Sundarar (Sundaramurti Nayanar)

01The bond at Tiruvennainallur

He was born towards the end of the 7th century at Tirunavalur, in a Shaiva Brahmin family of temple priests; his parents Sadaiyanar and Isaignaniyar are themselves counted among the Nayanars, the only case of its kind. Narasinga Munaiyaraiyar, a chieftain under the Pallavas, adopted him, and he grew up in luxury. On his wedding day, as the procession neared the temple, an old Brahmin stopped it and produced a palm-leaf deed saying that Aruran’s grandfather had bound his line to serve him. The elders of Tiruvennainallur examined it and found it true. The old man walked into the Shiva shrine and was gone. Aruran understood who his master was, and his first hymn begins ‘Pittaa pirai soodi’, ‘O madman wearing the crescent moon’.

02Paravai, Sangili and the lost eyes

He made Tiruvarur his home and married Paravai, a dancer of the temple. Later, at Tiruvottiyur by the sea north of today’s Chennai, he fell in love with Sangili, a Vellala girl who served the shrine, and married her too, swearing at the temple that he would never leave Tiruvottiyur. He missed Paravai and broke the vow, and the moment he crossed the boundary of the town he lost his sight. His hymns from the years that followed are the cry of a blind man going from shrine to shrine, quarrelling with his Lord as with a friend, and begging for his eyes. At Kanchipuram one eye was restored, and at Tiruvarur the other. Other hymns ask Shiva frankly for grain and gold to feed his family and the pilgrims at the temple kitchen.

Place · Chola temple, with later additionsBhaktajaneswarar Temple, TirunavalurThe birthplace of Sundarar, last of the three Tevaram singers, who sang his own village’s Lord.Read →

03With Cheraman to Kailasa

Cheraman Perumal, the Chera king of Kerala and a Nayanar himself, heard of him, came to Tiruvarur, and the two became friends and went on pilgrimage together. The Periya Puranam says that at Tiruvanchikulam in Kerala Shiva sent a white elephant for Sundarar, and Cheraman rode after him to Kailasa on his horse; the scholar Kamil Zvelebil puts his passing about 730. His hundred hymns, 1,026 verses, were sung in temples for nearly three centuries before Rajaraja Chola had Nambiyandar Nambi recover them from a sealed room at Chidambaram, together with those of Sambandar and Appar. Nambi set them as the seventh book of the Tirumurai. Sundarar’s Tiruttondattogai, a list of the devotees of Shiva, is the seed from which Sekkizhar later grew the Periya Puranam.