A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c19.s2.1

c19.s2.1

Some account has been given in Chapter VII of the literature of the Śangam Age, the oldest body of works now known in the Tamil language. That literature was the result of the meeting and fusion of two originally separate cultures, the Tamil and the Aryan. Its beginnings are no longer traceable, and the schematic anthologies that have been handed down doubtless represent a relatively late phase in that epochal literary movement, and to this phase we have suggested the period A.D. 100-300. A close study of the grammar and vocabulary of the different works as also of their ideas enables the trained reader to discern the outlines of a progressive development and to arrive at tentative conclusions on their relative chronology. The *Tolkāppiyam*, for instance, is best placed towards the close of the age indicated above, and at least two of the anthologies, the *Kalittogai* and *Paripāḍal*, may well be taken to at least a century later. The theme of all the 130 poems of the *Kalittogai* is love as manifested in the five *tiṇais* (types of landscape), and the treatment of the subject is much more sophisticated in these poems than in the *Ahanāṉūru*. This sophistication is found also in the *Paripāḍal* and both works mention new names of ornaments like *vāhu-valaiyam* (armlets), and *mekalai* (girdles) unknown to the earlier poems. A certain Nallanduvanār was the author of the verses in one section (*neydal*) of the *Kalittogai* by one account, and the compiler of the entire anthology according to another. The *Paripāḍal* takes its name from the metre employed in the poems in the collection; the original collection included seventy songs on different deities, and of these only twenty-four entire songs and a few fragments of some others have survived; Tirumāl (Vishnu), Muruga, and the river Vaigai form the themes of all these poems and fragments. This is the first instance of a work set to music and belonging to the class of *iśait-tamil*, ‘musical Tamil’. The songs show much familiarity with Upanishadic and Purāṇic lore, and are replete with advanced philosophic concepts belonging to different schools of thought.