Publisher`s description - Alwars
Traditionally, Alvars are considered to have lived between 4200 BCE - 2700 BCE,[2][3] Vaishnava orthodoxy posits the number of alvars as ten, though there are other references that include Andal and Madhurakavi, making the number twelve.[4] The devotional outpourings of Alvars, composed during the early medieval period of Tamil history, helped revive the bhakti movement, through their hymns of worship to Vishnu and his Avatars. They praised 108 of this deity's holy abodes in their hymns, known as the Divya Desams. Vaishanava bhakti literature was an all-India phenomenon in the Tamil-speaking region of South India, with twelve Alvar (one immersed in God) saint-poets, who wrote devotional songs. The religion of Alvar poets, which included a woman poet, Andal, was devotion to God through love (bhakti), and in the ecstasy of such devotions they sang hundreds of songs which embodied both depth of feeling and felicity of expressions.[5] Together with the contemporary sixty three Saiva Nayanars, they are accounted as South India's 75 Apostles of Bhakti because of their importance in the rise of the Hindu Bhakti movement. The collection of their hymns is known as Divya Prabandha.
