INTRODUCTION

(A)--The Hymns and their Significance

THE voice of chanting and song, to the accompaniment of unfamiliar instruments, floats out over the high wall of the temple in the coolness of the evening or the dawn, making the Western passer-by wonder what it is that is being chanted and sung. If only he had a Hindu hymn-book he thinks he could learn from it the spirit of Hinduism as well as a non-Christian could learn Christianity from Christian hymns. For the Tamil country at any rate there is such a hymnbook, and our present aim is to give enough specimens from it for readers to know what the hymns are like. Englishmen are wanting to understand India more than they ever wanted before, for their debt to India is heavy. Indians are wanting more than ever before to know the wonderful past of their own country, and the wonder of it is all bound up with its religion. At such a time these hymns are worth looking into, for they are being sung in temples and homes throughout the Tamil country, and Tamil is the mother-tongue of more than eighteen millions of people. For pious Saivites they equal in authority the Sanskrit Vedas; the mere learning of them by rote is held to be a virtue, and devout. Tamil parents compel their children to memorize them in much the same way as Christian parents make their children learn the Psalms.

The hymns here given are specimens from the Devaram and the Tiruvachakam. The Devaram is the first of the collections of works held as canonical by Tamil Saivites. Its hymns were composed between six and eight hundred A.D. by the three authors of whom this book gives some account, and the whole was put together in one collection of 797 stanzas by Nambi Andar Nambi about 1000 A.D. The Tiruvachakam, or Sacred Utterance, was written by one author, Manikya Vachaka (Tamilized as Manikka Vasahar) at a date so far unsettled that scholars are still divided on the question whether it preceded or followed the Devaram, though most scholars place it in the ninth, or early in the tenth, century. Whenever it was written, it stands even higher than the Devaram in the affections of Tamil people.