Thiruvavaduthurai, a small laid-back town in Tamil Nadu’s Mayiladuthurai district, hogged the limelight after Prime Minister Narendra Modi placed the Sengol or sceptre presented by the head of the Thiruvavaduthurai Math to India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in the new Parliament building. The event also evoked a lot of interest in the Math, foremost among the 18 Saivite Maths, that made unparalleled contributions to the Tamil language, music and Saivite philosophy.
“The monastery used to be praised as Siva’s kingdom. The head of the Math was the king of the Saiva monks. The monks living there under his absolute rule were philosophical knights in Saiva robes. Performing Siva puja, serving the Guru and studying good religious texts were their vocation. The monks took their tasks and duties with utmost seriousness and performed them with spotless perfection and with great joy in Saiva kingdom,” writes U.V. Swaminatha Iyer, the grand old man of Tamil, in his autobiography, En Charithiram (The Story of My Life), translated into English by Kamil Zvelebil, the Czech linguist.
It was Iyer’s first impression of the Math as a student after visiting and meeting Melakaram Subramania Desikar, the head of the Math between 1869 and 1888. Iyer’s teacher Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai was a poet laureate of the Math. In fact, it is Iyer’s writings that shed light on the contributions of the Thiruvavaduthurai Math and captured the imagination of anyone interested in Tamil literature and music in the 20th century.
