Isaignaniyaar

Isaignaniyaar is one of the sixty-three Nayanar saints of Tamil Shaivism, and one of only three women in that company, beside the ascetic poet Karaikkal Ammaiyar and the Pandya queen Mangayarkkarasiyar. She was the wife of Sadaiyanar of Tirunavalur and the mother of Sundarar, the last of the three great hymnists of the Tevaram. Her name is generally understood to mean one learned in music.

In the canon

Like her husband, Isaignaniyaar has no legend of her own in the hagiography — no vow, ordeal or miracle. Her canonisation rests on her son’s verse: in the final lines of the Tiruthondat Thogai, the hymn that first listed the servants of Shiva, Sundarar names himself their son, and mother and father entered the roll of saints with that naming. Sekkilar closes the Periya Puranam’s cycle of lives with her brief chapter. The tradition’s meaning is plain enough: the woman who bore and raised the poet of the saints performed a service to Shiva that needed no other deed. The canon that began with her son’s song thus closes at his mother — a deliberate symmetry, and a fitting one.