Sekkizhar: The Minister Who Wrote Down Everybody Else's Life

The method is worth setting out because it is the reason the book works.

He travelled. Before writing, by tradition, he went to the places.

He visited the towns and villages associated with the Nayanars, collected the local accounts, saw the temples, and gathered what was remembered in each place.

That is why the Periya Puranam is geographically specific. Each life is anchored to a named place, with the local temple, the local landscape and frequently local detail that could only come from having been there.

The structure:

• 4,286 verses
• Arranged in thirteen sections, sargas
• Following the order of Sundarar's Thiruthondar Thogai, so that the list determines the sequence
• Each life given the space it needs, from a few verses to several hundred
• Sundarar's own life is the frame, since he made the list, and it opens and closes the work

The literary quality. This is the part that gets less attention than it should.

The Periya Puranam is counted among the great works of Tamil literature, not only as a religious text. It is:

• In viruttam metre throughout, handled with great control
• Rich in description: landscape, towns, agriculture, festivals, crafts, and the physical texture of the Chola country
• Attentive to occupation. Because so many Nayanars were tradespeople, the poem describes weaving, potting, oil pressing, fishing, farming, hunting and washing in working detail
• Structurally varied, since the lives are of very different shapes

As a historical source. Worth stating carefully.

The Periya Puranam is a twelfth century text about people mostly of the sixth to ninth centuries, written to a devotional purpose.

What it is good evidence for:

• Twelfth century Chola society, agriculture, occupations and temple practice, which it describes incidentally and in detail
• The state of the Nayanar tradition in the twelfth century
• Which temples existed and mattered then
• The geography of Tamil Shaivism

What it is weaker evidence for:

• The historical details of individual seventh century lives
• Miracle accounts, obviously
• The polemical episodes, which reflect the period's concerns

Historians use it heavily and carefully, and its incidental descriptions of ordinary life are among the richest sources for the period.

The famous verse about it. There is a Tamil saying that the Periya Puranam is one of the works a person should read, and it is grouped with the Kamba Ramayanam and the Thirukkural in that kind of list.

Its influence on Tamil:

• It fixed the Nayanar canon
• It supplied subject matter for centuries of temple sculpture, painting and performance
• Its verses are recited and set to music
• It was a model for later Tamil narrative verse
• Modern Tamil writers have engaged with it, critically and otherwise, including on the difficult stories

Sekkizhar's own end. He is said to have attained his end at Chidambaram, and he has a shrine there.

His birthplace, Kunrathur, has a temple to him, and the Sekkizhar festival is observed.

The Jivaka Chintamani deserves its own account, both because it prompted the Periya Puranam and because it is a major work in its own right that most people have never heard of.

What it is:

• A Tamil epic, by Thiruthakka Thevar, a Jain monk
• Probably tenth century
• Around 3,145 verses
• One of the five great epics of Tamil, the Aimperumkappiyangal

The five great epics. Worth listing since most people cannot name them.

• Silappadikaram, by Ilango Adigal, the story of Kannagi and Kovalan, which is the greatest of them
• Manimekalai, by Sithalai Sathanar, a Buddhist work, the sequel, following Manimekalai the daughter of Madhavi
• Jivaka Chintamani, Jain
• Valayapathi, largely lost, Jain
• Kundalakesi, largely lost, Buddhist

The composition of that list is worth noticing. Of the five great epics of Tamil, at least three are Jain or Buddhist works, and two of those survive only in fragments.

That is a substantial fact about Tamil literary history that is not widely known.

What the Jivaka Chintamani is about:

• Jivaka, a prince whose father is killed and whose mother escapes
• He is raised by a merchant
• He wins eight wives, in a series of episodes involving music, archery, elephants and contests
• He recovers his kingdom
• And then, having everything, he renounces it and becomes a Jain ascetic

Why the king liked it. It is a good story, well told, with romance, adventure and music, and the renunciation at the end gives it a moral shape.

Why Sekkizhar objected. The tradition says he thought the king was spending his attention on a work of a rival tradition, and that the Shaiva material was better.

How he handled it. This is the part worth taking away.

He did not:

• Argue with the king
• Attack the Jivaka Chintamani
• Suggest banning or discouraging it
• Say anything against Jainism

He wrote something else, of at least equal quality, and handed it over.

That is a good model for a disagreement about culture, and it is unusual. The response to a book you object to being to write a better one is rare in any tradition.

What he actually said about it. His stated objection, in the tradition's account, was not that the Jivaka Chintamani was Jain but that it was fiction, and that the Nayanar lives were true and therefore better material.

Whether that distinction holds is a separate question. What matters is that the objection was framed as a claim about the material rather than about the community.

The Silappadikaram. Since it is the greatest of the five, it deserves a line.

Kannagi, whose husband Kovalan is wrongly executed at Madurai for a theft he did not commit, comes to the king's court, proves his innocence by breaking open her anklet, and burns the city.

She is worshipped as a goddess in Tamil Nadu and in Kerala as Bhagavathy at Kodungallur, and in Sri Lanka as Pattini.

It is one of the great works of Indian literature and its author, Ilango Adigal, is traditionally said to be a Jain prince and the brother of the Chera king.

The point of this section. That the Tamil literary landscape Sekkizhar was working in was genuinely plural, that the traditions were producing major works in competition, and that a great deal of what they produced is lost.

The Periya Puranam exists because of that competition. So does a large part of Tamil literature.

A chronicler makes choices, and Sekkizhar's are worth examining, particularly the difficult ones.

What he kept. He did not sanitise the list.

The Periya Puranam contains, in full:

• Kannappa's ritual violations, described in exact detail rather than glossed
• Nandanar's exclusion, and the fire
• Karaikkal Ammaiyar's request to be made a ghoul
• Sundarar's two marriages, broken oath and blindness
• Thirumangai's robberies, in the Vaishnava tradition though not this text
• Siruthondar's story, which is the hardest in the corpus and is treated in the next entry
• The Madurai episode with the Jains, including the impalement
• Several killings by devotees in the course of their devotion

He could have left things out. He was writing for a king, in a devotional register, to establish the superiority of his tradition's material.

And he included the man who put his foot on a linga, the woman who asked to be made hideous, the poet who broke an oath to his second wife, and the general who was asked for his son.

Why. Two possibilities and both are probably true.

One, the stories were already circulating locally and he was recording rather than inventing. Removing them would have been noticed.

Two, and more interestingly, the difficulty is the point. A saint list in which everybody behaves well demonstrates nothing. The extremity of what these people did is the evidence of the state they were in.

The problem with that second reading. It works for Kannappa's eye and Karaikkal Ammaiyar's request, which are self directed.

It works much less well where somebody else is harmed, and there are several such stories, of which the Siruthondar account is the worst.

Where a modern reader is left:

• The Periya Puranam is a great literary work and the source of a tradition
• It contains material that is genuinely disturbing and that has been criticised from within Tamil culture for a long time
• Both facts are stable and neither cancels the other
• Reading it means encountering both

The critical tradition around it. It is substantial and is not a modern import.

• Tamil reformist and rationalist writers have criticised specific stories, particularly Siruthondar and Nandanar
• Dalit criticism of the Nandanar narrative is extensive
• Jain writers have objected to the Madurai episode
• Modern Tamil literature has reworked several of the stories critically
• There is also substantial appreciative scholarship on the poem as literature

A reasonable position for a devotional reader:

• Read it. It is one of the great books in Tamil
• Know which stories are contested and why
• Do not repeat the harmful readings
• Do not defend what should not be defended
• And notice that the tradition itself has produced the criticism, which means the argument is internal rather than an attack from outside

Sekkizhar's own position on his material. Worth noting.

His stated framing is that these lives are true, as against the fiction he was competing with, and that their truth is what makes them worth reading.

That framing has a consequence he may not have intended: if the lives are offered as true, they are open to the ordinary questions one asks about true accounts, including whether what was done was right.

A tradition that had presented them as parables would be harder to argue with. Sekkizhar presented them as history.

Sekkizhar's actual contribution is an act of recording, and that is worth taking seriously as a devotional act in itself.

What existed before him:

• Eleven verses naming people
• Local memory in specific villages
• Temple traditions
• Nambiyandar Nambi's short expansions

What existed after him: sixty three complete lives, fixed, transmissible, and available anywhere in the Tamil country to anybody who could hear the verses.

The general principle. It recurs across this series and it is worth stating.

Traditions survive when somebody writes them down or otherwise fixes them.

• Nathamuni recovered and arranged the Prabandham and set it to music
• Nambiyandar Nambi compiled the Tirumurai
• Sekkizhar wrote the lives
• U. V. Swaminatha Iyer recovered the Sangam corpus from palm leaf manuscripts in the nineteenth century
• Arumuga Navalar edited and published the Tamil Shaiva texts
• The Buranji chroniclers in Assam
• Everybody who has recorded an oral tradition before its last carriers died

And what has been lost because nobody did.

• Two of the five Tamil epics
• Most of Appar's and Sambandar's hymns
• The Ajivika literature entirely
• Numerous Vedic shakhas
• Most regional oral traditions from before the twentieth century
• The yazh, the instrument, which survives only as descriptions

The household version. This is the practical takeaway and it applies to anybody.

Things that die in one generation if nobody records them:

• Family songs, particularly wedding, birth and mourning songs, which are frequently known only to the oldest women in a family
• Recipes that are never written down
• The specific observances your family keeps and why
• Genealogy beyond the living generations
• Where the family came from and when
• The names of ancestors used in tarpana
• Dialect words and phrases
• Craft techniques

What to do about it, concretely:

• A phone records audio and video. That is sufficient
• Ask the oldest person in the family to sing the songs and record it
• Write down the observances: what is done, when, in what order, and any reason given
• Record the family's place names and dates
• Do it before you need to, because the point at which you need it is generally after the person has gone

On family manuscripts:

• Old palm leaf, paper manuscripts, horoscopes, land documents and letters accumulate in households and are frequently discarded
• Manuscript libraries and the National Mission for Manuscripts collect, catalogue, conserve and digitise
• State manuscript libraries and university departments will assess material
• A great deal remains uncatalogued in private hands

Sekkizhar's method, transferred:

• Go to the places
• Ask what people remember
• Write it down
• Fix it in a form that can be transmitted
• Do not editorialise the difficult parts out

He did that for sixty three people, in the twelfth century, and the reason anybody knows those stories at all is that he took the trouble.

What it is: 4,286 Tamil verses in thirteen sections, book twelve of the Tirumurai.

Where to get it:

• Tamil editions with commentary, in print and online
• English translations exist, including prose retellings and verse translations
• Several abridged versions
• Recordings and discourses in Tamil are widely available

How to read it:

• Not straight through. It is a collection of lives
• Pick a Nayanar and read that life
• The famous ones first: Kannappa, Karaikkal Ammaiyar, Appar, Sambandar, Sundarar, Nandanar
• The occupational ones for the social detail: the potter, the weaver, the fisherman, the oil monger
• Sundarar's life, which frames the whole work

On the difficult ones. Read them, knowing what they are.

The Siruthondar account, treated in the next entry, is genuinely disturbing. The Madurai episode contains mass killing. Several stories involve devotees killing people, including family members, in the course of devotion.

A reader is not required to admire those. Knowing they are there is better than encountering them unprepared or pretending the book does not contain them.

Where the stories are visible:

• Temple sculpture across Tamil Nadu, particularly at Darasuram, where the base of the Airavatesvara temple carries small panels of the Nayanar stories
• Painting, in temple ceilings and walls
• Bronze, particularly Karaikkal Ammaiyar and Kannappa
• The Arupathimoovar procession at Mylapore in Panguni, where all sixty three are carried

Darasuram is the place to see them. The Airavatesvara temple at Darasuram, near Kumbakonam, has a base course of small carved panels illustrating the Periya Puranam stories, and it is the best surviving visual index of the text.

It is a UNESCO listed Chola temple, less visited than Thanjavur, and the carving is finer.

Places for Sekkizhar himself:

• Kunrathur, his birthplace, now within the Chennai area, with a temple to him and the Sekkizhar festival
• Chidambaram, where he wrote it and where he has a shrine
• The thousand pillared hall at Chidambaram, where the writing is placed

A practice from him

Record something. That is the specific instruction from this entry.

• A song somebody in your family knows and nobody has written down
• The reason your household does a particular observance the way it does
• Where your family is from
• The names used in tarpana

A phone is sufficient. It takes an afternoon. And unlike almost everything else in this series, it is a devotional act with a completely verifiable outcome: the thing either exists afterward or it does not.

A closing thought

A chief minister noticed his king was spending his attention on a book from another tradition.

He did not tell him to stop. He went to a temple, asked for the first word, was given one, and spent a year writing four thousand verses about sixty three people, most of whom had been dead for four hundred years and several of whom were potters, washermen and hunters.

He kept the parts that made his own tradition look bad.

And everything anybody knows about those sixty three people comes from that year.