Vallalar and Navalar: A History of the Literary Feud

In the nineteenth century, Tamil Nadu in South India and the Tamil-speaking regions of Sri Lanka were shaken by an extraordinary literary and religious conflict—a nearly fifty-year-long battle of wits that divided vertically Tamil scholarship across both societies. At the heart of this storm lay the collected hymns of Va??alar, titled Tiruvaru?pa (Poems of Divine Grace) by his followers. However, these hymns were fiercely opposed and rejected by Navalar and his traditionalist allies, who dismissed them as Maru?pa (Poems of Delusion), arguing that the sacred epithet Tiruvaru?pa belonged solely to the ancient Saivite texts. This historical study chronicles and delves into the bitter feud between Va??alar, the revolutionary saint-poet who championed a simple, ritual-free, and iconoclastic form of worship, and A?umuka Navalar, the staunch defender of traditional Saivite orthodoxy. Their ideological clash not only shaped the religious and literary landscape of their time but also left a lasting impact on Tamil culture and spirituality.