Nammalvar

Nammalvar's biography as told in the Divya Prabandha tradition is the most extraordinary of any Alvar. He was born mute and spent 16 years sitting in a hollow tamarind tree outside a Vishnu temple, in a state of absorbed meditation, eating nothing, speaking to no one. A wandering poet-saint named Madhurakavi found him and provoked him into speech. Everything Nammalvar then spoke became the Divya Prabandham. He composed four texts: the Thiruvaymoli, the Thiruviruttam, the Thiruvasiriyam, and the Periya Thiruvandhadhi. The Thiruvaymoli alone is 1,102 verses.

The Thiruvaymoli is organized in 100 decads of 10 verses each (plus a "fruit" verse making 11 per decad). The metres vary across the decads. The emotional register is extreme: Nammalvar writes as a woman longing for Krishna, as a mother watching her daughter possessed by love for Krishna, as a male devotee prostrating himself, as a metaphysical thinker probing the nature of the divine. The erotic framework of the akam tradition is directly employed — Krishna is the lover, the devotee is the woman, and the emotional tinai landscape determines the emotional tone.

Nammalvar is called "the greatest Alvar" within the Sri Vaishnava tradition. His Thiruvaymoli is recited complete over 10 days during the Adhyayanotsavam festival at Srirangam. It is the closest thing to a canonical "scripture" that the Tamil Vaishnava tradition has. Ramanuja, the great 11th-century Vaishnava philosopher, built his Vishishtadvaita theology partly on the basis of Nammalvar's poetry.