A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c19.s2.18

c19.s2.18

In general literature, the Jīvakacintāmaṇi of the Jaina ascetic and poet Tiruttakkadēvar was composed early in the tenth century. It follows late ninth-century Sanskrit originals and tells the life story of Jivaka, an ideal hero, equally distinguished in the arts of war and peace, the perfect saint no less than the charming lover. After a stormy youth marked by many adventures Jivaka finds himself, in the prime of life, the monarch of a splendid kingdom. For some years thereafter he leads a life of pleasure in the company of his eight queens; in fact the poem has another name, Maṇa-nūl, ‘The Book of Marriages’, on account of each of Jivaka’s early adventures culminating in a happy marriage. Jivaka is shaken from his complacency by an incident, trivial in itself, but full of deep significance to him. He sees in a moment’s flash the hollowness of human life and the wisdom of seeking release from its bonds. He installs his son on the throne and seeks the peace of the forest, and attains salvation in the end. In its present form the work contains 3,154 stanzas, of which it is thought that only 2,700 were composed by the original author, two contributed by his guru, with whose permission he wrote the poem, and the rest by a later writer. The annotator has marked out the guru’s two verses, but there is no means of identifying the work of the third writer. The art of Tiruttakkadēvar is marked by all the qualities of great poetry and even, as is well known, furnished the model for the genius of Kamban. The poem is said to have been the author’s answer to a challenge that while Jaina writers were admittedly distinguished in the field of religious literature, they could make no contribution to the literature of love. Tiruttakkadēvar was allowed to take up the challenge and write this long erotic poem after he had satisfied his guru that he had the literary capacity for the task and that he would not lose his spiritual balance by writing it. He is thought to have been a Chola prince by birth. Another Jaina writer of the time was Tōlāmoḷi (‘a man of unsurpassed eloquence’) whose Śūḷāmaṇi handles a Jaina purāṇic theme in very mellifluous verse and is counted among the five minor Kāvyas of Tamil literature.