A pragmatic analysis of Lord Shiva's dance

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the use of metaphors in selected Tamil hymns for Lord Shiva in one of his cosmic manifestations or murtis. The wisdom of life is communicated through the dance of the Lord and the use of metaphors in religious Saiva hymns invoke the reader/devotee to relate to the Lord's actions of creation, conservation, destruction, concealment and illumination. The article first discusses the multimodal visual metaphor of the dance form of the Lord and then gives a pragmatic analysis of the use of temporal and location metaphors in hymns or tevaram by the poet-saints or nayanmars. The article contends that there is a “slippage” between speaker (poet-saints') meaning and sentence meaning. The canonical literature becomes “meaningful” to the reader or devotee with the inclusion of emotional content that relates to the authority of the religious canon and its meaning. Findings reveal a particular narrative pattern in the tevaram and the use of metaphors explicates the devotion or bakhti of the poet-saints to the Lord.