A section from the journey

Drowned in God: the Alvars

The first great wave of bhakti rose in the deep south, in the Tamil land. Twelve poet-saints sang their love for Vishnu in their own mother tongue. They were called the Alvars, a word that means "immersed" or "drowned" in God. Their four thousand verses were gathered into one book the tradition honours as the Tamil Veda. Their songs ache with longing, and that longing later flowed north.

Picture the far south of the land, the Tamil country, with its temple towns and its warm rivers running to the sea. It is here, long before the saints of the north, that the great tide of devotion first rises.

We have met the word before, as a small seed in the Gita. Here it grows into a flood. And the first to be swept up in it were twelve poets who loved the god Vishnu with their whole hearts. They sang to him not in Sanskrit, the old priestly tongue, but in Tamil, the language of their own homes and mothers.

People called them the Alvars. The word comes from a root that means "to dive deep," and it means something like "those immersed in God," or even "those drowned in God." That is the picture to hold: a person so deep in love that the love closes over their head like water.

There were twelve of them, and they came from every kind of doorway. One was a king. Some were priests. One was a herdsman. One was a poet of low birth. And one, Andal, was a girl, whom we will meet next. Love, they showed, does not ask your rank at the door.

Listen to how they begin. One of the earliest, , opens his song by making a lamp out of the whole world.

"With earth as lamp-bowl, the poured-out sea as oil, the burning sun as light, I have twined a garland of words for the feet of him who wields the red blazing discus..."

His friend answers with a lamp of the heart instead.

"With love as lamp-bowl, desire as oil, mind melting with bliss as wick, with melting soul I have kindled the bright light of wisdom..."

Hear what they are doing. They take the whole sky and sea and make it small enough to hold up as one little flame before God. And then they say the truer lamp is the one lit inside, from love itself. That is the Alvar way.

The greatest of them was , born into a farming family the old order ranked low. The tradition tells that he sat silent under a tamarind tree for years, lost in God, until a disciple roused him with a single question. His long poem, the Tiruvaymoli, is held to hold the very essence of the four Vedas, though it was sung in Tamil by a man of humble birth.

Their deepest note is a kind of sweet ache. They call it , the pain of being apart. The soul has glimpsed God and now cannot bear the distance. It cries out, it waits, it burns. This love-in-longing is the Alvars' great gift, and scholars find it began right here, in the Tamil south, before it ever flowed north into the rest of the land.

After their time, a teacher named Nathamuni gathered their four thousand verses into one great book, the . He honoured it as a "Tamil Veda" — the Veda's holiness, now in a mother tongue, sung to be understood. Remember that. It is one of the great gifts of this whole age: God in the language you actually speak.

The Alvars made a lamp out of the sea and the sun, and then said the better lamp is lit inside, from love. When have you felt something so large that ordinary words felt too small to hold it? What small thing did you reach for to carry it?