ABSTRACT
The poet-saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār is at the center of this study. As much as I admire illuminating stories that revolve around a “nobody” – Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) comes to mind, controversial though that novel may be in some quarters – my study takes a “somebody” as its focal point. Tamils have revered Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār for over 1,000 years. She is celebrated as the first poet within Śiva-bhakti tradition; sixty-two other saints, about a dozen of them authors, followed her. Her devotional poetic works were preserved and then canonized. Her life story was imaginatively represented in a biography that also became canonized. She became embodied in bronze statues that reside and are ritually celebrated in numerous temples in Tamilnadu; in fact, devotees always point out that among the set of bronze images of the sixty-three saints, she alone is represented as sitting before the Lord, for all the other saints stand. In a world informed by the code of royalty, sitting in the presence of an exalted one is a privilege, and it was bestowed only upon her. While Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār is admired for pioneering new literary forms, she is most celebrated for her religious achievement. She is clearly a distinctive and important person and personage. My study is grounded in her singular importance, while acknowledging issues of historical precision concerning her actual existence.
