Sundarar

Sundarar — Sundaramurti Nayanar — is the third of the Muvar, the three foremost Tamil Shaiva poet-saints whose hymns form the Tevaram, and the latest of them, placed by tradition in the eighth century. Where Appar sings as a penitent and Sambandar as a prodigy, Sundarar’s register is unique in devotional literature: he addresses Shiva as a friend addresses a friend — demanding, teasing, complaining — and the tradition accordingly calls him Tampiran Tolan, the Lord’s own comrade.

The interrupted wedding

Born at Tirunavalur into a family of temple priests and fostered by a local chieftain, he was on the point of marriage at Tiruvennainallur when, the legend relates, an old ascetic pushed into the assembly waving a palm-leaf deed: the bridegroom, it declared, was his hereditary bondslave. The outraged youth called him a madman; the document was upheld; and the ascetic, leading his new slave to the temple, vanished into the sanctum — Shiva himself, come to claim his own. Commanded to sing, Sundarar began with the very insult he had offered: Pittha, madman crowned with the crescent moon. That hymn opens his corpus, and the claim of bondage runs through it — the saint styles himself the slave who quarrels with his master.

The comrade’s liberties

The hagiographies delight in the liberties the friendship allowed. Sundarar married Paravai, a temple woman of Tiruvarur, and later Sangili at Tiruvottriyur, swearing before the god an oath he then broke; he was struck blind, and hymn by hymn, shrine by shrine, sang his sight back. When Paravai barred her door over the second marriage, Shiva himself, tradition says, went twice through the night streets of Tiruvarur as the poet’s messenger to plead for him. Sundarar asked his friend for gold, for grain, and got them; no other Nayanar presumes so far, and the tradition treasures the presumption as the highest intimacy of bhakti.

The list of the servants

His hymns form the seventh book of the Shaiva canon, the Tirumurai. One of them proved a foundation-stone: the Tiruthondathogai, sung at Tiruvarur, in which Sundarar names and salutes the devotees of Shiva, declaring himself the servant of the servants. That roll-call became the seed of the whole Nayanar tradition — Nambiyandar Nambi expanded it, and Sekkilar’s twelfth-century Periya Puranam, the great hagiography of the sixty-three saints, is structured as a vast commentary upon Sundarar’s list. Tradition holds that his life closed at Tiruvanchaikkalam in the Chera country, where Shiva sent a white elephant to bear his comrade bodily to Kailasa, the Chera king Cheraman Perumal spurring after him. He was, by his own naming, the last servant on his own list; the tradition made him the door through which all the others are remembered.