Aditya Hrudayam: A Universal Hymn for Humanity

Sarada Thallam

Aditya Hrudayam: A Universal Hymn for Humanity

Abstract

Absract: This paper considers the Indian devotional prayer Aditya Hrudayam as a way of worship of the divine forces through Nature. In the course, the paper looks at the genealogy of sun worship in world cultures, particularly in the Indian culture, since the Vedic times to firmly ground its relevance in the contemporary world. Later it discusses the manifold ways through which Aditya is worshipped, the various manifestations of Aditya, the benefits of the worship and the universal significance of the prayer not merely in the present age but also in the ages to come. The paper concludes with the timeless relevance of the worship of this primordial ball of fire. The Aditya Hrudayam is a unique hymn in the pantheon of Indian devotional verses, owing to the immense power embedded in the mantra, that rejuvenates the sagging spirits of not a mortal human being, but a divine god like Lord Rama, in the Yuddhakanda of Valmiki's Ramayana. The powerful hymn that offers rich tributes to the primordial ball of fire, the source of all life, the origin of all energy and prana, remains perennially relevant not just to humanity of a bygone era, but to one and all in the years to come.

ākṛṣṭavānasi bhavān anukampamānaḥ sūtrānubaddhaśakuni kramataḥsvayaṃmāṃ Oh so steadily, of your own accord, out of innate compassion, you draw me to yourself like a bird on a string!-Vedāntadeśika Devanāyakapañcāśat, 8 tanme samarpaya matiṃca sarasvatīṃca tvāmañjasāstutipadairyadahaṃdhinomi But give me mind and the goddess of the tongue for singing and I'll straight away delight you with words of praise!-Vedāntadeśika Varadarājapañcāśat, 4 The Poet and His God on the Road to Kāñcī It is full dark, so the story goes, on the road north to Kāñcīpuram near the river Peṇṇai. We are in the Tamil Land, in the deep south of India, sometime in the late thirteenth century. The great scholar, religious teacher, and poet, Vedāntadeśika, is on his way out of town, just a few miles down the road from the village of Tiruvahīndrapuram, the "Town of the Holy King of Serpents," near the coast. We must imagine the rest: all of a sudden, the air around him streams with light, a clear high incandescence that obliterates the darkness. Then, after this first bright explosion, a deep orange glow settles on everything. The paddy fields and crouching areca and palm groves bristle with tawny flames. And with the flames comes, impossibly, a gentle rain, sweet on the lips. A god stands before the great teacher-poet: it is Devanāyaka, "The Lord of Gods" himself, the form of the god Vishnu at Tiruvahīndrapuram, a god he has just left behind in the (p.4) village temple after evening worship. But now Devanāyaka stands on the road, a glistening black deity with his halo of burning air, his weapons shining, a monsoon cloud just before the rains. And the poet begins to weep; his hair stands on end. As he would later write of Devanāyaka: You never turn from those devotees, O Acyuta, whose minds, How is your waist still so thin, when you hold in your stomach the eggs Whatever the historical veracity of this encounter, the implications of the story's central image-the desire of a vividly embodied and beautiful god for the songs of a particular singer-devotee-is clear. The god of this poet seeks and enjoys his I will explore the many continuities between this thirteenth-to fourteenthcentury poet-philosopher and the earlier generation of Tamil poet-saints and Ācārya-poets who composed in Sanskrit; I will also discern ways in which Deśika's work represents a departure from both Āḻvārs and Ācāryas. Deśika's devotional poetry combines in a dynamic way the local/regional literary prestige of Tamil as a language of "emotions" with the pan-regional aesthetic prestige and power of Sanskrit (with Māhārāṣṭrī as Middle Indo-Āryan literary spice). Deśika's writings expand the linguistic field of South Indian devotion beyond the normative claims either of Sanskrit or Tamil devotional texts. His language passively mirroring earlier masters? 17 Ramanujan has claimed that traditional Indian commentators do not see Indian literature in historical perspective; rather they form what he calls-citing T. S. Eliot-a " 'simultaneous order,' where every new text within a series confirms yet alters the whole order ever so slightly, and not always so slightly." 18 How then does Deśika's Sanskrit and Tamil poetry "confirm yet alter" the "order" of South Indian literature, most specifically, the Tamil literature of devotion? Our A Note on Sources and Translation Stotras and Prabandhams All of the poems discussed in this book have been edited and commented upon by Śrīvaiṣṇava Ācāryas from the early years of this century, and, as far as I know, there are no significant textual variants (other than minor misreadings here and there) or textual (p.13) problems connected with any of them. Because Deśika's Sanskrit stotras have a long history of liturgical use in temples, there are many editions of the "Deśika Stotra Mālā," including little pamphlets printed for use at

Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin) If one was to simplify, the book under review could be said to fall under what is popularly called comparative religion, except that it emphatically does not fall under this genre as the scholarship that it contains forcefully argues against the essen-tialist definition of religion. The crux of this book is about delineating what was new in the bhakti that emerged in North India during the medieval and early modern periods and how devotional communities that evolved around it aligned or disagreed with each other. Bhakti, tantra, yoga, and Sufism as important elements in the subtitle of A Genealogy of Devotion allude to these religious communities and give an impression that each of these religiosities will emerge as a distinct subject of discussion in the book. On the contrary, what Patton Burchett has ably done is to weave the in-terlinkages between them, suggesting that the boundaries around each were not rigid. In narrating the historical relationships between them, this book nonetheless shows that each of these strands also had distinct features that kept its individual identity intact. Thus, fluidity on the one hand as the harbinger of possible exchanges co-existed with concerted efforts of the practitioners of these religiosities to define oneself as distinct from the "other." These multiple sensibilities are complex to explain, and it is this heterogeneity and complexity that Burchett has carefully brought to the fore, thus establishing that neither binaries of opposition , nor distinct personalities of uniqueness remain historical subjects of enquiry for long. The most central issue in the book that is consciously highlighted is that each of these religiosities evolved against the complex politico-historical circumstances from the early medieval to the early modern period. This period concomitantly saw the emergence of Persianate traditions that then fruitfully fertilized with the Indic ones. It is this particu-larity of the historical context against which religious ideas evolved that is the essence of the book. The various chapters then unravel how this happened , what were the challenges and institutional impetus and most importantly, the ideological influences that transformed the religious landscape of North India during this period. Burchett does a microlevel regional case study of the Rāmānandīs to illustrate his arguments.

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