Introduction to Section 5.3

The Āḻvār now reverts to the state that obtained in IV-8 and is all agog to get united with the Lord. Non-fulfilment of his intense longing, however, induces him to contemplate the drastic step of coming into the open and carrying his tale of woe to the public at large so that the unresponsive Lord could be arraigned at the bar of public opinion and the union with Him got accelerated. It might be recalled that Śrī Rāma who had invoked the King of the oceans, got furious, when the latter didn’t turn up, and bade Lakṣmaṇa to bring unto Him the bow, so that the entire ocean could be dried up for the monkey battalions to walk through to the other shore. The frustrated Āḻvār is also likewise poised to negative God-head altogether, if the union longed for, so intensely, by him cannot materialise, there and then.

It can now be easily inferred that the Āḻvār is once again in the ‘Nāyakī’ state, that is, the forlorn female lover, weighed down by the intensity of God-love, unable to brook separation from her Beloved, any longer. In Tamil literature, there is what is called the ‘maṭal’, the episode of the hero going a-hunting and casually meeting the heroine who happens to be alone, having got accidentally separated from her maids when they were all playing about, picking up flowers etc. The hero and the heroine exchange erotic glances and part. The heroine whose heart has been stolen away by the hero, draws a sketch of him and keeps on gazing at it, days on end; she languishes without food, does not tend her person, scratches her body with the teeth of a palmyrah stem and runs about with dishevelled hair, bitterly complaining to the on-lookers that she has been badly let down by a heartless fellow and things of that sort. Moved by the piteous condition of the forlorn lady, the people would intervene to hasten the union of the hero and the heroine to the hero himself would rush in, terrified by the slander heaped on his head, and take the lady. The third alternative would, of course, be for the lady to seek relief through death (suicide). The underlying sentiment is thus ardent love, egging the desperate lover on, to a public declaration of such love, sometimes culminating in the tragic act of self-immolation. ‘Tolkāppiyam’, the ancient Tamil work, seems to confine this to the males only, the mad lovers riding to death, through the Streets, on the toothed edge of a palmyrah stem, as if on a horse. But, in the North, females were also permitted to have recourse to ‘maṭal’ (e.g.) Sītā, Vegavati, Vāsavadattāi, Umā, Uṣā, Ulūpikā etc.

The Āḻvār’s contemplated move is indeed extraordinary, the more so when he is in the vanguard of ‘Prapannas’ who are not to invoke any means other than God Himself and put to the imperative necessity of catering to His sole delight. Nevertheless, it cannot be criticised as improper; it is the exuberance of such love-intoxicated super-personalities that made them overshoot their mark. The Āḻvārs were no doubt endowed with supreme knowledge by the Lord Himself and they could, therefore, be expected to be above criticism. But their knowledge was not the dry-as-dust stock but one transformed into intellectual love of God. In the exuberance of such love they were thrown into a state of mental imbalance (Bhakti pāravaśya) and acts performed in such a state are indeed praiseworthy and, surely, these are not comparable with the transgressions committed by the common people due to immaturity and ignorance in a relatively unevolved state, still under the grip of nescience. The Āḻvār’s mental attitude is but an inevitable facet of God-love, seeking quick consummation by the Lord. It is worth contrasting the Nāyakī’s present stance with that in IV-8. Whereas she was then prepared to abjure herself and her possessions if they could not be engaged in the Lord’s service, she is now out to destroy Him and His cosmic wealth if He would not make Himself pliable to her. The mate could no longer keep the Nāyakī under sobering restraint and the latter was determined to destroy God-bead even at the cost of her own destruction. The Lord could no longer afford to be a passive witness to this state of affairs and, therefore, He presented Himself to the Nāyakī and thus redeemed her and Himself.