2 Distinctive Features Of Tamil Literature
One may observe, through the entire development of Tamil literature and, for that matter, Tamil culture in general, a kind of inner tension which may be traced to two sources: one is the truly dialectic relationship between the general and the specific, another the conflict between tradition and modernity. The problem of the relation of specific and general in Tamil literature and culture is a very central, very basic problem which has its important aspects in all spheres of life and which penetrates or at least touches a great number of other questions (such as the biculturalism of some strata of the Tamil community, the language-loyalty, language policy etc.). By “general” I mean the generally, the universally Indian, by “specific” I mean the specifically, distinctively Tamil. There is much talk today about the Indian linguistic area; after Emeneau applied the theory of a Sprachbund to India and so-to-say discovered India, in 1956, as a “linguistic area”, as an area in which genetically different languages show similar or even identical features, we should probably develop, along analogical lines of thinking, an Indian areal Literaturwissenschaft, with the same precision, with the same attention to detail, with the same rigour that Emeneau develops in his hypothesis of Indian linguistic area. There is no doubt that there are some “emic” features, typical for the pan-Indian Literaturbund.1 Hardly anybody can deny that there is a common Indianness in the literatures of India just as there are some common and distinctive features of Indian civilization and culture (though I have my doubts whether anybody has as yet successfully produced a classified list and a really deep and penetrating discussion of these features). These common features are of course results of a converging evolution; or, one should probably say, and this seems to me to be rather important, of a synthesis not yet fully achieved, actually far from achieved. The common Indianness, the “unity in diversity”, should be regarded not as something static and finished, but as a dynamic process, as a truly dialectical process; not as a sum, but as a movement which alters in the historical evolution, a kind of striving after synthesis of oppositions and conflicts which are frequently rather antagonistic.
1 Features which are common to the entire Indian sub-continent but unique only for it; not confined to any particular region or bound by any particular linguistic unit or social community. Examples of such features (seen, naturally, in a somewhat “collapsed” form) are, e.g., high degree of conceptualization and categorizing science against low degree of factgathering and hypotheses-testing; the conception of time as circular rather than linear, etc. etc. In the field of literature, its function and appreciation, such features are, to quote a few instances: higher regard for oral than for written transmission; emphasis on audience appreciation; the concept of “mood” (rasa in Sanskrit, meyppāṭu in Tamil) and its over-all importance— though the Tamil meyppāṭu is not identical, but an important “alloform” of the over-all category of “mood”; literature as rhetoric to move others, to intensify the feelings of the rasika; composition is prescribed; there is therefore high degree of conventionalization; characters analyzed rather by types than by individual heroes; high degree of anonymity, a typical Indian conception of authorship, originality and imitation; a particular conception of plot(s) etc. etc.
One of the basic-if not the basic-components of this dynamic process full of tensions and antagonisms is the striving after a Dravidian-Aryan synthesis. Tamil literature reflects this struggle, from its very beginnings in the text of the Tolkāppiyam until today’s writings of such men as Annadurai, Kannadasan or other apostles of the Dravidian movement on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in the writings of the synthesis-oriented, “Sanskritized” Brahmin writers.
As mentioned above, it is very probable that the first bloom of Tamil culture and literature took place before that type of diffusion which had been termed “Sanskritization” could have had any massive effect and any structurally deep impact upon the indigenous, pre-Aryan culture of the South. This does not, however, mean that even the earliest strata of classical Tamil culture are without any traces of “Sanskritization”. In fact, diffusion of at least some of the “Sanskritic” traits must have taken place as early as in the ProtoTamil or pre-Tamil stage, since, as Emeneau pointed out, these traits are very ancient in Toda culture, possessed by the Todas probably when they first appeared in the Nilgiris. As Emeneau says, Sanskritic culture has, indeed, been all-pervasive in India.
The very earliest monument of Tamil literary language and Tamil culture as such, the Tolkāppiyam, supposed to have been composed by Agastya’s pupil Tolkāppiyar, is to a great extent the product of an Aryan-Dravidian synthesis; and even in its Urtext, in its earliest layers, it shows beyond doubt the author’s well-digested knowledge of such Sanskrit authors as Pāṇini and Patañjali. The earliest traces of another style of Tamil-a style probably rather near to the colloquial speech of those days-preserved in the most ancient inscriptions in Tamil in the Brāhmī script-are influenced to a considerable extent by the Prakrit of the Jains and the Pali of the Buddhists.
Hence it is clear that Tamil literature did not develop in a cultural vacuum, and that the evolution of the Tamil culture was not achieved either in isolation, or by simple cultural mutation. The very beginnings of Tamil literature manifest clear traces of Aryan influence just as the very beginnings of the Indo-Aryan literature, the Rgvedic hymns, show traces of Dravidian influence. This, too, is today an undisputed fact.
On the other hand, there are some sharply contrasting features which are typical for Tamil classical culture alone, for the Tamil cultural and literary tradition as opposed to the non-Tamil tradition -and in this respect, the Tamil cultural tradition is independent, not derived, not imitative; it is pre-Sanskritic, and from this point of view Tamil alone stands apart when compared with all other major languages and literatures of India.
It is possible to express this fact briefly but precisely by saying that there exist in India only two great specific and independent classical and historically attested cultures-the Sanskritic culture and the Tamil culture.
Historically speaking, from the point of development of Indian literature as a single complex, Tamil literature possesses at least two unique features.
First, as has just been pointed out, it is the only Indian literature which is, at least in its beginnings and in its first and most vigorous bloom, almost entirely independent of Aryan and specifically Sanskrit influences. This primary independence of Tamil literary tradition has been, incidentally, the source of many conflicts. Second: though being sometimes qualified as a neo-Indian literature, Tamil literature is the only Indian literature which is both classical and modern; while it shares antiquity with much of Sanskrit literature and is as classical, in the best sense of the word, as e.g. the ancient Greek poetry, it continues to be vigorously living modern writing of our days. This fact was expressed in a very happy formulation by A. K. Ramanujan in his excellent book The Interior Landscape (1967): “Tamil, one of the two classical languages of India, is the only language of contemporary India which is recognizably continuous with a classical past”.
This fact-the relation between tradition and modernity-has, too, been the source of constant tension: contemporary Tamil literature has to carry the splendid but massive burden of an uninterrupted tradition and classical heritage, and sometimes the burden seems indeed too heavy to bear.
The following are then the diagnostic, characteristic features of classical Tamil literature with regard to its subject-matter and thought-content. First of all, Tamil is probably the one ancient language of India that bears the reflection of the life of an entire people; that is, its heroes are idealized types derived from what we might even call “common folk”. Classical (i.e. the so-called Caṅkam) Tamil literature is not the literature of the barons; neither is it the literature of a monastic order; nor the literature of an élite, of a nāgarika; it is thus not the literature of a particular social class. One major type of Tamil classical poems reflects the life of ordinary though idealized men and women, not the life of a sacerdotal or ruling nobility, of a priestly class, of nuns, monks, or of any élite group or groups of society. The whole gamut of basic human experience is contained in what has been best in Tamil writing. In this sense, it is very different from all strata of Sanskritic literature from the Vedic literature which is the literature of a sacerdotal class, from the great epics which are the literature of the ruling barons, from the classical literature which is par excellence the literature of the “man about town”, of the nāgarika; it is also different from the Buddhist and Jaina texts, since these are mostly the literature of monastic orders, of monks and nuns. However, this does not mean that it is, in its finished form, as we have it, “popular” literature or “folk” literature. Classical Tamil literature is literature about and of people but not a Volksliteratur. It is typically a Kunstdichtung.
The poets, of both sexes, had no priestly function to perform. There are more than twenty women minstrels, responsible for about 140 poems of the earliest strata of Tamil poetry. The true diagnostic feature of these poets is the fact that they were a professional, vocational group, held generally in high esteem. They belonged, by birth, to all classes of society; quite a number of them were born as princes and chieftains; a great number were of peasant or merchant origin; however, the list of ancient poets includes potters, blacksmiths and carpenters-by birth, that is. Some of the names are revealing: e.g. Nampi Kuṭṭuvaṉ, Kur. 243, belonged to the ruling dynasty of the Cēral kings; Maturai Eḻuttāḷaṉ, Kur. 223, was probably a scribe at the royal court of Maturai; Uṟaiyūr Mutukorran, Kur. 221, is the “old headman of Uṟaiyūr”, but Kiḷimaṅkalaṅkiḻār, Kur. 152, was a peasant by caste, while e.g. Māmūlaṉār, responsible for a number of poems, was a Brahmin scholar.
These early poets, recruited from many different communities, received bardic training-there were probably different schools and traditions of this training—and became professionals; the wandering minstrels and bards travelled about in groups, often rather poor, frequently, however, very influential, and sometimes rather affluent. When a poet in Puṟ. 208. 7-8 says: “I am not singing for money” and “I am not a poet who barters his art”, it implies the existence of “mercenary” singers. Some of the poems speak even of the duty, of the obligation (katan, lit. “debt”) towards the minstrels which the ruling monarchs and chieftains have to perform (Pur. 201. 14, 203. II).
The learning of the minstrels was oral, acquired by imitation and practice; the basis of their knowledge was purely auditory. Cf. the term kēḷvi “learning” (specifically of the poets): primary meaning “hearing, sound” (<kēļ), or kiḷavi “word, speech, language, utterance” <kiļa “to speak”, i.e. “to be heard” (DED 1677, Burrow BSOAS 1943, 128); kiḷavi is used most frequently for “poetic utterance”: all this points to the oral-auditory nature of early Tamil literature.
In this connection it is also interesting to note that the term for the most ancient Tamil metre, the metre in which almost the entire bardic poetry is sung, namely akaval, means “call, summon, song” (cf. DED 11 akavu “to utter a sound as a peacock, to sing, call, summon”, akavar “bards who arouse the king in the morning”). Later the same metre was called āciriyam, derived from āciri yan “priest, teacher, author of any literary work, scholar”, a very early lw. from Skt. ācārya- “a spiritual guide or teacher” (DBIA, item 30). That is, there was a semantic shift from “call, summon, song” to “teaching, sermon, explanation”. The poetry acquires more and more the character of learned Kunstdichtung, and this also leads, as Kailasapathy rightly observes, to the next stage of gnomic, didactic poetry (under the increasing impact of Jaina and Buddhist ideology).
But let us return to the bards: there were probably six major types of these early poets: the term which is used most frequently is
pāṇar: This is connected with paṇ “song, melody”, pāṇi “song, melody, music” and pāņu “song”; most probably the underlying monosyllabic morpheme is paṇ “music”. There are cognates in Malayalam and Tulu. It is interesting that the Pkt. pāṇa- (most probably connected) means “a low caste” (DED 3351). The pāṇar were minstrels who sang their songs to the accompaniment of the yāḻ or lute. In medieval times, they were regarded as a lower caste, and in such medieval texts as the Nantikkalampakam (anonymous, of the time of Pallava Nandivarman III, 846-869; historically a reliable text), the pāṇar are compared with pēy, “the devils, the demons”, and with nay, “the dogs”.
kūttar were dancing minstrels, performers of choral dramas (a synonymous term is āṭunar). Cf. Greek choroi who sang as well as danced at the festivals. This class of minstrels was degraded, too: kūtti “danseuse” in later time means “prostitute”.
porunar: a term which probably means “war-bards”; they were especially close to the chiefs and princes; the accompanying instrument in this case was the taṭāri or kiṇai “small drum”.
akavunar, akavalar or akavar <akavu “to utter a sound as a peacock, to sing, call, summon”, i.e. “summoners, callers”. Probably “heralds”. We also come across the term akavaṉ makaļir “women heralds”.
viṟaliyar: these were female dancers and singers; originally highly respected cf. the case of Auvaiyār, who was a great and esteemed poetess and a danseuse. In later times, however, mainly due to the puritanical attitude of Jainism and Buddhism, they became to be regarded as symbols of immorality, and the word was used first for concubines, later for harlots and prostitutes.
The only term which survived in the meaning “poet” was pulavar. This is the modern Standard Literary Tamil term (in de-Sanskritized Tamil). Original meaning is “wise men, the learned”. And this itself is important: the idea of wisdom, of knowledge, of learning connected with the person of the poet; it was a learned poetry. It also shows the reverence for the poets in ancient times: the pulavar are always highly respected-somewhat like in the Jewish tradition: a scholar is the most respected man in the society.
It seems from certain data that poets have not only been always associated with profound learning, but also with mantic wisdom, which was connected, again, with the cult of Murukaṉ. Murukaṉ is actually the patron-god of poets and scholars in the South; only much later this function (of the patron-god of wisdom and learning) is taken over by Gaṇapati.
In a way, ancient Tamil poetry, especially the erotic poetry, is very “democratic”. However, this democratism, I am afraid, was greatly exaggerated.2 The characters mentioned by name in the heroic poetry are almost exclusively aristocratic. On the other hand, in love-poetry, the personnel is anonymous-they are types, typified common people or rather people in general, without any determination of their social status, their occupation, etc.: just a man and a woman, the woman’s mother or girl-friend, the man’s friend or his charioteer. However, there is evidence which shows that even these anonymous types belong, in most of the erotic poems, to the “leisure class”. We may assume that, with a few exceptions, one and the same type of male is the hero of both–the war exploits and the erotic feats. The only difference is that when the poet describes his erotic achievements, he is discreetly anonymous, while anonymity in panegyric and heroic poetry would be quite unwanted; here, the hero is a concrete person. There is no personal love-poetry. The poet never speaks about his individual erotic experience; on the other hand, there is a lot of personal experience of the poet revealed in the poems from the other sphere–the sphere of public life. The male hero, though an “aristocrat”, cannot be compared with let us say a feudal baron of the Norman period. The Old Tamil hero was very close to the land, the economic basis of his existence, though he himself did probably no manual work in the fields; he did not live in huge castles, but in villages in big houses called maṉai, akam, il, and only occasionally in small fortresses. However, as Puṟam 311 says,
2 I would now hesitate to use the term at all. It is true that, on the one hand, the akam genre of classical poetry has for its dramatis personae anonymous types representative of men and women an sich (irrespective, among other features, of caste or class) who undergo common and total human experience of love in all its phases and aspects; on the other hand, these idealized types represent cultured, well-matched and fit pairs, to the exclusion of uncultured, ignorant, unfit people, who, in later scholastic literature, are said explicitly to be servants and workers. The ideology of the puṟam (heroic) genre is definitely “clannish” and “aristocratic”.
“he wears spotless white clothes washed by the pulaitti (washer- woman), who digs the salt land for water. He also wears a garland of flowers. He is always helpful to others. But he fights alone, unaided in battle. A fierce and mighty hero, he is, who wards off with his single shield the weapons aimed at him by his foes” (K. Kailasapathy’s transl.).
The bards did not indulge in moralizations concerning either the ethics of war or the problems of extramarital relationship or nonmonogamous sexuality of the heroes (Kailasapathy, 79, 80). Only later—probably due to the impact of Jainism, Buddhism and later Brahmanism there is some gnomic content in the poems—the central idea being the impermanence of life in the world: Tolkāppi- yam calls this theme kāňci, and Puṟapporuḷ veṇpāmālai calls it vākai. They stand apart, probably as later additions. Whether they are later or not, all of them are to an extent pervaded by some conception of universal humanism and unity of mankind. The reasons for this humanism are not drawn from a monistic identity with the Primeval Being, but from the very nature of man, from the fundamental identity of all men, from a rational unity found in nature and in the cosmos; above all, from a stoic-like, unimpassioned, imperturbable kind of acceptance of the facts of life. In these few stanzas, we see the poet-philosopher, or rather simply the “wise poet”, the pulavar, at his best, whether or not we regard these poems as a reflection of the progressive transformation of values, which were originally pertinent simply and purely to the heroic age, into more idealized values, interpreted from the moral standpoint. Whatever the process was, the outcome, represented e.g. by the well-known and often quoted poem beginning yātum ūrē yāvaruṅ kēḷir, Puṟam 192, played a very great role in subsequent ideological development, and is probably even more important today in its very contemporary political interpretations, and even misinterpretations. The whole context of the poem shows that we have to do rather with a stoic-like, Montaignesque resignation and even a privileged recognition of the transiency of life, than with any kind of egalitarianism and “universal brotherhood” which had been read into the opening line of this beautiful poem.
Any town our home-town, every man a kinsman.
Evil and good are not things brought
by others; neither pain, nor relief of pain.
Death is nothing new. We do not rejoice.
that living is sweet, nor resent it.
for not being so.
Life’s way is like the raft’s
when the restless descending waters lash on the rocks
as lightening skies pour down the rains
we know this very well
from the vision of the Open-eyed Ones.
So we do not marvel at those
big with excellence, nor scorn
the little ones.
—
Puṟam 192
Translation: A. K. Ramanujan
The ideal of human life was to be achieved in this life; and it was the ideal of a wise man of human proportions and with human qualities. There is even a specific term for this ideal man, appearing again and again in many stanzas-in fact one of the key-words of Tamil poetry, if not the key-word of the best in Tamil culture. I have in mind the term cāṉṟōr. This is a participial noun derived from the verb stem cal “to be abundant, full, suitable, filling, great, noble”; the noun cāl means “fullness, abundance”, cālpu “excellence, nobility” (DED 2037 a). Hence cāṉṟōṉ, pl. cāṉṟōr means “a complete, a whole man, a perfect, noble man”.
Actually the medieval glossators and scholiasts called consistently the most ancient poetry of the Tamils cāṉṟōr ceyyuḷ! “poetry of the noble ones”. K. Kailasapathy adds the following very true statement about this term: “It is perhaps no great exaggeration to say that no other expression sums up the totality of the nature of the earliest Tamil poetry as does cāṉṟōr ceyyuḷ ’poetry of the noble ones”. The TL iii 1397 gives the following meanings of cāṉṟōr: “the warrior, the great, the learned, the noble”, and “the poets of the Caṅkam period”. In a book of essays, Aňciṟaittumpi, on pp. 49-64, M. S. Venkataswamy discussed this word and its semantic field and tried to demonstrate that it originally connoted “warriors”. That may be true: but in the bulk of so-called Sangam poetry, it means “great, noble men” (in the moral sense). A stanza, Puṟam 182, maintains that the world exists as a liveable place because such perfect men exist.
This world lives because
some men do not eat alone, even the sweetest things,
nor even the food of the gods
earned by grace and penance;
they have no anger in them;
they do not fear evils that other men fear,
nor sleep over them;
they give their lives for glory
but will not touch the gifts of the whole worlds
if it should be tainted;
they have no faintness in their hearts,
and strive not for themselves
but for others;
this world is,
because such men are.
—
Puṟam 182
Translation: A. K. Ramanujan
Again, in another stanza of the anthology, Puṟam 191, we may read the following lines:
You ask me how it is
my hair is not gray
though I am full of years. Then listen:
a wife’s excellence; children fulfilled;
dear ones wishing me what I wish
for myself; a king who will do nothing
that isn’t done; and in the town
where I live, several men
full of virtue, courtesy,
masters of their senses.
—
Puṟam 191
Translation: A. K. Ramanujan
The same idea reappears later in the Tirukkuṟaḷ (e.g. in 571, 996); paṇpuṭaiyār paṭṭuṉ tulakam; atuviṉṟeṉ maṇpukku māyvatu man (996) “The world exists because noble and cultured men exist; without them the world would vanish in dust”.
The important fact is that this Tamil wise man, the cāṉṟōṉ, is not an anchorite or a recluse, not an ascetic of any kind and shade, but a man of flesh and blood who should live fully his days of courtship and of married life, of fighting and love-making, rejoicing in the laughter and happiness with his children and friends and fully dedicated to his social and civic duties. And this humanistic tradition is very much alive in Tamil literature from its beginnings to its present short-story writing, and is found strongly expressed in the best works of Tamil literature: in the earliest poetry which is
its source, in the pragmatic and empiric ethics of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, in the best of the bhaktas, in the conception of Kampaṉ’s Ayodhyā, and even in the medieval poets like Pukaḻēnti and Aruṇakiri, in Rāmaliṅka Cuvāmi and, much later, in the two probably greatest figures of new Tamil writing, in Pārati (Bharati) and Putumaippittaṉ. Before discussing another general characteristic feature of Tamil writing as such, let me trace in some detail the other key-words, the other diagnostic concepts typical for the earliest and most independent era of Tamil literature and thought.
One of such terms is nāṇ “sense of shame”. According to the most accurate and sensible commentator on early old Tamil literature, Iḷampūraṇar, “what is meant by this word is a state of mind that leads to the actions contrary to the conduct of the noble ones; it cannot be explained”. Akam 273.15 speaks about pulavar pukaḻnta nāṇ “sense of shame praised by the bards”.
Another key-term, and probably even more important, is pukaḻ, and its many synonyms, all meaning “glory”, “fame”. According to Puṟam 282, the ideal hero while alive lived in the battle ground to attain “gloire”; and after death he passed into the verses of the singers. To acquire fame and glory was the chief goal of his life. In Puṟam 36 it is said that “for fame they would give their very lives; against blame even the entire world they would not have”. And again, Puṟam 182. 5 says pukaḻeṉiṉ uyiruṅ koṭukkuvar “for fame they would give their very lives”. The synonyms for pukaḻ are urai, icai, perumpeyar, cīrtti, all meaning, “praise, fame”. K. Kailasapathy examines in detail the contents and attributes of these items (231 ff.). The poems are saturated with constructions involving these terms. The warrior constantly endeavours to establish his reputation, he is full of courage, having utter disclaim for death. One’s fame is more lasting than death itself, cf. Puṟam 165.2 etc. tampukaḷ niṟīit tāmmāyntaṉar “they died, having set up their fame on a firm basis”. Honour and fame could be achieved only by bravery in war and deeds of slaughter against the enemy. The true hero longs for battle. Cf. Akam 154. 3-4: “Having consumed plenty of strong palm-wine, the furious men long for battle”. Hence the hero’s pride in wounds received in battle, in viḻuppuṇ “excellent wounds” (Puram 180. 4.) which, according to the celebrated commentator of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, Parimēlaḻakar (Kuṛaļ 76. 6), are “glorious wounds which one receives … on one’s chest and face”.
Women were as brave and as thirsty for fame as men: cf. this amazing poem, Puṟam 86:
You stand against the pillar
of my hut and ask me:
Where is your son?
I don’t really know.
My womb is only a lair
for that tiger.
You can see him now
only in battlefields.
—
Translation: A. K. Ramanujan
With the longing for battle and thirst for fame is naturally connected the earliest Tamil conception of heaven. It is a hero’s heaven, the world of great renown, the world of the noble ones; whereas the earth is peopled by heroes and non-heroes, the warrior’s heaven is inhabited only by renowned (perumpeyar) persons. They will enjoy the bliss of marriage with the spotless maidens in heaven (Puram 287. 10-12). “Lucky are those who are killed by someone rather than just die” (Akam 61.1-2). Those who died a natural death were laid on a grass mat and cut asunder with a sword, so that they might die a warrior’s death. Even children did not escape this gruesome custom, cf. Puṟam 74. 1-2: “Whether it be a still-born child or a mere foetus, it is not spared but cloven asunder”. Leaving these gruesome aspects of early Tamil civilization behind, let me mention another and very typical and characteristic feature of the pre-Aryan Tamil literature-its predominantly secular inspiration, the absence of any “religious” sentiment. The earliest extant poetry is emphatically not ritualistic at all; even reflection and didactic features appear later. It was suspected and hinted at more than once, and probably quite conclusively proved by Kailasapathy, that the early poetry of the Tamils is founded on secular, oral bardic tradition-in sharp contrast to the Vedic poetry, and comparable rather with the Greek or Welsh bardic literature and, in some respects, with the early amorous lyric poetry of the trobadors of Languedoc and Provence.
The Tamil classical poetry is pre-eminently of this world; it makes almost no allusions to supernatural meddling in worldly affairs. When, quite marginally and exceptionally, it reflects some kind of religio, it is mostly the rites and ceremonies connected with the daily life of the people (such as marriage ceremonies), or, in bardic war-poetry, reflections of tribal cults and their survivals (sacrifice of blood and flesh to the devils, etc.). The presence of Vedic religion, of Brahmanism, in early Tamil poetry may be traced only with difficulty as a very feeble, unimportant superstratum.
The poetry only rarely reflects and speculates; where reflexion and elements of speculation appear, they are often of very different quality from what we find in Aryan texts: in old Tamil literature, reflections and speculations are of a general, humanistic and “stoic” character, preoccupied mostly with the impermanence and transience of human affairs, with man’s duties as a zoon politikon and as a social being, with the ability to live a full, happy life in this world. This original secularism and the absence of almost any religious inspiration is the one feature that later disappears from Tamil literature, and Tamil becomes what has been called “the language of devotion” and of religious philosophy. But Tamil religiosity is undoubtedly of a different colour than any other Indian religiosity; it has its specific and peculiar features, which will be discussed in detail when Tamil bhakti poetry, and the cittar texts, are analysed. Apart from these more general typical features of Tamil literature -its so-called “democratism”, humanism and secularism–we may of course characterize Tamil writing by its typical subject-matters, by its leading themes and motives. The traditional and in fact the only content of ancient Tamil poetry seems again to be something specific in India, and any attempt to bring it into direct relationship and one-to-one correspondence with the concepts of dharma or artha or kāma is bound to fail. To put it simply and somewhat crudely, the two topics of early Tamil poetry are mating and fighting. This fact finds its formal expression in the existence of two and only two genres. The genre of akam poetry, i.e. poetry of the “inner world”, speaks of private life. This is the tender, intimate love-poetry, anonymous, stereotyped, including some of the greatest love poems ever composed in world literature: a poetry based on a concept definitely broader and deeper than the Sanskritic kāma. The second genre is that of puṟam, of the “outer world”, poetry concerning individual heroes; about war, greatness, fame and duty; about public and political life; the result-magnificent bardic poetry, panegyrics and war lyrics. The genre comprises a great many aspects of the Sanskritic dharma and artha.
Finally, there is yet another feature which should be mentioned, a formal feature which is perhaps rather typical of the best achieve-
ments of Tamil literature as such, from the earliest exquisite lyrical stanzas to the quite contemporary prose-writings of such authors as L. S. Ramamirtham or the very contemporary putu kavitai, “new poetry” school. It seems somehow that the thing which matters most in Tamil creative writing is a conscious effort after brevity and conciseness, a striving after powerful abbreviation, clarity and transparence, which is the result of much effort to exploit to the utmost the technique of suggestion, of allusion, of inference and word-play, of a complex and telling use of imagery, of multiple overtones. This effort may be seen in the earliest lyrical stanzas as well as in the intensely concise couplets of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, in the songs of Cilappatikāram, in various stanzas of Kampaṉ’s epic, in modern essays and short stories.
Hence, the two most typical and best developed forms of Tamil writing throughout the ages are lyrical poetry and short story, that is basically brief forms. Epic poetry appears later, and is almost always an imitation; even the greatest Tamil epic poetry—with the possible exception of Cilappatikāram and its majestic grandeur-is rather a series of miniature dramatic situations arranged like a chain of individual stanzas similar to beads on a string, stanzas which are finished, homogenous and perfect in themselves. And, frankly speaking, a great novel and a great drama has yet to appear in Tamil literature, whereas Tamil poetry abounds in exquisite lyrical pieces and Tamil prose abounds in excellent short stories and essays.