Sambandar

Sambandar — Tirujnana Sambandar, “the one joined to sacred wisdom” — is the wonder-child of Tamil Shaivism, the youngest of the three foremost Nayanars and, in the traditional ordering, the first: his hymns open the Tirumurai canon. Born to a brahmin family of Sirkali in the seventh century, he lived, tradition holds, only sixteen years, and into them the hagiographies pour a prodigy’s career of poetry, pilgrimage, and public contest.

The milk of wisdom

The founding legend is set at the temple tank of Sirkali. His father, descending to bathe, left the three-year-old on the steps; the child, finding himself alone, wept — and Parvati herself, with Shiva beside her, came and fed him milk in a golden cup. His father returned to find milk on the child’s lips and demanded to know who had given it; the boy pointed to the sky and answered in verse — his first hymn, naming the god with the ear-ring, Todudaiya Seviyan. From then on the poems came in a flood. He travelled the shrine-towns of the Tamil country singing decad after decad, carried, tradition says, in a pearl palanquin granted by the god, his verses kept time by golden cymbals.

Madurai

The central episode of his public life is the contest at Madurai. The Pandya king had embraced Jainism; his queen Mangaiyarkkarasi and his minister Kulachirai — both later counted among the sixty-three Nayanars themselves — held to Shiva and summoned the boy south. The hagiographies recount the trials that followed: the king’s burning fever cooled by sacred ash where the Jain monks’ mantras failed; palm-leaves committed to fire, from which Sambandar’s emerged unburnt; leaves cast into the flooding Vaigai, where his alone swam against the current. The king returned to Shaivism — remembered thereafter as Ninraseer Nedumaran, and counted a Nayanar in his turn. The episode, told with a partisan’s relish in the later hagiographies, marks the turning of the Tamil country’s long contest between Shaiva devotion and the Jain establishment.

The early end

Tradition relates other wonders — most famously at Mylapore, where his hymn is said to have raised the merchant’s daughter Poompavai from her preserved ashes — but gives the prodigy no long life. At sixteen, yielding at last to his family’s wish, he was married at Tirunallurpperumanam; at the wedding he sang, a blaze of divine light opened, and the boy, his bride, and the whole company entered it and were gone. His hymns form the first three books of the Tirumurai, hundreds of decads marked by metrical brilliance and a child’s unclouded delight in the god. Of the three Tevaram poets he is the morning voice: Appar the penitent, Sundarar the comrade, and before them both the boy who was given milk by the goddess and never grew old.