Stories in film

Films of divine play tell how the Lord meets people; they belong to a different kind of narrative from the collected lives of the Nayanmars.

✦Thiruvilaiyadal · திருவிளையாடல்

1965 · Tamil · Director: A. P. Nagarajan (ஏ. பி. நாகராஜன்).

The film joins stories of Siva (சிவன்) and Uma (உமை) to a family conversation with Murugan (முருகன்). Dharumi (தருமி), a poor poet, longs for the king's reward; Nakkirar (நக்கீரர்) challenges the poem supplied by Siva. Other episodes concern Dakshayani (தாட்சாயணி), the Goddess born among fishing people, and the singer Panapattirar (பாணபத்திரர்), whom Siva helps by appearing as a firewood seller. Help comes to the singer through a stranger's song.

Beside the text: Paranjoti Munivar's (பரஞ்சோதி முனிவர்) Tiruvilaiyadal Puranam (திருவிளையாடல் புராணம்) gathers sixty-four games around Madurai; the film selects episodes and joins them to the Palani family frame and the Dakshayani story. Its extended exchanges and songs turn passages of sacred narrative into scenes whose voices remain in memory.

Film archive record.

✦Kandan Karunai · கந்தன் கருணை

1967 · Tamil · Director: A. P. Nagarajan.

Murugan's birth, his struggle against Surapadman (சூரபத்மன்), his marriages and the service of Virabahu (வீரபாகு) form the film's central movement. Avvaiyar (ஒளவையார்) also appears. Battles, divine encounters and courtship carry the story through a world in which Murugan's presence reaches both the warrior and the devotee.

Beside the text: This is a Murugan narrative associated with the Kanda Puranam (கந்த புராணம்), rather than an adaptation of a Nayanmar chapter in Periya Puranam or of Madurai's sixty-four games. Its selection of episodes and its prominent Virabahu role give the divine cycle the shape of an ensemble film.

Film archive record. Murugan's worship in the annual calendar is introduced in Festivals and Guru Pujas.

✦Two kinds of sacred story

The Nayanmars (நாயன்மார்கள்) are devotees whose lives Sekkizhar (சேக்கிழார்) gathers in Periya Puranam. The Tiruvilaiyadal stories gather Siva's interventions in the life of Madurai. The two worlds touch through worship and grace, but a film about the Lord's games does not thereby become a biography of the sixty-three saints.

An anthology brings saints together; a film of one life gives time to the household, the vow and the moment of recognition.

Tradition tells these lives in Sekkizhar's Periya Puranam; cinema receives them through that poem and through later telling, performance and song. Stories of the Nayanmars introduces episodes to read beside the screen.

✦Thiruvarutchelvar · திருவருட்செல்வர்

1967 · Tamil · Director: A. P. Nagarajan.

This anthology brings together Appar (அப்பர்), Sambandar (சம்பந்தர்), Sundarar (சுந்தரர்) and Tirukkuripputhondar (திருக்குறிப்புத்தொண்டர்), within a telling that also remembers Sekkizhar. Appar's aged figure and his relationship with Apputhi Adigal (அப்பூதியடிகள்) give devotion a human scale: service, hospitality and the loss of a child meet the saint's prayer. The washerman's service to a devotee gives another ordinary task the weight of a promise.

Beside the text: The film selects and interweaves lives that Periya Puranam unfolds within a much larger company, giving the actors' encounters and songs time of their own. Its Appar is one figure within that gathered narrative, rather than the subject of a separate complete life film.

Official film presentation. The saint's sung voice continues in Appar's Tevaram.

✦Karaikkal Ammaiyar · காரைக்கால் அம்மையார்

1973 · Tamil · Director: A. P. Nagarajan.

Punithavathi (புனிதவதி) feeds a devotee and gives him one of the mangoes kept for her husband. The fruit received through prayer changes her husband's understanding of her. The film follows the separation from domestic life, the form she asks of Siva, the journey to Kailasa and her devotion to the dance at Tiruvalangadu (திருவாலங்காடு). Lakshmi (லட்சுமி) and K. B. Sundarambal (கே. பி. சுந்தராம்பாள்) embody different phases of that movement.

Beside the text: The film expands household encounters into dialogue and song; Periya Puranam draws those encounters towards Ammaiyar's requested pey (பேய்) form and her abiding love of the dance. That transformation concerns the form of a devotee freed from attachment to bodily beauty, rather than simply a woman growing old.

Film archive record. Her own poems belong to Tirumurai 11.

✦Thiruneelakantar · திருநீலகண்டர்

1939 · Tamil · Director: Raja Sandow (ராஜா சாண்டோ).

M. K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar (எம். கே. தியாகராஜ பாகவதர்) plays the potter whose marriage becomes the setting for a vow made in Siva's name. The story moves through estrangement, restraint and the Lord's test, ending in the couple's renewal. Singing and the accompanying comic performance give the household story a public, theatrical life.

Beside the text: The film develops a musical and comic setting around the vow, whereas Sekkizhar gives sustained attention to the couple's long restraint and the test of the entrusted begging bowl. The restored youth is already in the poem; it is not an ending added by cinema.

Film archive record.

✦Thiruneelakantar · திருநீலகண்டர்

1972 · Tamil · Director: C. P. Jambulingam (சி. பி. ஜம்புலிங்கம்).

T. R. Mahalingam (டி. ஆர். மகாலிங்கம்) plays Ambalavanan (அம்பலவாணன்), the potter, and Sowcar Janaki (சௌகார் ஜானகி) his wife Leelavathi (லீலாவதி). The film adds the neighbouring Sarasvati (சரஸ்வதி), her illness and a prayer for her recovery, before developing the husband's attraction to a temple dancer and the wife's refusal of further intimacy. Nataraja's intervention brings the couple to renewal.

Beside the text: The neighbour's attachment and illness enlarge the domestic plot beyond Periya Puranam's account. Sekkizhar's narrative centres the wife's oath in Siva's name, their keeping of it into old age, and the Lord's test through the missing bowl.

Film archive record.

Nandanar and Kannappa approach Siva from outside established forms of temple life; their films add different obstacles and backstories to that approach.

✦Nandanar · நந்தனார்

1942 · Tamil · Director: Murugadasa (முருகதாசா).

M. M. Dhandapani Desikar (எம். எம். தண்டபாணி தேசிகர்) plays Nandanar, the devotee who longs to worship at Chidambaram. His landlord makes permission depend on an impossible harvest, completed through divine help. The film carries his desire towards the temple and towards the fire through which its ending represents his admission. Song gives the waiting devotee a voice that travels beyond the limits imposed upon him.

Beside the text: The landlord and the harvest condition come through the later musical Nandanar narrative associated with Gopalakrishna Bharati (கோபாலகிருஷ்ண பாரதி), rather than Sekkizhar's chapter. Periya Puranam already contains the fire transformation, so that troubling passage belongs to the literary account as well as the film.

Film archive record. In Periya Puranam, the saint's chapter is named Tirunalaippovar Nayanar Puranam (திருநாளைப்போவார் நாயனார் புராணம்), “the one who will go tomorrow”.

✦Bedara Kannappa · வேடர கண்ணப்பா

1954 · Kannada · Director: H. L. N. Simha (எச். எல். என். சிம்ஹா).

Rajkumar (ராஜ்குமார்) plays Dinna, the hunter who becomes Kannappa (கண்ணப்பர்). The film surrounds his devotion with the relationship with Neela, a hostile priest and accusations against him, before arriving at the offering of his eye to the wounded linga. Its dramatic world gives his love a series of human obstacles to pass through.

Beside the text: Sekkizhar begins with Tinnan's hunter family and brings him to love of Siva; the film gives Dinna and Neela a celestial past and adds the priest's hostile intrigues. The priest Sivakochariyar (சிவகோசரியார்) in Periya Puranam is instead led by Siva to witness and understand the hunter's love.

Film archive record.

✦Bhakta Kannappa · பக்த கண்ணப்பா

1976 · Telugu · Director: Bapu (பாபு).

Krishnam Raju (கிருஷ்ணம் ராஜு) plays Tinnadu, presented as Arjuna (அர்ச்சுனன்) reborn. A romance and a struggle within the hunting community precede his devotion to Siva. The film makes his change from refusal of worship to personal love of the Lord the movement through which the eye-offering acquires its meaning.

Beside the text: The Arjuna rebirth, romance and initial unbelief are features of this retelling, not the opening of Sekkizhar's Kannappa chapter. Periya Puranam attends to the hunter's immediate care for the linga and the Lord's disclosure of that love to the ritual priest.

Film archive record.

✦What the threshold asks

These stories bring caste, belonging and forms of worship into the viewer's attention. Nandanar's exclusion and Kannappa's unlearned offerings are distinct situations. Reading them separately keeps their particular human difficulty visible, while revealing how the Lord meets a devotee beyond what others can recognise.

Films also remember Saiva saints whose biographies belong outside Sekkizhar's sixty-three lives.

✦Manickavasagar · மாணிக்கவாசகர்

1939 · Tamil · Director: T. R. Sundaram (டி. ஆர். சுந்தரம்).

The film presents Manikkavasagar's life through the actor and singer M. M. Dhandapani Desikar. It gives the remembered saint a continuous screen presence, bringing sacred biography into the actor-singer form of early Tamil cinema. The film's subject leads towards the devotee whose inward voice is heard in Tiruvasagam.

Beside the text: Manikkavasagar has no individual life chapter among Periya Puranam's sixty-three, so the film belongs to his separate biographical telling. Tiruvasagam gives the saint's prayer and remembrance in his own poetic voice; a screen biography gives events a performed sequence.

Archival account of the film.

✦Pattinathar · பட்டினத்தார்

1962 · Tamil · Director: K. Somu (கே. சோமு).

T. M. Soundararajan (டி. எம். சௌந்தரராஜன்) plays Tiruvengadar (திருவெண்காடர்), a merchant whose adopted son's return from trade overturns his understanding of wealth. The small box and the needle without an eye bring the thought of the final departure into a prosperous household. He leaves that life and becomes the singing renunciant remembered as Pattinathar.

Beside the text: This merchant-renunciant life is outside Periya Puranam's sixty-three and follows the later Pattinathar biography rather than a chapter of Sekkizhar's epic. Its dramatic turning point is the disclosure of the limit of possessions, carried through household encounters and songs.

Film archive record. Later saints and poets opens the wider company of Saiva remembrance.

✦Hearing the voice after seeing the life

The film gives a remembered life the duration of an evening. A devotional poem may hold one recognition for much longer: gratitude, fear of another birth, a longing for the feet, or the desire to remain in the Lord's service. Reading after watching lets that recognition take time without the next scene arriving.

Film archives identify the screen telling; the saints' lives and poems let us return to the words behind and beyond it.

✦Films and archival records

• Indiancine.ma: Thiruvilaiyadal and Kandan Karunai: credits and narrative descriptions.
• APN Films: official channel and Thiruvarutchelvar: the publisher's presentation of the anthology.
• The Cinema Resource Centre: Thiruvarutchelvar material: the film's place among A. P. Nagarajan's productions.
• Karaikkal Ammaiyar, Thiruneelakantar, 1939 and Thiruneelakantar, 1972: separate film records for the household stories.
• Nandanar, 1942, Bedara Kannappa and Bhakta Kannappa: the Tamil, Kannada and Telugu films.
• The Cinema Resource Centre: T. R. Sundaram and Manickavasagar and Pattinathar, 1962: films of saints outside the sixty-three.

✦Return to the text

• Stories of the Nayanmars and Periya Puranam: the lives to set beside the films.
• Tamil prose accounts of Tiruneelakanta, Nandanar, Kannappa and Karaikkal Ammaiyar: accessible tellings derived from the saints' narratives.
• Appar's Tevaram, Sundarar's Tevaram and Tiruvasagam: the sung voices of saints whose lives acquire faces in cinema.
• Tirumurai 11: Ammaiyar's poetry, the Kannappa prabandhams and other forms of remembered devotion.
• Tirukkalirruppadiyar, verse 52: the distinction between narrating Kannappa's acts and knowing the love in which he offered them.