Key Ideas
Akam (“interior”) — love poems; puṟam (“exterior”) — poems of war, kings and death.
Five tiṇais — landscapes each linked to a phase of love — mountain (union), forest (waiting), field (infidelity), seashore (anxious waiting), wasteland (separation).
No named lovers — only “she”, “he”, “her friend”, “his mother”.
Yādum ūrē yāvarum kēḷir — “every town our home, every man our kin”.
Saṅgam literature is the earliest body of Tamil literature, composed roughly between 300 BCE and 300 CE and named after the legendary “academies” (caṅkam) of poets said to have flourished at Madurai under the Pāṇḍya kings. It comprises 2,381 poems by 473 poets (including some thirty women and over a hundred anonymous), collected in eight anthologies (Eṭṭuttokai) and ten long poems (Pattuppāṭṭu). It is one of the great classical literatures of the world, independent of Sanskrit in its origins, and strikingly secular, concrete and modern in feel.
The poems are of two kinds. Akam (“interior”) poems are about love; puṟam (“exterior”) poems are about everything else — war, kings, heroism, generosity, death, the poet’s poverty. Akam poems follow a remarkable convention, codified in the ancient grammar Tolkāppiyam: they name no individuals — only “she”, “he”, “her friend”, “her mother” — and each is set in one of five landscapes (tiṇai), each associated with a phase of love, a time, a season, a flower, a bird and a god: kuṟiñci (mountains) with lovers’ union; mullai (forest pastures) with patient waiting; marutam (cultivated fields) with the husband’s infidelity and the wife’s sulking; neytal (seashore) with anxious waiting; and pālai (wasteland) with separation and elopement. The landscape itself expresses the feeling.
A short akam poem from the Kuṟuntokai (in A. K. Ramanujan’s rendering), spoken by a woman of her love:
Bigger than earth, certainly, higher than the sky, more unfathomable than the waters is this love for this man of the mountain slopes where bees make rich honey from the flowers of the kurinji that has such black stalks.
Puṟam poems include laments of mothers and widows, praise of generous patrons, and philosophical reflection — above all the famous poem of Kaṇiyaṉ Pūṅkuṉṟaṉār (Puṟanāṉūṟu 192): “Every town is our town, every man our kin… Good and evil do not come from others; pain and relief come of themselves… We are not amazed by the great, nor do we scorn the small.”
Rediscovered by U. V. Swaminatha Iyer in the late nineteenth century and brought to world attention by A. K. Ramanujan’s translations, Saṅgam poetry is the foundation of Tamil literary identity.
Curiosities
did you know?- ‘Yādum ūrē yāvarum kēḷir’ — ‘every town is our town, everyone our kin’ — by the poet Kaṇiyaṉ Pūṅkuṉṟaṉār, is inscribed at the United Nations.
- The poems were rediscovered in the late 19th century by the scholar U. V. Swaminatha Iyer, who searched for decades for palm-leaf manuscripts.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can a landscape express an emotion?
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