Nandanar

Nandanar is among the most retold and most debated of the sixty-three Nāyanārs. An agricultural labourer of the Paraiyar community — bound, in the order of his time, to work the fields and supply leather for the temple drums, yet barred from the temple precincts themselves — he stands in the canon as its clearest test of whether devotion can override caste. His other name, Tirunāḷaippōvār, means 'he who will go tomorrow'.

The story

The Periya Puranam places him at Adhanur in the Chola country. His longing was to see the god directly. At Tiruppunkur, tradition tells, the great image of Nandi blocked his view of the sanctum from where he stood outside; at his prayer the bull moved aside — and pilgrims still point to the off-axis position of Nandi at Tiruppunkur as the mark of that grace.

His deeper desire was Chidambaram, the shrine of the dancing Shiva. Bound by his labour and his station, he deferred the journey day after day, saying always that he would go tomorrow — the deferral that gave him his name. When at last he reached Chidambaram, he circled the town, unable to enter. Sekkilar tells that Shiva himself resolved the impasse, instructing the temple's brahmins to kindle a fire: Nandanar passed through the flames and emerged transfigured, a sage wearing the sacred thread, and entered the sanctum, where he merged with the god.

Afterlives

In the nineteenth century Gopalakrishna Bharati's Tamil music-drama Nandanar Charitram carried the story far beyond the hagiographies, adding the figure of a scornful landlord and fixing Nandanar in the popular imagination of the emerging public stage. In the twentieth, the tale became contested ground. Reformers invoked it as proof that bhakti dissolves caste; Dalit critics have read the fire episode more darkly, as a story in which the outcaste is admitted only after his birth-body is burned away. The argument continues, which is one measure of the story's force.

Within the canon itself, Nandanar's entry remains what Sekkilar made it: the account of a man whose love was greater than the order that excluded him, and whom the god, not the priests, brought inside.