- Lived:
- c. 5th–6th century CE — scholars most often say around 550; born Punitavati in Kāraikkāl, a merchant port on the Kāverī delta coast (Karaikal, today a Puducherry enclave inside Tamil Nadu) → tradition takes her north to Kailāsa and back to the cremation ground of Tiruvālaṅkāṭu (Tiruvalangadu, near Chennai)
- Field:
- poetry and sainthood — the earliest of the 63 Nāyaṉārs, the Tamil Śaiva saints, and the first great bhakti poet in any Indian language
- The Big Idea:
- She traded the one asset her world valued in a woman — beauty — for the body of a ghoul, so that nothing would stand between her and the god she loved; and the songs she sang in that body began the bhakti movement, a thousand years of God addressed in love, in the mother tongue, by anyone at all.
- In their words:
- "From the day I was born and learned to speak, my love has grown for your red feet alone." (Aṟputat Tiruvantāti 1; the rendering is ours — Elaine Craddock's scholarly version runs close)
- If you remember one thing:
- Indian devotional poetry — the river that runs through Āṇḍāḷ, Basavaṇṇa, Kabīr, Mīrābāī and half the songs India still sings — begins with a woman who petitioned God to make her hideous, and called it the greatest gift she ever received.