Mysticism, Devotion and the Place of the Erotic in Devotional Expression: Reflections on Andal

Andal

In this blog post I would like to explore the life and poetry of the famous South Indian devotee-poetess Andal. The intense emotionalism and highly charged eroticism of her poetry has exercised a profound influence on the religious, devotional and artistic imagination and self-understanding of South Indian Hinduism. Moreover, whether in her role as an exemplary devotee or goddess, Andal continues to evoke and inspire devotion in the hearts and minds of the faithful. The hagiographical narratives that developed following her death reveal the complex and at times deeply creative ways in which succeeding theologians sought to make sense of the poetess’ life, poetry and unique devotional self-expression. As the hagiographical corpus on Andal developed, the poetess was made to undergo numerous transitions and transformations. By studying the development of the Andal narratives we can track the multiple trajectories entailed in Andal’s transformation from poet to saint to goddess; here though I am not so interested in the ontological implications of Andal’s eventual apotheosis- my objective here is to study the various roles that Andal assumes in the self-understanding of the Sri Vaishnava community.

The ambiguity inherent in Andal’s position seems to me to speak to not only the remarkable polyvalence of her poetry but also to the tremendously protean nature of her religious experience. This is not to suggest that Andal’s mysticism is of a particularly unstructured variety (after all, all mysticisms are by definition fluid and at least to some extent unstructured) but only to point out that the various guises that Andal employs in her devotional self-expression reflect in some important ways the various roles that her tradition have subsequently assigned her. In other words, when Andal speaks of the intense suffering that she experiences as a result of her separation from God, she speaks as an intimate devotee of the Lord. When she speaks of the felicity that her passionate union with the Lord engenders, she speaks as the Lord’s consort. Equally however, when Andal speaks of the nature of devotion to God, the means by which to achieve the Lord (etc) she speaks as a saint par excellence. All of these patterns of mysticism structure Andal’s poetry; Andal embraces all of these roles but as the hagiographical corpus devoted to her demonstrate, theologians following her chose to emphasise or privilege one role over another. This privileging process, of course, is fascinating since it reveals the complex dynamics at play in a religious community’s attempt to situate or position an influential religious figure in the broader tradition.

Andal’s deeply idiosyncratic life, the emotionalism of her poetry and the intensely erotic tenor of her devotional outpourings all combine to make the poetess a fascinating subject of study and reflection; I should, however, admit to a personal interest in my subject. I have been deeply attached to the poetry of Andal ever since I first encountered it almost a year ago. The path-breaking poetry of Andal forces us, in my view, to confront the widely held but all-too-often infrequently explored presuppositions that inform our understandings of, among other things, devotion, mysticism and the place of the erotic in devotional self-expression. Moreover, the subversive nature of Andal’s life reveal more generally the complex ways in which devotees are often required to negotiate the deeply entrenched social orthodoxies of their milieu in their attempt to express themselves devotionally; this tension between devotionalism and orthodoxy that Andal’s life does an important job of illuminating is in many respects a perennial one that finds expression in all of the major theistically-oriented world religions- I hope to be able to explore the issue in more depth as the post progresses.

Introductory remarks aside, let us now move on to consider Andal’s life in a bit more detail. Before we do so, however, it is important to point out that according to the religious imagination and theological self-understanding of the Sri Vaishnava tradition, Andal and her poetry are not self-standing. As many scholars on Hinduism know, devotional poets were often coopted by religious traditions and communities in an attempt to bolster their own legitimacy and self-standing within the wider community. The religiously competitive and deeply pluralistic nature of Indian society meant that religious communities depended not just on political patronage for their sustenance and development but equally, and perhaps more importantly, on the possession of charismatic or influential figures capable of inspiring commitment and devotion to tradition. Andal doesn’t quite fit into this pattern of religious formation. The sort of co-opting and contrived affiliation that we see with other poets doesn’t seem to have happened with Andal. In order to flesh out Andal’s positioning within the wider community of the Alvars, a few words need to be said about the background of the Alvars and Andal’s place among them.

The Alvars were a tremendously influential group of poet-saints who composed poetry in praise of their beloved Deity, Vishnu (in any one of his innumerable forms). [The word Alvar derives from the Tamil root Al ‘deep’ and the term Alvar ‘one who is immersed in the love of God’ was employed by the Sri Vaishnava community to refer to the twelve poet-saints- See Carman and Narayanan’s ‘The Tamil Veda’.] Unlike the sacred hymns of the Vedas and their corollaries, however, the Alvars wrote and sung in the vernacular. The vernacularization of devotion across the pan-Indian landscape has been the subject of detailed academic study but the important point to note for our purposes is that the Alvars were very much the progenitors of this tradition. This vernacularization of devotion and the bhakti movement that it gave rise to was to have an indelible impact upon the pan-Indian religious landscape. The notion that devotion could be expressed in the mother-tongue, ‘a language continuous with the language of one’s earliest childhood and family, one’s local and folk lore’, and not just in the religious lingua franca of the time (Sanskrit) transformed the nature of religious devotion in the subcontinent and gave rise to an intermingling of cultures and languages, vocabularies and themes whose effects we continue to experience quite palpably today. The Tamil hymns of the Alvar poet-saints (known as the Nalayira Divya Prabhandam) came to be seen by the Sri Vaishnava community as of equal revelatory significance to that of the Sanskrit Vedas. The two-fold Vedanta (Ubhaya Vedanta) that this gave rise to was a tremendously important innovation that was to distinguish the Sri Vaishnava community from its counterparts across the Indian religious landscape. There is much that can be said about the attribution of Vedic authority to the hymns of the Alvars. As interesting as that discussion may be, I don’t want to get into it now. Let us, instead, move on to consider Andal’s place within the Alvar lineage.

Of the twelve Alvars, Andal was the only woman. Later hagiographical developments, however, were to problematize Andal’s positioning within the Alvar lineage. Notwithstanding the vital role that her poetry played (and continues to play) in the religious and ritual imagination of the Sri Vaishnava community, Andal’s eventual apotheosis meant that she had, in some sense, transcended her Alvar affiliation in ways that other Alvars had not. Notwithstanding the ambiguous if also contested nature of Andal’s place within the Alvar lineage, Andal was, historically at least, very much an important part of the devotional milieu of the Tamil bhakti poets. Her poetical compositions display the same intimate familiarity with the conventions of secular Tamil poetry that characterize the Divya Prabhandam as a whole. Moreover, her exclusive devotional focus on Vishnu and the manner in which she expresses her devotion to the Lord’s iconic incarnations (so characteristic a feature of Alvar poetry) very much makes her a part of the Tamil bhakti movement.

Much of what we know of Andal comes to us from two important documentary sources: the Guruparamparaprabhavam 6000 or the ‘6000 Verses on the Splendor of the Succession of the Gurus’ (composed by Pinpalakiya Perumal Jiyar) and the Divyasuricaritam of Garudavahana Pandit. The hagiographical nature of both texts means that it is very difficult to construct a historically verifiable account of the poet’s life. However since my interest here is less in the historicity of Andal and more so on her place in the religious and ritual imagination of the community, this isn’t a problem. The following account of Andal’s life presents the key components of her life story as it is remembered in the Sri Vaishnava tradition.

Born probably in around the 8^th century in Sri Villiputtur, Andal as an infant was found in the flower (Tulasi) garden of Periyalvar (who was himself an Alvar) and was raised and brought up by the latter with great love and paternal affection. As a precocious child, Andal developed an intense yearning to marry God and to live with him in deep, lasting union. Her father, Periyalvar, was responsible for making the flower garlands for ritual offering to the presiding deity of the Sri Villiputtur temple, Lord Visnu. However, unbeknownst to her father, every morning, in a playful enactment of her fantasy as Visnu’s bride, Andal would wear the sacred flower garland that was meant exclusively for the Lord’s pleasure. One morning however, her father ‘caught her in the act, chastised her for the ritual transgression, and refrained from offering the polluted garland to the deity in the local temple.’ However, to his astonishment, Visnu appeared in a dream that night to Periyalvar and made clear his displeasure at not being offered Andal’s worn and used garland. [This famous episode, which forms the centerpiece of most Andal narratives, earned the poet the famous epithet cutikotuttanacciyar (meaning the ‘lady who gave what she had worn’)] The revelation notwithstanding, Periyalvar remained oblivious to his daughter’s increasingly intense desire to achieve union with the Lord. As Andal reached marriageable age, Periyalvar’s mind naturally turned to the issue of his daughter’s marriage: Andal, however, would have none of it. She vociferously ‘rejected the idea of marriage with a mere mortal: her womanhood was to be dedicated to none other than Visnu. According to the hagiographies, it was at this time that Andal produced her famous poetical compositions: the Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli. I will explore both of these compositions in greater detail as the post progresses.

Before I progress with Andal’s life story, it is important to say a few words about the notion of iconic-incarnation as it is understood in the Sri Vaishnava tradition, especially since the former forms an important part of the narrative focus of Andal’s life. According to Sri Vaishnava theology, the Supreme Lord makes himself tangibly present in various iconic-incarnations in response to the requests of his most intimate devotees. These famous iconic-incarnations are considered to be real, embodied manifestations of the Deity: they express and concretize God’s redemptive power and grace and speak to the extent to which the Lord can go to make himself accessible to his devotees. In fact these iconic incarnations are regarded as the ultimate in God’s descent, entailing as they do the apparent diminishment of the Lord to a level even lower than that of his devotees. The particular sites of these divine manifestations are especially sacred to the Sri Vaishnava tradition and are known by the name ‘divya desams’ (literally, divine abodes). These forms of the Lord have their own interesting personal histories that are invariably related to either the more famous pan-Indian Hindu epic narratives or to more sectarian Sri Vaishnava tales. Much, much more could be written about the theology underpinning the devotional notion of iconic-incarnation (or archa-avatara) but for our purposes, this much is enough (of course, I should also point out that I have written an earlier blog post on the topic of image worship in Hinduism and so readers interested in the subject are advised to consult that post).

As Andal’s days passed in increasing absorption in her beloved Lord, Periyalvar’s understanding of his daughter’s predicament developed. He inquired from her as to which form of the Lord she particularly desired. In response to his daughter’s request, Periyalvar sung of the glory and deeds of the Lord in each of his forms. As Andal listened rapturously, her love for the Lord of Sri Rangam (one of the most famous iconic-incarnations) intensified. Andal’s resolute commitment to Ranganatha (the Lord of Sri Rangam) concerned Periyalvar who became increasingly anxious about his daughter’s future. However, gracious as he is, the Lord appeared (yet again) in a dream to Peryialvar, assuaging the father’s deep concern and assuring him that he would accept Andal as his bride. The hagiographies indicate that the Lord himself arranged for Andal to be brought from Sri Villiputur to Sri Rangam for the sacred marriage. Indeed, it is said that when the bridal procession eventually arrived at the sanctum of Ranganatha, Andal emerged from the palanquin and after embracing the feet of her beloved Lord, merged into the divine iconic-incarnation. Her union with the Lord, after much agony and anguish, had been finally consummated.

Now, what are we to make of this wonderful story? The question of the historicity of the events related above are not my concern here; indeed, the only real historical evidence that we have regarding the life of Andal is the internal evidence of her poems. In terms of their historical content, these poems do not give us much to work with. However, in terms of their theological and mystical content, these poems constitute a veritable repository of devotional themes and motifs that help illuminate Andal’s (and by extension, the Sri Vaishnava tradition’s) understanding of devotion, separation from and union with God, and the place of the erotic in devotional expression. Before I go on to reflect more deeply on Andal’s mysticism, let us take a closer look at the main themes of her two poems, the Tiruppavai and the Nacciyar Tirumoli.

Andal’s Tiruppavai occupies an incredibly important role in the ritual and theological imagination of the Sri Vaishnava tradition. As its title (pavai) indicates, the poem is structured on and around a famous religious rite (vrta) observed in South India (but also across certain sections of North India) by aspiring brides during the sacred autumnal month of Margasirsa. The purpose of the rite is to secure for the aspiring bride an ideal husband. The Tiruppavai is, if you like, Andal’s own imaginative reenactment of the rite in which she herself becomes a participant in the ritual. Of course, here though, her desire is not so much to secure an ideal (mortal) husband, as it is to secure the Lord himself as her groom. As an aside, it should be pointed out that the pavai ritual is featured in the Bhagavata Purana as well, all be in it in a slightly different form. There the cowherd maidens (gopis) construct and propitiate Katyayani’s sand image on the banks of the sacred Yamuna river. The pavai ritual’s defining moment, as it were, is the predawn ritual communal bathing that precedes the propitiation proper. All of the ritual motifs that are present in Andal’s pavai reenactment are rich with symbolic and theological meaning; these are brought out expertly in the commentaries that were written on the text. Dissecting the poem here would render this blog post inordinately lengthy but in my subsequent posts I hope to be able to go through each stanza of the poem in more detail, looking closely at the way the poem features liturgically and theologically in the imagination of the Sri Vaishnava tradition.

Andal’s poetry forces us to confront the question of the use of the erotic in devotional expression. Before we dive deeper into Andal’s idiosyncratic use of erotic imagery in her poetry, it would be useful to abstract from Andal’s particular context a little and say something more generally about the issues at hand. The devotional use of the erotic sentiment is of course, not a distinctly Hindu phenomenon. Every major theistically oriented world religion contains within itself certain traditions or mystics who have taken recourse to erotic imagery in their articulation of the relationship between God and man. I think that the reason why sexual imagery features so prominently in such articulations is because it is, in some sense, the most effective means by which to articulate something of the passion and intensity that is entailed in a deeply intimate union with God.

When poets and theologians speak and write of ‘transcendental issues’ they employ secular vocabularies, idioms and themes that are broadly well understood among the laity- to shed light on the unfamiliar we take recourse to the familiar. This is how we make intelligible issues that are otherwise overly esoteric in their scope and comprehension. I think that something very similar happens in the poetry of the great mystics. Their task is to invite us all to share with them the deep and profound religious experiences that animate and sustain their lives. But of course the more intimate and esoteric one’s relationship with God the more ineffable it becomes- ineffability, however, is a problem for those who wish to say something about the nature and the depth of their religious experiences. So what do they do? Well, [many of them] they take recourse to the erotic imagery of our world because that comes closest to approximating something of the intensity, passion and deep and enduring intimacy that characterize their relationship to God.

Think for example of the use of alcohol or wine in the poetry of the Sufi saints. They find themselves so deeply immersed in God that they wish to express something of that experience. But how do you go about doing that. This is where the metaphor of intoxication becomes important. To help those of us who lack intuitive insight into the divine reality and the effects of ‘drowning in it’, the Sufi mystics employ the imagery of alcohol and intoxication since it helps to convey, didactically at least, something of what is involved in the experience of monistic union with (or in) God. It is also what helps to explain, for example, Omar Khayyam’s remarkable statement in his Rubaiyat: ‘I will leave all reason and religion behind, and take the maidenhead of wine for mine’. Or better still: ‘Piety and moral goodness have naught to do with ecstasy; stain your prayer rug with wine! (Hafiz)’.

Looks can, of course, be deceiving. It is vitally important not to lose sight of the fact that there are profound philosophical strategies at play in the poems and other such compositions of the great mystics. I want to telescope back into the Indian traditions in this part of my discussion since it is the area that I am most familiar with. Moreover, even though my preceding two paragraphs focus generally on the employment and use of secular themes and imageries in devotional expression, let me move this discussion back into the primary subject matter of this blog post: the use particularly of the erotic in devotion.

The non-carnal nature of the erotic themes that we find, for example, in the poems of Andal, is best brought out by reflecting theologically and philosophically on the role that love for God plays in the theology of the Sri Vaishnava tradition. According to Sri Vaishnava theology, the individual soul is utterly and existentially dependent on God; this relationship of dependence that obtains between the individual soul and God indicates that the former exists solely for the pleasure of the latter. Why is it that in so many of their poems, the Alvars conceive of themselves as consorts of God? Well, the ‘consort-hood’ concept, I would argue, brings out important themes that critically underpin the devotional experience involved in relating to God as a servant. For example, the notion of being absolutely dependent on God, of being firm in the decision to serve none but God and the conviction that God is the most enjoyable object of devotion and love are all effectively personified in the consorthood concept; and yet all equally signify the defining characteristics of the experience of ‘servitude to God’. In other words, what I am trying to say here is that assuming the guise of a consort of God acts as a particularly effective means by which to draw attention to the defining characteristics of our relationship with God. What appears to be a poetic device then becomes on closer inspection an incredibly effective theological strategy that it enables the poet to speak meaningfully (if also didactically) about the experience of God. The conjugality of the poems, then, function as symbols that are expressive of the deep, mutual and passionate attachment that the individual soul has for God.

For the sake of clarification let me be clear that I am not suggesting that poets like Andal are best understood as theological strategists, creatively and intentionally crafting poems that work didactically for the benefit of the religious community of which they are a part. Andal’s poetry is, in the first instance, a spontaneous expression of her deep, intimate love for God. There is, I would argue, little that is calculated about the way she sings or expresses herself. However, her employment of certain guises or ritual motifs are best understood when the theological parameters that implicitly structure her poetry (and her tradition’s understanding of her poetry] are made clear and explicit. This requires a detailed analysis of the ways in which Andal’s poetry makes use or relies upon theological assumptions that inform devotional expression more generally in the Indian religious context.

As a starting point, it needs to be pointed out that Andal’s yearning for the Lord, which in her poetry tends to be expressed in overtly erotic vocabulary, represents, more theologically, an estranged soul’s longing for reunion with the Lord. This intense yearning and longing that Andal experiences is expressed in deeply poignant fashion in her Nacciyar Tirumoli, a poetic composition of 143 verses wherein Andal, in the guise of a gopi in love with Krishna, implores the Lord to consummate her desire for union with him. In a remarkably touching passage, Andal declares, again, in deeply erotic language, the complete offering of herself to God: ‘My voluptuous breasts swell for that lord alone. [If there is even talk of offering my body to mortal men, then I cannot live. It is equal in violence to a forest jackal stealthily entering and sniffing at the sacrificial food the learned Brahmins [] offer the gods in heaven.] Andal’s breasts here symbolize the poet’s femininity or womanhood: it is this that she has offered to her Lord. In other words, here Andal offers her most intimate possession, the attribute that arguably defines the most, to God, thereby affirming that she exists solely for the Lord’s pleasure and not for the use or pleasure of ‘mortal men’.

While experiencing anguish born out of separation from the Lord, Andal often seeks to convey her feelings of grief through birds and objects of nature as messengers. This of course is a poetical strategy quite common to the kavya genre of Indian literature; Kalidasa’s Meghaduta, for example, is arguably one of the finest examples of that rhetorical strategy at work. According to tradition, however, these various objects employed by Andal and other such Alvars represent the spiritual preceptors who act as mediators in between God and the individual soul. These preceptors assist the faithful by pleading on their behalf to secure divine grace.

In the preceding paragraphs I sought to demonstrate, if only very briefly, the myriad ways in which theistic mysticisms are structured. Interestingly, Andal’s mysticism is distinguished from that of other Alvars since the former did not need to adopt the voice of the lover of God: she was the lover of God. Again this goes back to the theological self-understanding of Andal within the Sri Vaishnava tradition: as an avatara or incarnation of Bhudevi, Andal’s relationship with the lord is the relationship towards which all devotees aspire, it is, to put it another way, representative of the ontological relationship that all individuals have with God.

Earlier I alluded to the tensions that often exist between devotion and social orthodoxy. The question can be raised, to what extent (if any at all) is Andal’s mysticism of socio-political consequence? This brings me back to the various hagiographical developments that Andal was made to undergo. As her hagiographies developed, Andal was transmogrified into an ideal mystic; the ‘idealism’ of her mysticism and her dual status as mystic-goddess essentially meant that her poetry was prevented from being construed in socio-political terms. The domestication of Andal in the process of universalizing her importance is expressed brilliantly by Vasudha Narayanan:

‘Every Sri Vaishnava bride is dressed like Andal and during wedding rituals, a particular set of songs in which Andal describes her dream in which she gets married to Lord Vishnu is recited. In one sense, the human bride is likened to Andal; but the theological explanation is that all human beings- the bride, the bridegroom, and the guests- ought to be like Andal, all devotees of the Lord. While this theme of Andal as paradigmatic devotee is unquestioned, it seems to me that the Sri Vaishnava community subscribes only to selective imitation of certain features of Andal’s life. What is important to note here is that the community has avoided the issue of making Andal a social or dharmic role model, and has instead opted to make her a theological model or model of one who seeks moksha; she then becomes a model for all human beings. Thus, the Sri Vaishnava community, does not encourage young girls to socially imitate Andal’s life; that is, girls are not encouraged to be unmarried and dedicate their lives to the Lord. Andal’s rejection of marriage and her subsequent union with the Lord is seen as a unique event and as suitable only for her’.