Arivattaya

Arivattaya Nayanar was a farmer of Kanamangalam in the Tamil country whose sainthood consisted in a lifetime’s regularity: every day, before his own household ate, he offered Shiva the best of his harvest — fine red rice, with greens and pickle — and the tradition remembers that his offering was never refused.

The spilled offering

Ruin came, as it does in these stories, to test the habit. His lands failed, and the farmer laboured for hire; but the wage went first, as the harvest had, to the daily offering, while he and his wife ate what remained or went without. The Periya Puranam relates that one day, carrying the offering to the temple, weak with hunger, he stumbled and fell, and the rice spilled into the mud. To Arivattaya the loss was not of food but of the day’s service — the one thing his ruin had not touched. In despair he set his sickle, his arival, to his own throat, choosing to end a life that could no longer serve. The god’s hand, tradition holds, came out and gripped his wrist; Shiva revealed himself, declaring that the offering had never once failed to reach him — the devotion, not the rice, had been received each day — and took his servant into grace. From the sickle comes the name by which the canon knows him.

In the canon

Among the sixty-three Nayanars, whose tests are usually staged by the god in disguise, Arivattaya’s trial is plainer: poverty, a stumble, and a habit of giving that had become the whole of a life. Sekkilar’s telling makes the quiet point that constancy, too, is heroism.