The Romance of Andal

By J. PARTHASARATHI, M.A.

“What a sweet dream I dreamt, my friend! I heard, in my vision, the loud beat of the drum and the joyous blare of the conchshell sweet. In a lovely bower, under a pearl-in-wrought canopy, I saw my Lord clasp mine arm. Strange!”

–These are lines of a rapturous lyric of Sri Andal, the maid who would wed none but the Lord Himself. She was a rare soul, who found no peace until she became one with the Infinite. She had consecrated herself to His service; her life may be fittingly described as a poem in praise of God.

Tradition in South India has it that, like Sita of the Ramayana, she was a foundling brought up by Saint Vishnuchitta. Perialvar–as Vishnuchitta is otherwise called–was wont to worship the deity of Srivilliputtur, his native place, with choicest flowers culled from his private garden. In the course of his usual labour of love, this childless man was overjoyed to come across a handsome infant; he read the intervention of Providence in this act, and, ever afterwards, tended the God-given baby as the apple of his eye. The precocious daughter, as the years went by, mastered all the ancient lore of her religion; she developed an absorbing passion for Lord Narayana. In her undiscerning love, she stealthily used to deck herself with the garlands meant by her foster-father for the God of Srivilliputtur. Thus would the innocent girl judge whether her father’s offering might fitly adorn the Heavenly one. How could she know that, to other men, this would appear a deed of sacrilege, an insult to the great God? When Vishnuchitta at last happened to catch her red-handed in her usual offence, he shed tears of repentance for his erring child. A fresh garland was made ready and apologetically offered to the God. But, strange to say, Vishnu willed it otherwise, to the utter bewilderment of Perialvar himself. He made it known to His devotee in a vision that garlands ‘desecrated’ by the erring maid were most acceptable to him. And, henceforth, Vishnuchitta had to carry the garland doubly fragrant, fragrant with flowers and fragrant with maiden love. Andal came to be called ‘Gotha’, the maiden adorned with flowers with the Lord’s own approval.

A girl with this single-minded devotion to God could never bring herself to offer her hand to any mere mortal. Yes, she had set her mind firmly on Lord Ranganatha of Srirangam. And this humble tribute of a girl’s life was approved by the Omnipotent: Sri Ranganatha appeared in a vision before Perialvar and ordained that the love-lorn maid should be brought to His temple. Accordingly, the saintly father took his daughter with due pomp and splendour to the great Vaishnavite island centre; and there, the soul of the divinely love-sick maiden melted into the depths of the “Being that creates, animates and sustains the Universe”. Perialvar’s sorrow knew no bounds; his heart-ache finds superb poetical expression in these lines: –

“My house stands deserted, all its glory and life extinct. It is like a lovely lotus pond, once in full bloom, but now desolate, with all the flowers frost-bitten and petals lying dead. My precious one is nowhere to be seen. Perchance she is with the Lord.”

Such, in brief, is the story of one of our great women, at once noble and moving. The traditional account of her life, as handed down to us with accretions of centuries, may be a little exaggerated; but it is clear from tone and temper of the songs of Vishnuchitta and his daughter that it is a drama of intense love and yearning, enacted in the distant past. Along with other Vaishnavite saints, called the Alvars, Andal may be said to exemplify the central doctrine of the Bhakti school of mystics, that of supreme self-surrender to Lord Narayana, Hari or Krishna, Great men like Namdev, Tukaram and Tulsidas leap to our mind, when the Bhakti school is mentioned. Truly, there is a kinship of soul between these saints of the North the Alvars of the South. What is the Bhakti cult but popular mysticism for the lay man? Godhead may be reached by simple, absolute, boundless faith in your Maker; there is no need to tread the austere path of book-knowledge, no necessity to mortify the flesh with fast and penance. Put your childlike trust in Him; He is your all, your father, mother and brother. The Prince of Princes is waiting at your doors, and you have nothing to do but surrender yourself to Him. Andal is one of the finest flowers of such popular type of mysticism.

To those familiar with Western mysticism, the mention of Andal may bring to mind names like St. Angela of Norwich and St. Catherine of Siena. Indeed, mystics in all lands speak the same language, “the language of those who have transcended the temporal and the material, attaining to experience, here and now, of what we call eternity”.

Andal’s poems deserve our careful reading; they have an unsurpassed lyrical appeal. Her “Nachiar Tirumoli” is full of untranslatable delicacies of touch and colour; it reflects the ever changing hues of the mind of a lady-love, now pensive, now desperate and now triumphant. In the true mystical strain, God is her lover, most fickle and false and yet most true. She addresses the wandering clouds and cuckoos to beckon unto her Lord; to the clouds she says: –

“O you dark clouds that gather in the winter sky over the Venkata hill, will He never vouchsafe a life-giving word to poor me, for ever chanting His valour in battle, and withering away like the yellow leaf of the rain-swept Erukkalai plant.”

In the morning, a choir of birds sweetly chirping, seem to her to sing of her Lord’s approach, but she is puzzled that He does not come after all. She chides the little dancing peacocks, all ignorant of her sorrow: –

“O you peacocks that gleefully dance and unfold your feathers, how can I have the wherewithal to enjoy the sight of your dance? The arch dancer Govinda with his cunning devices has made me all his own, ah me!”

Love, hopeless love for the unattainable has separated her from her kith and kin:

“‘She went astray, leaving father, mother and her dear ones all alone’–so say the people of the world, and hard it is to ward off this blame, once it has found expression on the lips of men. Lo! the bewitching One still shows Himself to me and spirits me away. Will you not lead me, under cover of darkness of the mid-night to the palace of the father of the mischievous son who sets the hearts of women in turmoil, ruining them utterly?”

Presently, however, this mood of desperation gives place to a triumphant note, an epithalamion song of the dream of a sweet union with the Lord.

The Tiruppavai^* is more objective, being a glorification of Sri Krishna, the Avatar of Vishnu. The poem purports to be a page in the life of the Divine Child. The maidens of Gokulam, where the Lord is growing, observe a religious fast about the month of December. On the full moon day of that month, the shepherd maids awake their friends before dawn; they go to the palace of Sri Krishna to request him to join them in the holy bath undertaken to propitiate the gods for abundant riches and rains. He had promised to give them little drums as tokens of love and they go to demand them.

The poem breathes the atmosphere of the chill December dawn, when the early morning frost sends an invigorating shiver through our nerves. The bitterness of the chilly morn is doubly enforced by the suggestion of the cosy, warm, well lit-up room where one little aristocratic maiden sleeps away the dawn, blissfully ignorant of the urgent tasks awaiting her. In a few delicate little touches, all the simple wealth of the cowherd colony with its never failing milk cows is recaptured for us: –

“O sister of the lord of milk cattle whose udders, at the thought of the little ones, overflow with milk that floods the yard!”

As we read the poem, the picture of the maids of Gokulam, who pursue their artless trade of tending cattle in the plains, puts us in mind of the description of Perdita in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: –

“Good sooth! She is the queen of curds and cream.”

Andal pours out her own overladen heart from the lips of these virgin maids; the Tiruppavai is full of felicitous praise of the Most High: –

“Even as a princely lion issues forth roaring from his lair after his long slumber, fiery-eyed, shaking his fragrant manes and lifting his head high up, O heavenly Sire, blue as the Kaya flower, come forth from your palace, and sitting on this great throne, enquire of us the wish that brought us hither.”

Little wonder that this God-intoxicated poetess has been deified and the place of her birth, Srivilliputtur, hallowed in the memory of all devotees as well as lovers of Tamil literature. Thousands bend in adoration today before the image of the simple girl who, ages ago, “allowed herself to be cheated into the splendour of God’s mysteries.”

* There is an excellent full-length English translation of this poem by Sri R. Seshadri Iyengar, B.A., B.L., Advocate, Ramnad.