The ancient literature of the Tamils, like the
literature of the ancient Greeks, impresses one not so
much by the bulk, range and variety of the works that
have been preserved for us, as by the comparative
novelty and compelling nature of its contents, and by
the light that it throws on the hoary and
characteristic culture of the southern part of
Peninsular India.
What Goethe said of literature in general is also
true of Tamil.
"Literature is a fragment of a fragment; of all that
ever happened or has been said, but a fraction has been
written, and of this but little is extant''.[l]
With Greek and Latin, Tamil shares
the misfortune of having lost the vast portion of its
ancient literature, but while Greek and Latin have yet
their drarnas, epics, and historical, philosophical and
forensic prose, it is almost exclusively the lyric and
heroic and bardic poetry of ancient Tamil that has
survived. Yet what has escaped the ravages of time,
though not even a hundredth of the actual output,
[2] reveals elements
so original and fresh in the history of literature, and
throws such new light on the history of a portion of
the world, that to study the literary features of
ancient literature or to describe the world as it was
at the age of Asoka, or Alexander, or Augustus, it
would not be sufficient to take count only of Greek and
Latin, and Sanskrit and Chinese. It would be necessary
to consider Tamil as well.
During the last two centuries some
European scholar or other of nearly every generation
has paid Tamil the tribute of a sigh, [3] and insisted that Western
scholarship ought not neglect it, but even so, all the
interest that has been created has only resulted in
some stray compliment paid in legendary language, "In
the South of India there is an ancient language with an
ancient literature." Tamil has not had its Max Mullers.
Macdonells, Keiths and Winternitzes and even these have
unwittingly prolonged Western neglect of Tamil because
by identifying Indian literature with Sanskrit
literature, they have created the belief that Sanskrit
literature is both exclusively and exhaustively
representative of Ancient Indian Culture. Max Miiller
wrote about what India can teach the West. By India he
meant the Indo-Gangetic plain. The Kaaveeri delta has
interesting lessons too.
While it is given to the student of
comparative literature to trace the origins of Sanskrit
literature in the hymns of the Vedas, and the early
attempts of the Grecian bards in the Homeric poems, of
the origins of Tamil literature, he can find little
trace or historical account. The earliest book extant
is Tolkaappiyam, and that book argues the existence of
numberless grammarians, a large literature, and years
of anterior literary culture. [4]
Even by the most rigid canons, the
date of its composition cannot be fixed later than the
third century before Christ.[5] It is this book which gives the
scholar a wealth of material for the study of the
social life and literary conventions of the Tamils of
the half millennium preceding the Christian era. As
such, the third part of the book, which deals with the
functions, the matter, and the mode of poetics,
Porulatikaaram, is the first and fundamental source for
the study of Nature in ancient Tamil literature.
It describes the conventions which
regulate the two-fold classification of Tamil poetry,
namely, "Love poetry and all that is not love poetry"
(Akam, Puram), the landscape, the seasons, the hours
appropriate to each aspect and emotion of love; the
trees and flowers which are symbolic of different
landscapes or strategic movements; in short, how Nature
is to be framed as the background of human bellaviour
and emotions in poetry. The poetry belonging to the age
before and immediately after the composition of
Tolkaappiyam has not come down
to us. What have reached us are the Ten Idylls
(Pattuppaattu) and the Eight Anthologies (Ettuttokai)
which are collections of poems composed after
Tolkaappiyam by various poets, most of whom belonged to
one single epoch. Most of this poetry was composed
before the second century A.D.[6]
These poems, however, do not exactly
belong to a Golden or Augustan Age of Tamil literature
as has been supposed.[7] Indications point to their being the
efforts of an age when decades of convention were
setting limits and marking boundaries to poetic
inspiration, and preventing the free and unfettered
beat of the poets' wings. Nevertheless, it is a great
and spacious age in Tamil literature.
These poems present faithful
portraits of the social, economic, political, and
literary state of the Tamil country, the two centuries
before and after Christ. A good portion of the literary
legislation of Tolkaappiyarn regarding Nature as the
background of poetry is illustrated by these poems. The
Tolkaappiyam and these poems which collectively are
often referred to as Cankam Literature, are the texts
used for the present study.[8]
The Ten Idylls contain lengthy and
picturesque descriptions of the Tamil country and its
seasons. Most of them are in the form of Aarruppatai, a
literary device by which a bard or a minstrel who has
received bountiful gifts from some wealthy patron is
supposed to direct another to the same
Maecenas.[9] This
gives the occasion to the poet, among other topics, to
describe in great detail the natural beauty, fertility,
and resources of the territory which has to be
traversed to reach the palace of the patron. These
poems which are in the nature of guide-books and
travelogues adopt a more credible and realistic device
than those Tamil poems of a later age which utilize
inanimate objects like the cloud and the wind as
messengers or the media of poetic observation. The
Aarruppatai is of a piece with Tamil realism and
describes the journey as experienced by a human
traveller, and that on terra firma.
Each of the Ten Idylls contains
passages relevant to the theme of Nature. The first
poem on the god, Murukan, contains descriptions of the
natural beauty of spots most beloved by him, of his
immanent presence in Nature, and of the flowers, trees
and animals sacred to him. Minute and interesting
descriptions of the hill country, of the dawn and the
setting in of evening, and of the close life of the
people with Nature, occur in Malaipatukataam, and
Kapilar's famous Kurineippaattu.
Few passages can rival the
description of the North Wind and its effects, and the
interplay of human emotions and sentiments as found in
Netunalvaatai. The conventional regions of the Coola
and Paantiya kingdoms, the Kaaveeri and Vaiyai which
water them, and regional fusion (tinai mayakkam) are
faithfully portrayed in the other poems which are
intentionally panegyric. The greatness of a sovereign
was assessed also by the fertility and the diversity of
regions found within his kingdom and, therefore,
descriptions of the landscapes of the territory of a
sovereign often form an integral part of laudatory and
heroic verse.
The Eight Anthologies are classified
again according to the subjects treated, namely, into
Akam and Puram. This is a fundamental division in Tamil
poetry, and is made on the basis of psychological and
psychic experience. Akam is a word denoting "interior"
as opposed to Puram which means the "exterior".
Under Akam poetry comes what is
supposed to be the most internal, personal, and
directly incommunicable human experience, and that is
love and all its emotional phases. All that does not
come under this internal and interior experience is
classed as Puram. While love poetry is Akam, all the
other poetry, elegiac, panegyric and heroic is Pu!am.
In Puram poetry, the study of Nature is mainly
objective and consists in similes and metaphors,
whereas in Akam poetry Nature is the background and
sympathetic stage for the emotional and aesthetic
aspects of love.
There is in Tamil love poetry much
of the sympathetic interpretation of Nature whereby
Nature is brought into relationship with man,
furnishing lessons and analogies to human conduct and
human aspirations, and expressing itself in sympathy
with or in antagonism to the lives of men. The
Puranaanuuru, and the Patirruppattu which belong to the
Puram category do not entertain certain elements of the
interpretation of Nature, which, on the other hand, are
considered to be vital to the Kali odes, the
Ainkurunuuru, the Kuruntokai, the Narrinai, and the
Netuntokai or Akanaanuuru.
An abundance of similes and
metaphors regarding Nature, and exquisite touches of
suggestion, are to be found in the Puranaanuuru and
Patirruppattu. Some of the poems in the former
collection may be easily classed among some of the best
of Nature poetry in world literature. But the poetry of
the Akam collections introduces, in addition, an
outlook which is foreign to other literatures. It has
been the object of writers like Humboldt, Ruskin, Biese
and Palgrave to regard the ancient and modern world,
when looked at from the standpoint of the poetic
interpretation of Nature, as "one great confederation".
Though the study of ancient Tamil literature confirms
this view in a general way, it also shows that in a
corner of Peninsular India, a people developed an
interpretation of Nature the like of which was not
conceived on the plains watered by the Ganges, or on
the banks of the Nile or the Tiber, or on the shores of
the Aegean Sea.
The Kali odes, so-called because of
the Kali metre employed in their composition, are
extremely rich in figures of speech and in a keen
observation of Nature. They contain apostrophes
supposed to be made by lovers to such objects as the
cloud, the wind, the moon and the sea, but the most
precious part of the poems of the anthology are the
highly artistic expressions of feminine love sentiment.
The Paripaatal, another anthology consisting of long
odes of a special metre and meant to be sung to the
accompaniment of stringed instruments, consists partly
of devotional odes to Murukan and Tirumaal, and partly
of poems exclusively on the Vaiyai river and the
water-sports connected with the festival celebrated
around its annual freshes after the monsoon rains. The
natural scenery in which the religious shrines are
located are praised in a devotee's language of love and
rapture in the devotional odes, while the odes on the
Vaiyai contain abundant descriptions of the birth of
the river, and its rapid and sometimes devastating
progress amidst scenes of natural loveliness. They
contain also protestations of almost a human affection
on the part of the poets for the river that confers
beauty, fertility and prosperity to the city and the
kingdom of Maturai.
The other four books are anthologies
of love poems, alike in subject and metre, but
different only in length. The Netuntokai consists of
poems of thirteen to twenty-one lines, the Narrinai of
poems of nine to twelve lines and the Kuruntokai of
poems from four to eight lines. The Ainkurunuuru also
consists of similar poems of three to six lines, but
forms a separate anthology since it is divided into a
hundred poems on each region. Though human emotions
form the primary subject of these anthologies, it is
the human emotions of a people who lived in intimate
relationship and communion with Nature.
The shorter the poem the more
intense is its suggestiveness regarding Nature; the
longer the poem the more detailed is the description of
Nature, and the more explicit the avowal of the mutual
influence between Man and Nature. While human passions
in these poems are suggested in a few lines, it is the
description of the landscapes and the natural setting
appropriate to these passions which are described at
length. Many of these poems are landscapes in verse. It
looks as if the Tamil poets had a tradition of writing
on the same theme verses of different length, for it is
easy to trace an idea embodied in a couplet of
Tiruvalluvar in an expanded form in a poem of
Kuruntokai, and yet more diffuse in Netuntokai, and
with minute and elaborate details in, say,
Netunalvaatai.
There is, therefore, no dearth of
material for a study on the poetic and philosophic
interpretation of Nature in ancient Tamil poetry. The
mediaeval commentators of Tolkaappiyam and the Cankam
Classics have rendered this task easier by their
illustrations and exegesis. To such names as
Naccinaarkiniyar, and Ilampuuranar, and Parimeelalahar,
must be added also the names of modern editors, the
prince among whom is the late Dr. Swaminatha Iyer,
whose introductions and apparatus criticus render great
aid to the student engaged in Tamil research. The
difficulty for the student is rather the embaras de
choir.
There is such an abundance of
material that to select, collate and make the subject
presentable and readable to those whose acquaintance
with Tamil literature is scant, is not a light task.
The flora and fauna, the very hills and localities
mentioned in Cankam literature have yet to be explored
and identified. Literary criticism of Tamil poetry is a
new field of study, for histories of Tamil literature
have until recently been preoccupied with disputes
regarding chronology, and with proving or disproving
the veracity of fabulous accounts that have grown
around literary origins and lives of poets.
The books which I have found to
treat in a satisfactory manner the concept of Nature
among the ancient Tamils, are P. T. Srinivas Iyengar's
Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture and History of the Tamils from
the Earliest Times to A.D. 600. [10] The author's main sources for the
history of that period are the very ones which are the
texts for the present study. He has studied them to
some extent from the historical angle.
It now remains to examine them from
the point of view of the literary critic and the
literary historian. Professor M. Varadarajan in his
book The Treatment of Nature in Sangam Literature has
made a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the texts
concerned [11] For
a book intended for foreign readers on this subject, I
have paid greater attention to Akam poetry as revealing
the more original aspects of Nature poetry in Tamil. It
has not been my intention to crowd into this study
abundant details, or make it heavy reading with a
multitude of quotations, and reference to single
objects of Nature as mountains, rivers, trees, flowers,
animals, or single forces of Nature, as lightning and
thunder.
Where other literatures are
concerned, ancient and modern, this province of
literary criticism has attracted a satisfactory number
of scholars. While there have been several works on the
interpretation of Nature of individual poets like
Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley, or the entire
literature of single nations, world literature itself
has been the subject of research in this interesting
aspect. Schiller led the study with his Uber die naive
und sentimentale Dichtung (1794), followed by Alexander
von Humboldt, who in his Kosmos, a work of
encyclopaedic information, discussed Nature in the
poetry and landscape painting of the Indo-European
races. Ruskin in the third volume of Modern Painters
has interpreted the Nature of Landscape art in
classical, mediaeval and modern times.
Victor de Laprade's two studies, Le
sentiment de la nature avant We Christianisme and chez
les modernes are bold and masterly surveys by a critic
of refined thought. Comparative literature received
very adequate and comprehensive treatment in the
studies of Alfred Biese, who in his two works covered
the whole field from the Homeric poems to the Romantic
School of the Nineteenth Century, Die Entwickelung des
Naturgefuhls bei den Griechen und den Romern (1884) and
Die Entwickelung des Naturgefuhls im Mittelalter und in
der Neuzeit. Francis Turner Palgrave came next with his
work on Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson, and
John Campbell Shairp with his Poetic Interpretation of
Nature in which may be found studies of Homer,
Lucretius, Vergil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and
Wordsworth. None of these works contains even a single
reference to ancient Tamil literature, though the Vedic
hymns and Kalidasa come in for some little comment.
The reader will probably feel at the
end of this work, if he will peruse it to the end, that
Nature as studied, described, and embodied by the
ancient Tamil poets, contains features not in the least
negligible in a study of comparative literature, and
that the works of Humboldt and Biese would have been
more complete, and the studies of Laprade and Shairp
richer and more accurate, if Tamil Cankam literature
had been available to the authors at least in
translations. [12]
1 Goethe quoted in The New Dictionary
of Thoughts, subject Literature, New York,
1936.
2 On the antiquity and extent of
ancient Tamil literature, see K. S. SRINIVASA PILLAI,
History of Tamil (Tm), pp. 1-41, Madras, 1922; T. R.
SESHA IYENGAR, Dravidian India, pp. 79 ff, and 166
If,, Madras, 1925; K. N. SIVARAJA PILLAI, The
Chronology of the Early Tamils, Madras, 932; A.
cHlDAMBARANArHA CHE=AR, Advanced Studies in Tamil
Prosody, Annamalainagar, 1943, in which the antiquity
may he examined from a new angle, namely, prosody. On
the characteristics of ancient Tamil Poetry, see
Swami Vedachalam, Ancient and Modern Tamil Poets,
Pallavaram, 1939.
3 Beschi, Ellis, Bower, Caldwell,
Pope. Dr. Winslow writes in the preface to his
Tamil-English Dictionary (Madras, 1862): "It is not
perhaps extravagant to say that in its poetic form
the Tamil is more polished and exact than the Greek
and in both dialects, with its borrowed treasures,
more copious than the Latin". Dr. Schimid: "The mode
of collocating its words follows the logical or
intellectual order more so than even the Latin or
Greek". "Although the very ancient, copious and
refined Tamil language is inferior to none, it is
regarded by most people as the (probably barbarous)
vernacular of a people living somewhere in a remote
district. Neither does our Indian Government nor do
our Universities (British) fully recognize the value
of Tamil literature; and so those who spend their
lives in seeking for pearls under water". Dr. G. U.
POPE in Tamilian Antiquary, No. 6, p. 3, Madras,
1910. Scholars as those mentioned above, well versed
in European classical literatures, would have been
impressed far more if the Cankam literature available
to the present generation had been available to them.
Max Muller in Prefatory note to Hindu Manners and
Customs, "Tamil Literature hitherto has been far too
much neglected by students of Indian literature,
philosophy and religion."
4 This is fairly clear from the nature
of Tolkaappiyam which codified already existing
literature and grammar.
5 In addition to the works mentioned
see Simon Casie Chetty, The Tamil
Plutarch, Colombo, 1946. In the note (p. 122)
under the title "Tolkaappiyanaar, T. P.
MEENAKSHISUNDARAM dates the work as anterior to third
century B.C. Later interpolations are not ruled
out.
6 DR. U. V. SAMINATHA IYER,
Kuruntogai (Tm) Introduction, p. 8 ff, 2 ed., Madras,
1947. PIERRE MEILE, in Histoire des Litteratures,
Vol. I, p. 1046 if,, Paris, 1955.
7 S. KRISHNASWAMY IYENGAR in the
Tamilian Antiquary, No. 5, Trichinopoly, 1909, writes
of this period as The Augustian Age of Tamil
Literature. The phrase has been often used since then
by writers on Tamil literature.
8 T. 1037, see General Introduction of
Pattuppaattu translated by J. V. CHELLIAH, Colombo.
V. R. RAMACHANDRA Dikshtar, Studies in Tamil
Literature and History, 1946, pp. 21-85, London,
1930.
9 The term "Cankam literature" is very
widely used among the Tamils to designate their
ancient books written prior to, say, the third
century of the Christian era. The word Cankam here
stands for 'Literary Academy' and these books are the
works of poets who lived at a period when the
activities of a literary body regulated and set the
standards for Tamil literature. The persistent Tamil
tradition speaks of three academies, the first two of
which were Succeeded by geological upheavals that
caused the loss also of the literature of those
epochs. What has remained are mostly the books of the
third epoch or of the third aeademy, and now "Cankam"
has by degrees come to mean par excellence the third
academy and the third epoch.
10 The author makes several useful
observations which if developed will contribute
greatly to Tamil research. His chronology, however,
is debatable. His book is referred to as H.T. in
these pages.
11 These pages were written before the
publication of M. Varadarajan's The Treatment of
Nature in Sangam Literature, Madras,
1957.
12 See the English translation of
Pattuppaattu by J. V. CHELLIAH, o.c. DR. G. U. POPE,
has translated some poems of the Puranaanuuru in the
Tamilian Antiquary, No. 6, pp. 45-77, Madras, 1910.
The Tolkaappiyam Porulatikaaram has been translated
with a commentary by VARADHARAJA AIYER,
Annamalainagar, 1948, and P. S. SUBRAHMANYA SASTRI
(see bibliography).
Both VARADHARAJA AIYER and
P. T. SRINWAS IYENGAR, o.c., have translated into
English numerous poems in their texts but there is
yet room for improvement in the diction of the
translations. Dr. Kamil Zvelebil of Prague has
published an anthology of Ancient Tamil Poetry in
Czech.
Plants are identified in
this book generally on the basis of BURROW and
EMENEAU's Dravidian Etymological
Dictionary.
