There is even a scene where Andal sings a Subramania Bharati song (Kaakkai Chiraginile), never mind the anachronism! Otherwise, Kannadasan’s songs enliven the film no end, given the lyricist’s deep admiration for Andal’s personality and poetry as revealed by him in his speeches, prose writings as well as references in many of his lyrics spread over decades. Written and directed by A P Nagarajan, and starring Sivaji and K R Vijaya among others, this version modified the traditional account with an eye on the box office, but capably captured the story for a modern audience, punctuating the narration with lilting songs and comedy. It is the 1968 version of Andal’s life as presented in ‘Thirumal Perumai’ that has survived in its entirety to this day. We have most of the songs of the film as they were recorded for the gramophone, but the film is lost. It was a great musical with Tamil poet Shuddhananda Bharati penning the lyrics and G Ramanathan composing the music. The amazing Soprano and actress U R Jeevaratnam, a petite young woman in her twenties in 1948 played Andal in ‘Sri Andal’. One of Tamil cinema’s pioneering directors, R Prakash, directed the Andal story’s first cinematic version in 1937, featuring famous Thevaram exponent Sundara Odhuvarmurthi as Andal’s father, but the film sank without a trace. His success was reflected in the generous donations he made to Andal’s temple in her hometown. At a time when stage plays managed with a few gaslights, Cunniah employed generators to make them an awesome splash of light and colour. M L Vasanthakumari’s magnetic rendering which tweaked the musical pace and the melodic setting of a few verses put the golden seal on Ariyakudi’s pioneering effort.Ĭ Cunniah, the great stage impresario who was known for spectacular mythologicals like ‘Dasavathaaram’, ‘Sri Krishna Leela’ and ‘Bhagavad Gita’, considered Andal his patron saint and godmother and had S G Kittappa, the reigning dramatic star of his age, play Andal in ‘Andal Kalyanam’ in the late 1920s. But after Carnatic music stalwart Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar composed the music for all the 30 verses of Andal’s Tiruppavai and popularised them through cutting discs and live programmes, the musical Tiruppavai was well set to be immortalised in the Carnatic idiom. Ironically, in the huge surge of liturgical hymns and devotional songs rendered mostly by devadasi singers in the gramophone boom of the first half of the 1900s, Andal’s verses found expression but rarely, though through entrancing singers like Vasundhara Devi, D K Pattammal and M S Subbulakshmi.