Person · Alvar poet-saint

Āṇḍāḷ

Also known as Andal, Kodhai, Godadevi, Nachiyar

Date

c. 9th century

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Tiruppāvai; Nāchiyār Tirumoḻi

Confidence

Established / referenced

Worth knowing

Tradition has her wear the garlands meant for the deity before sending them, and be found out by her father, and the god declare he wanted no others. She is said to have merged into the image at Srirangam rather than to have died.

Connections (3)

• Life routeShrīvilliputtūr

  Shrīvilliputtūr is Āṇḍāḷ's town, where she was found as a foundling by Periyālvār and where the garland story is set. The temple keeps her shrine and his, and sends garlands to Srirangam annually — the one place in the Tamil country whose principal deity is a woman poet. The garlands sent to Srirangam each year are the temple's re-enactment of the offence that made her famous — wearing the god's flowers before he did.

• Mythic sequenceShrīrangam

  Āṇḍāḷ's story ends at Srirangam, where tradition says she walked into the sanctum and merged with Ranganātha rather than dying. It is the only such ending given to any Ālvār, and it makes the largest temple in the world the endpoint of a girl's refusal to marry a man. Her Tiruppāvai is recited across Tamil Nadu through the whole month of Mārgaḻi, which makes her the one Ālvār most Tamil households hear every year whether or not they are Śrīvaishnava.

• Devotional corpus onKrishnadevaraya

  The Āmuktamālyada is Krishnadevarāya's retelling of Āṇḍāḷ's life — a sixteenth-century Telugu emperor writing about a ninth-century Tamil poet. It is also a manual of statecraft in places, with advice on revenue, forts and how to treat Brahmins, so the devotional poem doubles as the one text in which a Vijayanagara king speaks for himself.

Sources

Wikipedia, “Andal”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.

• Wikipedia — Andal