From Tirumozhi to Surdas: The Ancient Tradition of Singing Krishna as a Child
The Alvar Saints and the Bhakti Current
Long before the great bhakti poets of North India composed their celebrated verses, the Tamil Alvar saints of South India had already lit the flame of personal, passionate devotion to Vishnu and Krishna. The twelve Alvars, whose name means “those immersed in God,” composed in Tamil between roughly the 6th and 9th centuries CE, producing a vast body of devotional poetry later compiled as the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the Four Thousand Divine Compositions. Their vision was radical for their time: God was not merely a cosmic sovereign to be approached through ritual, but a beloved presence to be adored, sung to, wept for, and cradled in song.
Periyalwar and the Birth of Vatsalya Bhakti
Among the twelve Alvars, Vishnuchitta, reverently known as Periyalwar, the Great Alvar, stands in a category entirely his own. Composing nearly 1100 years ago, he authored the Tirumoli, a collection of songs that did something no poet in the Vaishnava tradition had done before with such sustained depth and tenderness. He sang Krishna not as the wielder of the Sudarshana Chakra, not as the preacher of the Bhagavad Gita on the battlefield, but as a small, beautiful, sometimes naughty child in the arms of his mother Yashoda.
The Tirumozhi describes with intimate warmth the everyday moments of Krishna’s infancy and early childhood. Yashoda hums a lullaby as the child drifts to sleep. She coaxes him gently to nurse at her breast. The poems capture the anxiety and joy of his first bath, the wonder of his first stumbling step, and the ritual solemnity of his ear-piercing ceremony, a rite of passage that even the Lord of the universe must pass through when he takes human form. These are not theological abstractions. They are the lived experiences of a mother and a divine child, rendered in verse of exquisite sensitivity.
This mode of relating to Krishna is called Vatsalya Bhava, the sentiment of parental love, and it is one of the five primary emotional modes of bhakti described in Vaishnava theology. The Bhagavata Purana, the foundational scripture of Krishna devotion, affirms the centrality of this approach. In its tenth book, which narrates the life of Krishna in Vrindavana, Yashoda’s love for the child is described as the purest mirror in which the divine chooses to see itself. As the Bhagavata Purana states:
“He whose glories are sung by the Vedas and the Upanishads chose to suckle at the breast of Yashoda, bound by her love.”
(Bhagavata Purana, Skandha 10)
Periyalwar understood this mystery profoundly. His genius was in recognizing that the most exalted spiritual experience is not necessarily one of awe and majesty but can equally be one of tenderness and care.
Symbolism and Meaning: Why Krishna Must Be a Child
The image of Krishna as a child carries deep symbolic weight in the Bhagavata tradition. The child is utterly dependent, yet this particular child is the sustainer of all existence. Yashoda feeds him, yet he contains within himself all the worlds. She scolds him for stealing butter, yet he is the source of all abundance. This paradox is not incidental. It is the heart of the theology.
The Bhagavata tradition teaches that God takes the form in which his devotees most ardently love him. When Yashoda’s love was so intense and so maternal, Krishna allowed himself to be completely small and vulnerable before her. The famous episode in which Yashoda ties Krishna to a mortar as punishment for mischief, an event known as Damodara, is celebrated precisely because it shows God willingly bound by the love of a devotee. No ritual, no austerity bound him. Only love did.
For the devotee who sings these songs or hears them, something similar happens. The overwhelming grandeur of the divine becomes intimate, accessible, and deeply personal. The distance collapses.
From Tamil South to Braj North: The Thread Continues
Nearly 700 years after Periyalwar composed his Tirumoli, the blind poet-saint Surdas of North India composed his celebrated Sursagar in Braj Bhasha, the dialect of the Braj region where Krishna spent his childhood. Surdas, drawing on the Bhagavata Purana and on the living bhakti tradition that flowed from the Alvars through generations of saints, composed hundreds of padas, lyric poems, devoted to the child Krishna. His depictions of Yashoda’s attempts to feed the child, of the infant Krishna crawling across the courtyard of Nanda’s home, of the playful thefts of butter and the uproar they cause among the Gopis, belong to the same current of Vatsalya Bhakti that Periyalwar had first set in full flow.
The geographic and linguistic distance between Tamil Nadu and the Braj region is enormous, yet the spiritual imagination is the same. This is the remarkable unity of the Bhakti movement, a current of love that crossed caste, language, and region.
Modern Relevance: A Living Devotion
The tradition Periyalvar initiated is fully alive today. The celebration of Krishnashtami, particularly in its Dahi Handi festivities and in the intimate domestic rituals of bathing and dressing a small idol of the infant Krishna, continues to express Vatsalya Bhakti. In homes across Tamil Nadu, the Tirumoli is still sung. The Damodara month of Kartika sees families lighting lamps and singing hymns to the child Krishna. In temples from Guruvayur in Kerala to Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh, the deity is treated not merely as an object of worship but as a living child to be bathed, dressed, fed, and put to sleep.
This is the enduring power of what Periyalwar began: the understanding that devotion is not merely a matter of doctrine but of love, and that love finds its purest and most natural expression in caring for the small, the vulnerable, and the beloved. In singing Krishna to sleep, Periyalvar taught the world how to hold the infinite in human arms.