Extraordinary Child: Poems from a South Indian Devotional Genre

by Paula Richman

For hundreds of years Tamil poets have been composing devotional texts in which they adopt the voice of a mother and address praises to an extraordinary child. The poems, called pillaittamil (literally "Tamil for a child"), form a major genre of Tamil literature. Since the twelfth century, when the first known pillaittamil was written in honor of a Chola king, many of these poems have been composed in praise of Murugan and South Indian goddesses,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824810635
• ISBN13: 9780824810634
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.3"