Person · Tamil saint-poet
Arunagirinātha
Also known as Arunagirinathar, Arunagiri
Tamil poet of Tiruvannāmalai whose Tiruppugazh is some thirteen hundred surviving songs to Murugan, composed in intricate metrical patterns called chandam that are counted in syllabic beats before the words are fitted to them. He sang at shrines across the Tamil country and in Sri Lanka, naming each place in the song itself.
- Date
- 15th century
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Tiruppugazh; Kandar Anubhuti
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Hagiography has him attempt suicide from a temple tower at Tiruvannāmalai and be caught by Murugan, who gave him the first line of his first song. The Tiruppugazh's metres were long sung without notation; twentieth-century scholars reconstructed the tunes from the chandam.
Connections (3)
- Devotional corpus onPālani
Arunagirinātha sang Tiruppugazh at Pālani, and the hill is among the places he names most often. His songs are built on chandam, metrical patterns counted out in beats before any word is fitted to them, so a Tiruppugazh verse can be recited as rhythm alone. Pilgrims climbing the steps still sing them.
- Devotional corpus onSwamimalai
Swāmimalai is one of the stations named in the Tiruppugazh, where Arunagirinātha addresses Murugan specifically as the teacher of his own father. The poet's route across the Tamil country and into Sri Lanka names each shrine inside the song, so the corpus doubles as a fifteenth-century record of which shrines were then being visited.
- Devotional corpus onKataragama
Arunagirinātha names Kataragama in the Tiruppugazh, which places the Sri Lankan shrine inside the Tamil Murugan geography by the fifteenth century rather than as a later borrowing. The songs travelled with Tamil pilgrims across the Palk Strait, and Kataragama's Kandasamy temple is still sung to in Tamil. Kataragama's own festival keeps Vedda, Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu rites running side by side through the same two weeks each July.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Arunagirinathar”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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