Hymns for the Drowning by Nammalvar

Author:Nammalvar [Nammāḻvār]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789351187424
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

“A Local Habitation and a Name”

By the sixth century, the Sanskrit texts themselves had been classified according to origin and audience as Śruti and sṃṛti. Śrutis were esoteric, “revealed” scripture, the closed texts; the sṃṛtis were “remembered” texts, interpreted by experts, but open to all. The epics, the major Hindu mythologies (purāṇas), and the Gītā were such sṃṛtis; they were part of the direct bhakti inheritance.

In the first regional movements of bhakti, one hears a new kind of utterance that cannot be adequately described by earlier terms such as “heard, revealed” (Śruti) or “remembered” (sṃṛti), or as “that which is known” (the Vedas), or as that which is learned by “sitting at or near the feet [of a teacher]” (the Upaniṣads). For, as the terms suggest, they by now represent passive, receptive modes. Bhaktas prefer the active mode. Nammāḻvār’s text is called Tiru-vāy-moḻi, “holy-mouth-word,” or “divine utterance”; Māṇikkavācakar called his work Tiruvācakam, “the holy utterance”; the Kannada-speaking Vīraśaivas called their poems vacanas or “sayings.” The emphasis has shifted from hearing to speaking, from watching to dancing, from a passive to an active mode; from a religion and a poetry of the esoteric few to a religion and a poetry of anyone who can speak. This shift is paralleled by other religious shifts: from the noniconic to the iconic; from the nonlocal to the local; from the sacrificial-fire rituals (yajña and homo) meant to be performed only by Vedic experts to worship (pūjā) by nearly all; from rituals in which a plot of ground is temporarily cordoned off and made into sacred space by experts in a consecration rite—to worship in temples, localized, named, open to almost the whole range of Hindu society. These changes are accompanied by a shift away from the absolute godhead, the non-personal Brahman of the Upaniṣads, to the gods of the mythologies, with faces, complexions, families, feelings, personalities, characters. Bhakti poems celebrate god both as local and translocal, and especially as the nexus of the two. As the Murukaṉ poem (p. 115) says, he is the kind who dwells “here, but not only here.” The poems celebrate the giving and the receiving, the reciprocity of human and divine.

One must add that bhakti traditions did not entirely discard Upaniṣadic concepts of a non-local, non-concrete godhead. Temples and images were seen by some as the earlier and inferior stages in the path of salvation; the ignorant may need images as props to lean on, but will soon leave them behind to move on to more abstract stages. A distinction is made between a god “with attributes” (saguṇa) and a god “without attributes” (nirguṇa).39 A prayer attributed to Śaṃkara points up the paradox:

O lord, forgive me my three human sins:

you are everywhere, yet I worship you here;

you are without form, yet I worship you

in these, and these other forms;

you need no praise, yet I offer you

this prayer.

Lord, forgive me my three human sins.

But the āḻvār’s god is never nirguṇa, attributeless, never without “body, parts, or passion,” or without a local habitation and a name.

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