Between roughly the sixth and ninth centuries Tamil country produced the bhakti movement, devotional religion sung in the mother tongue, and its hymns remain in daily liturgical use. The Shaiva saints, the Nayanars, sang the Tevaram, whose core is the work of Sambandar, Appar and Sundarar, and Manikkavasagar added the Tiruvasagam, of which Tamil tradition says that whoever is not melted by it must have a heart of stone.
The Vaishnava saints, the twelve Alvars, produced the four thousand verses gathered as the Divya Prabandham, including Andal's Tiruppavai, sung across Tamil homes each Margali month. These corpora acquired canonical standing. The Divya Prabandham is called the Tamil Veda, and in Srivaishnava temples it is recited liturgically alongside the Sanskrit Veda, a dual canon formalized by Ramanuja's tradition. Shaiva temples maintain hereditary and trained singers, the otuvars, whose office is precisely the singing of the Tamil hymns before the deity. The bhakti corpus also carries the pann system of ancient Tamil music, ancestor of ragas still used. Pilgrims sing these hymns at the shrines the saints themselves sang of, the padal petra sthalams, so that a verse composed thirteen centuries ago is still performed at the very temple it names.