Kulasekhara Alvar

Kulasekhara Alvar is the royal saint of the Vaishnava canon: a king of the Chera line of the Kerala coast who, tradition holds, came to find kingship weightless beside devotion and finally renounced it altogether. Attempts to identify him with a particular Chera sovereign of the eighth or ninth century remain uncertain; what the tradition preserves with confidence is the poetry and the temperament behind it.

The king undone by Rama

The hagiographies dwell on the completeness of his absorption. Hearing the Ramayana recited, it is said, he would forget that the events were ancient: at the news of Rama facing the demon hosts alone he ordered his armies to march to the rescue, and his ministers had to contrive the story’s happy turn to call him back. Alarmed by his growing attachment to the company of devotees, his courtiers slandered them with a charge of theft; the king thrust his hand into a pot containing a cobra to prove their innocence, and was unharmed. At length he gave up the throne to his son and went east to the temple towns of the Tamil country, above all to Srirangam.

The poems and the step

His Tamil work, the Perumal Tirumoli, comprises 105 verses within the Divya Prabandham; a celebrated Sanskrit hymn, the Mukundamala, is also attributed to him. The Tamil poems are notable for their dramatic sympathy — the poet sings as Devaki mourning the childhood of Krishna she never saw, and as Dasaratha grieving for the exiled Rama — grief borrowed from the epics and made personal. Best remembered of all is his wish to be born at Vishnu’s threshold in any form whatever: a fish in the temple tank, a flagstaff, a doorstep — anything near the god. At Srirangam and in the Tirupati tradition the raised threshold at the sanctum is called the Kulasekharan padi, the king’s step, in memory of the prayer; the sovereign who gave up a throne is trodden, by his own wish, at the door of the god he served.