Sangam literature: The Tamizhakam tales that offer a window into ancient Tamil life

Witten between 300 BC and 250 AD, Sangam poems stand testimony to an ancient, sophisticated culture of Tamizhakam, the southernmost region of the Indian subcontinent comprising today’s Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, which prevailed more than 2000 years ago. There are 18 Sangam books — 10 long songs (Pathuppattu) and eight anthologies (Ettuthokai) — with 2,381 poems, written by 537 poets, of which 39 were female poets, and 102 poems were written by anonymous poets. The poets, both men and women, came from various walks of life. There were kings, laymen, businessmen, teachers, goldsmiths, potters and cattle herders among them.

The poems reveal many vivid images of ancient Tamizhakam, according to Vaidehi Herbert, a self-taught Tamil scholar, who has translated all the 18 ancient Sangam books and 10 post-Sangam works into English. What attracted Vaidehi to Sangam poems was their timelessness. The elements of nature that the Sangam poets used while narrating the day-to-day lives of people and their emotions made them different. They spoke about everything: life forms spread over all the five landscapes, the food people ate, clothing that people in different geographical regions wore, the lives of bards, dancers and musicians who played instruments, battles and warriors, trading with the Greeks, Romans and others.

The mastery of Sangam poets was not limited to the earth as they had a fairly good knowledge about the sun, moon, planets, comets and many constellations.

“The elements of nature are intertwined with love, valour, agony, ecstasy, kindness, war, cruelty, honour, charity, friendship and many more facets of humanity. The Sangam poets never lost sight of the physical world around them. They brought to life the fauna and flora, and used them effectively in almost every poem, to reveal human emotions and situations, thereby creating beautiful vignettes,” Vaidehi, who is currently working on a dictionary of Sangam literature, told The Federal.

“There are more than 100 flowers described in the poems. One can travel back in time and see many mammals, reptiles, insects, birds, bushes, vines, flowers, mountains, forests, ponds, waterfalls, rivers and streams in the Tamil country. The sky with the constellations, sun, moon, stars and planets are also used effectively. The tiny red velvet bugs of the rainy season, to the mighty elephant in the jungle, are part of the drama. A piece of foam dashing on the rocks in a flooding stream and breaking apart little by little, is used to describe the heroine fading away in pain in ‘Kurunthokai’,” she added.

Sangam was not an overnight affair, it was a tradition of continuous contributions of poetry from people belonging to various walks of life. However, the initiative was not known as ‘sangam’ in the beginning, according to poet and translator AK Ramanujan. “It [Sangam] means an academy or fraternity. The word is probably borrowed from the vocabulary of Buddhism and Jainism, the two religions competing with Hinduism in the 6th and 7th centuries in South India,” wrote Ramanujan in the introduction to Poems of Love and War, a collection of poems that he translated from the Sangam anthologies.

Sangam poems are not only known for their literary merits, but also for their records of the history of Tamizhakam. The kings of Tamizhakam used to have trade with foreign countries. “We have descriptions of foreigners coming with gold coins and leaving with pepper. There is a reference to importing wines. The trade did not continue past the 3rd century AD. We have the accounts and observations of Greek and Roman writers like the author of Periplus (AD 70), Pliny (AD 78), and Ptolemy (AD 140), which have elaborate descriptions of many cities and ports in the Tamil country,” said Vaidehi.

Sri Lankan king Gajabahu I (173 to 195 AD) and Cheran Chenguttuvan of ‘Pathitruppathu’ were contemporaries. Vaidehi said that Gajabahu synchronism is accepted by most scholars today. “Renowned epigraphist and scholar Iravatham Mahadevan has shown that the inscriptions at Pukalur, which can be dated to 200 AD, mention the names of a couple of Chera kings who appear in ‘Pathitruppathu’. There are four references to Mauryan (322 BC and 182 BC) incursions into today’s Tamil Nadu in Sangam poems,” she said.

Even though the Sangam flourished between 300 BC and 250 AD, the manuscripts were lost for many centuries. Scholars got to know about their existence since there were references to them in the commentaries written many centuries after the Sangam age.

“They were buried amidst the collections of Saivite monasteries and a few families, without anyone knowing of their existence. They were re-discovered by UV Swaminatha Iyer (1855 -1942) and CW Thamotharam Pillai (1832-1901) in the late 19th century. Iyer started the process in 1883 at the Thiruvāvaduthurai Saiva monastery, and both these men, along with the help of a few other scholars completed the work of editing and bringing them to print, over the next few decades,” said KV Balasubramanian, a renowned scholar of Tolkappiyam, Sangam literature, Thirukkural, Silappathikaram, Manimekalai and Bhakthi literature.

Both Vaidehi and Balasubramanian spoke as part of a series of online lectures on Kerala in the classical age and its largest context through the literary sources of the period organised by PAMA Research Institute, Pattanam, Ernakulam recently.

“Tolkappiyam is considered the ancient known source of literature in Tamil. Balasubramanian said Tolkappiyam was a guide to the Sangam poets, who followed it while writing poems. Tolkappiyam was there much before the peak of the Sangam era. A grammatical text like Tolkappiyam will not appear overnight. The author has made it clear that he was just presenting what his ancestors said. This shows that Tolkappiyam might have existed in an oral form much before the origin of the Sangam period. That’s why the poets of the Sangam period used it as a guide,” he said.

Vaidehi said the poems started out as oral tradition which must have gone on for a very long time. “They reached a high level of sophistication even many centuries BC. The process is the creative act first, when the texts are composed. Next is the oral transmission of the texts. Following is the editing and codification of the anthologies. Colophons were added to the poems a couple of hundred years after the poems, around the 5th century AD. The surviving ancient commentaries for the Sangam poems were written about a thousand years or so after the Sangam era,” she said.

Even though the Sangam literature is mostly secular, some earlier works have a few references to the gods Sivan, Murukan, Thirumal and Kotravai. “The earlier works Natrinai, Kurunthokai, Akananuru, Ainkurunuru, Pathitruppathu and Purananuru have a few references to the gods Sivan, Murukan, Thirumal and the mother goddess Kotravai. Paripadal has many hymns for Murukan and Thirumal. Thirumurukatruppadai was written for Murukan. Perunthevanar’s invocation poems were added to Purananuru, Natrinai, Kurunthokai and Akananuru, around the 8th century when the texts were compiled into anthologies. However, only in Purananuru, it is inserted as poem 1, and is made to be part of the anthology,” said Vaidehi.

They were ancient Tamil gods and goddesses who were later Sanskritised as Hindu gods, according to Balasubramanian. “There was an amalgamation of gods and goddesses. The ancient Tamil gods and goddesses were Sanskritised. Muruka turned into Skanda and Thirumal as Mahavishnu. Lord Siva was turned into Rudrashiva,” he said.

It was UV Swaminatha Iyer’s unending search for the Sangam manuscripts which eventually helped him rediscover the mammoth body of work and reintroduce them to the public. Many manuscripts were found in the Saiviate monasteries of Tamil Nadu. They were being worshipped as sacred objects. “I am happy that most such ancient manuscripts were found in Tirunelveli, my hometown. The colonisers and missionaries took away a large number of manuscripts from India when they left the country. Today, they are under the control of the national museums in London, Vatican and Germany. I am trying my best to get the copies of those ancient manuscripts,” said Vaidehi.