Commentary Writing, Religious Reading, and Pedagogy in Medieval South India: The First Commentary on Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi

Though written commentaries are repositories of intellectual scholarship, full assessment of their content requires consideration of some of the contexts in which they were embedded. Considering a section of a written commentary on Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi, the Āṟāyirappaṭi, that is deemed enigmatic by current scholarship, this paper proposes that it was designed to serve a didactic function. Examining the overlapping contexts of religious reading, commentary composition, and pedagogical practices, it demonstrates that the written section in question is designed for parallel reading between certain authoritative Śrīvaiṣṇava texts that was facilitated by the oral commentary of a teacher. Written in the twelfth century at a time when Śrīvaiṣṇavism was a budding tradition, the first commentary on the āḻvār’s poem by Tirukkurukai Pirāṉ Piḷḷāṉ sought to consolidate its Sanskrit and Tamil heritages. As a case study of commentaries belonging to this larger socio-cultural context, this paper explores interpretive strategies and the functions of commentaries in pedagogy.