Reading Theology Across Genres: Māṇikkavācakar's Tiruvācakam and Tirukkōvaiyār in Conversation

Abstract

This dissertation examines two ninth-century Tamil Śaiva texts of different genres attributed to the poet-saint Māṇikkavācakar: the Tiruvācakam (“The Holy Utterance”), a collection of devotional hymns, and the Tirukkōvaiyār (“The Holy Garland”), a narrative about two lovers. Tiruvācakam is a beloved work still engaged by contemporary audiences, but Tirukkōvaiyār remains largely absent—peripheral at best—in both scholarship and practice. Thus, although these two texts are canonized together as a single volume in the Tamil Śaiva canon (tirumuṟai), Māṇikkavācakar’s contributions to Śaiva theology are predominantly understood through Tiruvācakam alone. This dissertation reintroduces Tirukkōvaiyār to larger discussions of theology and reads Tiruvācakam and Tirukkōvaiyār together, framing them as related projects and significant Śaiva literary interventions in their period. I argue that despite disparate formal features and divergent reception histories, these texts use shared rhetorical strategies and poetic forms to construct a mutually constitutive Śaiva theology, the contours of which differ from previous Śaiva works. First, taking two large analytic categories—time and place—I demonstrate how these texts are in conversation with one another as they offer reflections on the hardships of human life and Śiva’s enduring grace. By looking at the use of shared grammatical forms, tropes, and poetic devices in expressions of time and place, I reveal a deeply intertextual relationship and recover shared conceptual territory between them. Second, considering the theological implications of this shared territory, I then demonstrate that these texts are more than the sum of their parts. Reading them in tandem, I show that they are generative of an affect karuṇai (compassion) that contributes to a theological vision that places new emphasis on compassion, a previously underdeveloped concept in earlier Śaiva devotional literature. Casting aside the Śiva whose character is defined by chaos or paradox, I suggest instead that Māṇikkavācakar’s Śiva is defined by compassion that is both reinforced and mirrored in the generative affect of compassion created for the reader by both texts’ explorations of suffering. This dissertation is the first of its kind to approach these works as related projects and argues that not only should they be read together, but their theological message is understood more fully in doing so.