Singing “Nan Yar?”

Scholars and devotees alike create an image of Tamil sage Ramana Maharshi as a modern era jnani (a yogi of knowledge) who is Socratic in tone and epic in reputation as an instantly awakened being without even a trace of devotion or practice. How, then, to take up a plausible practice that seems to consist of an awakening almost quantum in nature: sudden and discrete, the-awakening-of Ramana-particle? If our practice takes the form of listening we will hear much music. Ramana’s algorithm, “Nan Yar?,” or “Who am I?,” asks us to take our attention and point it towards the songs that were sung by Mother Maharshi in the young Maharshi’s household, where the tropes and practices of Advaita Vedanta - a first millenium BCE Vedic discourse bent toward the perception of non duality or “Oneness” - even now are singing. This chapter situates the high metaphysics of Vedanta monism within the kitchen songs of Maharshi’s youth. Through grateful recourse to recent scholarship on the songs of Avudai Akkal translated by Kanchana Natarajan, this chapter argues for a comparative rhetoric that is willing to sing without a singer. That is, it is the very existence of the I that becomes rhetorically illuminated through the practice of singing “Nan Yar?” Any willingness to sing, and, therefore, sing “Nan Yar?,” brings practice to comparative rhetoric where even now these songs can be sung. As Akkal sang, “let me feel your presence, Mother Supreme! Come and take root in my tongue, thus enabling me to balance, throw vigorously (and sing!)” (Natarajan 146).