The Rapids of a Great River Read online

  Edited by

  LAKSHMI HOLMSTRÖM, SUBASHREE KRISHNASWAMY AND K. SRILATA

  The Rapids of a Great River

  The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry

  Contents

  A Note on Transliteration

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Sangam Poets

  Ilanko Adigal: From Silappadikaram

  Sattanar: From Manimekalai

  Tiruvalluvar: From Tirukkural

  Saivite Saints: From Tirumurai

  Sekizhar: From Periya Puranam

  Nammalvar: From Tiruvaymoli

  Andal: From Naacchiyaar Tirumoli

  Kamban: From Iramavataram

  Siddhar

  Tayumanavar

  Melakaram Tirikudarasappa Kavirayar: From Kuttrala Kuravanci

  Gopalakrishna Bharati: From Nandanar Charitra Kirtthanai

  PART TWO

  Subramania Bharati (1882–1921)

  Na. Pichamurti (1900–76)

  Nakulan (1922–2007)

  Sundara Ramaswamy (1931–2005)

  Vaidheeswaran (1935–)

  Si. Mani (1936–)

  Gnanakoothan (1938–)

  Pramil (1939–97)

  Shanmugam Sivalingam (1940–)

  S. Sivasegaram (1942–)

  Vatsala (1943–)

  M.A. Nuhman (1944–)

  R. Meenakshi (1944–)

  Kalyanji (1946–)

  A. Sankari (1948–)

  Su. Vilvaratnam (1950–2006)

  Kalapriya (1950–)

  Anandh (1951–)

  Atmanam (1951–84)

  Devadacchan (1952–)

  Ki. Pi. Aravinthan (1953–)

  Thirumavalavan (1955–)

  Urvasi (1956–)

  Sukumaran (1957–)

  Solaikkili (1957–)

  Cheliyan (1960–)

  R. Cheran (1960–)

  Maitrayi Sabaratnam (1960–)

  Em. Yuvan (1961–)

  B. Balasooriyan (1963–)

  Aathavan Deetchanya (1964–)

  Avvai (1965–)

  Perundevi (1967–)

  Manushyaputhiran (1967–)

  Salma (1968–)

  Malathy Maitri (1968–)

  S. Sivaramani (1968–91)

  Yazhan Aathi (1970–)

  P. Ahilan (1970–)

  Ilampirai (1970–)

  Uma Maheshwari (1971–)

  Sukirtharani (1973–)

  Kutti Revathi (1974–)

  Translators’ Note

  Biographical Notes

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  A Note on Transliteration

  In the case of well-known names of poets and texts, we use the established transliteration (Andal, Alvar). Where names might be unfamiliar to non-Tamil readers, we use an easy and recognizable phonetic transliteration (Sekizhar). We follow the spellings used by modern authors for their own names.

  Introduction

  Lakshmi Holmström, Subashree Krishnaswamy and K. Srilata

  1

  The well-spring of Tamil poetry, so vibrant and varied, is its long, sophisticated tradition. The earliest Tamil poetry that has come down to us is known as Sangam poetry, named after the assembly or sangam of poets based in the Pandyan capital, Madurai. According to tradition, there were two earlier such sangams, whose poetry is now lost to us. Sangam poetry dates from the second century CE, and consists of eight anthologies (Ettuthogai) and ten long poems (Patthupaattu). The poetics on which these are based is codified in the earliest grammar in Tamil, Tolkappiyam, which also dates from this period, and continues to have a profound effect on Tamil poetry. Tolkappiyam classifies all the subject material of poetry under two themes or world views, akam and puram. Akam means ‘that which is inside’ or ‘the inner world’ and is, effectively, love poetry. Puram means ‘outside’, and consists of public poetry, the praise of kings and celebration of their prowess and generosity, about war and the death of warriors. Characters in akam poetry are never named, but there is a given set of characters who appear in them: the idealized hero and heroine, He and She, Her Mother, Her Friend, and so on, set in idealized landscapes. Puram poems, on the other hand, are about named historical characters such as Killivalavan, Adiyaman and Pari, chieftains of known places with which they are closely associated.

  We are very grateful to the writer Dilip Kumar for his valuable insights, meticulous readings and critical comments.

  The idealized landscapes in which akam poetry, in particular, is based, is central to the design of the poems. There are five such landscapes in akam proper: kurinci or hillside, marutam or cultivated land, mullai or forest, neytal or seashore, and palai or wasteland. Each landscape is named after a flower native to it. Not only is each landscape associated with a season and time of day, but also with specific gods, animals, birds, trees and so on. Most importantly, each landscape is associated with an aspect of love: kurinci with lovers’ union, marutam with the lover’s unfaithfulness; mullai with patient and hopeful waiting, neytal with anxious, uneasy waiting, and palai with separation and hardship. There are two further aspects of love, perunthinai or mismatched, and kaikilai or unrequited, which are at the edges of the akam frame; no particular landscapes are assigned to them.

  The Sangam poets never lose sight of the landscape that they know, and their poems are full of concrete and unforgettable details of the fauna and flora of Tamil Nadu— for example, the black-legged white heron, the hen-eagle with its parched head and chisel beak, and the long arrangements of flowers upon cassia twigs (all from A.K. Ramanujan’s translations). At the same time, as A.K. Ramanujan has said, ‘A conventional design thus provides a live vocabulary of symbols: actual objective landscapes of the Tamil country become the interior landscape of Tamil poetry’ (Ramanujan 1999, 204).

  Akam and puram poems complement and contrast with each other. Though puram poems are arranged in landscapes which correspond to akam ones, they are named after different flowers, each standing for a particular stage in siege or battle. Yet the schematization does not work as closely as it does in akam; the symbolism is not as instantly recognized. There is also room for poems which appear to belong to both groups, borrowing from both conventions.

  Sangam poetry lays the foundation for a Tamil poetic tradition. The notion of the five landscapes with their associated emotions are deeply embedded in its imagery; they inform the early epics such as Silappadikaram, for example, and references to them continue until much later. Although Sangam poetry is largely secular, the devotional poems of the Saivite and Vaisnavite saints owe much to both akam and puram styles of loving and yearning as well as celebration. And specific poems continue to inspire modern poets, as with the Sri Lankan poet Su. Vilvaratnam who takes the lament of Pari’s daughter as his starting point to write a political poem of loss and betrayal. Sangam poems continue to speak directly to a modern sensibility because of the universality of many of the situations they portray, the sharpness of their imagery, and the terse style they often employ.

  Akam poems can be read as ‘dramas in miniature’, as Parthasarathy (1993, 281) says in the postscript to his translation of Silappadikaram. They are monologues, or addressed to a particular person or friend or mother. Puram poems are also fragments of stories in the public world: exploits, celebrations, laments. For full-length narrative poems, however, we must turn to Silappadikaram and Manimekalai. Silappadikaram is attributed to Ilanko Adigal, younger brother of the king of the Cheras, Senguttuvan (2nd–5th century CE?). In its Prologue, it is described as a ‘poem interspersed with pro
se and song cycles’, and it tells the well-known and much loved story of the merchant prince Kovalan and his wife Kannagi. Kovalan leaves Kannagi for the beautiful courtesan and dancer Madhavi with whom he lives for many years, until, convinced suddenly of her falsehood, he returns home. Kovalan and Kannagi set off for Madurai where they hope to begin a new life, but Kovalan, accused of stealing the queen’s anklet, is killed by the order of the king. In fury, Kannagi sets fire to Madurai by tearing off her breast and cursing the city.

  Silappadikaram is arranged in three books or kaandam, named after the capitals of the three ancient Tamil kingdoms: Puhar of the Cholas, Madurai of the Pandyas and Vanci of the Cheras. The first two tell the story of love and betrayal, and are closely linked to akam themes and conventions. The third tells of the exploits of the Chera king and the celebration of Kannagi as goddess Pattini for whom he raises a temple; it follows puram conventions closely. The entire poem is full of vivid descriptions of the real landscape, which also has an emotional significance. Each kaandam is made up of a series of cantos, usually called kaadai (story). But five of these are entirely made up of song cycles, placed at strategic points of the narrative; they serve as a kind of chorus, commenting on the progress of the story and its characters. For example, the series of seashore songs, kanalvari, which Kovalan and Madhavi sing to each other in the neytal mode, reveal poignantly and subtly Kovalan’s change of heart, Madhavi’s realization of this, and the inevitability of their parting.

  Silappadikaram and Manimekalai are sometimes referred to as the ‘twin epics’, irattaikappiyam, and there are many links between the two. The same story material informs both: the Prologue to Silappadikaram tells us, in fact, that it was Sattanar who first told the Chera court the story of Kovalan and Kannagi, and that it was he who suggested that Ilanko write a poem about it. He assigned for himself the sequel, the story of Manimekalai, daughter of Kovalan and Madhavi. According to tradition, Ilanko was a Jain ascetic, and though his poem is remarkable for its tolerance towards all the sects and religions in the Tamil Nadu of his time, it is undoubtedly Jain in its slant. Sattanar was a Buddhist: his poem retells the story in Buddhist terms, and one of its special features is that it is the only extant Tamil Buddhist text. Manimekalai has an underlying love story, that of Prince Udayakumaran whose obsessive love for Manimekalai ends in tragedy, but its main theme, embellished with kilai kaadai, branch stories, is the spiritual journey of Manimekalai who renounces her life as a dancer, and becomes a bhikkuni. It is a didactic work, ending with a detailed exposition of the Buddhist precepts as preached by the sage Aravana Adigal.

  The other much loved Tamil work, dating from around the same time, is Tirukkural, attributed to Tiruvalluvar. Tirukkural takes its name from the verse form kural, in which it is written: a short verse of two lines, four feet followed by three. The book is arranged in sets of ten pithy aphorisms or kurals, under three divisions, aram, virtue or duty; porul, wealth; and inbam, love. These, with the fourth, viidu (moksha in Sanskrit), are the four great ends of life in classical tradition. Tirukkural does not engage with mysticism or philosophy; it is loved for its down-to-earth common sense, its moderation and compassion. It is free of all notions of caste or difference according to birth. But Tirukkural is also loved for the elegance and wit of its verse, its graphic metaphors and wordplay.

  Between the sixth and the ninth centuries CE there was a remarkable flowering in Tamil of what we now call ‘bhakti’ poetry, the poems and songs of a number of Saiva and Vaisnava poet-saints. These are personal poems of love and devotion to god, where the poet perceives herself or himself as child, lover, slave or friend. The Vaisnava poets are known as the Alvar, those who are immersed in their devotion to Visnu. The poems of the twelve Alvar are known collectively as the Naalaayira-divya-prabandam (Four thousand divine poems). They are said to have been collected and arranged in four sets by Nathamuni, a devotee who lived in the tenth century. The two works by Andal, the only woman Alvar, are placed in the first thousand. The works of Nammalvar, perhaps the most important of all the Alvar, find place in the third thousand, while the fourth thousand consists entirely of his Tiruvaymoli.

  The Saivite saints are known as the Nayanmar. Saivite devotional poetry is collected in twelve books of Tirumurai (Sacred tradition). This, however, is a more complex collection than the Naalaayira-divya-prabandam. The first seven books make up what are known as Tevaram (Holy songs) and are the collected works of Tirunavukkarasar (also known as Appar), Tirugnanasambandar (Sambandar) and Sundaramurti (Sundarar), the great three. Book 8 is given over to the works of Manikkavasagar, another well-loved poet. The last book of Tirumurai, Book 12, is the Periya Puranam of Sekizhar and consists of the lives of the sixty-three canonized Saivite saints. It is to be noted that not all the Saivite saints were poets, nor are all the poets included in Tirumurai. Only one woman is featured, Karaikkal Ammai, one of the earliest of the Saivite poets.

  Although bhakti poems transformed Tamil literature— and indeed, Tamil society—they also reveal a direct continuity with certain aspects of Sangam poetry and its conventions. A third of the thousand poems which make up the Tiruvaymoli of Nammalvar are shaped by the conventions of akam poetry, but there are only three characters: the heroine, talaivi, the friend, tozhi, and the mother, tay. The poet speaks in all these roles. The hero, of course, is Visnu himself; and such implicitness breaks the rules of anonymity fundamental to akam poems. The Krishna myth of the beautiful lover-god lends itself to akam treatment, and Vaisnava bhakti poetry in particular grows out of and develops the idiom of the lover and the beloved, as well as the themes of separation, absence, and longing for union. These themes are used with great intensity and beauty, notably in the poetry of Andal, who, legend tells us, became the bride of Lord Ranganatha of Srirangam, and vanished within his image.

  Many scholars (Mu. Varadarajan, A.K. Ramanujan, Norman Cutler, Indira Petersen, to name a few) have also pointed out the correspondence between puram and bhakti poems. Indeed, the Tirumurugarattrupadai, one of the ten long songs of Sangam poetry, in which Lord Murugan is praised as patron-king, but whose gift is the gift of salvation, was later incorporated into the Tirumurai. There are also individual songs of praise and devotion to Tirumal and Murugan in Paripatal. Indeed, the particularity of puram poems, in praise of named historical kings and chiefs, lords of specific places, transposes easily into much of bhakti poetry which is associated with sacred shrines and temples, and the deities present there. So too, the celebration of kingly acts of valour and generosity changes into the celebration of the miraculous deeds and the divine grace of the gods. Here it is worth noting that in Tamil Hinduism, the gods are often perceived as kings; the word for temple, kovil (ko-il), means the dwelling place of the king, and could equally well mean ‘palace’. The services performed for the gods are also traditionally the services performed for the king. So, the master–servant idiom of the puram poems moves easily into bhakti literature. The waking up of the king or the deity early in the morning, for instance, gives rise to a most beautiful genre, the palliezhucchi, of which we have included an example by Manikkavasagar.

  But while Tamil bhakti poetry continues, in many ways, with Sangam conventions and themes, it draws from more than the Tamil classical traditions; it brings together other traditions and influences: Puranic mythologies and Vedic references on the one hand, local traditions and folk influences on the other. The ancient Tamil ritual when young unmarried girls went down to the river to bathe and to make the paavai vow throughout the month of Margazhi becomes the basis of Andal’s well-known work Tiruppaavai, in which the girls take on the roles of the gopis who praise and serve Lord Krishna. Similarly, Periyalvar uses elements of folk lullabies, taalaattu paattu, and the celebrations of the deity as a child, pillai-tamizh, in his poetry.

  Above all, bhakti poems are meant to be direct and immediate. They speak of the poet’s own experience; they are narrated in his or her own words. They address a specific god, or a particular audience, a communi
ty which shares his devotion. The poems are meant to be performed, recited or sung; many are incorporated into the liturgy of temple worship.

  The last of the great Saiva and Vaisnava poet-saints take us up to the twelfth century, when Chola power was at its height in Tamil Nadu. This was a time of artistic splendour: temple architecture and sculpture, music and poetry, all flourished. One of the greatest of Tamil poets belongs to this period, and his greatest work is the Iramavataram, commonly known as Kambaramayanam.

  Kamban’s Ramayanam follows, of course, the Ramayana of Valmiki, which was composed nearly a thousand years earlier, but it cannot, by any means, be described as a close translation. Kamban’s work consists of nearly twelve thousand stanzas arranged in six books or kaandam: Balakaandam, Ayodhyakaandam, Aaranyakaandam, Kishkindakaandam, Sundarakaandam and Yuddakaandam. So far it follows Valmiki, but most importantly, it leaves out Uttarakaandam, in which Rama sends away Sita into permanent exile because of the gossip among the people of Ayodhya. Besides its different ending, Kamban’s Ramayanam also has a completely different beginning from Valmiki’s. Whereas Valmiki begins with the famous story of the hunter who shoots and kills one of a pair of love-birds, and of his own curse which gives him the sloka metre, Kamban begins with a unique and vivid description of the river Sarayu flowing through Ayodhya. Kamban leaves out some episodes, expands on others and adds many story elements from a south Indian folk and storytelling tradition to Valmiki’s narrative. For example, Kamban adds the story of Vali’s son Angadan who takes refuge with Rama; he inserts an episode whereby the rakshasas in Lanka produce a counterfeit Janaka to persuade Sita to give in to Ravana. Kamban also gives his characters a different slant: both Surpanaka and Ravana appear to be genuinely in love with Rama and Sita respectively; and Tarai, wife of Vali, remains a faithful widow instead of marrying Sugriva, as in Valmiki’s version.

  Many scholars have pointed out that Valmiki’s is a secular text, whereas Kamban’s is a religious one, closely related in feeling to the works of some of the Alvar such as Nammalvar and Kulasekara Alvar, and their treatment of the Rama story. In Valmiki, Rama is treated largely as a human hero, whereas in Kamban, there is never any doubt that he is an avatar of Visnu. Yet, Kamban complicates Rama’s status in the epic, for, although he is frequently recognized by others, both demons and sages, as an avatar, he himself appears either unaware of this or indifferent to it. In his article in Many Ramayaņas, David Shulman (1991) points to Rama’s silence when eulogies are made to him, even by Brahma himself.