Forty-Eight Letters

Brahma went down to the Ganga at Varanasi to bathe, as the rite he was performing required, and his wives went with him: Saraswati, Savitri and Gayatri. The path ran along the bank. On the bank, under a tree, a Gandharva woman sat with a yazh in her lap, playing.

Saraswati stopped.

She is the goddess of music. Every raga there is came out of her, and there is no singer she cannot follow and no player she cannot better. She stood on the path and listened, and the longer she listened the more certain she was of something she had never had to admit before. This was sweeter than her own. The others walked on. She did not notice them go. She did not notice the sun move. When the song ended and she came back to herself, the path was empty and the bathing was over.

She found them on the ghat, dried and dressed.

"Was it right," she said, "to bathe without waiting for me?"

Brahma looked at her for a moment before he answered.

"A wife who comes to a rite with her husband does not stop on the road," he said. "You forgot what you came here for, and you forgot it for another woman's music. Take forty-eight bodies, one for every letter of the script, and be born on earth forty-eight times."

He was the creator, and what he said was already done. She did not argue the sentence. She asked about its shape.

"Forty-eight lives," she said. "One after another? A whole life each, and the next one waiting?"

Her distress reached him, and he changed the sentence without withdrawing it.

"Not one after another," he said. "All at once. The letters will be born together, as poets, in the Pandya country in the south, and the letters are your body, so your body will be whole there even while it is divided. And the first letter, the letter a, on which every other letter leans, will not be any of the forty-eight. It will be Shiva. He will be the forty-ninth."

So the letters became men. Forty-eight of them, grown, learned, with the whole of the language already in their mouths, walked south out of the north until they came to Madurai, where Sundareswarar lives with Meenakshi. They went into the temple and bowed at the god's feet, and there they founded the academy of poets that the Tamil country calls the Sangam.

The god gave them a seat. It was a board to sit on, and he gave it in an order: Nakkeerar sat first, then Kapilar, then Paranar, and the others after. On that board the forty-eight wrote the finest poetry the south had heard. And then a strange thing happened, which could only happen to poets who had all been one goddess an hour before. The poems were so alike that nobody could tell whose was whose.

"This is mine," said one, holding up a verse.

"That is mine," said another. "Read the second line."

The verses were handed round the board and came back unclaimed. In the end it was the god who sorted them. Sundareswarar, who had been the letter a all along, took the pile and gave every poet his own poem back, and the poets did the only sensible thing and made him the head of the academy. Forty-eight letters and one president: forty-nine. That is the whole alphabet, and that, Madurai says, is where Tamil poetry began.

The temple tells it with a plank in it, and gives the king's name.

In the days of the Pandya king Vankiya Sekaran, Brahma had finished ten horse sacrifices in the north, and on the morning after the last he went to bathe in the Ganga with Saraswati, Savitri and Gayatri. A Gandharva woman was playing the yazh on the way. Saraswati, who found the music sweeter than her own, stood still and lost the hour, and Brahma and the other two bathed and did not miss her.

When she came to herself she was hurt, and she said so. Brahma answered that a wife follows her husband, and that she had forgotten her duty for another woman's playing. Then he spoke the curse: her forty-eight forms would be born on earth as learned men, with Sundareswarar of Madurai as their head, and by his grace they would one day be joined again and come home.

They were born masters of eighteen languages and devoted to the god of Madurai. He came to them as a learned man and asked what they were looking for.

"A leader," they said, "under whom we can present our books."

He led them into the sanctum and walked into the linga, and was gone. They understood whom they had followed, and took him for their leader. The king heard of them and called them to court, and they praised him in verse so well that he gave them gold and built them a hall, the Sanga Mandapam, north-west of the temple. The poets of the town, passed over, forced a debate on them and lost it.

The newcomers wanted more. They prayed to Sundareswarar for a greater skill, and he came to them as an old scholar carrying a plank.

"It may appear short," he said. "It has mantra power. A poet whose poem is correct may sit on it, and it will make room for every other correct poem."

Nakkeerar and Paanar sat first, and the plank stretched for them. The others sat, and it stretched again, until all forty-eight had a place, and after that the plank was the judge of a poem: the Sanga Palagai, the Sangam plank. But their poems were all on the same matter, and they began to quarrel over whose verse was whose, and the god had to come back a third time, as a poet, and hand each man his own. In the end, as he had promised, her forms came together again by his grace, and Saraswati went home whole.