Andal/ Kothai
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The Poet Who Is Celebrated As Goddess Andal
Archana Venkatesan, August 11, 2021: The Times of India
The 9th-century poet, Kothai, is perhaps the most well-known among premodern female Tamil poets. We know little of her historical life, except for what we can glean from two magnificent poems – Tiruppavai, Sacred Vow, and Nacciyar Tirumoli, A Woman’s Sacred Utterance – that have come down to us. The two masterful compositions explore ecstatic devotion to god, here Vishnu, both in community and in the individual voice of a woman.
In the short Tiruppavai, a poem of 30 verses, Kothai describes a vow undertaken by young girls to win a husband for themselves. As this is a bhakti poem, the desired husband is none other than Krishn. Although there is a long tradition of reading the poem autobiographically – that is , the poet performing the vow herself – Kothai explicitly declares that she has imagined the scenario.
Thus, in the Tiruppavai, we hear Kothai speak in the voice of several gopis, cowherd girls, awakening in the pre-dawn hours, to cleanse themselves and to arrive at Krishn’s door to petition him for his love. Although Krishn is at the centre of this poem, it is a woman’s world he inhabits. We hear the churning of butter, the milking of cows, women adorning themselves in jewels, calling to each other, urging mothers and aunts to help them in their joint quest. Indeed, in one of the most famous verses, the girls address Nappinnai, Krishn’s wife, asking her to intercede on their behalf.
If the Tiruppavai is largely univocal, all the plural gopi-voices collapsing into one, the longer Nacciyar Tirumoli – it consists of 143 verses spread over 14 sections – is more complex. Like the Tiruppavai, it too begins with a vow, except this one is undertaken by one woman, whom the poet clearly identifies as herself. But this invitation to read the Nacciyar Tirumoli as autobiographical gives way with the re-emergence of our gopis, who appear early in the poem, but disappear midway. Where the Tiruppavai is teeming with female characters, Kothai’s longer poem is largely devoid of female companions or female spaces, save the three gopi-decads,Nacciyar Tirumoli 2-4, that open the poem.
The autobiographical persona the poet constructs for herself in this poem is that of a lonely woman. When this female voice appeals to her companions for aid, they are silent and unhelpful, leaving her to suffer alone. This suffering is finally relieved in the Nacciyar Tirumoli’s final decad, in which the gopi-voices and the solitary female voice converse across space and time. It is as though the poet, Kothai, can only find comfort and understanding in a world of her own creation.
Today, the poet Kothai is celebrated as the goddess, Andal. She has a grand and famous temple at Srivilliputtur, south of Madurai, where she is worshipped with great love and adoration. Her poems form the backbone of this love, lacing stories and ceremonies of all who visit her there. There is no greater way for us to honour this great poet than to sit with her gorgeous, moving verses and to take her invitation to live within the world of the imagination she embroidered with words with such care and wonder.
The writer is professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. Today is Andal Jayanti
