Andal
THE VAISHNAVA POETESS
PREOCCUPIED from the earliest times with divine
knowledge and religious aspiration the Indian mind has turned all forms of
human life and emotion and all the phenomena of the universe into symbols and means by which the embodied soul may strive after and grasp the Supreme.
Indian devotion has especially seized upon the most intimate human relations
and made them stepping-stones to the supra-human. God the Guru, God the Master,
God the Friend, God the Mother, God the Child, God the Self, each of these
experiences - for to us these are more than merely ideas, - it has carried to
its extreme possibilities. But none of them has it pursued, embraced, sung with
a more exultant passion of intimate realisation than the yearning for God the
Lover, God the Beloved. It would seem as if this passionate human symbol were
the natural culminating- point for the mounting flame of the soul's devotion:
for it is found wherever that devotion has entered into the most secret shrine
of the inner temple. We meet it in Islamic poetry; certain experiences of the
Christian mystics repeat the forms and images with which we are familiar in the
East, but usually with a certain timorousness foreign to the Eastern
temperament. For the devotee who has once had this intense experience it is
that which admits to the most profound and hidden mystery of the universe; for
him the heart has the key of the last secret.
The work of a great
Bengali poet has recently reintroduced this idea to the European mind, which
has so much lost the memory of its old religious traditions as to welcome and
wonder at it as a novel form of mystic self-expression. On the contrary it is
ancient enough, like all things natural and eternal in the human soul. In
Bengal a whole period of national poetry has been dominated by this single
strain and it has inspired a religion and a philosophy. And in the Vaishnavism of the far South, in the songs of the Tamil Alwars we find it again in another form,
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giving
a powerful and original turn to the images of our old classic poetry; for there
it has been sung out by the rapt heart of a woman to the Heart of the Universe.
The Tamil word, Alwar, means one who has drowned, lost himself in the sea
of the divine being. Among these canonised saints of
Southern Vaishnavism ranks Vishnuchitta,
Yogin and poet, of Villipattan in the land of the Pandyas. He is termed Perialwar,
The Great Alwar. A tradition, which we need not
believe, places him in the ninety-eighth year of the Kaliyuga.
But these divine singers are ancient enough, since they precede the great saint
and philosopher Ramanuja whose personality and
teaching were the last flower of the long-growing Vaishnava
tradition. Since his time Southern Vaishnavism has
been a fixed creed and a system rather than a creator of new spiritual
greatnesses.
The poetess Andal was the foster-daughter of Vishnuchitta,
found by him, it is said, a new-born child under the sacred Tulsi-plant.
We know little of Andal except what we can gather
from a few legends, some of them richly beautiful and symbolic. Most of Vishnuchitta's poems have the infancy and boyhood of
Krishna for their subject. Andal, brought up in that
atmosphere, cast into the mould of her life what her foster-father had sung in
inspired hymns. Her own poetry - we may suppose that she passed early into the
Light towards which she yearned, for it is small in bulk, - is entirely
occupied with her passion for the divine Being. It is said that she went
through a symbolic marriage with Sri Ranganatha,
Vishnu in his temple at Srirangam, and disappeared
into the image of her Lord. This tradition probably conceals some actual fact,
for Andal's marriage with the Lord is still
celebrated annually with considerable pomp and ceremony.
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