Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints

Indira Viswanathan Peterson is a scholar of Tamil literature and religion, and this Princeton University Press book is her scholarly study and translation of the Tevaram, the devotional hymns of the Tamil Saiva saints, combined with historical and literary analysis of the bhakti tradition that produced them. Its strength is that it presents both a careful translation and the historical context needed to understand these hymns' place within Tamil Saiva devotional practice, rather than treating them as isolated poetry. Its limit is that it is a specialist study of this specific Tamil devotional corpus, so a claim about the Tamil language or the wider Dravidian language family in general, outside this particular religious and literary context, needs a linguistics source rather than this study of devotional poetry.