Tirumangai Alvar

Tirumangai Alvar, last of the twelve in the traditional reckoning, entered sainthood by the least likely road in the canon: he was a chieftain, then a brigand, before he was a poet. Born Kaliyan near Tiruvali-Tirunagari in the Chola country, he held the lordship of Tirumangai, and his hymns — vigorous, learned, restless — make up a substantial share of the Nalayira Divya Prabandham. Tradition places him around the eighth century.

The robber converted

The hagiographies relate that Kaliyan sought the hand of Kumudavalli, a physician’s foster-daughter, who set her price: he must feed a thousand and eight Vaishnava devotees every day for a year. He agreed, and the feeding ruined him; when his treasury failed he took to the highways, robbing travellers to keep the kitchens open. One night he waylaid a wedding party of unearthly splendour and stripped it of everything — but a single ring on the bridegroom’s toe would not yield, and the bundle of plunder could not be lifted from the ground. Demanding to know what spell held it, he received his answer: the bridegroom was Vishnu himself, who bent to the robber’s ear and gave him the eight-syllable mantra. The thief rose a poet, thereafter called Parakalan, “beyond time”, and turned the same appetite for exploits to pilgrimage and verse. Legend adds, with evident relish, that he later stripped a golden image from a Buddhist vihara at Nagapattinam to fund the walls of Srirangam — the reformed brigand robbing one last time, for the god.

In the canon

Six works are his: the Periya Tirumoli, much the largest, with the Tirukkuruntandakam, Tiruneduntandakam, Tiruvezhukurrirukkai, and the two Madal poems — together over a thousand verses, a share of the canon second only to Nammalvar’s. He was a traveller’s poet: the Periya Tirumoli sings shrine after shrine across the length of the Vishnu-country, and he is credited with hymning more of the divya desams than any other Alvar, fixing many of them in the canon. The tradition honours him too as a master of every verse-form, and his two Madal poems press the old Tamil convention of love’s public self-abasement into the service of God. In him the canon closes on its most worldly figure — soldier, lover, bandit, builder — gathered whole into devotion, appetite and all.