Karaikkal Ammaiyar

Karaikkal Ammaiyar — “the mother from Karaikkal” — is one of three women among the sixty-three Nayanars, and in the scholarly reckoning the earliest of all the Tamil Shaiva poets, placed around the fifth or sixth century, before the Tevaram trio. Her legend is the most startling in the canon: a beautiful merchant’s wife who prayed to be rid of her beauty, received the emaciated form of a demon, and in that form sang at the feet of the dancing god.

The two mangoes

Born Punitavati to a merchant family of Karaikkal on the Coromandel coast, she was married to the merchant Paramadattan. The hinge of her story is a pair of mangoes her husband sent home from his business. Before he returned, a hungry Shaiva ascetic came to the door, and having nothing else ready she gave him one of the fruits with his meal. At table her husband ate the remaining mango, found it excellent, and asked for the second; she prayed to Shiva, and a fruit appeared in her hand — so unearthly in taste that Paramadattan demanded the truth. Told it, he asked for another as proof; another came, and vanished from his hand. The merchant, tradition says, was not moved to devotion but to fear: he could not live as husband to a being of such power. He left quietly, settled in the Pandya country, remarried, and named his daughter after the wife he had abandoned — whom he now worshipped as a goddess. When her relatives at last brought Punitavati to him, he prostrated himself before her with his new family.

The demon’s form

Released by that prostration from wifehood itself, she asked Shiva for the one gift the tradition never tires of pondering: that the beauty kept for a husband be taken away, and that she be given instead the form of a pey, a skeletal demon of his ghostly retinue. It was granted. In that form, tradition relates, she travelled to Kailasa, and out of reverence would not walk on the holy mountain — she climbed it on her hands. Shiva, watching her approach, called to her the word that became her name: Ammai, mother. Asked what she desired, she wished only to sit at his feet, singing, wherever he danced; he appointed her his witness at Tiruvalangadu, where he dances the fierce urdhva-tandava.

The poems and the image

Four works are attributed to her — the Arputat Tiruvantati, the Tiru Irattai Manimalai, and two decads on Tiruvalangadu — the oldest stratum of Tamil Shaiva poetry, unsparing in their imagery of the cremation ground where the god dances among ghouls, the poet-demon among them. Chola bronze-casters fixed her iconography: a wasted, grinning figure, ribs bare, cymbals in hand, keeping time for the dance — among the most singular images in Indian art. The tradition that begins its canon with a woman who traded beauty for truth has never quite decided whether her story is terrible or triumphant; her poems suggest she saw no difference.