Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World. By Leah Elizabeth Comeau
Leah Elizabeth Comeau’s Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World offers a timely analysis of one of the most significant works of Śaiva bhakti or devotional literature from the Tamil-speaking southern part of India: the Tirukkōvaiyār, composed around the ninth century CE by the poet Māṇikkav...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2021
|
| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2021, Volume: 89, Issue: 2, Pages: 780-783 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
|
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Leah Elizabeth Comeau’s Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World offers a timely analysis of one of the most significant works of Śaiva bhakti or devotional literature from the Tamil-speaking southern part of India: the Tirukkōvaiyār, composed around the ninth century CE by the poet Māṇikkavācakar. Along with the Tiruvācakam, the other major work attributed to Māṇikkavācakar, the Tirukkōvaiyār constitutes the eighth volume of the Tamil Śaiva canon known as the Tirumuṟai.The Tirukkōvaiyār borrows from and builds upon the conventions of classical Tamil poetry known as Caṅkam literature, which was divided into two categories: akam (“interior”), associated with love and romance, and puṟam (“exterior”), associated with heroic battles and kingly exploits. At the Tirukkōvaiyār’s center is a love story in which natural landscapes define and represent the various stages of romantic courtship. Whereas the akam poems of the Caṅkam period depict isolated romantic episodes and thus can be read independently of each other, the kōvai (“garland”) genre, of which the Tirukkōvaiyār is the earliest complete extant example, organizes these episodes into a single continuous narrative that follows an anonymous pair of lovers—the hero and the heroine—from the moment of their first encounter through a prolonged period of separation and into married life with all its ups and downs. The Tirukkōvaiyār’s unique contribution to the genre is that the interactions of the dramatis personae are punctuated with the praise of Śiva, who takes on the role of the patron-hero of the poem. Every dramatic utterance of the characters becomes an opportunity to praise Śiva and to establish that he is as much a part of the Tamil landscape as the lovers who traverse it. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfab036 |