Kari

Kari, or Kari Nayanar, is one of the sixty-three Nayanars, the saints of Tamil Shaivism, and one of the few remembered specifically as a professional poet. Tradition associates him with Tirukkadavur in the Chola country.

The story

Sekkilar’s Periya Puranam describes him as a master of Tamil who composed kovai poems — a courtly genre of linked erotic-panegyric verse — and a work remembered by his own name, the Karikovai. With this art he travelled to the courts of the three crowned kings of the Tamil land, the Chera, the Chola and the Pandya, and was richly rewarded. What distinguishes him in the tradition is the destination of the reward: the wealth his poetry earned he spent building temples to Shiva and honouring the god’s devotees, keeping nothing for himself. For this steady conversion of art into worship he was numbered among the saints.

Poet-saints

Kari’s chapter is brief, and his verse, unlike that of the great Tevaram hymnists, has not survived. Yet his figure completes a pattern within the canon: alongside kings, farmers, fishermen and weavers, the Nayanar tradition found room for the professional man of letters, whose offering was the marketable skill of his tongue.