நாச்சியார் திருமொழி
About the Sacred Utterances of the Lady
The நாச்சியார் திருமொழி (Nācciyār Tirumoḻi — "Sacred Utterances of the Lady") is Āṇṭāḷ's second and greater work: 143 pāsurams of passionate devotion to Tirumāl (Viṣṇu), arranged in fourteen decads. Where the Thiruppāvai is a communal dawn-vigil, the Nācciyār Tirumoḻi is intensely personal — a single voice burning with longing (viraha) for the divine beloved.
Āṇṭāḷ (ஆண்டாள் — "she who rules") was born in Śrīvilliputtūr in Tamil Nadu, the adopted daughter of the Vaiṣṇava saint Periyāḻvār (Viṣṇucitta). She is the only woman among the twelve Āḻvār saints and is venerated as an avatāra of Bhūdevi (the Earth Goddess), one of Viṣṇu's two consorts. Both her works — the Thiruppāvai and the Nācciyār Tirumoḻi — form part of the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham (Four Thousand Divine Compositions), the canonical Vaiṣṇava scripture.
The Work and Its Structure
The Nācciyār Tirumoḻi is organised into fourteen decads (திருமொழிகள்). The first decad opens with the love-vow (Kāma-nōmbu) — Āṇṭāḷ's ritual observance in the month of Thai, garlanding, fasting from butter, and petitioning the god of love to unite her with Tirumāl.
The second decad describes her dream of the Lord. The third — titled வாரணமாயிரம் (Vāraṇam Āyiram, "A Thousand Elephants") — is the most celebrated section: the great wedding dream in which a thousand-elephant procession circles the bride and the Lord himself places the wedding crown on her head. This decad contains some of the most magnificent devotional poetry in Tamil literature.
The middle decads (4–11) employ the classical Sangam device of the messenger (tūtu): Āṇṭāḷ sends the koel bird, parrots, clouds, and rivers to carry her longing to the absent Lord, deploying all the conventions of Tamil akam (interior love) poetry in the service of bhakti. The twelfth decad describes a full month of separation. The thirteenth introduces the ācārya (spiritual teacher) who showed her the Lord's feet. The fourteenth decad is the formal colophon (phalaśruti), declaring the benefits of recitation and naming the poet as Kōtai (Āṇṭāḷ).
Sangam Poetry and Bhakti
The Nācciyār Tirumoḻi is a masterpiece of intertextual devotion. Āṇṭāḷ inhabits the persona of the akam heroine — the young woman separated from her beloved, sending messengers, reading omens in nature, building sand houses — and identifies this persona entirely with the soul's longing for the divine. Every Sangam convention is redeployed as bhakti: the mullai landscape of patient waiting becomes waiting for the Lord; the neytal landscape of separation by the shore becomes separation from Tirumāl; the kuyil's cry is the cry of the soul.
The theological heart of the work is viraha bhakti — devotion through the ecstasy of longing. The Nācciyār Tirumoḻi does not describe union so much as the burning desire for it; the 143 verses are the fire of that desire made into poetry. The final verse's revelation that the entire work is a dream (கனவே) does not diminish it — in bhakti theology, the dream of the divine is itself divine.
Place in the Canon
The Nācciyār Tirumoḻi forms part of the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, the scripture-canon of Śrī Vaiṣṇavism. Along with the Thiruppāvai, it constitutes Āṇṭāḷ's contribution to the Prabandham. Both works are recited daily in Vaiṣṇava temples. Āṇṭāḷ herself is worshipped as a goddess at the Śrīvilliputtūr Andal Temple, one of the 108 Divya Deśams.
This Presentation
Each pāsuram is presented in six layers: the original Tamil, a romanized transliteration, an English translation, a Tamil prose commentary (உரை), an alternative English rendering, a devotional theme, and a literary and theological note. The 43 pāsurams presented here are drawn from all 14 decads, with the first three decads given in full (30 pāsurams) and representative verses from each subsequent decad.
About this Library
The Nācciyār Tirumoḻi completes the Āṇṭāḷ pair in this library alongside the Thiruppāvai — together the full surviving corpus of Tamil's greatest woman poet. Return to the library →