The Colas c9.19

c9.19

The Cōḷa empire under Vijayālaya and his successors witnessed one of the greatest periods of literary and religious revival in South India. Sometime in the tenth or eleventh century A.D., the canonical works of South Indian Śaivism were arranged more or less in their modern form by Nambi Āṇḍār Nambi, who was also its first hagiographer and whose work formed the basis of the far more elaborate *Tiruttoṇḍar Purāṇam*, known generally as *Periya Purāṇam*, of Śēkkiḻār, a contemporary of Kulōttunga II in the twelfth century. Great as is the value of the tradition preserved by these writers, they are to be accepted more as witnesses to beliefs current in their own times than as correctly recording what we should now call the early history of Śaivism. This distinction has not been sufficiently considered by those writers who have drawn rather freely from Śēkkiḻār in their accounts of transactions that took place centuries before his time. Moreover, a careful study of the *Periya Purāṇam* reveals that many details for which there is no warrant in Nambi Āṇḍār Nambi's short notes on the saints make their appearance for the first time in Śēkkiḻār's account; and for aught we know, Śēkkiḻār was guided only by his imagination and by popular belief. Such details, however valuable as reflecting a definite, and as it happened the final, stage in the growth of Śaiva hagiology, should not be accepted, without sufficient corroboration from other sources, as part of the early history of Śaivism in South India; much less would they be entitled to credence if they are opposed to the testimony of contemporary inscriptions or other evidence equally trustworthy. It seems only proper, therefore, that we accept the beautiful pen-pictures which abound in Śēkkiḻār's great work as idealised accounts of life and society as he saw them in his own day rather than as studies and portraits of a bygone age. Thus the description of the Brahman village of Ādanūr and of the hamlet of pariahs attached to it in the story of Nanda, the pariah saint, may well be used in any re-construction of rural life in Cōḷa times, allowance being made, of course, for the play of the wellunderstood conventions of literature that dominate such accounts.