Hindu Gods in Classical Tamil Poetry
One of the great achievements of Tamil culture in the field of literature is the
corpus of over 2,300 poems collected in the eight so-called can.kam anthologies.
According to legend, the authors of these poems were members of a literary
academy (can.kam) that flourished in the city of Maturai under the patronage of
the Pa ̄n.t.iya kings. The legend of the Maturai Tamil can.kam may or may not be
based upon historical fact, but no one who knows these poems can doubt that
their authors shared a poetic grammar and vocabulary. The poems presuppose
their audience’s familiarity with a shared repertoire of dramatic situations,
geographical settings, characters, and poetic figures, and these are defined
in the earliest extant Tamil treatise on the principles of grammar and poetics,
Tolka ̄ppiyam.The earliest poems in this corpus were probably composed during
the first few centuries ce.
The poems included in five of the eight anthologies are classified as poems of
the “interior world” (akam). The “interior world” is populated by a cast of char-
acters who are identified only by the roles they play in the dramatized situations
represented in the poems. Each poem depicts a moment in the story of two lovers
through the words of one of the two or one of several other characters, such as
the girl’s close friend, the girl’s mother, the man’s other lover, and a few others.
An especially striking feature of many of these poems is their setting. In akam
poetry landscape serves as a mirror of mood. Classical Tamil poetics recognizes
five landscapes – mountains, forest, seashore, the riverine tract, and arid land –
each of which carries a particular emotive association. In the poems mood is
signalled by specific features or “germinal elements” (karupporul.) of these
landscapes, which include not only obvious elements such as mountain pools,
rivers, coastal backwaters, flora, and fauna, but also human inhabitants of these
regions – for instance, fisherfolk and mountain tribes – and their customary
beliefs and practices, including the gods they worship.
Complementing the “interior world” is the public “exterior world” (pur
̄
am),
a world where warriors are acclaimed for their valor, kings are praised for their
generosity, and poets instruct their patrons in right action and the nature of life.
Pur
̄
am poems, by and large, offer their audience scenes painted in bold, clear
strokes, and here the poets generally do not subtly orchestrate features of setting
to suggest nuances of mood as in akam poems.
According to Tolka ̄ppiyamthe gods who preside over the mountains, forest,
seashore, riverine tract, and arid land are, respectively, Ce ̄yo ̄n
̄
, “the Red One,”
Ma ̄yo ̄n
̄
, “the Dark One,” Varun.an
̄, the god of the sea and wind, Ve ̄ntan
̄, “the
King,” and Kor
̄
r
̄avai, goddess of war. Ce ̄yo ̄n
̄is an alternate name for Murukan
̄,
“the Beautiful One,” a very popular deity in Tamilnadu, who in the course of
time coalesced with the Sanskritic god Skanda, son of S ́iva, though the icono-
graphy and mythology of Murukan
̄
maintains features not generally associated
with Sanskritic images of Skanda. Ma ̄yo ̄n
̄
, also known as Ma ̄l, “the Great One”
or “the Dark One,” became identified with Vis.n.u. Finally, Ve ̄ntan
̄
, “the king,”
refers to Indra, King of the gods.
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