ĀḺVĀRS. The Āḻvārs are a group of Hindu religious poets of South India. Their name in Tamil means "sages" or "saints." As devotees of Māl, a deity who combines attributes of the Kṛṣṇa of the Bhagavadgītā and earlier Purāṉas with those of Viṣṇu and Nārāyaṉa, they differ from a second, contemporary group of poets, the Śaiva Nāyaṉārs. Yet in other respects both groups are closely related and together must be regarded as responsible for the formation of a devotional, vernacular Hinduism.

The only reliable source on the Āḻvārs is the corpus of their own poetry, which the semilegendary Nāthamuni compiled in the early tenth century CE (and which was somewhat modified in the twelfth century). This corpus is known as the N...