Sundaramurtti

(8th c.) The last of the Nayanars, a
group of sixty-three southern Indian
poet-saints who were devotees (bhakta) of the god Shiva. Along with their
contemporaries the Alvars, who were
devotees of Vishnu, the Nayanars
spearheaded the revitalization of
Hindu religion through their passionate devotion (bhakti) to a personal god,
conveyed through hymns sung in the
Tamil language. Along with his predecessors, Appar and Sambandar,
Sundaramurtti actively opposed the
heterodox sects of the times, particularly the Jains, whom he reviles in his
poems. The collected hymns of the
three most important Nayanars—Appar,
Sambandar, and Sundaramurtti—comprise the Devaram, the most sacred of
the Tamil Shaivite texts. Sundaramurtti
is also important for his catalog of the
sixty-three Nayanars, which forms
the first literary source for Tamil
Shaivite hagiography.