The Tamil poems of the twelve āḻvār are embedded within a well-established commentarial tradition in Sanskrit, Tamil and Manipravala that traces itself to at least the twelfth century. To read these poems and to translate them, is to reckon with this legacy: in the case of J.S.M. Hooper, who offered the first English translation of all twelve poets in his Hymns of the Alvar (1929), this debt expressed itself in heavy annotations and an explicit expression of reliance on the commentaries as a way to make sense of the world of the āḻvār; for A.K. Ramanujan, the commentaries were but a useful aid to be rejected or utilized depending on how it served his own finely honed aesthetic sensibility. But unlike either Hooper or Ramanujan, the Śrīvaiṣṇavas do not approach commentary as a way to make sense of esoteric, theologically demanding poems. Rather, commentary is a path of enjoyment, and its goal is relish (anubhava). The purpose of a commentary is not simply to elucidate meaning, but through its practice, to induce in its audience the āḻvār poet’s enjoyment (anubhava) of god. Framed as anubhava, commentary for the Śrīvaiṣṇavas therefore is not only located in a written (printed) text, but lives and is refreshed through oral discourse, performance, and gesture. In such commentarial practices, the poem has no fixity and instead becomes a fluid, malleable thing of permeable boundaries, shaped into a conduit for the undammed emotion of anubhava. In this paper, I frame translation itself as anubhava, to explore the implications of working within the religo-aesthetic imperatives of the commentarial traditions of the Śrīvaiṣṇava saṁpradāyas.

If Udbhaṭa (c. 800) is one of the unsung heroes of South Asia's intellectual history, this is epitomized by his Kumārasambhava. Not a single study of this work exists, and it is doubtful whether any modern scholar has even read his illustration verses as a continuous poem, let alone examined them as such. The purpose of the current essay is therefore simple: to begin the process of thinking about Udbhaṭa’s forgotten poem. Thus, the paper offers a first complete English translation of the 94 verses that we have of it, independently of the figurative phenomena they illustrate (references to and explanations of the relevant alaṅkāras are relegated to the footnotes). The final sections of the paper are dedicated to an initial analysis of some aspects of the poem, primarily its subversive presentation of its protagonist, Śiva, and to speculations about the reasons for its cold reception.