Person · Sangam poet
Nakkīrar
Also known as Nakkeerar, Nakkirar, Nakkīrar Deva Nāyanār
Tamil poet of the Sangam corpus, credited with the Tirumurugārruppadai, the guide-poem that sends a devotee from one Murugan shrine to the next and in doing so fixed the six Ārupadai Vīdu as a single pilgrimage. Later tradition also makes him head of the Madurai academy and author of a commentary on the Iraiyanār Akapporul.
- Date
- Sangam age, c. 2nd–5th century CE
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Tradition
- Sangam corpus; Pattuppāttu
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The Tirumurugārruppadai is an ārruppadai, a 'guiding' poem in which one who has received a patron's bounty directs the next suppliant to him. Nakkīrar turns the courtly form on a god, so the reader is directed shrine by shrine rather than court to court.
Connections (2)
- Canonised by textThiruparankundram
Nakkīrar's Tirumurugārruppadai opens at Thiruparankundram and sends the reader on to the next camp, and the next. Before the poem the shrines were separate hill and shore cults; after it they were six stations of one pilgrimage in a fixed order. The set exists because a poem put them in a sequence a traveller could follow.
- Canonised by textPazhamudircholai
The sixth and last camp in the Tirumurugārruppadai is Pazhamudirchōlai, and the poem's closing section is what keeps a fruit grove in the list beside four built temples. The Alagar hills shrine has almost no architecture to speak of; its standing in the set rests on those lines. Tamil tradition counts the grove as a temple because a poem said so, which is an unusually clean case of literature creating sacred geography rather than recording it.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Nakkeerar”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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