A song of kings and poets

(and battle and social structures and, maybe, tax)

An enormous pleasure of this week has been sitting down with Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom (in Tamil, Puranānūru), in the translation by George L. Hart and Frank Heifetz.¹

If you have never heard of these, you’re definitely not alone. Around the first and second centuries CE, across Afro-Eurasia, poetry was having a real moment. Some of the results of that moment have become touchstones for ‘classical’ brilliance. Others have faced greater obscurity on the world stage. The reasons why have more to do with what happened centuries later than with the poetry itself.

Roman poets, such as Virgil, Ovid and Martial became part of the canon of European literature and Europe took over large parts of the world. Tamil poets, some whose names we know, others whose names we do not, first composed and sang, then wrote down (or had written down by others) works which were admired, copied and commented upon for centuries but which have not been part of a process of global cultural colonisation.²

At the time, however, both may have recognised the other’s craft, even if the worlds in which they wrote were very different. Both Latin and Tamil poets in these early centuries of the first millennium valued not just fine similes or arresting imagery, but also brevity, squeezing the language dry of any unnecessary particle. Their audience was, primarily, wealthy men.

In the Roman Empire, those men might have poems performed at their parties or read it in their leisure time. They could pay poets to write for them, buy their books, hand-copied at stalls around Rome and other major cities or attend salons to hear the works. Repeating them and commenting on them was a way of demonstrating taste and education. (The Roman elite was as snotty about the nouveau riche as any other landed aristocracy.)

Across the Western Indian Ocean, in the southern regions of peninsular South Asia, in what is now roughly the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala (but also parts of Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh), poets, both men and women, wandered from royal court to royal court. Some of these were the homes of great kings, others more minor royalty. Everywhere was expected to be generous and hospitable: the poet would determine if a man’s name and deeds lived forever.

These poems have not yet enjoyed anything like the modern study of the Roman corpus. Their dates remain uncertain (though considerably narrowed down in the last half century). Their language remains challenging and elusive. There are now excellent translations of at least some of the major works, but much still to be gleaned from close work on their structure and vocabulary by linguists and literary scholars.

For a historian, they are a treasure trove, and I plan to share them with you in more detail over the coming few weeks. Often, they are not works which can simply be read: like a lot of ancient and medieval poetry, especially in translation, they can seem dry, clunky, needlessly repetitive or obscure. Reading them without context is also to miss layers of subtlety which every hearer at the time would have been mean to grasp and which were central to how the poems were understood. We may not always know what these are when we spot them, but fortunately, we often do, thanks to painstaking work by generations of scholars up to this point.

Sometimes, though, in any corpus of great literature, there will be the odd piece that needs no caveats, no essays and no introduction. It sends shivers down the spine because suddenly, leaping off the page, is a voice, immediate, human and alive forever.

I hope you will bear with me as I unpick snarlier passages and complex allusions. I’m having so much fun with this anthology and can’t wait to share it as a live research and reading project! I’m also learning a huge amount, as well as putting to work things learned over many years.

For now, though, this is the moment that caught me, when a fragment of a world appeared so vividly in front of me that I could appreciate the artistry of the poet without the thousand apologies we make for the past not sounding enough like the present:

As the hostile onslaught bent on destruction beats at the front ranks

of the army of his king, he alone, sword raised in his right hand,

blocks the enemy from surging on and so he is like a shore

to a great ocean, that man whose lineage, like him, has shown

preeminent generosity, the ruler of a village which other than always

feeding those who come to it singing

does not even create enough income to merit being taxed by a king.

The song of Maturaik Kanakkāyanār.³

From the point of view of a historian of economic and social systems, I will definitely want to talk more about those words ‘income’ and ‘tax’. I am not sure that they are the only translations possible, and there are others which might fit better with what we know about the society in which this poem was written.

As a historian of political systems and state structures, I am fascinated by the picture this paints of a king, served by village leaders who are their supporters in battle.

From a material culture perspective, I want to know more about the sword: how big was it, what was it made of, how many people had them?

In terms of understanding the role of literature in this society, I am caught by the observation that, however poor this hero was, he still took care to reward those who turned up at his village offering songs and poems. Perhaps we might imagine the poet raising an eyebrow, giving a knowing look or simply pausing to allow that to land as he performed the song for a feast or festival at a kingly court. Perhaps we don’t need to: it would simply have been obvious.

After thinking about all of those things and deciding to follow many of them up, though, I simply went back and re-read the poem again: the rising cadence of the battle, the surging ocean imagery, building to a crest which suddenly, at ‘that man whose lineage’, peaks and falls back like the receding wave. The poet pulls us back into the man’s everyday life, the smallness of his world, ending on the mundane and blunt evaluation of his village’s wealth. The whole is balanced so perfectly that, just as a wave peaks only in relation to its trough, the hero’s courage stands spotlit against the ordinary.

If the reward for generosity was to be remembered eternally, then surely even poor hospitality here achieved its ends.

1. Hart, George L., and Hank Heifetz, eds., The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom: An Anthology of Poems from Classical Tamil, the Purananuru (Columbia University Press, 1999).

2. I should say, I don’t think Virgil, Ovid or Martial are anything less than brilliant. It is just that their fame is not a proportionate reflection of their brilliance, so much as things they could never have foreseen.

3. Song no. 330 (p. 188).