The romance of lice
And the glory of kings
In this handful of newsletters, I’ve been talking about a selection of poems created in southern peninsular South Asia in the first and second centuries CE.
Probably originally oral performances, written down later, perhaps from the third century onwards, they are considered the epitome of the classical form of Tamil language. They stand out for vivid metaphors and similes, complex use of analogy and ecological symbolism and, above all, brevity. Squeezing a world into a word was the highest aim of these ancient poets.
Because of all of this, they are fiendishly complicated to read and translate today, even for native speakers or advanced scholars of Tamil. I am able to work with them by comparing translations into English with the original texts, to see how specific words or phrases are being translated, which I’ll be doing some of next week, but I definitely can’t sit with them and read them.
In fact, I began studying Tamil many years ago precisely to be able to use these works as sources, and I’m still a long way off fluency but every step closer is immensely rewarding. It brings a new appreciation of the craft of those ancient artists, the skills and insight of later compilers, commentators, editors and translators, who have worked on them since at least the 5th century CE, and the richness of life that they reveal. Along the way, I’ve also made friends and been able to read much simpler things in Tamil which have still helped my research.
Coming back to these poems in my most recent work has been massively encouraging for seeing how much more I can now do with them as a result of years of slow, incremental, sometimes frustrating progress. Whatever it is you’re plugging away it, keep going!
This week, I want to think about these poems as a body of work. What are they, why do they exist, who created them and how? And what are they called? This bit might sound simple but isn’t, so let’s begin there.
Naming the Thing
The first name I learned for these works was ‘Sangam poems’ or ‘Sangam epics’. The word ‘sangam’ means gathering, council, or group of scholars. It is also the word used for a Buddhist community in ancient South Asian texts. According to legend, a large number of Tamil works, revered for their artistic and moral quality, were created in the distant past by a ‘sangam’ of the greatest poets. This label is sometimes also applied to the whole period when this sangam was meant to be operational, so it is possible to fine references to ‘Sangam Age’ coins or buildings or kings or empires in some writing about ancient southern South Asia (which is also sometimes referred to as ‘the Tamilakam’, or the region where Tamil was spoken).
This terminology is now not used very much for several reasons. One is that we know much more about the world in which these poets were writing, thanks to archaeology and identifying connections with sources from other regions, especially Sri Lanka and further north in South Asia. Thus, we no longer see this past completely through the lens of the poems.
Another reason is that much more is known about the poems themselves. Once, their origins were shrouded in legend and were placed anywhere between 6000 BCE and 300 CE. They could be found associated with ancient myths of a land swamped by a great flood. Now, careful linguistic and historical research by generations of scholars has identified that the whole body of poems once termed ‘sangam’ can actually be divided into several discrete blocks, created at different times, for slightly different purposes and audiences.
The ones I’m interested in here are those produced earliest in this process, and now thought to have been composed mainly in the first two centuries CE, with perhaps some in the last century BCE. These can be called Eṭṭuttogai, or the Eight Anthologies, because they have traditionally been organised into, well… eight anthologies! This was probably done in or just before the fifth century when a poem first refers to these eight anthologies.
In total, the Eṭṭuttogai contain 2,371 poems. Some are very short, just three or four lines. Some are more like thirty or forty lines. Within these, some anthologies have received more attention than others, and a lot of that depends, especially in my work, on work to translate them. For example, I have been working lately mainly with the two anthologies translated by the great US scholar of Tamil, George L. Hart III (one of them in collaboration with Hank Heifetz).
These are the Four Hundred Songs of War (Pūram = song of war, nāngu = four, nūru = 100, so puram + naanu + nooru = Pūranānūru), and the Four Hundred Songs of Love (akam = song of love).1 Specifically, akam are songs about romantic and erotic love, so as another great scholar of Tamil, Kamal Zvelebil, nearly put it, all of the poems are in one way or another about f**king or fighting (it was 1973 in a book published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, so he actually went for ‘mating and fighting’).2
So, when I’m talking about the early Tamil poems, the Eṭṭuttogai, or the individual anthologies, that’s what I mean.
Questions of History
Now, for those more historical questions: why do they exist, how were they made?
The poems themselves actually tell us quite a bit about this, and the picture is at once very familiar (starving artists begging people to pay them for their creations) and an insight into a very specific and distinctive world.
The artists who created the poems in the Eṭṭuttogai were both make and female (mostly male, but female poets were not just one-off exceptions) and drawn from various different backgrounds (again, mostly from higher status groups, but poets from lower-status groups were not rare). There is also reference to a ‘caste of bards’ (e.g. Puranānūru 103, 105), suggesting that artistic status could be inherited.
Poets were mobile and it seems that, as well as possibly being an inherited status, poetry was also often something of a family affair, with several references to wives travelling as dancers and musician, who may well have performed alongside their poet husbands. For example,
With my wife, the dancer decked with bangles following after me
and struggling to climb the narrow paths, their crevices hard to cross
in the high mountains where tigers wander, her body stopped over
and taking only short steps because she has already walked too much,
(Extract from Uraiyūr Ēniccēri Mutamōciyār sings Āy, Puranānūru 135. See also 60 and 64)
These poems were certainly intended to be entertaining, and skilful use of complex schemes of rhyme and rhythm were highly valued and were expected to be highly rewarded. There was also enough technical appreciation for these skills that they could, at least according to the commentary on one of these poems, provide a ‘reference’ for travelling poets, who, after all, might be suspected of other activities, such as spying or theft. Producing a good on-the-spot verse might be the difference between life and death, as in this case, where a poet named Ilantattan entered a city under siege and was accused of espionage. The spontaneous performance of a fellow poet saved his life:
Does the life of a bard in need of favour harm anyone else
as he grows lean in search of reward, thinks of patrons,
moves along like a bird, crosses many rugged wastelands
and does not think them long, sings the best that he can
with his tongue that isn’t perfect, and is happy with whatever
he receives, feeding his family and eating without saving,
and generous as well, holding nothing back? No, this life harms no one
other than by the shame it causes rivals in the discipline of song
when he walks off, with his head held high, and there and then
he is happy! His is a life as fine as yours,
you who have gathered wealth from ruling the earth and whose fame soars!
(Puranānūru 47)
The livelihood of these poets seems to have been precarious. Many of the poems speak of their poverty and suffering, of having to be always on the move and of wearing threadbare rags, though this may also have been meant to persuade kings to greater generosity.
Lice are an enemy! They’re all over us,
their eggs securely laid within the hollows
of the seams of our clothes that have been sewn
and resewn with so many threads they might as well be
the bowls of our yāls [a stringed instrument like a lyre], where the strings hang down!
(Extract from Turaiyūr Ōtaikilār sings Āy, Puranānūru 136)
Certainly, the poets expected to be given gold and food, preferably, we are told in some poems, fatty meat. They also claimed the right to respect, bordering on veneration. One poem, for example, tells of a road-weary poet who, entering a king’s hall, mistook the ceremonial couch for the king’s great war drum for a bed and promptly fell asleep on it. The king could have had him killed for this great insult but, being a wise, learned and respectful man, he knew better and instead settled down to fanning the poet with his own hand so that he could sleep better!
All of this raises the question, then, of why kings might also have bought into this relationship (even if the story above is an exaggeration or a salutary tale to encourage other kings)?
In my next newsletter I plan to wind up at least this thread on the Eṭṭuttogai by thinking more about what it meant, in practical and economic terms, to be a king in the first and second centuries in the southern South Asian peninsula. In other words: how could they afford to pay poets and what made them king anyway? But there is also a cultural or ideological dimension to this question. If we accept for now, that kings could be kings and could afford to pay people for their services in gold and hospitality, why did they choose to bestow that on wandering, possibly slightly unsanitary songsmiths?
The phenomenon isn’t actually that uncommon in the ancient and medieval world. Similar arrangements are likely the reason why we have the works attributed to Herodotos, from the world of the Aegean in c. 800 BCE, the Old English epic Beowulf, written perhaps c. 800 CE but based on older oral tradition, the semi-legendary tales of Sundiata, the 13th-century ruler of Mali, whose songs have been sung by generations of West African griot performers, the Skaldic poems of Viking Age Scandinavia (c. 9th-13th centuries), and I could go on.
After all, if you are a king in a world without mass media such as television, radio or printing, how do you make sure that people know you are king? Wandering poets, reciting their tales in one court after another could spread the word. And, if you are a king who fancies himself a great king, how can you possibly be sure? Comparing your deeds to those of other kings from long ago or faraway, or having somebody skilfully do it for you might look like good options.
We should also never underestimate the massive potential that resides in human boredom and the thirst for entertainment. Is it better to spend another evening sitting around in the royal hall having the same conversations over again with the same group of people, reminiscing about the same old stories or talking about what to plan on the west bank of the river next season if it looks like the weather might be wet, or to sit back, drink some wine and listen to a music and dance troupe tell beautiful tales about how great your ancestors were and how much more awesome you are?
There is another factor, though, which comes through the poems strongly. To be king requires distinctions which are beyond simply greater access to wealth or even success in battle. All societies with hierarchies of power do this in different ways but all hierarchies do it: those at the top are distinguished by differences of clothing, habit, housing, appearance, their behaviour and the behaviour of those around them. Having poets sing their praise was one of the ways in which early kings in southern South Asia were made different from the people they ruled.
The poems reveal some of the other ways, including drinking foreign wine, riding elephants in musth, raising a white parasol and controlling their hall. They also point to a more subtle distinction: being trained to recognise and value the most skilled poetry.
Culture can be analysed as a series of more-or-less logical or explicable or functional processes, like this, but its power is that it is not experienced that way. Kings did not pay and support poets, or grant them free passage even across kingdoms at war, because they thought ‘in this way I continue to look more kingly and my power will be more secure’. Culture skins deep into who we are and how we experience the world and this is perhaps the most striking explanation that the poems in Puranānūru offer for their own existence:
…O Celiyan
with your tall umbrella of victory and your chariot and its banner!
May your stars remain and endure, but given over to destruction,
may the stars of your enemies not endure! As the force,
of your efforts, greatness! is praised by those of noble family
who live by the sword and are long linked to your victorious clan
as your life is long linked to you or your body is long
linked to your life, while those who come in their need to you
exalt your generosity, and rapt in pleasure you drink toddy
that is cool and fragrant and clear, brought to you by women wearing
shining bracelets who serve you in vessels of gold, may you act beneficently!
It is said that only by living in this way, one truly lives.
Many born in the wide world have never acted
to spread and firmly ground their fame but have merely existed and died!
(Extract from Mānkuti Kilār sings Pāntiyan Talaiyālankānattuc Cerunvenra Netuncoliyan, Puranānūru 24)
The fame which could only come from being glorious in battle, generous to retainers and praised far and wide in beautiful words, became core to the meaning of kingship, and life itself.
This best explains the privilege and influence which poets enjoyed and even the chance to escape from other social conventions: kings whose meaning and memory depended on the finest and the sharpest words would willingly compete to elevate the most capable. And competition for those royal rewards fostered the creation of some of the most beautiful poetry of the ancient world and created a group who could even mock and chastise kings themselves.
…If you live by martial courage, open [your gates] and fight!
But if you are without righteousness, without martial courage and all
you do is hide on your own grounds within your high walls
while your massive gates stay closed
and never open, do you realize how much cause for shame there is in this!
(Extract from Kōvūrkilār sings Netunkilli when Cōlan Nalankilli besieged Āvūr and was was locked inside the city, Puranānūru 44)
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) and Hart, George L., ed., The Four Hundred Songs of Love: An Anthology of Poems from Classical Tamil, The Akanān̲ūr̲u(French Institute of Pondicherry, 2016).
Zvelebil, Kamil Veith, The Smile of Murugan. On Tamil Literature of South India (1973).