Maṟaiñāṉa-campantar was a Tamil poet and a prominent śaiva-siddhānta scholar, who lived in Chidambaram in the sixteenth century. His magnum opus is the Civatarumottaram, a translation into Tamil of the Śivadharmottara, which makes him a central figure in the South Indian branching of the Śivadharma tradition. Yet, in addition, Maṟaiñāṉa also composed two large-scale temple mythologies (tāla-purāṇam), dedicated to the great Śiva temples in Tiruvārūr and Tiruvaṇṇāmalai.
Composing such texts was by no means as unusual endeavor in this period. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Tamil-speaking region in south India witnessed an upsurge of literary production in Tamil, and one of its expressions was the creation of hundreds of texts labeled as “tālapurāṇam.” This title is a direct translation of the Sanskrit sub-genre by the same name (sthāla-purāṇa). Nevertheless, the Tamil tālapurāṇams formed a different genre, using a highly stylized register of the Tamil language and embedding literary themes from the Tamil and Sanskrit poetic traditions, alongside the puranic mythological and theological contents.
Our new reading group, which includes Tamil scholars and students, meets (via Zoom) every Monday to read a selection of verses from Maṟaiñāṉa-campantar’s Kamalālayac-ciṟappu, a tālapurāṇam dedicated to the Tiruvārūr temple. By reading this work, we enrich our knowledge of the cultural and scholarly milieu of sixteenth-century Chidambaram, in which this author played a central role. Moreover, through his descriptive passages on the towns and temples of the Kaveri-delta area, we learn about his conception of the ideal śaiva society.