Vaḷḷalār and Nāvalar: A History of the Literary Feud

In the nineteenth century, Tamil Nadu in South India and the Tamil-speaking regions of Sri Lanka were shaken by an extraordinary literary and religious conflict—a nearly fifty-year-long battle of wits that divided vertically Tamil scholarship across both societies.

At the heart of this storm lay the collected hymns of Vaḷḷalār, titled Tiruvaruṭpā (Poems of Divine Grace) by his followers. However, these hymns were fiercely opposed and rejected by Nāvalar and his traditionalist allies, who dismissed them as Maruṭpā (Poems of Delusion), arguing that the sacred epithet Tiruvaruṭpā belonged solely to the ancient Saivite texts.

This historical study chronicles and delves into the bitter feud between Vaḷḷalār, the revolutionary saint-poet who championed a simple, ritual-free, and iconoclastic form of worship, and Āṟumuka Nāvalar, the staunch defender of traditional Saivite orthodoxy. Their ideological clash not only shaped the religious and literary landscape of their time but also left a lasting impact on Tamil culture and spirituality.

P. Saravanan serves as Assistant Director at the Tamil Nadu Text Book Society, a wing of the Tamil Nadu Educational Service, Chennai, India. He was formerly the Headmaster of a higher secondary school in Chennai, India.

The source text for this book began as the author’s university research project. The first edition was published in 2001, followed by a second edition in December of the same year, and a third in August 2002. His innate love and passion for Tamil literature—part of a 2500-year-old tradition—were inspired by his father, a Tamil teacher who passed down this legacy to him with great affection.

The author’s mission is to make classical Tamil literary texts accessible to the common reader in highly readable prose. As part of this mission, he has already published a collection of classical texts, including Cilappatikāram, Tiruvācakam, Kaliṅkattupparaṇi, and Puṟanāṉūṟu. His contributions have earned him several accolades, including the prestigious Aruṭperuñ jōti Vaḷḷalār Virutu, awarded by the Tamil Nadu Government for this particular work.

K. Thiagarajan is Professor of English with a distinguished forty year teaching career at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Tamil Nadu Collegiate Educational Service, as well as in institutions in Pondicherry, Sana’a, Hodeidah, and Aden. He taught Translation Studies for twelve years at the postgraduate level in Pondicherry and Aden Universities.

He is the author of comprehensive, encyclopedic book in Tamil on Translation Studies, the first edition of which was published in August 2022, followed by a second edition in September 2022. In addition to his authorship, he has supervised nearly sixty research projects at the M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. levels and has presented research papers at both national and international seminars.