alvars

The Alvars, the Tamil poet-saints of roughly the 6th to 9th centuries CE, sang this Krishna in ecstatic verse and helped carry bhakti across the south.

In the Tamil south, the Sri Vaishnava tradition reveres a body of 4,000 Tamil verses composed by twelve poet-saints called the Alvars , who lived roughly between the fifth and eighth centuries.

…e sixth and ninth centuries, and there were two families of them. The Alvars, twelve in number, were lost in love for Vishnu.

The first singers: Alvars and Nayanars The movement crystallised first in the Tamil south, in two parallel streams that ran from roughly the sixth to the ninth centuries.

In the Tamil south there is a further treasure, the hymns of the Alvars , twelve poet-saints of the sixth to ninth centuries whose Divya Prabandham is revered as a Tamil Veda.

Sanatana Dharma has no founder and no single date of birth. It is the cumulative tradition of the Indian subcontinent, built up over more than three thousand years,…

The twelve Āḻvārs , who lived across roughly the sixth to ninth centuries and included the towering Nammāḻvār and the one woman among them, Āṇṭāḷ, poured out their longing to the Vishnu of particular shrines.

The Nayanars , sixty-three of them, sang to Shiva . The Alvars , twelve, sang to Vishnu .