A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c19.s1.39

c19.s1.39

Very soon after the literary group of Mānavikrama flourished Melpattūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri (1560-1666), a star of the first magnitude in the literary firmament. He was a polymath who adorned everything he touched. His celebrated Nārāyaṇīya sings the glory of the divinity of Guruvāyūr in 1000 stanzas and forms the best devotional poem in Sanskrit, regarded in Kerala as of equal sanctity with the *Bhāgavata Purāṇa*. His *Prakriyā Sarvasva* is a work on grammar which enjoys as much popularity in Kerala as the *Siddhānta Kaumudī* does outside that area. He maintained that great poets were not bound by the strict rules of grammar and that grammar should follow their usage, and upheld the position in his polemical work *Apāṇinīya-prāmāṇya-sādhana*; in this respect he followed his teacher Achyuta Pisharoti who departed from Pāṇini and simplified grammar in his *Praveśaka*, a primer of the subject. Among other works, Nārāyaṇa wrote the Māna section of *Mānameyodaya* a primer of Bhāṭṭamīmāmsā, which was completed when the Meya section was written by another Nārāyaṇa, a protégé of Mānaveda of Calicut. Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri composed several *Campūs* for recitation by Chākkiyār. His *Niranu-nāsika-prabandha* is a literary tour de force, containing no nasal letters as it describes the complaint of Śūrpaṇakhā to Rāvaṇa after her nose had been cut of. Bhaṭṭatiri lived to be well over a hundred years and his fame elicited the admiration of Yajñanārāyaṇa, the chief minister of Raghunātha Nāyaka of Tanjore (1650).