Tamil Heritage Trust
Invites you to a Digital Talk on
Women and Bhakti Poetry:
Karaikal Ammai & Andal
By
Dr Sarada Thallam
SV University, Tirupati
At 5.30 pm, Saturday, November 7, 2020
Please register for the talk here
About the Talk:
The Bhakti movement is the child of the Dravida desa, especially the Tamil land and language. Women saint poets from Tamil Nadu have had a deep nexus with both the ethos of bhakti as well as its devotional poetics as reflected in their poetic corpus. Two Tamil women poets of the bhakti movement remain deeply etched in our memory for their sterling contributions to devotional poetics. Karaikkal Ammai and Andal are towering figures both for their bhakti rasa and for their poetic excellence. One is a Saiva poet of the sixth century, while the other is a Vaishnava poet of the 9th century. Separated though by three centuries, and religious sub sects, these two women weave exquisite garlands of devotional verse that engross both the connoisseurs of poetry and the bhaktas alike, with a powerful simultaneity.
This talk would compare the two poetic jewels of the Tamil land and analyse their divergent, yet converging patterns of bhakti and surrender, that have enriched the fine tapestry of Tamil, nay, Indian devotional aesthetics.
About the Speaker:
Prof. Sarada Thallam teaches in the department of English at Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati. With over 25 years of teaching experience. She has to her credit several published works including a book on African American Women Playwrights, and Rajam Krishnan’s Indian Feminist Hermeneutics. She has published research papers and book chapters in the domains of contemporary literary studies and classical literature. She has presented research papers in many conferences within and outside India. Besides, she has given numerous talks on multiple aspects of literature and culture.
A post-graduate in English Literature from the Madras University, Sarada later did her doctorate from the University of Hyderabad.
A former Fulbright Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she has visited the universities of Oxford, Georgia and Emory on academic schedules.
Her interests include African American Women’s Writings, Gender Studies, Theatre, Performance, Postcolonial Studies, Literary Theory, Translation and Comparative studies. Bhakti literature, and its women poets in particular, are especially close to her heart!
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