The Three Early
Tiruvantātis of the Tivyappirapantam.
Annotated Translation and Glossary by Eva Wilden with
the collaboration of Marcus Schmücker, Collection Indologie n° 143 ;
NETamil Series n° 7, Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient
/ Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2020, xiii, 556 p.
Language: Tamil, English. Rs 900 (38 EUR). ISBN: 978-2-85539-238-7 (EFEO) /
978-81-8470-234-7 (IFP).
About the book
The
early Antātis of the three Āḻvārs known as
Poykaiyāḻvār, Pūtattāḻvār and Pēyāḻvār form the earliest
layer in the Nālāyira Tivyappirapantam
(“Four-thousand Heavenly Compositions”), the devotional
corpus of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas, a religious group of
devotees of the god Viṣṇu active to this day in
Tamilnadu and beyond. Still in the earlier metre Veṇpā
and thus part of the Iyaṟpā, the portion of the
canon to be recited and not sung, they stand at the
transition from Old to Middle Tamil and contain on the
one hand many interesting transitional forms, on the
other hand experiments with the young genre of
devotional poetry, looking back to the earlier
conventions of Akam and Puṟam, playing
with them and partly going beyond them. This volume
offers a metrical Tamil text with print variants and a
first glance into a few manuscripts, a word-split
transliterated version and an annotated English
translation. It includes, along with an introduction and
an epilogue on theology, an analytical
glossary-concordance and three appendices concerned with
names and epithets of the deities, with incarnations and
mythic episodes, and with temples and toponyms.
About the authors
Eva Wilden has been a
scientific member (maître de conférences) of the EFEO
from 2003 to 2017, working on the critical re-edition
and the transmission history of the Tamil Caṅkam corpus.
From 2014 to 2019 she was the principal investigator of
the ERC project “NETamil: Going from Hand to Hand ‒
Networks of Intellectual Exchange in the Tamil Learned
Traditions”, jointly hosted by the University of Hamburg
and the EFEO. In 2015 she received the Indian
presidential award “Kural Peetam”. She is now a
professor of Tamil and Manuscript Studies in Hamburg.
Marcus Schmücker is a
senior researcher at the Institute for the Cultural
and Intellectual History of Asia (IKGA) of the
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. His
main area of research includes Vedāntic and Vaiṣṇava
theology in Sanskrit, Tamil and Manipravalam.