Dr.George L.Hart
Dr. George L. Hart – Professor Emeritus, Chair in Tamil Studies, University of California, Berkeley, California, U.S.A. Dr. Hart’s wife Kausalya Hart is also a Tamil scholar. Her book, ‘Tamil for Beginners’ is an excellent one.
Books written by Dr. George Hart:
1. The Poems of Ancient Tamil – Their Milieu and their Sanskrit Counterparts
2. Poets of the Tamil Anthologies – Ancient Poems of Love and War
3. The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom – An Anthology of Poems from Puranānuru
4. A History of Indian Literature – The relation between Tamil and Classical Sanskrit Literature
5. The Forest Book of the Ramayana of Kampan
6. A Rapid Sanskrit method
THE POEMS OF ANCIENT TAMIL – Their Mileau and their Sanskrit Counterparts (Excerpts from this book)
Chapters
1. The poems, Their Nature and Their Date
2. The King and His Kingdom
3. Some Indigenous Elements in the Religion of the Ancient Tamils
4. Northern Elements in Tamilnad at the time of the Anthologies
5. The Role of Sacred Power in Ancient Tamil culture
6. The Bards of Ancient Tamilnad
7. The Technique of Suggestion in Tamil and Indo-Aryan
8. Prosody: Tamil and Indo-Aryan Parallels
9. Tamil Poetic Conventions and Indo-Aryan Parallels
10. Tamil Elements in Indo-Aryan Before the Sattasai
The earliest poems in Tamil that have survived to the present comprise eight anthologies and ten songs, a total of 2381 poems by 473 poets and including 102 poems by anonymous authors. The anthologies consist of poems divided into two broad categories, called akam, or interior, and puram, or exterior. Five anthologies contain akam poems exclusively. The Ainkurunuru, or five hundred short poems, contain stanzas from three to five lines by five different poets, each of who, has written one hundred poems on one of the akam themes. The Kuruntokai, or short anthology, contains 401 poems from six to eight linesby 205 poets; the Naṟṟinai has four hundred poems of from nine to twelve lines by 192 poets; the Akanānuru or four hundred on akam, contains poems of from thirteen to thirty-one lines by 142 poets; and finally the Kalittokai has 150 poems, in the kali meter, of twelve to eighty lines by five poets, each of whom has treated a different akam theme. Two of the anthologies contain only puram poems: the Puranānuru contains four hundred poems of four to forty lines by 156 poets, and the Patirruppattu has eighty poems of between five and fifty-seven lines, ten by each poet on one Chera king (two sets of ten poems have been lost; originally the work contained one hundred poems). Finally, there is one anthology, the Paripātal, containing mixed poems of thirty-two to one hundred forty lines by thirteen poets. Only twenty-two of the the original seventy poems are extant. The Pattupāttu, or ten songs, are much longer poems, of 103 to 782 lines by ten different poets.
Of the early Tamil works described, the Pattupāttu, the Paripātal, and the Kalittokaiseem slightly later than the others on stylistic and linguistic grounds. As for the date of the main corpus of poems, it has been shown recentlyby Iravatham Mahadevan that the inscription at Pukalur, which can be dated by paleographic methods to about 200 A.D., mentions the names of Chera kings and other chieftains who appear in the Patirruppattu and other anthologies. The evidence agrees with the fact that the Cilappatikāram, an epic that must have been written several hundred years after most of the early literature described above, judging by its language and style, mentions King Gajabāhu I of Ceylon, who is known to have reigned from 173 to 195 A.D., as the contemporary of the Chera king Cenkuttuvan who appears in the early anthologies. Thus the poems describe Yavanas, or westerners, a trade whose date is indicated by the fact that hoards of Roman coins of the emperors of the first and second centuries A.D. have been found in Tamil Nadu.
It is clear that, in the six earliest anthologies, few if any poems were written outside the period fo the first to third centuries A.D.: the language is too consistent and does not contain forms and words that Mahadevan has show occur in the second and first centuries B.C., or that occur later in such literature as the Cilappatikāram. The people mentioned in these anthologies, moreover, seem all to have lived within about ten generations.
K.A. Nilakantasastri, the most frequently cited authority for early South Indian history, is of the opinion that, in the early Tamil anthologies, Sanskrit ideas and institutions are so intermixed with Dravidian ones that the two are virtually inseperable. He says, “none can miss the significance of the fact that early Tamil literature, the earliest to which we have access, is already fully charged with words, conceptions, and institutions of Sanskritic and northern origin”, “All these literatures (Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam) owed a great deal to Sanskrit, the magic wand whose touch alone raised each of the Dravidian languages from the level of a patois to that of a literary idiom”, and “the most striking feature in the pictures of its composite character; it is unmistakable result of the blend of two originally distinct cultures, best described as Tamilian and Aryan; but it is by no means easy to distinguish the original elements in their purity.”
However, as I view the evidence, though there was certainly northern influence, Nilakantasastri has exaggerated its extent. It is difficult indeed to see how Nilakantasastri can state that early Tamil literature is full of northern words. Any reader who knows which words are of Sanskritic origin can see tht they are few and far between. J.V. Chelliah has estimated that Tirumurukarruppatai, one of the ten poems of Pattupāttu, which is later than most of the anthologies, contains only two percent Sanskrit words, even when such words as meen, tāmarai and muthu, which are now known to be of Dravidian origin, are countered as Sanskritic. A survey of the Mahabhārata would, I believe, show a much higher percentage of Dravidian words. Nilakantasastri’s contention that early Tamil is full of Sanskritic words is, then, mistaken.
The King and his Kingdom: In ancient Tamil society, the king was the central embodiment of the sacred powers that had to be present and under control for the proper functioning of society. The poems indicate that before the advent of the Brahmins there was no priestly class of higher status than the king; indeed, those members of society who dealt closely with sacred powers were of low status, as will be seen. The king’s position is suggested by the fact that words that meant king in ancient Tamil now denote God. For example, iraivan (he who is the highest) used to mean king but is now generally applied to the supreme deity, while koyil (the ‘king’s house’ or ‘palace’) now means temple. It is significant that in the North, the word for god, ‘deva’ came to mean king, whereas in Tamil the process was reversed.
There were three preeminent kings in Tamil Nadu, the Chera, Chola and Pandyan kings, with capitals respectively at Vanchi, Uraiyur and Madurai. Puram 50 calls these monarchs “the three kings of Tamil,” while Puram 357 mentions “the world which is held in common by the three kings,”. Each of these kings had his own special emblem, his own festival and his own flower. Besides these great monarchs, there were many smaller kings or chieftains, many of whom gave tribute to one of the three great kings.
The various emblems and accoutrements of authority that the Tamil king possessed lend insight into the position of the king. First, as agent of the sacred, the king held a staff symbolizing both the connection between this profane world and the sacred world above and the king’s role as the guardian of that connection. If a king ruled unjustly, his staff was said to have bent, the implication being that the king’s connection with the sacred was broken; if he ruled justly, then his staff was said to be straight or in an auspicious condition (senkol). Staffs were also held by bards (Puram 152, 399), by the village elders at marriage ceremonies (Kur. 148), and by the priest of Murugan, all people who had a special connection with the sacred.
As symbol of his pwer, the king had a royal drum, called a muracu. The sacred status that this drum possessed is well described in Puram 50, where a poet, after traveling, comes to the palace and mistakenly lies down on the table of the drum, which has been taken out to be given a bath. In war, a victorious king would at once take his enemy’s drum (Puram 26), by which act he received the right to his kingdom (Puram 70). If a muracu broke, it was extremely bad omen (Puram 238). The muracu was made of the skin of a bull that had vanquished a rival in a bullfight (Puram 288) and of wood taken from an enemy’s tutelary tree.
Some Indigenous Elements in the Religion of The Ancient Tamils: The gods of the ancient Tamils were frightful beings indeed. Of the words used to denote deity, one is from a root meaning to fear (Cur), one from the root meaning to afflict (ananku), and one, from a root meaning debt or sacrifice (katavul). Very few deities in ancient Tamil actually have names – I have found only three indigenous deities who are named: Murukan, Kotravai, and Kutruvan. Of these, Murukan is by far the most prominent. His name means tenderness, tender age, youth, beauty. He is said to have killed the demon (Cur) and his tribe (Puram 23, Akam 59, but he appears to have been no less malevolent on account of that. In Kur. 1, the girl’s friend refuses the love token offered by a lover, a bunch of red kāntal flowers, sacred to Murukan. Akam 22 says of Murukan, “His hands have the fame of wiping out those who do not bow to him.” In Akam 118 and 158, he is compared to a hunter with dogs. In Puram 56, Murukan is said to have the peacock on his banner and to use this bird as his vehicle, a notion that may have been borrowed from the North through identification of Murukan with Skanda, as this poem also mentions several Aryan gods and their vehicles and banners.
He is especially worshipped by hill folk (Akam 13), and his special place was Tirupparankunram near Madurai (Akam 149), as it is even today. His sacred places were not only in the hills, however, for Puram 55 mentions the sands at Centil (modern Tiruchendur) as place where he was established. Murukan takes possession of people and makes them sick. One of the most common themes in the akam poems is that a girl’s despondency at being in love with an unsuitable man is mistaken for possession by the god. In order to heal her, a priest, called a Velan (“one with a spear”), is called to perform various rites to Murukan.
In Akam 345, Korravai is said to live in a forest (kān amar celvi), and to have given a horse to a certain bard. In Kali. 89, she is called the victory goddess of the great forest (perukāttu kotri) who knows all, and the efforts of the hero to deceive the heroine about his affair with his courtesan are likened to the demon’s (pey) efforts to set riddles to the goddess. In line 450 of the Perumpānārrupadai, one of the songs of the Pathupāttu, she is called “the lovely goddess of the tunankai dance” (tunankai ām celvi), and the vain effort of the demon (ananku) to deceive her with riddles is again described.
It seems to me that Korravai must have been an indigenous goddess, at least in her character as a goddess of war and victory who lives in a forest and dances the tunankai. Certainly the northern goddess Durga is not associated with victory, and none of her names has that meaning.
The final indigenous Dravidian deity to be considered is Death, Kurruvan. He is said to carry an axe (puram 145) or a club (Puram 42) but never a noose as in the North, and to take people at the appointed time (Kur. 267). Many poems compare the king on the battlefield to Death (Puram 3, 23, 41, 42), or scold Death for being so stupid as to take the king, who is doing his work for him by killing in battle (Puram 210, 227, 230).
The Bards and Poets of Ancient Tamil Nadu: The assortment of poets, bards, drummers, dancers, and other performers that existed in ancient Tamil Nadu is bewildering, to say the least, at first glance. The bard called Pānan took his name from the word pan, a generic name for modes of music much like the modern raga. The principal instrument of the Panan was a Yal, a kind of lute. Unlike the many drums that were played, it was suitable establishing a pan. Thus in Puram 152, when the concert leader tells various performers to take up their instruments, he asks one person “to play the pan on the Yal,” while, in Akam 186, the word Yal is used as a synonym for pan.
The music-making activities of the Pānans are various. Most commonly Pānans are described as they travel from the court of one king to another to make music and receive a gift from the monarch to sustain the wretched existence they and their families led. They would be accompanied by their wives, called Viralis (from viral, “victory”), who would dance as they performed. Pānans would be kept in the houses of the rich to impart the family life of a man and his wife an aura of auspiciousness, and to entertain them by singing songs appropriate to the various times of the day and the various activities of the house. Thus, in Ain. 407 and 410, a Pānan plays his yal as the hero and his wife play with their son, while, in Ain. 408, many bards are present singing mullai songs as the couple stays at home. Like the other bards and drummers, the Pānans had certain ritual duties. During battle, the Panan would play the tunnumai drum (Akam 106; Nar. 310). That drum was also beaten before battle to assemble the soldiers and tell them to take flowers for the battle (Puram 289). It was beaten when men cut paddy (Puram 348, Akam 40, Patir 90.41); it was struck as a caravan came through the forest surrounding a fort, to inform all of its approach (Kur. 390); in Akam 63, it is beaten as the Kalvans (a thieving tribe) bring stolen cows home; and in Akam 87, the wilderness is said to resound with the sound of the tunnumai rising in the strong fortress of the Maravans, who rob wayfarers. It seems a justified inference from the uses of the tunnumai that the drum was the largest and loudest of all the drums used by the ancient Tamils. Pānans who could not make thier living by performing would catch fish, residing in their own part of the city and exchanging some of the fish for paddy (Puram 348; Akam 196, Ain 47, 48, 49, 111).
There existed in ancient Tamil Nadu entourages of performers called Vayiriyansand Kotiyans. Though these performers played the yal in additon to their other instruments (see the beginning of Porunarārruppatai; Puram 164), and though their women were called Viralis (Akam 82, 352), they were different from the Panans, for Maturaikanchi, line 750 says, “Let Pānans come; let women singers (Pattiyar – women Pānans, according to Naccinarkkiniyar) come; let prosperous Pulavans come; let Vayiriyans come.”
The Kotiyans received their name from kotu, a horned instrument, and iyan(“player”). Their special instrument was the tumpu, a long horn that resembled the trunk of an elephant (Akam 111), also called an uyir according to Naccinarkkiniyar’s commentary on Malaippatukatam, line 6, and the old commentary on Puram 152. The etymology of Vayiriyan is vayir, a kind of large horn, and iyan. It is not possible to discern any difference between the Kotiyans and the Vayiriyans.
These performers would dance at festivals (Maturaikānchi 628) and give concerts, going from place to place. A typical concert is described in Puram 152, where the leader of the group says, “I’ll sing a song. Virali, You there beat the mulavu drum; you play the pan on the Yāl; amd you play the uyir, like a hollow elephant’s trunk open at one end. You play the ellari and the ākuli, and beat the patalai drum softly on one of its eyes. And give in my hand the black staff.” Another concert is described in Akam 82.
Another class of performers the poems mention are dancing men and woman. In Kur. 31, the heroine, who calls herself a dancing woman (ādukalamakal), searches in the tunankai dance at the festival for her lover, a dancing man. In Puram 393, the poet says that he came as exhausted praising the king “as the loins of a dancing girl”. In Nar. 95, there is a description of a dancing girl walking on a rope of twisted fiber as the flute is played with other instruments. It seems likely that such dancing women were courtesans, for, in Akam 76, the parattai (courtesan whom the hero visits) says that her lover “has come to our street as we dance ecstatically to the resounding drum (mulavu).” Similarly in Akam 186 the heroine says that her lover is with a courtesan, “Taking her cool arms fragrant with sandal as shining-bangled girls sing their old yal (meaning pan) and beat the clear mulavu drum,” and in Akam 66, the mulavu is said to resound in the house of the courtesan. In Kur. 363, it appears that the woman who danced the tunankai dance was a courtesan, for the heroine, called “the courtesan kept at home” (irparattai) by the colophon. Theparattai often speaks of “our street” (for example in Akam 76), and that street is always different from the street on which the higher class heroine lives. In light of Paripadal 7.31-32, which speaks of “the dancers street” (ātavar cheri), it seems likely that the parattai lived with the other dancers in a separate part of the city.
The pānans, the concert givers, and the dancers all resembled one another in that they sang and performed in the various pans, or modes. The concert-givers and dancers (and perhaps the pānans as well) played the mulavu, a cooncert drum that was the ancestor of the moder mrdangam; thus that drum is said to be played by Vayiriyans (Puram 164;Kur. 78;Akam 155), by concert-givers (Puram 152, Akam 82), by players of the yāl (Puram 164), by Viralis (Puram 103), and by dancers (Akam 76, 189). There are two references to rich houses “where the mulavu never sleeps” (Puram 247; Akam 145), showing that if a man were rich enough, he would keep a man to play the drum as well as a Pānan at home.
To a very different category than the Pānan, the concert-giver, and the dancer, belonged the man who played the kinai drum. It is likely that one of the names of thekinai drum player was Paraiyan, and that the modern Paraiyan is his descendant. Thus Puram 388 says that the kinai player plays the parai (a generic term for drum), while in Puram 371, a suppliant packs up his parai, goes to the king, and plays thetatāri (another name for the kinai). In Puram 335, the Paraiyan clan is distinguished from the Pānan and Tutiyan clan, while in Purapporulvenpāmālai, a later work, a verse mentions the Kinaiyan, Tutiyan and Pānan as three different clans; thus it seems natural to identify the Kinaiyan and the Paraiyan.
Like the Pānan, the Kinaiyan was supposed to drum during battle (Puram 79), a task whose importance is suggested by Patir. 75.9, where “those whose job it is to beat the difficult parai” are said to be cause of the enemy’s defeat. In Puram 78, the kinai is beaten as enemy kings are executed. The most commonly mentioned office of the kinai player is to come to teh kings’ door as a suppliant in the morning and receive gifts (Puram 369-400). In Puram 255, the parai drum is said to be beaten in the morning as conchs sound at the doorways of kings. In Akam 249, the kinai drum is said to be played by a group called Akavanans. There is no way of determining just what the relationship of the Akavunan was to the kinai player described above, but the fact that they both played the same drum indicates that they were closely related. The root akavu means to call; it is generally applied to birds, and, as has been seen, these were ominous. In what is evidently an extension of the meaning of the root akavu, akaval means a prophetic utterance, Akuvanan a man of the Akuvanan clan who tells the future, and Akavanmakal a woman of that clan. It is extremely significant that the name of the meter used for all of the early anthologies is akaval, for that shows that the meter was first used for oracular purposes, probably by the Akavanans.
When they prophesised or sang, Akavunans would hold in their hands a small staff of bamboo, called in the old commentaries on Puram 152 and Patir 43.27 thepirappunarttunkol, or the staff that gives knowledge of the future. Like the Akavunan, the Akavanmakal would also hold a small staff (Kur. 298). In Kur. 23, the heroine’s friend addresses the Akavanmakal who has been hired by the mother to determine what is the matter with the lovesick heroine. In form, this verse appears to imitate the utterance of the Akavanmakal.
The final important low-caste people whose office included some kind of music-making was the Tutiyans. These men would beat their drum, called a tuti, before and during battle (Puram 260, 287); indeed, so important was this function, that, in Puram 260, the tuti is said to be the raft in which a chieftain crosses the flood of arrows in battle to get back to his stolen cattle. In most places where the tuti is mentioned, it is associated with rude and dangerous men who live in the wilderness. In Akam 159, men steal cattle and dance to the time of the tuti; in Akam 79, hunters (Eyinans) go in the wilderness to plunder “with curved bows and loud tutis whose lovely mouths resound with every dance” (see also Akam 261); abd ub Akam 89, Maravans attack a caravan as tuti is played. Elsewhere, the tuti is associated with cattle raiding (Puram 260, 269). The Tutiyan stands as guards over heroes wounded in battle, in Puram 285 and Puram 291, and, in Akam 35, he is said to play his drum when the memorial stone is worshipped.
We now turn to a very different group of performers, the Pulavans or poets, who wrote the poems in the anthologies. Probably during the reign of Mauryas in the second or third century B.C., the Brahmi syllabary was introduced into Tamil Nadu. In all likelihood, this was the first alphabet the Tamils used, though it is conceivable that they wrote previously in the Indus-Valley script. The result was similar to waht happened in Greece: a few centuries after a practical writing system was introduced, there sprang lyric poetry, which, perhaps because of its freshness, because of the fact that the authors felt that they were the first to write poems in a permanent form, is quite excellent. The men who wrote this poetry are Pulavans. Like all writers, the authors of this poetry modeled their compositions on forms with which they were familiar.
Two points need to be made here. First, the poets took their conventions and subject matter almost entirely from the oral bards; and, secondly, they copied the bards’ life-style, at least to the extent of going from one court to another until they found a king, who would support them in return for their poems. Pulavans, being of high caste, and being in close contact with the kings, naturally became the advisers of the kings. Indeed, they came to be considered sages and became the moral custodians of society. There are many poems in which Pulavans take it upon themselves to criticise the actions of kings, seemingly with impunity. An example is Puram 47, or Puram 96, in which Auvaiyar describes the son of her patron Atiyamān Netumān Anci. In some instances, kings themselves became Pulavans and perpetuated their own fame. A good example is Puram 71 by king Ollaiyurtanta Putuppāntiyan.