“Do You Think This Body Lasts Forever?”: Condemning Worldliness and Teaching Devotion in the Early Modern Tamil Hinterlands

The Vairākkiya Catakam (“One Hundred [Verses] on Dispassion”) is a seventeenth-century Tamil poem composed in the vicinity of Pērūr, in what is now western Tamil Nadu, that encourages devotion to Śiva. Significantly, it is divided into a “treatise” enjoining the mind to abandon its worldly attachments, and a “hymn” appealing directly to Śiva for liberation. This formal innovation appears designed to reform a group of “worldly people” (Tm. ulakar) by instructing them in the aspirations and sensibilities of a Śaiva devotee. Enhancing this project is the poet’s repeated mentions of his personal experiences of Śiva, which likely allude to the contemporaneous construction of a golden hall in the Pērūr temple by the Madurai Nāyakas. Ultimately, I suggest that the poem’s effort to replace its audience’s worldliness with devotion is inextricable from wider political and religious processes that drew the previously marginal Tamil hinterlands into an expansive early modern Śaiva ecumene.