Whitney Cox, University of Pennsylvania

Periyapuranam among the Public Narratives at Cidambaram

The Periyapuranam, Cekkilar’s long narrative of the sixty-three saints revered in southern Saivism, was demonstrably a product of the culture of the great Tamil temple city of Cidambaram in the middle decades of the twelfth century.  The text is generally counted among one of the foremost examples of the Tamil mahakavya, or court epic.  This definition, while useful for explaining certain formal features of the text, fails to capture some of the dynamism that underlay the text’s creation and that conditioned its initial reception.  In an earlier paper, I argued that an episode of the Puranam could best be explained through reference to a controversy among theologians writing in Sanskrit in that time and place.  In the present paper, I will focus on the relationship between several sections in the first long canto of the narrative and the complex textual ensemble of the inscriptions housed in the temples of Cidambaram.  Understanding this latter archive as the principal medium for the articulation of public claims about self and community, I am interested in attempting to understand the Periyapuranam within a similar social and textual logic.  In addition, this will provide an opportunity to discuss more broadly the question of embedded textual genres within the literary narrative.