Tirumangai Alvar (Parakala)

01The chief of Tirumangai

The tradition gives his birth as the year 399 of the Kali Yuga, which makes him the last of the Alvars. Historians, reading the Pallava names in his hymns, generally make him a contemporary of Nandivarman II (731–796) and place him in the 8th century; others put him in the 9th. He was born Kaliyan, or Kalikanti, at Tirukkuraiyalur near Sirkazhi, to Nilan, a commander in the Chola service. He was a skilled archer and became a commander himself, and for his services was given the small territory of Ali Nadu, with its capital at Tirumangai; hence the name Tirumangai Mannan, the chief of Tirumangai, which he kept even as a saint. His military title was Parakala.

02Robbing the Lord

He fell in love with Kumudavalli, the adopted daughter of a Vaishnava physician at Tiruvellakkulam. She would marry him on two conditions: that he become a Vaishnava, and that he feed a thousand devotees every day for a year. He kept the vow until his treasury was empty, and then took to robbing travellers on the highway to keep it. One night his men fell on a wedding party and stripped it, but the bridegroom’s toe-ring would not come off, and Kaliyan bent to bite it loose. The bridegroom was Vishnu, the bride Lakshmi. The Lord taught him the eight-syllable mantra, Om Namo Narayanaya, and the robber began at once to sing: the first verse of his Periya Tirumoli, ‘vadinen vadi’, ‘I wilted, I withered’, before he found the Name. The tradition holds that the Lord of Tirunaraiyur gave him the pancha samskara, the Sri Vaishnava initiation.

Place · Two temples 5 km apart sung as one Divya Desam; Chola foundations with Vijayanagara and Thanjavur Nayaka halls of the 16th century; Thirunagari gopuram about 38 mThiruvali–Thirunagari (Lakshmi Narasimhar and Vedarajan Temples)The birthplace of Thirumangai Alvar and the home of his wife Kumudavalli: two temples that the Alvar always sang together, in over forty pasurams. At Thirunagari the flag post faces the Alvar’s shrine, not the Lord’s.Read →

03Eighty-six shrines and the walls of Srirangam

He gave up his chieftainship and spent the rest of his life going from shrine to shrine of Vishnu across the Tamil land and beyond, singing each one; more of the 108 Divya Desams are praised in his hymns than in those of any other Alvar. His works are six: the Periya Tirumoli, the Tirukkuruntandakam, the Tirunedundandakam, the Tiruvezhukkurrirukkai, and the Siriya and Periya Tirumadal, more than a thousand verses in all, and the Sri Vaishnava tradition calls them the six angas of Nammalvar’s four works, as the Vedangas are to the Vedas. The tradition says he spent the wealth of his last years on the walls and mandapas of Srirangam. His bronze, with sword and shield, stands in Vishnu temples across the South, and at Tirunangur his image rides out with eleven Lords on Garuda each year.