a minister of the Pandya king. We learn further from the Guruparamparai that the name of Nammalvar was Maran, that he was a saint from his childhood, that he was the son of one Kari a Vellala by caste and that one of his disciples was Madhurakavi, a Brahman of Tirukkolur in the Tinnevelly district. Obviously, confounding the names Kari, Maran and Madhurakavi, which occur in the inscriptions as well as in the Vaishnava biography, a recent writer in the Indian Antiquary jumps, like Fluellen, to the conclusion that Kari or Madhurakavi was the son of Nammalvar or Maran and that both of them were contemporaries of Tirumangai Alvar. According to this perverted view Nammalvar should have lived prior to A.D. 770. We cannot understand how the Koil-olugu, on which the reviewer relies so much for his data, is more trustworthy than the Guru paramparai. The latter work unmistakably asserts that Madhurakavi Alvar was a Brahman and that Nammalvar was a celibate saint. Evidently this writer does not seem to have read either the Guruparamparai, or the works of Nammalvar, or even Mr. V. Venkayya's notes on the Triplicane Inscriptions of Dantivarman in the Ep. Ind. Vol. VIII. p. 290.
Nammalvar has one hymn on the god of Tirumokur and four or five on the famous shrine at Tirumalirum-Solai ; but he has left none on the Vishnu deity at the foot of the Yanai Malai or the Elephant Rock which lies between these two places. Our Alwar must therefore have lived either before or long
