Tirumurai 11: Saiva Prabandha Malai

Tirumurai 11 is the canon's many-poet prabandha garland: forty works by twelve attributed poets, carrying early bhakti, shrine poetry, literary experiment, renunciation and the remembered community of Siva's devotees into one volume.

✦A book made of small books

The first ten Tirumurais can be described in fairly large units. The first seven are the Tevaram of Sambandar, Appar and Sundarar. Tirumurai 8 contains two works of Manikkavasagar. Tirumurai 9 gathers Tiruvisaippa and Tiruppallandu. Tirumurai 10 is the single long Tirumantiram.

The Eleventh Tirumurai changes scale. It is an anthology of forty separate works. Some are substantial poems; others are small garlands or single compositions. The poets do not belong to one century. Karaikkal Ammaiyar stands near the beginning of Tamil Saiva bhakti; Nambiyandar Nambi stands near the other end of the volume's historical span.

The familiar name Saiva Prabandha Malai describes that character well: a malai, a garland, made from many prabandhas, shaped compositions. The received sequence ranges through pathigam, venba, antadi, irattai manimalai, mummanikkovai, ula, arruppadai, kalambakam and other forms.

✦Forty works, forty-one numbered units

One small numbering puzzle is worth knowing. Karaikkal Ammaiyar's Tiruvalangattu Mutha Tiruppathigam survives as two pathigams, now displayed as 11.002 and 11.003. The received electronic sequence therefore runs through 11.041, but those two pathigams are counted together as one work. That is how the anthology can contain forty works while its displayed units reach forty-one.

The traditional order begins with Siva of Madurai as the giver of a sacred letter, moves through early saints and little-known poet-devotees, and ends with Nambiyandar Nambi, poet and remembered compiler of the first eleven Tirumurais.

The lives below are told as the Periya Puranam, the later Tirumuraikanda Puranam and Saiva author histories remember them. For several poets outside Sekkizhar's Nayanmar biographies, little independent biography survives, so the works themselves give the firmer foothold.

✦1. Tiru Alavai Udaiyar · திருவாலவாயுடையார்

The first attributed author is not a human poet. Tiru Alavai Udaiyar, Siva of Madurai, is named as the speaker of Tirumukap Pasuram, 11.001 at Alavai, Madurai. The poem takes the form of a sacred letter sent on behalf of the musician Panapattiran to Cheraman Perumal, asking that the singer be received with generosity. The anthology therefore begins with an arresting claim about poetry itself: the Lord is imagined not only as the one praised in Tamil, but as one who sends Tamil speech into the human world.

✦2. Karaikkal Ammaiyar · காரைக்கால் அம்மையார்

Karaikkal Ammaiyar is remembered first as Punithavati of Karaikkal, married to the merchant Paramadattan. A hungry devotee came to her house, and she fed him, giving him one of two mangoes her husband had sent home. When Paramadattan later asked for the second mango after eating the first, she prayed and received another by Siva's grace. When the event was revealed, he came to regard his wife not as an ordinary spouse but as a sacred being and withdrew from the marriage.

Punithavati then asked Siva to strip away the beauty that bound others to her human appearance and to give her a form suited to unbroken devotion. She is remembered in the pey form in which her own poems speak. She turned north toward Kailasa and, unwilling to set her feet upon the holy mountain, approached it on her head. Siva addressed her as Ammaiye, “Mother”. She asked not for worldly restoration but for unfailing remembrance and for the sight of His dance. She was directed to Tiruvalangadu, where her two Mutha Tiruppathigams sing the dancing Lord amid flame, skulls, owls, jackals and pey figures.

Her four surviving units in the Eleventh Tirumurai form three works: the two Tiruvalangattu Mutha Tiruppathigams, 11.002–11.003 at Tiruvalangadu, Tiru Irattai Manimalai, 11.004, and Arputha Tiruvandadi, 11.005. She is commonly placed around the 6th century CE. The poems are early evidence; the full mango and Kailasa life-story comes from later sacred biography.

✦3. Iyadigal Kadavarkon · ஐயடிகள் காடவர்கோன்

Iyadigal Kadavarkon is counted among the sixty-three Nayanmars. He is remembered as a Pallava ruler at Kanchi who handed kingship to his son and chose pilgrimage and song. His Kshetra Tiruvenba, 11.006, moves through Siva shrines in venba, turning royal travel into sacred geography. Attempts to identify him with a particular historical Pallava king remain debated.

✦4. Cheraman Perumal · சேரமான் பெருமாள்

Cheraman Perumal, also remembered as Kazharitrarivar Nayanar, is the Chera king whose life becomes closely bound to Sundarar. He serves Siva at Tiruvanchikkalam, meets Sundarar and forms the friendship remembered in Tirumurai 7. The sacred biography ends with Sundarar travelling toward Kailasa on a white elephant and Cheraman following on horseback. At Kailasa he is remembered as reciting Tirukkayilaya Gnana Ula, 11.009, one of his three works in this volume. His other two are Ponvannattandadi, 11.007, and Tiruvarur Mummanikkovai, 11.008 at Tiruvarur. The historical identity and date of the Chera ruler behind this sacred biography are not settled.

✦5. Nakkirar · நக்கீரர்

Ten works stand under the name Nakkirar or Nakkiradeva Nayanar, more than any poet in the anthology except Nambi. They range from Siva hymns and formal compositions to Tirumurugarruppadai, 11.018, the old arruppadai that guides a seeker through Murugan's sacred landscape. Tamil Saiva transmission receives these works under one revered name; some scholars distinguish the Sangam Nakkirar associated with Tirumurugarruppadai from a later Saiva Nakkiradeva responsible for several of the other works. The anthology preserves the received attribution without requiring the historical question to be simpler than the evidence allows.

✦6. Kalladar · கல்லாடர்

Kalladar contributes one work, Tirukkannappa Devar Tirumaram, 11.020, a short asiriyappa poem on Kannappa's devotion. It follows Nakkirar's work of the same title at 11.019. The Eleventh-Tirumurai Kalladar is not securely identified with the same-named poet of the Sangam corpus. What remains clear is the canonical pairing: two poets, two compact tellings of Kannappa's love for Siva.

✦7. Kapilar · கபிலர்

Kapilar is given three works: Mutha Nayanar Tiru Irattai Manimalai, 11.021, on Vinayaka; Sivaperuman Tiru Irattai Manimalai, 11.022; and Sivaperuman Tiruvandadi, 11.023. The surviving literary tradition distinguishes this Kapiladeva Nayanar from the better-known Sangam Kapilar. His presence in the anthology is therefore best understood through these devotional works rather than by importing a Sangam biography into them.

✦8. Paranar · பரணர்

Paranar's contribution is Sivaperuman Tiruvandadi, 11.024, an antadi of praise to Siva. As with Kapilar and Kalladar, the old and prestigious poet-name invites identification with a Sangam figure, but that identification is not historically secure. The received Saiva work stands on its own under the name Paranar.

✦9. Ilamperuman Adigal · இளம்பெருமான் அடிகள்

Ilamperuman Adigal is known in this volume through Sivaperuman Tirumummanikkovai, 11.025. Little secure biography accompanies the name. The title tells us more than later legend can safely add: this is a three-form kovai offered to Siva, preserving another voice that would otherwise be almost lost to us.

✦10. Athiravadigal · அதிராவடிகள்

Athiravadigal contributes Mutha Pillaiyar Tirumummanikkovai, 11.026, addressed to Vinayaka as the “elder Pillaiyar”. Again, secure biographical detail is sparse. The work matters because the Eleventh Tirumurai does not preserve only long saintly lives; it also preserves poets who remain visible principally through one surviving composition.

✦11. Pattinattu Pillaiyar · பட்டினத்துப் பிள்ளையார்

Pattinattu Pillaiyar, commonly placed around the 10th century, contributes five works centred on Tillai, Sirkazhi, Tiruvidaimarudur, Kanchi Ekambam and Tiruvotriyur. His poetry can speak with sharp renunciant force, setting kingship and wealth beside service, alms and dependence on Siva. He needs to be distinguished from the later Siddhar Pattinattar whose merchant-to-renunciant life dominates popular stories under the same shortened name. The Eleventh-Tirumurai poet is known first through these five canonical works.

✦12. Nambiyandar Nambi · நம்பியாண்டார் நம்பி

Nambiyandar Nambi belongs to the 10th–11th century CE and closes the anthology with ten works. He is remembered at Tirunaraiyur, devoted to Pollap Pillaiyar, and his own poems range from Vinayaka and Siva to Sambandar, Appar and the community of Saiva devotees. His Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi, 11.034, takes the compressed list of Sundarar's Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur, and expands the individual and collective devotees into ninety antadi verses.

A later account, Umapathi Sivacharyar's Tirumuraikanda Puranam, gives Nambi another role. It says that the Chola king Rajaraja longed to recover the hymns of Sambandar, Appar and Sundarar; Nambi learned that their palm-leaf manuscripts lay in a sealed room beside the dancing hall at Chidambaram. Images of the three saints were brought in procession, the room was opened, and leaves were found damaged by age and insects. Nambi and the king then recovered what could be read and arranged the sacred songs into Tirumurais. The same account places the first seven books under the three Tevaram poets and continues the ordering toward the eleven-book canon.

History gives us a firmer but smaller statement. An inscription of Rajaraja at the Rajarajesvara temple in Tanjavur records his provision of paddy for forty-eight people appointed to recite Tiruppadiyam, with two drummers. This confirms organised royal support for the Saiva hymns during Rajaraja's reign. It does not record the sealed room at Chidambaram, the damaged leaves, or Nambi's role in arranging them. Those details remain the remembered account preserved in a text written later.

Karaikkal Ammaiyar · Nakkirar · Pattinathu Pillaiyar (Pattinattar) · Nambiyandar Nambi · All the poets and teachers ›

The Eleventh Tirumurai is not one genre but a library of small forms: forty works grouped under twelve attributed poets, with Karaikkal Ammaiyar's two Tiruvalangadu pathigams counted as one work.

The order below is the traditional poet order. The numbers are the received Eleventh-Tirumurai unit numbers. Because 11.002 and 11.003 are the two pathigams of one Tiruvalangattu Mutha Tiruppathigam, forty works occupy forty-one numbered units.

✦Why so many forms belong together

The anthology shows that devotional Tamil did not grow in one literary channel. A shrine could be praised in venba. A saint's life could become tirumaram. A pilgrimage guide from the old classical corpus could be received into the Saiva canon. An antadi could make memory itself part of the poem's mechanism. A kalambakam could gather several forms under one devotional subject.

That variety is not a side note to the Eleventh Tirumurai. It is its structure.

Karaikkal Ammaiyar joins two movements that later Tamil Saiva poetry will keep returning to: Siva's terrifying dance at the cremation ground and the devotee's quiet certainty that only His grace cuts birth.

✦The earliest voice in the canon

Karaikkal Ammaiyar's poems are commonly treated as the earliest surviving poetry within the Tirumurai canon, earlier than Sambandar and Appar. That does not make them a rough beginning. Their world is already sharply formed: Siva wears bones and snakes, carries the crescent and Ganga, dances in fire, receives the company of pey figures and yet remains the Lord to whom the poet speaks with intimacy.

The Tiruvalangattu Mutha Tiruppathigam, 11.002–11.003 at Tiruvalangadu, gives that world a place. This is not an abstract cremation ground. The refrain names Tiruvalangadu as the place of the Father's dance.

The bodily imagery is deliberately unsettling. Ammaiyar does not clean the burning ground before placing Siva in it. Bone, ash, fire, corpse, bird and pey remain part of the scene. Siva's dance is not fragile; it does not require a pleasant landscape in order to be divine.

✦From the dance to grace

Arputha Tiruvandadi, 11.005, often sounds very different. It still knows Siva's ash, serpent and cremation ground, but its central speech can be inward and doctrinal. Verse 11.005.5 calls Siva the one who brings every life forth and the one who brings withdrawal. Verse 11.005.9 goes further: grace governs the world, grace cuts birth, and through grace the devotee looks toward the Real.

This is already close to a central Saiva Siddhanta grammar. The soul does not manufacture release by its own power. The decisive movement is arul, Siva's grace. Ammaiyar still speaks as the one who receives it, serves Him and longs for His feet. Grace does not erase the relationship; it fulfils it.

✦Kailasa and Tiruvalangadu

The remembered journey to Kailasa explains why Ammaiyar's bodily strangeness is not self-hatred. She has asked to live free of the social claims attached to beauty. When Siva calls her Ammaiye, the pey body has not made her less near to Him. It has become the form in which the tradition remembers her nearness.

She asks to remain beneath His dancing feet, and Tiruvalangadu becomes the earthly place where that wish takes poetic form. The journey moves north toward Kailasa, but the songs return the reader to a Tamil shrine. Heaven and sacred geography meet in the act of witnessing the dance.

Tirumurugarruppadai, 11.018, turns the classical arruppadai into sacred direction: the seeker is led through places, landscapes, worshippers and forms of Murugan until pilgrimage becomes a way of learning how to see Him.

✦An old poem in two canons

Tirumurugarruppadai, 11.018, is unusual even inside this varied book. It also stands at the head of the Pattuppattu, the classical Ten Idylls. Its form is arruppadai, a “showing of the way”. In secular arruppadai poetry, one performer who has received generosity directs another toward a patron. In this poem the destination is Murugan.

The poem runs for 317 lines in the asiriyappa-akaval movement. It leads the hearer through Tirupparankunram, Tiruchiralaivay, Tiruvavinankudi, Tiruveragam, Kunruthoradal and Pazhamutircholai, while also describing Murugan's form, attendants, worship, landscapes and the many kinds of people who turn toward him.

The first section begins at Tirupparankunram, the hill shrine near Madurai. The poem does not give a dry itinerary. Sunlight, mountain, forest, battle power, women, sages, ritual specialists, hunters, musicians, spirits and devotees enter the movement. The road teaches through what the traveller sees.

✦Six places, more than six addresses

Later Tamil devotion knows these places through the language of Murugan's six sacred abodes. The poem is one of the important early literary witnesses to that sacred geography. Yet its force is not exhausted by making a checklist of six temples.

At each stage Murugan is encountered differently. One place is marked by hill and battle memory; another by sea and ritual; another by ascetic and priestly worship; another by mountain people and ecstatic forms. The seeker learns that the divine presence is not confined to one social setting.

The poem also refuses a simple opposition between “temple” and “nature”. Mountain, grove, water, cultivated land and ritual ground are all inhabited landscapes. Murugan is praised in established shrines, but he is also recognised in the life of the hills and in the acts of those who call him.

✦Why the Eleventh Tirumurai keeps it

The authorship question needs one careful sentence. Tamil Saiva transmission receives Tirumurugarruppadai under Nakkirar/Nakkiradeva Nayanar; some scholars distinguish its Sangam-age poet from the later Saiva Nakkirar to whom several other works in this Tirumurai are attributed. The poem itself remains in both literary worlds: classical Pattuppattu and sacred Tirumurai.

That double place is fitting for this anthology. Tirumurai 11 repeatedly takes Tamil literary forms with lives beyond temple hymnody and gathers them into Saiva remembrance.

Pattinattu Pillaiyar's five works repeatedly loosen the grip of rank and possession: service to Siva and His devotees is weighed against royal power, wealth and the body's passing claims.

✦The Pattinattar in this Tirumurai

The name Pattinattar carries many later stories in Tamil memory. The poet of the Eleventh Tirumurai is more carefully called Pattinattu Pillaiyar or Pattinattu Adigal. His five canonical works are 11.027–11.031. He is commonly placed around the 10th century, and he needs to be kept distinct from the later Siddhar Pattinattar unless a particular historical argument is being made.

His first work, Koyil Nanmanimalai, 11.027 at Tillai Chidambaram, itself displays the literary richness of this Tirumurai. Forty poems rotate through four forms: venba, kattalai kalitturai, asiriyappa and viruttam, linked as a garland.

But the formal skill does not soften the renunciant edge. The second poem asks what kind of life is genuinely joyful.

The contrast is exact. One life has umbrella, weapon, enemies and rule. The other has service, doorway and alms. The poem calls the second kalippu, joy.

✦Renunciation is relational

The poem can sound like a simple rejection of kingship, but its positive centre is adiyar service. That matters for Saiva Siddhanta. The world is not made holy merely by possessing less. The question is what the freed attention is turned toward.

This is close to the servant's path, chariyai, familiar from Appar: temple service, service to devotees, carrying the body into acts that reduce self-importance. Pattinattu Pillaiyar's language can be more sharply renunciant than Appar's, but the direction is related.

His other works broaden the field. Tirukkazhumala Mummanikkovai, 11.028 at Sirkazhi, Tiruvidaimarudur Mummanikkovai, 11.029 at Tiruvidaimarudur, Tiru Ekambamudaiyar Tiruvandadi, 11.030 at Kanchi, and Tiruvotriyur Orupa Orupathu, 11.031 at Tiruvotriyur keep renunciation tied to actual sacred places. The poet who loosens his hold on the world does not become placeless. He keeps arriving at temples.

Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi, 11.034, stands between Sundarar's compact Tiruttondattogai and Sekkizhar's Periya Puranam: a ninety-verse act of remembering persons, groups and forms of service.

✦Sundarar names them

In Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur, Sundarar names devotees and groups and repeatedly places himself beneath them: “I am the servant of the servants.” The hymn is brief enough that many lives appear only as a name, an epithet or one identifying act.

Nambiyandar Nambi takes that inherited list and expands it into Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi, 11.034. The work has ninety verses in antadi linkage. Individual devotees are given compact narrative identities; the collective groups are counted and remembered; Sundarar himself is drawn into the company he first praised.

Near the close, Nambi turns back explicitly to the Tiruttondattogai and counts what it holds.

The verse is doing more than arithmetic. It makes memory itself a discipline. The devotees are not examples chosen later to decorate doctrine. Their acts become one of the ways the tradition teaches what belonging to Siva can look like.

✦Nambi expands; Sekkizhar narrates

The line of development is clear:

1. 1

   Sundarar · Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur

   a compact hymn naming individual devotees and groups.

2. 2

   Nambiyandar Nambi · Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi, 11.034

   ninety antadi verses expanding names into brief identities and remembered acts.

3. 3

   Sekkizhar · Tirumurai 12, Periya Puranam

   full sacred biographies shaped into a continuous narrative of the devotees.

Sekkizhar does not simply turn Nambi's ninety verses into longer prose. He composes a new work with its own narrative architecture, speeches, places, relationships and theological emphases. But Nambi is an important bridge. He helps stabilise the remembered company that Sekkizhar will later unfold.

✦The theological weight of the devotees

Saiva Siddhanta does not treat devotion to adiyar as sentimental attachment around the edge of doctrine. The released and ripening soul learns to recognise Siva's presence through worship, temple, guru and devotees. Meykandar will later state this with philosophical precision: the mature devotee worships Siva's devotees and temple as Siva's own presence.

Nambi's poem gives that teaching a human archive. It asks the reader to remember not an abstract category called “devotee”, but people with different occupations, bodies, resources and forms of service. The unity is not social sameness. It is orientation toward Siva.

Two parts of this varied Tirumurai remain especially visible beyond literary study: Tirumurugarruppadai continues in Murugan devotion, and Karaikkal Ammaiyar's mango story is enacted each year in Karaikkal's Mangani festival.

✦Tirumurugarruppadai in Murugan worship

Tirumurugarruppadai, 11.018, is still approached as more than a classical poem to be analysed in a classroom. Murugan devotees recite it as sacred Tamil, and its descriptions remain attached to the living geography of Murugan worship. The temple administration at Tirupparankunram, for example, names Tirumurugarruppadai among the old Tamil works that praise the shrine.

Its usefulness in devotion follows its literary form. A reciter does not merely praise Murugan in one static image. The poem moves. It names places, ways of worship, landscapes and people. Recitation can therefore become a verbal pilgrimage even when the devotee is at home.

✦Karaikkal's Mangani festival

At Karaikkal, Ammaiyar's remembered mango episode is still held in public festival. The district administration describes the Mangani festival as an annual observance in the Tamil month Aani, around the full-moon day, centred on Karaikkal Ammaiyar and the temple complex in the town.

The mango is therefore not left as a private miracle in a medieval life-story. It becomes public memory. A fruit given to a hungry devotee begins the remembered sequence: hospitality, the husband's question, grace, recognition, renunciation and the life that leads toward Kailasa and Tiruvalangadu.

The festival keeps the first act visible. Before Ammaiyar is the pey-poet at the burning ground, she is Punithavati feeding someone who came hungry to her door.

✦A Tirumurai that resists one practice

There is no single daily recitation pattern that can represent all forty works. Some pieces belong naturally to temple and shrine remembrance; some reward literary study; some are saintly memory; some are used in personal devotion. That variety is appropriate to the book. The anthology survives not because every work is used in the same way, but because the canon refuses to let only one kind of sacred Tamil count.

Cheraman Perumal's Tirukkayilaya Jnana Ula and the praise of Kailasa beyond the Tevaram: The Jyotirlingas and the Himalayan shrines.

Read Tirumurai 11 through complete Tamil texts, its literary-form studies, the later account of Nambi's compilation, the Rajaraja inscription and the living settings of Murugan and Karaikkal Ammaiyar worship.

✦Complete Tamil text

Project Madurai, Eleventh Tirumurai, part 1 gives the works from Tiru Alavai Udaiyar through Athiravadigal, including the Karaikkal Ammaiyar and Nakkirar texts used above. Part 2 continues with Pattinattu Pillaiyar and Nambiyandar Nambi and gives the Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi text used above.

Shaivam.org's Tiruvalangadu Mutha Tiruppathigam gives the shrine, pann and numbered Tamil verses for 11.002 at Tiruvalangadu. Its Tirumukap Pasuram page gives 11.001 at Alavai.

✦The forty works and their forms

Tamil Virtual Academy's Eleventh Tirumurai study surveys the twelve poets, forty works and several major forms. Its material on Kapiladeva Nayanar and Pattinattu Pillaiyar gives useful descriptions of irattai manimalai, nanmanimalai and mummanikkovai structures.

Tamil Virtual Academy's Nambiyandar Nambi study lists his ten works and explains the relation of Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi to Sundarar's devotee-list and the later Periya Puranam.

✦Nambi, Rajaraja and the canon

Tamil Virtual Academy's text of Umapathi Sivacharyar's Tirumuraikanda Puranam preserves the later sacred narrative of Rajaraja, Nambi and the recovery and ordering of the hymns.

South Indian Inscriptions II, no. 65, in the DHARMA epigraphic corpus gives the Rajaraja-period record for forty-eight Tiruppadiyam reciters and two drummers at the Tanjavur temple. It is the firmer contemporary evidence for royal institutional support of Saiva hymn recitation in Rajaraja's reign.

✦Living settings

The Karaikal district administration describes the continuing Mangani festival in the Aani season. The Tirupparankunram Murugan temple administration names Tirumurugarruppadai among the old Tamil works associated with the shrine. Ratna Navaratnam's study of Tirumurugarruppadai discusses its arruppadai structure, six sacred settings and continuing devotional reception.

✦Related pages

Read Tirumurai 7 for Sundarar's Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur, the seed-list behind Nambi's Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi. Read Tirumurai 10 for the doctrinal and yogic work immediately before this anthology, and Tirumurai 12 for Sekkizhar's full sacred biographies of the devotees Nambi remembers in compact form.