise of ultimate
reward. The worthy – those whose loving awareness of Śiva is rendered
profound through previous tapas – are restored to life, their limbs healed,
while the unworthy remain in their maimed and mutilated state. Inter-
esting in this regard, and reading the Periyapurān.am against the earlier
Jain railing against sexuality and the female form, are the number of
instances in which a violated female character is left out of Śiva’s restora-
tion. Kalikkampar, for example, cuts off his wife’s hand when she hesitates
at washing the feet of a visiting Śaiva ascetic who was once their household
servant (v. 4024); he performs the rite of service, and only he is said to enter
into the ‘shade of the feet of the one whose throat is adorned with poison’
(kal.attil nañcam an.intavar tāl. nilal kı̄r) (v. 4025). The wife of the great
¯
king and servant of Śiva, Kalarciṅkar, ¯ suffers horrible mutilation twice
over for having touched and then ¯ ¯ inhaled the fragrance of a flower intended
for the lord: first an ascetic, Ceruttun.ai, cuts off her nose (v. 4106), then
her own husband cuts off the offending hand that first touched the flower
(v. 4110). As above, nowhere does Cēkkilār mention any restoration of the
wife’s appendages. The community of Śiva’s ¯ devotees, it would seem, is
thus an exclusive one, one whose members have been tested and proven
their unfailing devotion, one reluctant to admit anything of the sexuality
that peripheral female characters introduce.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 159

One final way in which, following Umāpati’s suggestion, the

Periyapurān. am might be construed as an ‘answer’ of sorts to the Jain
Cı̄vakacintāman. i lies in the characterization of Cuntarar or Cuntaramūrtti,
arguably the central character among the nāyanmār as presented by
Cēkkilār. Repeatedly called Śiva’s van ton..tar or ¯‘harsh devotee,85 – for
¯
his continual demands that the lord ¯provide him with gold (vv. 3265–
3268) and serve as liaison to his estranged first wife (vv. 3467–3534)
– Cuntarar’s story provides the framework for the entire text. Cēkkilār
opens with the story of Cuntarar’s first wedding ruined by the appear- ¯
ance of Śiva disguised as an old brahmin; he ends with the nāyanār’s
ascension to civalōkam, Śiva’s heavenly abode, on a white royal elephant. ¯
In between, several episodes in Cuntarar’s life are woven into the stories
of other nāyanmār, with particular focus on his relationship with his two
¯
wives: Paravaiyār and Caṅkiliyār. Cuntarar’s centrality to Cēkkilār’s work
¯
is heralded early in the text, as the great sage, Upaman.n.iyar (Upamanyu),
notes that ‘through the grace of my father [Śiva], the celebrated harsh
devotee, king of Nāvalar, will come to the south’ (v. 27); to the assembled
brahmins, he adds, ‘he is worthy of our worship’ (nām tolum tanmaiyān)
(v. 29). Cuntarar’s Tirutton..tattokai is hailed as the basis of¯ Cēkkil¯ ār’s text
¯
(vv. 47–48), and the poet himself is called ‘the lord’s friend’ (tampirān¯
tōlar) (v. 275). The language of mūrti (Tamil mūrtti, ‘divine embodiment’) ¯
¯
(v. 172)86 and avatāram (v. 90)87 is used throughout the text to refer both
to Cuntarar and his female consorts.
Yet why does Cēkkilār so privilege the life of Cuntarar in his anthology
of nāyanār stories? Is it¯because he is the author of the Tirutton..tattokai, the
¯ work to list the saints of Śiva and the ‘root’ (mūlam) (v. 4234)
first poetic
of the Periyapurān. am? Were that the case, one would expect, perhaps,
equal treatment of Cēkkilār’s two other sources: Nampi Ān.t.ār Nambi
and Upamanyu. Was Cēkkil ¯ ār perhaps a particular devotee of Cuntarar,
eager to promote in his literary¯ work the glories of his favorite among the
nāyanmār? That, of course, will never be known for sure. Yet Umāpati’s
claim¯ that the Periyapurān.am constitutes a Śaiva response to the Jain
Cı̄vakacintāman. i suggests another possibility. Read in that light (and given
the discussion of violence above), the characterization of Cuntarar – as an
eminently human devotee who struggles with his passions, who endures
85 Vanmai in Tamil also connotes anger, violence, strength, and thoughtfulness.
¯
86 Here onlookers praise the beauty of the young Cuntarar on the eve of his wedding:
‘To see him thus bejeweled is to see a virtuous mūrti’.
87 Here the reference is to the heavenly servant of Śiva’s consort taking incarnation
as Paravaiyār, Cuntarar’s first wife: ‘Paravai made her womanly avatāram’. Verse 149
describes Cuntarar as having ‘made a holy avatāram in order to raise up the world’ (ulakam
uyyat tiru avatāram ceytār).
160 ANNE E. MONIUS

the trickery of his lord88 – emerges as a formidable Śaiva counterpart to

Tiruttakkatēvar’s Jain hero, Cı̄vakan.
Immediately striking upon reading ¯ Cuntarar’s story in light of the
others told in the Periyapurān. am is its language of sexuality, passion, and
trickery. As discussed above, the Periyapurān.am strips even its central
deity of the sexuality afforded him by the earliest Tamil Śaiva poets;
Śiva here is paternalistic, a father figure, stripped of the eros so prevalent
in the Tēvāram. Indeed, within the Tēvāram, it is Cuntarar’s voice in
particular that voices the language of sexual love for lord Śiva, exhib-
iting precisely that sort of bodily love or bhakti that, as argued above,
the Cı̄vakacintāman. i seeks to ridicule. In a hymn sung by Cuntarar at
Tiruvārūr, for example, the poet, in the voice of a love-struck young
woman, invokes the birds, bees, and clouds to serve as messengers to her
beloved; her plaintive refrain to her would-be ambassadors echoes with
love-sick desperation: ‘Are you able to make [him] realize [the depths
of my love]’ (un.artta vallı̄rkal.ē)? (Tēvāram, Vll-37). Cuntarar speaks
to the sexually beguiling form of Śiva Bhiks.āt.ana in seventeen hymns
(Dorai Rangaswamy, 1990: 1250), where both Śiva and his consort, no less
the voice of the poet, take on their most sexually provocative language.
The poet’s entanglement with two wives leads, in his poetry, to startling
requests for material sustenance from the lord, ironically charging that Śiva
himself knows full well the expense of living with two women:
You have a woman as half your self;
the Lady Gaṅgā lives on your spreading matted hair;
you know well the problems
of supporting two good women.
In Kun.t.aiyūr surrounded by beautiful groves
I got some grain.
Primal Lord, God of miracles,
send me men to carry the grain!89

These themes of sexuality, passion, and reliance on the material world

are elaborated by Cēkkilār at some length in the Periyapurān.am. Like the
¯
royal Jain hero of the Cı̄vakacintāman. i, Cuntarar, although born a brahmin,
has his claims to kingship: he is adopted by King Naraciṅkamun aiyar and
raised in the royal palace (v. 151). His story contains the only ¯ hints of
sexuality and the only open displays of affection between men and women
in the text, as when Cuntarar’s first wife, Paravai, flies into a rage when she
learns of her husband’s marriage to a second wife, suffering the physical
sickness of separation typical of classical Tamil love poetry:
88 As at Periyapurānam, vv. 230–233, where Cuntarar’s sleep is repeatedly interrupted
.
by Śiva, disguised as an old brahmin, who places his dusty feet upon the nāyanār’s head.
89 Tēvāram VII-20.3; translation from Peterson (1989: 313–314). ¯
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 161

She was not able to rest in slumber on her bed [strewn with] soft petals, nor was she able
to rest in wakeful joy;
she could not sit on her seat of flowers and gold, nor was she able to stand or walk or go
outside;
she could not purge the shower of flower-darts [shot by] the god of love;
she could not think about [her] lord, nor could she forget him.
She was situation between the two – [the sorrow of] separation and sulking – both of which
melt one’s bones. (v. 3474)

The scene of Paravai’s joyous reunion with her husband evokes physical
union in a way not encountered in the life-stories of other married devotees
of Śiva, however chaste and indirect the reference:
Praising the nature of the wealth of compassion and holy grace that the lord had performed
for them,
their minds were immersed in a flood of joy;
They become a single life,
in their positioning of one in the other. (v. 3540)

Cuntarar, as the sole nāyanār whose domestic relations the audience

is allowed to witness at some ¯ length, provides a unique link in the
Periyapurān. am among the themes of earthly life, sexuality, and feeling.
Such thematic patterns are also interspersed with scenes of tremendous
humor – as Shulman (1985) notes, ‘Cuntarar’s checkered career is riddled
with comic episodes’ (p. 251) – extending even to the final scene in which
Cuntarar’s great friend, King Ceramān Perumāl., is left standing at the
gates of Śiva’s kingdom. When finally¯ brought before the lord, bowing
and showing all due respect, Śiva inquires slyly: ‘How is it that you have
come here without being invited by us’ (iṅku nām alaiyāmai nı̄ eytiyatu en)
¯ making requests for
(v. 4278)?90 Cuntarar berates his lord, as noted above, ¯
money to support his wives, taunting the lord with images of his own divine
wife, and, in general, displaying much more of a full-bodied personality
than his nāyanmār companions.
¯ in short, something of a counterpart to Cı̄vakan, experi-
Cuntarar is,
¯
menting with the domestic life while all the while being pulled toward the
deity. Cuntarar’s relationships with his wives demand Śiva’s intervention;
love for lord and love for spouse are not wholly unrelated. Yet passion and
love must be tempered in a life of devotion to Śiva; love is a legitimate
human experience, but human love always exists in tension with love for
the divine. When Cuntarar, for example, falls in love with the beautiful
Caṅkili, he begs that Śiva help him to marry the girl (v. 3391); through a
series of dream interventions, Śiva extracts a promise from Cuntarar, the
itinerant poet, that he will never leave this second wife (v. 3404). They are
married, but soon the spring winds of love begin to blow, and Cuntarar is
90 This scene is discussed at some length by Shulman (1985: 253–256).
162 ANNE E. MONIUS

drawn to see his beloved lord in Tiruvārūr; the moment he leaves Caṅkili’s
town, he is stricken with blindness:
As he left the expanse of the city of Orri [Tiruvorriyūr], because of the oath he had made,
the ground before [him] was hidden from¯¯ [his] eyes,
¯¯ and he fainted. (v. 3433)

In this odd give-and-take between god and his poet-devotee, Cuntarar

must suffer for not being a good husband, for breaking his oath never to
leave his second wife (even if he does so as an act of devotion!) While
Cuntarar, like Cı̄vakan, sings a song of renunciation in the final chapter
of the Periyapurān.am¯ (v. 4263),91 it is renunciation in the loving shade
of Śiva’s holy mountain, in the company of his two wives now reborn in
heaven as servants of the goddess. While Cuntarar and Cı̄vakan share a
¯
variety of characteristics – their travels, their marriages, their adventures
– Cuntarar offers a markedly different picture of liberation. Renunciation
and freedom from earthly bonds mean not a life of solitude and asceticism,
as in the Jain text, but a life of loving community in the ambit of lord Śiva.
Love, tested in the human realm and tempered by devotion to Śiva, remains
a vital part of Cuntarar’s narrative trajectory.

6. ADAPATION OF JAIN LITERARY STRATEGIES

Ironically, perhaps, many of the literary techniques used by Cēkkilār to

forge a new vision of anpu or devotion to Śiva can be traced to¯ Jain
sources. While seeking to¯ recover the value of love as the foundation of
bhakti against the challenges posed by the Cı̄vakacintāman. i (as well as by
works in the ulā and paran.i genres), Cēkkilār borrows heavily from the
very Jain material he seeks to resist. This is¯ particularly clear when one
looks to the Jain Sanskrit tradition of purān.a composition, particularly
the Mahāpurān. a attributed to two ninth-century Digambara monks from
Karnataka: Jinasena, author of the Ādipurān.a, and Gun.abhadra, author of
the slightly later Uttarapurān.a.92 Cı̄vakan’s (Sanskrit Jı̄vandhara’s) story
is first told in the latter text, Gun.abhadra’s¯ Uttarapurān. a.93 By Cēkkilār’s
day, several version of the Mahāpurān.a existed in other languages, ¯

91 Here Cuntarar sings a hymn meant ‘to eradicate the bonds of this world’ (iv ulakinil
¯
pācam at.utta). Shulman (1985: 253) reads this as a gloss on the hymn Cuntarar recites here,
beginning with the lines: ‘I hate the householder’s life; I have renounced it completely’
(veruttēn manaivālkkaiyai vit..tolintēn) (Tēvāram VII-4.8).
92¯ For¯ a brief
¯ ¯ ¯ ¯
overview of the contents of the texts, see Cort (1993: 191–195).
93 For an English translation of the text, see Hultzsch (1922).
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 163

including the Apabhraṁśa version of Pus.padanta and the Kannada version

of Cāmun.d.arāya (both tenth-century).94
When considering the Periyapurān.am in light of Jain material to which
it may have been responding, several characteristics – oft noted in the
scholarship, but seldom developed – strike even the casual reader imme-
diately. First, there is the name. Periyapurān.am, albeit the text’s popular
name rather than its formal title, is a direct Tamil translation from the
Sanskrit Mahāpurān. a, or ‘Great Collection of Ancient Stories’. Like the
tris.as..tiśalākāpurus. a or ‘sixty-three great beings’ of the universe whose
lives are narrated in the Mahāpurān.a,95 Cēkkilār narrates the stories of
sixty-three ‘leaders’ or nāyanmār. Peterson (1994), ¯ in fact, argues that the
¯
Mahāpurān. a tradition of sixty-three great beings provided the impetus to
the ‘canonization’ of the nāyanmār (p. 196).
Yet why would Jain literature ¯ provide such a compelling model for a
twelfth-century Tamil Śaiva poet? Certainly the Mahāpurān.a narratives
are full of the kind of martial heroism with which Cēkkilār infuses a
redefined bhakti, stripped of the eros so maligned by earlier Jain ¯ literature
in Tamil. Jina means ‘victor’, and the Mahāpurān. a paints a martial view
of the jina as the victor over karma (Dundas, 1991: 173–174). Like the
most violent among Cēkkilār’s nāyanmār, Bāhubalı̄, son of the first Jina,
R.s.abha, is a ‘heroic figure’, ¯ a ‘Jain¯ warrior’ (p. 180), yet he suddenly
withdraws from mortal combat with his brother to become an ascetic.
While stridently martial in tone, the Mahāpurān. a’s ascetic warriors are
combatants against karma, against the passions and bodily ties to this
world. As Strohl (1984) notes in his study of the Ādipurān.a of Jinasena,
‘the weapons of the mendicant warrior are considered to be the variety
of lists of vows, qualities, virtues, and modes of self-restraint’ (p. 108).
Images of violence and battle, in the Jain literary tradition, are invoked –
as in the Periyapurān.am – to a new end: renunciation of the world to be
a warrior against the karma that enslaves us all. The story of Jı̄vandhara
makes explicit the connection between worldly power and personally
transformative, inner power:

With joined hands, I salute that lord Jı̄vandhara who, in consequence of former good deeds,
won eight virgins hard to be won by others; who at the head of battle dispatched into the
other world the enemy who had killed his father; and who became an ascetic, dispelled the

94 Cort (1993: 205) provides a useful chart of pre-modem Jain purānic composition.
Peterson (1998: 179) suggests that Cāmun.d.arāya’s Kannada text is the true source of
Cēkkilār’s inspiration, not the Cı̄vakacintāman.i.
¯
95 These are the twenty-four Tı̄rthaṅkaras or Jinas, the twelve Cakravārtins or world-
rulers, and the twenty-seven Baladevas, Vāsudevas, and Prati-Vāsudevas. For a discussion
of the characteristics of each, see Cort (1993: 196–202).
164 ANNE E. MONIUS

darkness of his deeds, and was illumined by the splendor of salvation. (Hultzsch, 1922:
347–348)

Throughout the Mahāpurān.a, from the story of Bāhubalı̄ to that of

Jı̄vandhara, the warrior’s weapons of battle are turned inward. The true
warrior of the Mahāpurān.a is the practitioner of asceticism, generating
karma-burning tapas, literally ‘heat’, to free himself from the bonds of
existence.
While Cēkkilār, as discussed above, tempers his vision of divine love
¯ it be accompanied by tapas, the Periyapurānam would
with insistence that .
seem to depart from the Jain images of martial and heroic figures by
insisting on a movement outward rather than inward; anpu for Śiva must
be externalized, enacted in the world. Whereas Jain heroes ¯ renounce the
world entirely, turning their weapons to the karmic ties that bind one to
saṁsāra, Cēkkilār’s nāyanmār must outwardly display – through gentle
¯ through
acts of supplication, ¯ violent responses to service interrupted – their
unswerving devotion to the lord. Where Bāhubalı̄’s warrior asceticism has
him enduring ‘hunger and thirst, cold and heat, both gadflies and gnats, for
the sake of full success in movement along the [Jaina] path’ (Strohl, 1984:
104), Cēkkilār’s characters emote openly, flying into rages at interruptions
to their acts¯ of devotion, giving up life and home to wander singing the
praises of the lord. Their tapas, whether Can.t.ēcurar’s or Kan.n.appar’s,
sends them out into the world to display heroically their devotion to Śiva.
Cēkkilār’s vision of the warrior-bhakta, constructed against the back-
drop of ¯Jain images of the warrior-ascetic, presents new possibilities
for kingly behavior, possibilities strenuously denied throughout the
Mahāpurān. a. In the Jain presentation of kingship in the Mahāpurān.a
– as in the Tamil Cı̄vakacintāman. i – dharma and rule are antithetical:
Jı̄vandhara cannot win liberation while engaged in the world of kingdom
and consorts; Bāhubalı̄ moves from the world of chaos and violence to
one of serene practice and movement ‘along the Jain path’. There is, in
short, no dharma for kings allowed in the Mahāpurān. a (Strohl, 1984:
1092); the royal duties of war and engagement in the world prevent any
true upholding of the ascetic ideals that define the Jain moral system. The
Periyapurān. am, however, offers here a markedly different vision of king-
ship for its royal sponsor: a vision of spiritual warfare, of the weak made
strong (as in the stories of the child-saint, Can.t.ēcurar and the innocent
hunter, Kan.n.appar) through rigorous engagement with the external world,
what Shulman has, as noted above, called the Tamil tendency toward the
‘externalization’ of emotion. Cēkkilār’s vision of anpu for the lord is
infused with the Jain elements of vı̄ra,¯ ‘the heroic’, but¯ those elements are
turned outward for display to the world, making possible a life of engaged
worldly activity while pursuing a path toward Śiva and his grace.
 LOVE, VIOLENCE, AND THE AESTHETICS OF DISGUST 165

7. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Cēkkilār’s depictions of violence done in the name of devotion to Śiva –

¯
interspersed with descriptions of profound love expressed in far gentler
ways – thus emerge as central to a vision of religious life lived in active
engagement with the world, an active engagement ridiculed in its violence
and passions by the Jain Cı̄vakacintāman. i and in the medieval literary
genres of paran.i and ulā. Using the imagery of the martial warrior or hero
from the Jain purān.ic tradition, the Periyapurān.am constructs a vision of
rigorous – even heroic – bhakti at work in the world.
While Umāpati’s comment about Cēkkilār’s intended audience has
¯
steered this study in the direction of Jain literature, equally possible – as a
foil of sorts – for Cēkkilār’s text is the growing popularity of Kr.s.n.a-related
¯
Vais.n.ava traditions in twelfth-century South India. The Periyapurān.am is
the first Tamil text to use the term avatāram (Sanskrit avatāra), usually
reserved for Vais.n.ava accounts of god’s earthly incarnations. Cuntarar is
said to take earthly form (avataritta) in Tirunāvalūr to foster Vedic Śaivism
there (v. 148); as noted above, at his birth he is said to be an avatāram of his
heavenly self (v. 149). Mānakkañcāranār becomes a ‘holy avatāram’ (tiru
avatāram ceytār) (v. 877),¯ while Śiva’s
¯ ¯ holy ash is deemed ‘the original
avatāram’ (mūlam avatāram) (v. 1231). So ubiquitous and unique is this
Śaiva use of avatāram terminology, one wonders if it might not serve to
argue for Śiva’s enduring presence in the world; although he never takes
full incarnational form, his favored devotees and holy ash do.
Such use of avatāram language is coupled with a number of stories
that seemingly seek to turn upside-down the pastoral images of Kr.s.n.a
frolicking with his gopı̄ friends. As noted above, both Can.t.ēcurar and
Kan.n.appar begin their lives steeped in the ethos of Kr.s.n.a: Can.t.ēcurar
befriends a cow being molested by a herdsman and takes up the task of
caring for the entire herd; Kan.n.appar’s village in the forest is the scene of
many playful scenes with the local girls. Ānāyar is the master of the flute
¯
(vv. 931–972). Yet these bucolic, pastoral settings reminiscent of Kr.s.n.a’s
boyhood home steer their emotion-laden characters in decidedly unique
directions; for both Kan.n.appar and Can.t.ēcurar, the experience of love is
neither sexually charged nor gentle. The pastoral realm of Kr.s.n.a becomes
an arena for the martial display of utmost devotion of lord Śiva.
Whether influenced by Jain literary tradition or Vais.n.ava, the
Periyapurān. am clearly does not emerge from a literary vacuum; rather,
it is a complex and sophisticated narrative in dialogue with a wide range of
genres and sectarian traditions. The construction of Śaiva identity implicit
here – the single-pointed focus, the engagement in the world – emerges
in conversation with and resistance to a variety of texts. As a literary
166 ANNE E. MONIUS

product of the ‘productive encounter’ (Davis, 1998: 220–222) among Jains

and Śaivas in medieval South India, the directly anti-Jain invective of the
Periyapurān. am belies the indebtedness of the text’s author to his Jain
counterparts. As Spiegel (1993) notes in her study of prose historiography
in thirteenth-century France, the telling of a heroic history seeks ‘to mantle
adverse historical change beneath the calm and deproblematized surface
of . . . narrative’ (p. 10), imagining clear victories and values when, in
fact, historical reality is far more complex. Indeed, Nirenberg (1996), in
his study of violence in medieval Spain, posits tropes of inter-sectarian
violence as necessary for the peaceful toleration of competing groups;
violence is merely one form of ‘association’ among others (pp. 7–10).
Cēkkilār’s treatment of non-Śaivas, his depictions of often violent yet
¯
easy victories over adversaries, perhaps mask what is most evident in the
Periyapurān. am itself: complex patterns of engagement through narrative,
of resistance accompanied by borrowing and adaptation.
As Cēkkilār seeks to frame a life lived in utter devotion to Śiva
against a Jain¯ backdrop of sarcastic denigration of passion and violence,
literary aesthetic theory emerges as a significant marker of religious iden-
tity. Against the Cı̄vakacintāman. i’s evocation of the rasa or meyppāt.u of
bı̄bhatsa or ‘the disgusting’, leading eventually to the renunciation of the
world and śānta, ‘the peaceful’, Cēkkilār posits a new form of śr.ṅgāra,
¯ redirected toward the lord, and
‘the erotic’, here stripped entirely of eros,
infused with a hearty does of vı̄ra, ‘the heroic’. He turns the Jain use of
heroic imagery outward, focusing not on the ascetic’s inner powers of
transformation but on life lived in complete and passionate engagement
with the world. Nowhere are the relative ontological or epistemological
merits of Jainism and Śaivism taken up for discussion; the heart of the
debate between the Periyapurān.am and the Cı̄vakacintāman. i would seem
to be the relative value of human emotions, the extent to which the rasas
can lead one to self-transformation. The use of such aesthetic elements
in defining and articulating sectarian identity in pre-modem South Asia
demands further scholarly attention.

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