பாசுரத்திலிருந்து புனிதப் புவியியலுக்கு திருமங்கையாழ்வாரின் பெரிய திருமொழியில் திவ்யதேசங்களின் எண்ணிம வரைபட ஆய்வு: From Pasuram to Sacred Geography: A Digital Mapping Study of the Divya Desams in Tirumangai Alvar's Periya Tirumozhi

Abstract

In Tirumangai Alvar's Periya Tirumozhi, the sacred site is not only the place where the Lord dwells but also a space in which nature, memory, bodily experience and worship come together. This article subjects twelve pasurams relating to six Divya Desams—Tiruvenkatam, Tirukkadalmallai, Tiruvarangam, Tirunaraiyur, Tirukkannapuram and Tiruppullani—to close reading and digital coding. Four elements—place name, local water body, description of nature and the form of the deity—are encoded as data and compared by linking them with present-day geographic coordinates. Rather than treating every geographic word in a pasuram as the setting of the site, the study keeps apart local description, metaphor, mythological place and reference to another site. In the selected sample, local water references occur in three pasurams and local plant or agricultural description in five. At Tiruvarangam the flow of water and human life come together; at Tiruppullani the seashore and the memory of separation are linked; at Tirukkannapuram similes for the form of the deity are prominent. These results apply only to the twelve pasurams studied. The central argument is that sacred geography must be understood by reading the location of a place together with the semantic structure of the text. The digital map serves as a tool for testing this reading.

Keywords

• Tirumangai Alvar
• Periya Tirumozhi
• Divya Desam
• sacred geography
• digital humanities
• place names
• literary cartography