Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World

Leah Elizabeth Comeau’s Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World highlights the importance of sensuous descriptions of objects and emotions as material religion in a revered Tamil poetic work, the Tirukkovaiyar of the 9^th-century poet Manikkavacakar. Weaving in stories and color photos from her fieldwork, Comeau not only argues for the priority of sensory experience in religion, she also demonstrates it. In doing so, she adds helpfully to the growing attentiveness toward material in scholarship on bhakti, South Asia, and religion.

Drawing on David Chidester, Kathleen Stewart, S. Brent Plate, and others, Comeau points out that many considerations of material religion are permeated by an assumption that material merely expresses or illustrates doctrines and ideas (4). This perspective, along with problematic conventions of Tamil literary periodization and about what properly constitutes bhakti, limits an appreciation of texts like the Tirukkovaiyar (6). Comeau presents an alternative approach that regards sense, experience, and embodiment as ends in themselves rather than as instruments to convey doctrinal lessons. In short, “materiality yields the religious” (25).

The book’s five chapters explore arenas in which poetic description revels in material and sensuality. Classical Tamil grammars established sets of references (flowers, birds, topographical features, human behaviors, etc.) that classical poets used and passed on to later generations, such as in the kovai genre that the Tirukkovaiyar developed and epitomized. Comeau shows how Manikkavacakar navigated and innovated within these traditional guidelines, paying special attention to emotional relationships with places, evocations of the natural environment, a limited cast of characters (human-hero, heroine, their respective companions, and god-hero), and ornamentation of bodies and poetry.

Comeau reveals this poetry’s “dual citizenship” in both classical and devotional literary worlds (151)—a tandem allegiance that explains a feature of the Tirukkovaiyar that baffles newcomers but is arguably the poet’s greatest accomplishment. Rather than depict Shiva straightforwardly as an object of devotees’ desire, in the Tirukkovaiyar he is revered as the text’s patron, following the classical model of praising the ruler-benefactor repeatedly throughout the composition (115). That Shiva appears throughout the text regularly but often tangentially to the major drama between the hero and heroine prompts us to re-envision what constitutes religion here.

In each thematic chapter, Comeau comments on copious translated excerpts, offering an extended masterclass in how to read verses in the kovai genre, recognize sensory references and their associated emotions, and understand their implications. Comeau’s book engages readers deeply in the medieval Tamil text, allowing its aesthetics to work on them. Consequently, the book has a constructive, integrative, world-building quality. Comeau excels at helping readers experience the text and appreciate its medieval Tamil literary context.

Given the book’s focus on materiality and sensation, Comeau’s (and Leslie Orr’s) recommendation to avoid the temptation to draw political conclusions about geography in the Tirukkovaiyar raises a broader question. Despite attending so closely to specific geography and material realities, were Tamil poets like Manikkavacakar oblivious to humans’ power and authority within that world? Deciding which aspects of everyday life and what kinds of people to represent poetically is a political act, as Christian Novetzke argued in The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia, 2016). If nothing else, the Tirukkovaiyar’s depiction of Vishnu’s submission to Shiva has political implications (163). To this reviewer’s mind, material religion—as with the material world generally—is inevitably bound up with politics on some level.

Many topics in Material Devotion invite comparison with examples from elsewhere in South Asia. For example, love, longing, and the anticipation of bodily intimacy are common devices across Indic literatures, especially those considered as bhakti. Comeau’s exploration of this 9^th-century Tamil text could be helpfully compared with other regional representations of love and relationship, such as with Mirabai’s expressions of longing in Rajasthani, or Ksetrayya’s and Annamayya’s Telugu verses set in the voices of mistresses. Comeau considers a remarkable example of the devotee-as-mistress motif from a latter section of the Tirukkovaiyar that virtually cries out for such comparison (133). Such reflections would deepen our understanding of how poets evoke emotions and embodiment with and without religious overtones.

Comeau’s book could be paired insightfully with Anne Feldhaus’ work on the logics of pilgrimage geographies and Catherine Walker Bynum’s work on medieval Christian women mystics to extend embodied religious experience to the realm of taste and sustenance. Compared to Bynum’s mystics, the sense of taste seems surprisingly marginal in the verses that Comeau includes. As Comeau notes, the “visceral descriptions of succulent fatty meats and pungent fermented drinks” that characterized early Tamil heroic poetry make no appearance in the Tirukkovaiyar (115). Aside occasional references to honey’s sweetness (95), the inseparability of nectar and its taste (124), or the sight of betel-stained lips (134), food and its consumption—a most intimate material engagement—seem under-represented in the Tirukkovaiyar’s sensorium. If this is indeed indicative of the Tirukkovaiyar or segments of Tamil poetry, how ought we understand such a relative disinterest?

One technical question persisted for this reviewer while reading the book: although Comeau’s interpretive comments alongside her translations are quite illuminating, the degree to which these reflect traditional Tamil hermeneutics or follow her own aesthetic sensibility is less clear. In the first chapter, she outlines the principles for classical composition laid out in 8^th- and 13^th-century Tamil grammatical treatises, but as her book proceeds and excerpts from the Tirukkovaiyar pile up, a relative absence of citations makes it difficult to discern how exactly Comeau arrived at her interpretations. A bit more clarity in this respect would be helpful for locating the interpretative activity and its possible implications about historical Tamil aesthetics.

Finally, this reviewer looks forward to seeing Comeau unpack further how religion operates materially, especially considering the criticisms of conventional bhakti and religious studies she made in her introduction. The book’s final two pages begin a provocative conversation about materiality yielding or creating religion, but the discussion’s brevity may generate a feeling often expressed in the Tirukkovaiyar: longing for more and anticipating its eventual arrival.

Jon Keune is an associate professor of religious studies at Michigan State University.

Jon Keune

Date Of Review:

January 30, 2023