In classical Sanskrit alaṃkāra-śāstra (poetics), śṛṅgāra — the rasa of love — is divided into two principal modes: sambhoga (enjoyment in union) and vipralambha (the ache of separation). Vipralambha itself is analytically subdivided into pūrvarāga (love before meeting), māna (wounded pride, the lover's sulk), pravāsa (separation due to journey), and viprayoga (separation by death or irretrievable loss). In the Āzhvār corpus, these modes are employed not as literary artifice but as genuine maps of the soul's relationship with Bhagavān.
The nāyikā-bhāva — the Āzhvār or the devotee identifying as the heroine longing for the divine hero — is the dominant mode of the Divya Prabandham. Nammāzhvār's Tiruvāymozhi, Āṇṭāḷ's Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumozhi, and Kulacēkara Āzhvār's Perumāḷ Tirumozhi all draw heavily on vipralambha śṛṅgāra. The logic of vipralambha in the devotional register is profound: the soul's separation from Bhagavān is not presented as a simple absence but as the intensification of the soul's consciousness of its own true longing. The greater the sense of separation, the more vividly the soul perceives that its entire being is oriented toward Bhagavān alone.
Āṇṭāḷ's Nācciyār Tirumozhi is perhaps the most sustained and intense exploration of vipralambha in the entire Prabandham, enacting every phase of the heroine's longing — from the first stirrings of love in a dream (pūrvarāga) through acute suffering in separation. The Ācāryas, particularly Periyavāccāṉ Piḷḷai in his vyākhyānam, interpret this not as mere literary convention but as a theological statement: the ātmā's highest condition in saṃsāra is precisely this acute awareness of its distance from Bhagavān.