The three early tiruvantatis of the tivyappirapantam

The early Antatis of the three Alvars known as Poykaiyalvar, Putattalvar and Peyalvar form the earliest layer in the Nalayira Tivyappirapantam ("Four-thousand Heavenly Compositions"), the devotional corpus of the Srivaisnavas, a religious group of devotees of the god Visnu active to this day in Tamilnadu and beyond. Still in the earlier metre Venpa and thus part of the Iyarpa, the portion of the canon to be recited and not sung, they stand at the transition from Old to Middle Tamil and contain on the one hand many interesting transitional forms, on the other hand experiments with the young genre of devotional poetry, looking back to the earlier conventions of Akam and Puram, playing with them and partly going beyond them. This volume offers a metrical Tamil text with print variants and a first glance into a few manuscripts, a word-split transliterated version and an annotated English translation. It includes, along with an introduction and an epilogue on theology, an analytical glossary-concordance and three appendices concerned with names and epithets of the deities, with incarnations and mythic episodes, and with temples and toponyms.

About the author

Eva Wilden has been a scientific member (maître de conférences) of the EFEO from 2003 to 2017, working on the critical re-edition and the transmission history of the Tamil Cankam corpus. From 2014 to 2019 she was the principal investigator of the ERC project "NETamil: Going from Hand to Hand - Networks of Intellectual Exchange in the Tamil Learned Traditions", jointly hosted by the University of Hamburg and the EFEO. In 2015 she received the Indian presidential award "Kural Peetam". She is now a professor of Tamil and Manuscript Studies in Hamburg.

Marcus Schmücker is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia (IKGA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. His main area of research includes Vedantic and Vaisnava theology in Sanskrit, Tamil and Manipravalam.