Sundara Murthy Naayanar

Sundara Murthy Naayanar, also known as Sundarar, is presented as a celebrated Saivite pilgrim and poet whose hymns could confer lasting sacred distinction on a temple. Two episodes illuminate his place in the narrative: his spiritual association with holy sites beside the Kedilam River, and a comic account of how he refused to sing for deities whose names made them sound old. The first links him to a landscape shaped by devotion; the second gives his poetic judgment a vivid, irreverent edge.

Identity and Sacred Geography

In Thirumunaippaadi Nadu, the Kedilam River occupies a place of particular natural abundance. Its banks lie near two sacred sites: the shrine associated with the saint Appar’s union with the lord of Thiruvathigai Veerattaanam, and Thirunaavalur, where the local deity turned Sundara Murthy Naayanar away from material advancement and gently toward a spiritual course. His significance is therefore bound not only to the hymns he composes, but also to a landscape in which divine intervention redirects human ambition.

The account sets these holy places within an active route between regions. A royal road from Thondai Mandalam toward Chozha Nadu and Nadu Nadu passed between them, and its ferry crossing made the riverbank a busy stopping place. The devotional setting was not remote from ordinary movement: pilgrims and travelers shared the crossing, while people paused there to eat and rest. The sacred geography associated with Sundara Murthy Naayanar thus sits alongside the everyday traffic of the road.

The Poet at Thirumudhukundram

A story told during a journey describes Sundara Murthy Naayanar on one of his regular pilgrimages, arriving at Thirumudhukundram, also known as Vriddhachalam. After the priests welcomed him and conducted the proper worship, they asked him to praise their deity in verse. He did not immediately agree. First, he asked the deity’s name, and the priests answered that the lord was called Vriddhagireeswarar, after the town.

The name displeased him because he heard in it the image of an old man. He then asked for the name of the divine consort. When the priests answered Vriddhagireeswari, he objected that they had given the Goddess the same aged character. Rather than compose a hymn under those conditions, he left the temple in anger. His refusal was not a rejection of the shrine’s divinity; the story makes the naming of its deities the point of contention. The town’s name derives from Vridha, meaning old, and Achalam, meaning mountain, and the principal deities’ names likewise conveyed the sense of an old lord and an old Goddess.

A Refusal Reversed

The priests feared that a temple left without Sundara Murthy Naayanar’s verses would be excluded from the community of celebrated sacred sites. They gathered and installed another idol of the Amman, giving her the name Balambigai, which signified youth. Once they had corrected the name that had provoked his objection, they approached the poet again and reported the change. Sundara Murthy Naayanar then returned to Thirumudhukundram and sang a pathigam in praise of Vriddhagireeswarar and his young consort.

The sequence turns a dispute over names into a negotiation between poetic judgment and a temple’s desire for recognition. The priests alter the devotional presentation, not the town’s name: the lord remains Vriddhagireeswarar, while the consort receives a new title. Sundara Murthy Naayanar’s eventual return matters as much as his departure. His standards can withhold the honor of a hymn, but the priests’ response makes it possible for him to praise the shrine after all.

The Story as Comic Analogy

Karikalan hears the account with delight, having first marvelled that he did not know the story and urged its continuation. Once told how the poet balked at praising an old lord and an old Goddess, he turns the episode into a joke about Pazhuvettarayar’s marriage to Nandhini. He imagines a poet at Pazhuvettarayar’s court refusing to sing about an old man and his equally old wife. Parthibendran and Kandamaaran laugh at the comparison, and Parthibendran extends the humor by wondering why people must grow old before death.

This retelling gives the episode a second function beyond its account of Sundara Murthy Naayanar’s pilgrimage. His sharp response to the temple names becomes material for Karikalan’s teasing analogy, while the friends’ laughter carries the joke forward. The story preserves the poet as a figure capable of refusing an expected act of praise, but its placement also shows how a devotional anecdote can be recast as lively social wit.