A section from the journey

Hounds of Shiva: the Nayanars

Beside the Alvars who loved Vishnu stood the Nayanars, sixty-three saints who loved Shiva. They came from every caste and trade: kings and Brahmins, a potter, a hunter, a washerman, and one man the old order called untouchable. Their Tamil hymns, the Tevaram, are still sung in Shiva's temples. They called themselves the hounds of Shiva, content to be his faithful dogs.

The Tamil tide ran in two streams side by side. We have followed the Alvars, who loved Vishnu. Now meet the others, who poured the very same love toward Shiva. They are called the Nayanars.

There were sixty-three of them. And the wonderful thing is who they were. They came from every doorway the old society had. Among them were Brahmins and kings, but also a potter, a hunter, a fisherman, washermen, a weaver, and a man named Nandanar, whom that society called untouchable. Shiva, their songs say, looks at the heart, not the birth.

Their love for Shiva was not distant or grand. It was close, even familiar, the way you speak to one you have known your whole life. Listen to , a saint who sang as a child, paint his Lord.

"His ears are beringed. He rideth the bull; / His head is adorned with the crescent moon's ray; / White is He with ash from the burning-ground swept; / And He is the thief who my heart steals away."

Hear that last line. "He is the thief who my heart steals away." The saint does not praise God from far off. He half-complains, tenderly, that God has crept in and made off with his heart. That is : love so near it can tease the beloved.

Then there is , whose name means "King of the Tongue." He had once been a Jain monk, then returned to Shiva with his whole heart, and spent his days with a small scraper, humbly cleaning the courtyards of Shiva's temples. One of his verses was so loved that a beggar in Madras, the old books tell, recited it and nothing else all day long.

"He is honey and milk and the shining light. He is the king of the Devas, / Immanent in Vishnu, in Brahma, in flame and in wind... / If there be days when my tongue is dumb and speaks not of Him, / Let no such days be counted in the record of my life."

And there is , who was so close to Shiva he could call him friend. He gave the Nayanars one of their dearest images of themselves: not as lords or scholars, but as Shiva's faithful dogs, his hounds, glad to be owned by him.

"I roamed, a cur, for many days / Without a single thought of Thee... / My Shepherd, I became all thine; / How could I now myself forswear?"

A cur, a stray dog, who once wandered without a thought of God, and then was claimed by grace and made wholly his. To call yourself God's dog is not shame here. It is the joy of belonging completely. These hymns of the three were gathered, with others, into a great Tamil scripture for Shiva, whose heart is called the .

Now we must be honest, the way a good teacher is honest, even when the ground is tender. The Nayanars sang that all souls are equal before God. Saints rose among them from the lowest ranks. And yet the village around the temple did not always change to match the song. Here is a question the whole age leaves us, so let us pause at the and look at it plainly.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differThe Nayanars came from every caste and sang that all are equal before God. Did this devotion actually loosen the social order of caste, or mainly grant equality in the eyes of God while the old hierarchy held?

What scholars find

Scholars who study these saints draw a careful line between two kinds of equality. The bhakti saints clearly proclaimed spiritual equality: any soul, of any birth, could reach God by love, and saints did arise from the lowest ranks. But most historians find that this largely did not dismantle the social order of caste in daily life. The lived reality of birth-based jati, with its rules of purity and exclusion, mostly held. The telling case is Nandanar, the one untouchable Nayanar: in the canonical life, the Periya Puranam, he is allowed into the great temple only after passing through fire to be purified, so the very text that honours his devotion also re-inscribes the hierarchy he was born under. Scholars such as Eleanor Zelliot read such stories as devotional inclusion living side by side with real social exclusion. Where bhakti did soften hierarchy, it was often through shared worship and shared food rather than through overturning birth-rank, and the saints themselves usually remained within their own castes.

As the tradition holds

The tradition holds up these lives as a living rebuke to caste-pride. It remembers that Shiva chose his sixty-three from every doorway: a potter, a hunter, a washerman, an untouchable, beside kings and Brahmins, and ranked them only by the depth of their love. It keeps Nandanar's name with deep tenderness as a true saint whom God himself welcomed when men would not, and tells how the great stone bull at his temple moved aside so he could see his Lord. In the tradition's eyes the saints proved, once and for all, that no birth can bar the soul from God, and that a devotee of the lowest rank may stand far above the proud. That the world was slow to live up to the song is, in this telling, the world's failing, never the song's.

Whatever the village did, the song itself never wavered. It said the heart is what God weighs, and a potter or a hunter or an outcaste could be a saint. That song would be sung for a thousand years, and it would not be unsung. We carry it forward with us.

Sundarar was glad to be God's dog, owned and belonging completely. We often prize standing on our own. Where in your life has belonging to something larger felt not like a loss, but like a kind of freedom?