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.