Place · Divya Desam temple town · India
Shrīvilliputtūr
Also known as Andal, Srivilliputtur, Srivilliputhur, Srivilliputtur, Virudhunagar, Shrivilliputtur, Virudhunagar, Andal — Srivilliputtur, Shrīvilliputtūr — Āṇḍāḷ temple town
Birthplace of Āṇḍāḷ, the one woman among the twelve Ālvārs, whose Tiruppāvai is sung across Tamil Nadu each Mārgaḻi. Its twelve-tier gopuram is the emblem on the Tamil Nadu state seal, and Krishnadevarāya's Telugu epic Āmuktamālyada retells her story.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Ālvār hymns; Shrivaishnava tradition; Āmuktamālyada
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — The place is documented; its associated historical or cultural record and its named tradition are distinct layers.
- Location
- 9.512, 77.634
Connections (4)
- Life routeĀṇḍāḷ
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.
- Site adjacencyNānguneri
Nānguneri and Shrīvilliputtūr are the two Divya Desams of the far southern Tamil country, about a hundred kilometres apart in Tirunelveli and Virudhunagar. Both keep their deity under a covering — sesame-oil taila at one, Āṇḍāḷ's garlands at the other — and both are Ālvār country. Both also lie in the Tirunelveli and Virudhunagar country that produced the Ālvārs themselves, so the canon's southern end is also its birthplace.
- PatronageKrishnadevaraya
Krishnadevarāya's Telugu epic Āmuktamālyada retells Āṇḍāḷ's story and is dedicated to the deity of Shrīvilliputtūr, who he says appeared to him in a dream on campaign. An emperor writing a Telugu poem about a Tamil woman saint is the clearest case of Vijayanagara gathering the south's traditions into one court culture.
- Devotional corpus onĀmuktamālyada
Andal was a Tamil Alvar of Srivilliputtur in roughly the eighth century; the Amuktamalyada is a sixteenth-century Telugu poem about her, written by a Kannada-country emperor at a capital on the Tungabhadra. The temple's twelve-tier gopuram is now the Tamil Nadu state emblem. One saint's life crosses three languages and eight centuries inside this repository.
On these journeys
- Vijayanagara patronage
- Divya Desams & great Vaishnava temples
- Krishnadevaraya and the Ashtadiggaja circle
Sources
Andal / Srivilliputhur; Krishnadevaraya, Amuktamalyada
Open Shrīvilliputtūr in the repository →