A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c19.s2.21

c19.s2.21

The impulse to produce devotional religious literature which was so active in the last period (500-850) continued with some force far into this (850-1200), and the extant arrangement of the Śaiva canon into eleven books was the work of Nambi Āṇḍār Nambi who lived at the close of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century. His part in the collection and editing of the canon became the subject of Umāpatiśivācārya's poem Tirumuṟai-kaṇḍa-purāṇam (fourteenth century). Nambi's own works include six Prabandhas on Ñānasambandar and one on Appar, besides Tiruttoṇḍar-tiruvandādi which gives brief accounts of the lives of the sixty-three saints and is based on Sundaramūrtti's Tiruttoṇḍattogai. All these and the poems he wrote in praise of Vināyaka and Chidambaram, find a place in the eleventh book of the canon. The same book includes five compositions of Paṭṭinattu-piḷḷaiyār in which this senior contemporary of Nambi celebrates the Śaiva shrines of Chidambaram, Kaḷumalam (Shiyali), Tiruviḍaimarudūr, Kāñchipuram and Oṟṟiyūr. Earlier than Nambi but not far removed from him were the authors represented in the ninth book of the canon, Tiruviśaippā. There are nine of them including Gandarāditya, the son of Parāntaka I, and a Karuvūr Dēvan who has hymns on the three famous Chola temples newly erected in his day—the Ādityēśvara at Kaḷandai, the Rājarājēśvara at Tanjore and the Gangaikonda-śōḷēśvara at Gangaikonda-śōḷapuram.