Long before our modern world came to recognize the moral and mental worth of women, some ancient cultures gave the highest respect to womanhood by personifying wisdom and knowledge as a She. Thus, Saraswati is the goddess of Wisdom in the Hindu world, as Athena and Minerva were in Greece and Rome. So was Isis for ancient Egyptians.
The Tamil people (originally from South India) recall with respect and affection Avvaiyár: a woman of keen intelligence blessed with the gift for encapsulating wisdom in pithy sayings, verbal vitamins as it were, that jolt us into awareness. Nowhere is the Shakespearean phrase, “Brevity is the soul of wit (wisdom)” more tellingly illustrated than in Avvai. Her alphabetically arranged maxims are both descriptive and prescriptive, and often within grasp of even young minds.
Tamil children are often taught Avvaiyár’s opening line in her Áttichchúdi: aṟam cheya virumbu – Desire (develop a wish) to do what is proper. Avvaiyár advises us to wish to do the right thing. She reveals thereby a deep understanding of human psychology: once the desire is implanted in heart and mind, action would follow spontaneously.
Other nuggets in this treasury include: Anger cools off. Never give up learning. Hinder not charity. Refrain from hurtful words. Never abandon persistence. Speak not ill of numbers and letters. First give, then eat. Behave righteously.
A companion work, Kondṟai Véndan, is another mound of maxims. Each maxim is a string of four terse words. The genius of the Tamil language sparkles in these precious nuggets in rhythmic meters. The work begins with: annaiyum pitávum munnari deivam: Mother and father are the first Gods to be reckoned. Then we are reminded that it is very good to worship in a house of prayer. In the same work, we are advised to forget promptly an unattainable desire; to dwell in a town where water is readily available; to refrain from grieving about a loss and to get back to work again; to never give up zest.
These two of Avvaiyár’s works have acquired prestige and permanence in Tamil culture. When writing on palm leaves was in vogue, children began their education by writing the maxims of Avvaiyár, even as passages from scriptures are learned by rote in some other cultures. Avvaiyár’s precepts are non-denominational, though there is the customary invocation to the Almighty at the beginning. In the Avvai-inspired tradition, the letters of the alphabet introduce the young to values and wisdom, rather than to apples, boys, cats, and dogs.
Avvai shows the path for balanced and meaningful living without metaphysical mumble-jumble. She doesn’t speak of soul, heaven, and hell. Nor does she tell us how to meditate to achieve mystic ecstasy. She is a down-to-earth teacher who utters wisdom as common sense. Long before William James, she knew what pragmatic ethics is. She was humble too. “What has been learned has the measure of a fistful of sand,” she reflected, “what is not learned is vast as the world.” Centuries later, the great mathematical physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace said, What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense.
Like other enlightened thinkers of the tradition, Avvai proclaimed that there was no difference between human beings in the traditional birth-based castes. There are only two classes of people: those willing to share their blessings, and those who don’t.
Avvaiyár was a prodigy who talked poetry at age four. She grew up to be a lovely lass. As she grew to become a dainty damsel, her father began to seek a beau for the belle. Now she prayed to the Almighty to transform her into a wrinkled old granny, white hair, curved spine and all, for wedded wifehood wasn’t her womanly wish. The boon was granted, so says the lore, and she was metamorphosed into a graceful grandma who became the doyenne of Tamil poetry. What a contrast from the common obsession to look younger than what the calendar reveals! So no one knows how she dressed up as a dame. Artists have always sketched her as an elderly matron: indeed, that is what the word avvai signifies.
Avvaiyár stands tall among the women-poetesses of the world, though she is seldom recognized as such, even within India. She was not a saint in the religious sense, but she was considered by later generations to be worthy of being enshrined in a temple. On the long stretch of Chennai’s Marina there is a tall statue of the revered poet with a walking stick standing with disarming simplicity.
Spurts of Thought 