emotional religion here uses the language of a mythology which it has outgrown.  The emotion itself while charged with the love of god, the sense of sin and contrition, has in it another strain which jars on Europeans.  Siva sports with the world and his worshippers treat him with an affectionate intimacy which may be paralleled in the religion of Krishna but hardly in Christianity.[537] Thus several hymns have reference to a game, such as tossing about a ball (hymn vii), battledore and shuttlecock (xiv) or some form of wrestling in which the opponents place their hands on each other’s shoulders (xv).  The worshipper can even scold the deity.  “If thou forsake me, I will make people smile at thee.  I shall abuse thee sore:  madman clad in elephant skin:  madman that ate the poison:  madman, who chose even me as thy own."[538]

Again, though in part the tone of these poems is Christian, yet they contain little that suggests Christian doctrine.  There is nothing about redemption or a suffering god,[539] and many ideas common to Christianity and Hinduism—­such as the incarnation,[540] the Trinity, and the divine child and his mother—­are absent.  It is possible that in some of the later works of the Sittars Christian influence[541] may have supervened but most of this Tamil poetry is explicable as the development of the ideas expressed in the Bhagavad-gita and the Svetasvatara Upanishad.  Chronologically Christian influence is not impossible and there is a tradition that Manikka-Vacagar reconverted to Hinduism some natives of Malabar who had become Christians[542] but the uncertainty of his date makes it hard to fix his place in the history of doctrine.  Recent Hindu scholars are disposed to assign him to the second or third century.[543] In support of this, it is plausibly urged that he was an active adversary of the Buddhists, that tradition is unanimous in regarding him as earlier than the writers of the Devaram[544] who make references (not however indisputable) to his poem, and that Perisiriyar, who commented on it, lived about 700 A.D.  I confess that the tone and sentiments of the poem seem to me what one would expect in the eleventh rather than in the third century:  it has something of the same emotional quality as the Gita-govinda and the Bhagavata-purana, though it differs from them in doctrine and in its more masculine devotion.  But the Dravidians are not of the same race as the northern Hindus and since this ecstatic monotheism is clearly characteristic of their literature, it may have made its appearance in the south earlier than elsewhere.

The Tiruvacagam is not unorthodox but it deals direct with God and is somewhat heedless of priests.  This feature becomes more noticeable in other authors such as Pattanattu Pillai, Kapilar and the Telugu poet Vemana.  The first named appears to have lived in the tenth century.  The other two are legendary figures to whom anthologies of popular gnomic verses are ascribed and some of those attributed to Kapilar