Appar

Appar — “father”, the name the boy-saint Sambandar gave him in reverence — is one of the three foremost Nayanars, the Tamil Shaiva poet-saints of the Tevaram. Born Marulneekkiyar at Tiruvamur in the seventh century, he is also styled Tirunavukkarasar, “king of the tongue”. His life spans the great religious contest of his age: he crossed to Jainism, rose in its monastic order, returned to Shiva, and — tradition holds — brought the Pallava king back with him.

The return

Orphaned young and drawn to the Jain establishment at Tiruppadirippuliyur, he became a monk under the name Dharmasena and mastered the doctrine. His elder sister Tilakavati, who had remained a devout Shaiva after losing her betrothed, prayed for his return; when he was seized by an agonising abdominal illness that no Jain remedy could touch, he came to her, and was cured — the tradition says — by sacred ash and the grace of Shiva at Tiruvadigai. His first hymn rose out of that deliverance, and the convert’s name Marulneekkiyar, “dispeller of darkness”, took on its meaning. The Jain establishment, alarmed at so prominent a defection, moved the Pallava king Mahendravarman against him: the legends recount an ordeal in a burning lime-kiln, which he found cool as evening; poison that did not kill; a war-elephant that circled and saluted him; and finally the sea, into which he was cast bound to a stone — and did not sink. The king, tradition holds, yielded and returned to Shaivism, a conversion that reshaped the religious landscape of the Tamil country.

The hoe and the hymns

For all the drama of the ordeals, the image the tradition keeps of Appar is humbler: an old man with an uzhavaram, a small hoe, walking from shrine to shrine and scraping the grass from temple courtyards — service, not miracle, as the devotee’s proper work. His hymns fill the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of the Tirumurai, and their voice is the most inward of the three Tevaram poets: self-reproach, weariness of rebirth, and a hard-won serenity. The most famous of his verses declares the freedom his surrender bought — we are slaves to no one, we do not fear death, we know no illness — a statement of spiritual defiance that Tamil memory has never let go. Tradition records that he died at Tirupugalur at a great age, working to the last. Among the Muvar he is the penitent elder: Sambandar the wonder-child, Sundarar the comrade, and between them Appar, the man who found his way back and spent a long life sweeping the god’s floors.