Person · Alvar poet-saint
Thirumangai Ālvār
Also known as Thirumangai Alvar, Tirumangai, Kaliyan, Parakala
The last of the Ālvārs and by far the most travelled: he sang at eighty-six of the 108 Divya Desams, more than a third of them named by nobody else. A chieftain and, by his own account, a highway robber before his conversion, he is also credited with building Srirangam's outer walls.
- Date
- c. 8th century
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Nālāyira Divya Prabandham; Periya Tirumoḻi
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The tradition is unembarrassed about the robbery: he is said to have funded temple building by waylaying travellers, and to have once robbed a wedding party that turned out to be the god. His thousand-odd verses make him the single largest contributor to the Prabandham after Nammālvār.
Connections (2)
- PatronageShrīrangam
Thirumangai is credited with building Srirangam's outer walls, funded — tradition is explicit — by robbery on the roads. He also sang more of the 108 than anyone else, so the same figure supplies both a large part of the canon and a large part of the masonry of its first temple.
- Devotional corpus onPadmanābhaswāmī, Thiruvananthapuram
Thirumangai sang at eighty-six of the 108, including the thirteen Malainādu shrines of what is now Kerala. Several of those temples are known as Divya Desams only because he reached them; the canon's geography is in large part the record of one poet's travelling. He describes himself in his own verses as having robbed travellers to pay for temple building, a confession the tradition preserves rather than suppresses.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Thirumangai Alvar”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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