In brief
The Alvars, twelve Vaishnava poet-saints, and the Nayanars, sixty-three Shaiva ones, sang devotional hymns in Tamil between roughly the sixth and ninth centuries. Composing in the spoken language, and drawn from every social background, they began the bhakti movement that later spread across India.
The Alvars were twelve Vaishnava poet-saints and the Nayanars sixty-three Shaiva ones, active in Tamil country roughly between the sixth and ninth centuries. What they did was structurally simple and enormously consequential: they composed devotional poetry in Tamil rather than Sanskrit, addressed directly to Vishnu or to Shiva, and they sang it in public. The collected Alvar hymns, the Divya Prabandham, came to be called the Tamil Veda, which indicates how seriously the claim was taken.
The social composition of these groups is part of the point. Among the Alvars was Andal, a woman whose poetry is among the most intense in the corpus, and Tiruppan, from a community considered untouchable, who was carried into the Srirangam temple on a brahmin’s shoulders. The Nayanars included potters, fishermen, hunters and washermen alongside kings and brahmins. Hagiography exaggerates, but the pattern of the lists is consistent and was clearly meant to say something about who devotion was available to.
Their influence spread far beyond the region. The theology developed out of the Alvar hymns became the foundation of the Srivaishnava tradition that Ramanuja systematised, and the movement travelled north over subsequent centuries, surfacing in Kannada, Marathi, Braj, Bengali and Hindi in turn. Almost everything characteristic of later devotional religion in India, the vernacular hymn, the personal address, the indifference to ritual qualification, begins in these two groups, and the case for bhakti as a complete path is essentially theirs.
The Alvars and Nayanars are where devotional religion in India acquires its voice, in a language people actually spoke. To see the path they established, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Questions people ask
The Alvars were twelve Tamil poet-saints devoted to Vishnu, and the Nayanars sixty-three devoted to Shiva, active roughly from the sixth to the ninth century. They composed and sang devotional hymns in Tamil rather than Sanskrit.
The Nalayira Divya Prabandham is the collection of four thousand Alvar hymns. It came to be called the Tamil Veda, a measure of how seriously it was received.
Andal, a woman whose poetry is among the most intense in the corpus, and Tiruppan, from a community considered untouchable, were Alvars. The Nayanars included potters, fishermen, hunters and washermen alongside kings and brahmins.
Alvar theology became the foundation of the Srivaishnava tradition that Ramanuja systematised, and the bhakti movement spread north into Kannada, Marathi, Braj, Bengali and Hindi. The vernacular hymn and the personal address to God begin with them.
Part 43 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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