Andalआण्डाल

Andal is the only woman among the twelve Alvars, the Tamil poet-saints of Vishnu — and the only one of them worshipped as a goddess rather than as a saint.

She is Kodhai, the garland; Goda in Sanskrit; and Nachiyar, the lady. Āṇḍāḷ means she who ruled: the name is what she was called afterwards, by a tradition that had decided she had.

She lived, on the usual reckoning, in the eighth or ninth century at Srivilliputhur in the Tamil country, and left two works:

• the Tiruppavai, thirty verses, recited at dawn every day through the Tamil month of Margazhi across South India, Sri Lanka and the diaspora;
• the Nachiyar Tirumoli, a hundred and forty-three verses, which is a different order of thing entirely — direct, bodily, impatient and at moments furious.

And she is the subject of the story everyone knows: that she put on the garland meant for the deity, looked at herself in the well, and sent it to the temple anyway — was discovered and reproached, and the deity said he preferred it that way.

What makes her unusual in this encyclopedia is that she was a person. Most of what is here is gods with narratives. Andal is a poet with a surviving corpus, and the tradition made her a goddess because of what she wrote.

The Alvars. Twelve Tamil poet-saints, conventionally placed between the sixth and ninth centuries, whose four thousand verses — the Nalayira Divya Prabandham — are treated in Sri Vaishnavism as equal in authority to the Sanskrit Veda, and recited in temple liturgy alongside it. The doctrine is called Ubhaya Vedanta, the two-fold Vedanta, and it means exactly that. Āḻvār means one immersed. Andal is the only woman among them.

Found, not born. The hagiographies say that Vishnuchittar, garland-maker to the Srivilliputhur temple, found an infant girl in the earth beneath the tulsi plants of his garden and raised her as Kodhai. He is the Alvar known as Periyalvar.

That she was found in the ground is not incidental: it is the basis of her identification with Bhudevi, the earth, and it places her with Sita, found in a furrow. Both pages carry it.

The garland. Vishnuchittar's service was the daily garland for Vatapatrasayi, the temple's reclining Vishnu. Kodhai took to wearing it first, checking her reflection in the well, and returning it to the basket. When her father found out he was appalled and offered an unworn one — and the deity, in the standard telling, refused it and asked for hers.

From this she is Soodikkodutha Sudarkodi, "the radiant creeper who gave what she had worn", and Amuktamalyada in Sanskrit — the title Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara gave his own Telugu poem about her.

The refusal. She would not consider marriage to any man. Her father despaired; Vishnu, in the hagiography, instructed him in a dream to bring her to Srirangam; she was carried there, walked into the sanctum, and was not seen again.

What can and cannot be said. The tradition says she merged with Ranganatha. The historian's account can say only that a young woman of the ninth century wrote two remarkable works, that her death is not recorded, and that within a few generations she was being worshipped. This page gives the tradition's account as the tradition's, and does not convert it into biography.

Standing, with a parrot. The standard image: a young woman standing, dressed as a Tamil bride, a parrot on her right hand and a garland or lotus in the left. The parrot is hers throughout the Nachiyar Tirumoli, where she talks to it and sends it with messages.

The hair, to one side. Her identifying feature: the koṇḍai, a knot of hair worn on the left of the head rather than centred, dressed with flowers. The Andal kondai is recognisable across Tamil Nadu and is worn by brides.

The garland. Often in her hands or at her neck — the worn garland, which is the whole story.

Bridal throughout. She is dressed as a bride, and her festival image is taken annually to be married.

The gopuram at Srivilliputhur. Not an image of her, but the most reproduced object associated with her: the eleven-tiered tower of her temple, some sixty metres, is the emblem of the Government of Tamil Nadu — printed on every state document and number plate. A woman poet's temple is on the state's seal, which is a distinction no other figure in this encyclopedia holds.

Kodhai / Goda. Her given name; Goda Devi in the Sanskrit tradition and in Andhra and Karnataka usage.

Nachiyar. The lady — the name under which her shrine appears in temples, as the Nachiyar Sannidhi.

Soodikkodutha Nachiyar / Amuktamalyada. The epithet from the garland.

Bhudevi descended. Sri Vaishnava theology's identification, and the reason she is a goddess rather than only a saint. The Prithvi page carries the earth goddess she is held to be.

As an Alvar. In the liturgical reckoning she is one of the twelve, and her verses are recited in the Divya Prabandham sequence alongside theirs.

In the Ramanuja tradition. Ramanuja is called Kovil Annan, her elder brother, because of a vow he fulfilled on her behalf generations later: she had promised a hundred pots of butter at Tirumalirunsolai if she were united with Ranganatha, and could not make good on it, and he did.

Not Mirabai. The comparison is made constantly and should be made carefully. Two women, five centuries and a language apart, both refusing human marriage for a divine husband, both leaving a corpus, both traditionally said to have merged into an image. They are not connected: Mira is a Krishna-tradition bhakti poet of Rajasthan, not an Alvar, and the resemblance is structural rather than historical.

The garland, and what the story is actually about. It is usually told as charming, and it is. It is also transgressive in a specific way. Temple offering is governed by purity rules, and a garland already worn is nirmālya — used, and not offerable. Kodhai broke a real rule, and the point of the story is that the deity overruled it in her favour, preferring the garland precisely because she had worn it.

A tradition that tells this about itself has said something about where it ranks purity against love, and it has said it with a young girl as the example.

The Tiruppavai. Thirty verses in which Andal imagines herself a gopi of Vrindavan, waking her friends one by one in the cold dark of Margazhi to go to the river and keep the pāvai vow — the Katyayani vow the Bhagavata gives the gopis, which the Navadurga page also carries. Each verse wakes another sleeping girl; the last few reach Krishna's house and wake him, and his doorkeeper, and at length ask for what they came for.

It is a poem about collective action in the dark, and its device — nobody goes alone, and the party is not complete until the last sluggard is up — is a large part of why it has held for twelve hundred years.

The Nachiyar Tirumoli. The other work, and the one people are less often told about. Longer, and not decorous. She addresses Kamadeva and demands a husband; she writes about her own body and her longing without circumlocution; she berates the clouds, the conch, the cuckoo and her parrot for failing to carry her message; she dreams her wedding to Ranganatha in complete ritual detail; and in one passage she threatens to tear out her breasts if she is not given to him.

Sri Vaishnava commentators have never suppressed it, and read it as the highest register of bhakti. It is among the frankest bodies of devotional writing by a woman in any premodern literature, and any account of Andal that gives only the Tiruppavai has given half of her.

Srirangam. She is carried there as a bride, walks to the sanctum, and merges. She is the only Alvar without a death.

Margazhi. The Tamil month from mid-December to mid-January. For thirty days, in every Sri Vaishnava temple and an enormous number of households across Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Sri Lanka and the diaspora, the Tiruppavai's thirty verses are recited one a day at dawn — over loudspeakers, on radio and television, in music sabhas and in the street. The kolam is drawn larger; people get up before light.

By volume of participation this is among the largest daily religious observances in South India, and it is the recitation of a poem by a teenage girl.

Tiruvadhyayana Utsavam. The ten-day festival at Srirangam and other Sri Vaishnava temples at which the whole Divya Prabandham is recited, her verses in place.

Adi Pooram. July–August, her birth star, kept at Srivilliputhur with her marriage to Ranganatha re-enacted.

In Vaishnava weddings. Her Varanam Ayiram — the dream-wedding sequence of the Nachiyar Tirumoli — is sung at Tamil Vaishnava marriages, so her most private poem is recited at other people's weddings.

In Carnatic music. The Tiruppavai is standard concert repertoire and is performed constantly through the December season.

The garland at Srivilliputhur is still made at her temple and sent to others.

DharmSetu records these observances as practised and makes no claim about outcomes.

Srivilliputhur Andal Temple (Virudhunagar district, Tamil Nadu) — her temple, where she was found, and where Vatapatrasayi is the presiding form of Vishnu. The eleven-tiered rajagopuram is the emblem of the Government of Tamil Nadu. One of the 108 Divya Desams.

Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam (Tiruchirappalli district) — where she merged. Her shrine is within the complex and the annual marriage is kept there.

Andal shrines across the Sri Vaishnava temples — the Nachiyar Sannidhi is a standard feature and she has one in a large proportion of the Divya Desams.

Tirumalirunsolai / Azhagar Kovil (Madurai district) — the temple of the hundred pots of butter, and of Ramanuja's fulfilment of her vow.

Tirupati and the Andhra temples, where she is Goda Devi, and the Telugu tradition around Krishnadevaraya's Amuktamalyada — one of the great works of Telugu literature, and it takes her as its subject.

Diaspora temples — Sri Vaishnava foundations in North America, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia keep Margazhi and the Tiruppavai, which has carried her further than most Indian saints.

A human being in a book of gods. Nearly everything else in this encyclopedia is a deity with a mythology. Andal was a girl who wrote two books, and the tradition read them and concluded that only Bhudevi could have written them. The deification runs from the poetry to the goddess, not the other way round, and that direction is rare enough to be worth stating plainly.

The only woman among the twelve. Sri Vaishnavism gives the Tamil Prabandham the authority of the Veda, and one twelfth of the group that produced it is a woman whose verses are recited daily in temple liturgy. Set against the well-documented exclusion of women from Sanskrit Vedic recitation in the same centuries, the contrast is sharp and is not often drawn.

The worn garland. A purity rule, broken by a girl, and overruled by the deity in her favour — and the tradition kept the story and made it her defining one. A small anecdote carrying a large claim: what is offered in love outranks what is offered correctly, told by the same tradition that produced elaborate purity codes, about its own goddess.

Two registers, and the second is not optional. The Tiruppavai is public, communal and safe to teach children. The Nachiyar Tirumoli is private, bodily, impatient, and at moments violent in its longing. Both are hers, both are canonical, and Sri Vaishnava commentators have taken the second as seriously as the first. Presenting Andal through the Tiruppavai alone — the common practice — produces a sweeter and considerably smaller poet than the one who existed.

The refusal. She would not marry a man. In ninth-century Tamil society that is not a sentiment but a decision with consequences, and the hagiography records her father's distress at it. Whatever happened at Srirangam, the corpus is the record of a young woman who declined the only future available to her and wrote her way to a different one.

And thirty verses at dawn. For twelve hundred years, through the coldest month of the Tamil year, people have got up before light to recite a poem in which a girl wakes her friends and tells them not to sleep through it. Of all the afterlives in this encyclopedia, hers is the one that most closely resembles what the author actually asked for.