especially when faced with enticing marriage prospects, material wealth and the demands of family ties.⁷

Beschi has very ingeniously made this poem locally appealing. The Indian mind in general and the Tamil mind in particular lays the greatest emphasis on the chastity of women. The two great Tamil epics, the Rāmāyaṇam and the Ciḻappatikāram centre around the heroine only. The whole plot centres around the heroine in Beschi’s Kittēriammāḷ who is equally chaste and completely at the disposal of her Lord. A similar heroine, Maṇimēkalai, in one of the twin epics in Tamil (who was a spinster like Kittēriammāḷ) devoted herself entirely to God and was a virgin also. She serves God and performs miracles.

The incident about drowning the children in the river is also not new to the natives. The story of Karṇaṉ, the eldest of the Pāṇdavās is an example.

The commending verses beautifully describe the saint. The arguments about the description of her beauty between the women are very interesting. The saint’s “lotus feet” are said to stand on the moon by the first maiden. The second says that the lotus will not blossom on seeing the moon but on the other hand will shut its petals. She feels that the bee will not approach the lotus feet since it is ‘shut’. The next maiden continues the strain and sings that since the saint has wrapped the sun around her as a garment, the lotus is open and the bees drone around it. Another maiden questions whether the saint will not burn herself wrapped with the sun. Since the body of the saint is immersed in the tank of benevolence, the sun cannot burn her, says the next maiden. So proceeds the poem.

The vocabulary is simple, using common, every day words and the style of the poem is also simple and rhythmic.

We learn that two medical books in Tamil verse are attributed to Beschi. They are (1) Vaittiya Nācakāṇṭam edited by Polur Narayanaswamy Nadar in the Hindu year “Bava”. There are 100

7. Besse, L.: Father Beschi, Pp. 87-97