The Colas c34.10

c34.10

The *Kallāḍam* is a poem of Kallāḍanār, the work and the author alike taking the name of a place,¹⁴ possibly the birth-place of the poet. He must have been different from the Śaṅgam poet of the same name, five of whose songs figure in the *Puṟanānūṟu*,¹⁵ and others in the *Ahanānūṟu* and *Kuṟundogai*. There is a tradition that the author of the *Kallāḍam* chose one hundred verses from the *Tiruccirṟambalak-kōvai* as the basis for his work, and this may well have been so. The work is written in a peculiar style, the result of the author's forced attempt to revive the poetic forms and diction of the Śaṅgam age. The whole poem is thus a curious instance of extreme pedantry. It comprises a hundred pieces, each purporting to depict a particular mood of love (*Ahattuṟai*). The formalised schematic and rather soulless treatment of love in the *Kōvai* type appears, to a modern mind, enough in itself to spoil the chances of real literature; our author has imposed further shackles on himself by tying himself up to a selection of verses from the *Tirukkōvai* and by his deliberate effort to write in an idiom unnatural in his age; and there is no evidence to suggest that the author meant it to be a mere burlesque or parody; in fact it is too serious for that, and the story is that the excellence of the *Tirukkōvai* was demonstrated to the satisfaction of the Śaṅgam only by this effort of Kallāḍanār. The decay of taste and the failure to reach a proper standard of literary criticism and maintain it, is best seen in the admiration in which this stilted composition has been held by generations of scholars and poets in recent times.¹⁶