Studies in Cola History and Administration c6.23
Studies in Cōḻa History and Administration c6.23
- Language
- English
c6.23.1
In trying to establish the unreliable character of the colophons to the Puram, Mr. Srinivasa Aiyangar permits himself to make so many contradictory statements that it is not easy to understand his real position on questions of vital importance to the discussion. Let us first bring together his statements about the chronology of the colophons and see how they fare in relation to one another. In a somewhat rhetorical rebuke he administers to modern Tamil scholarship, he says: * “It is high time that scholars gave up confounding the texts of poems with the commentaries of probably a thousand years later”, and he makes it clear on the same page that, in his opinion, the colophons and the commentaries were composed probably between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. From this we may conclude that the original composition of the poems has to be ascribed to a period between the second and the sixth centuries. But then we are told that “the four anthologies were made up in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D.” and that, at that time, “for each ode was noted the name of the tinai (and perhaps turai) to which it belonged and the name of its author.” So that, on the author’s own showing, no great interval elapsed between the original composition of the poems and their collection in anthologies—a result which in itself would go far to establish the authenticity of the tradition relating to the poems. This result is by no means so clear-cut, because elsewhere Mr.
c6.23.2
Srinivasa Aiyangar says * that Perundēvaṇār, a poet of the ninth century A. D. " seems to have taken a great interest in the collections of the poems of an earlier age, for he has provided introductory odes in praise of Śiva " to some of these collections. In the author's Tamil book on the Pallavas he states more definitely that Perundēvaṇār of the ninth century made the anthologies and provided them with introductory verses. Then again, it is not clear whether the colophons of the Puram are held to be all of them absolutely unreliable and useless for historical purposes, or whether only some of them are suspect for certain specific reasons, or whether, lastly, because some are demonstrably false, the rest have, for that reason, to be rejected. "The Puram as we have it," contends Mr. Srinivasa Aiyangar, "has besides,† (1) colophons indicating the particular occasions when each of the first two hundred and sixty-six odes were sung, (2) paraphrases of these two hundred and sixty-six odes and brief notes grammatical or interpretive (sic). The colophons stop where the paraphrases stop and probably both were done by an editor of the age when commentaries were composed on old Tamil poems, i. e., probably between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.
c6.23.3
The colophons, and not the commentaries, are resumed with the three hundred and fifty ninth ode and are continued to the end." Once more the errors in the statement of facts in this passage are not only considerable in themselves, but are such as to lend strong support to the hypothesis that the colophons and the paraphrases of the first part of the collection belong to one late author. The facts as stated in the passage just quoted are: (1) the colophons and the paraphrases stop at the 266th ode, and (2) the colophons, not the commentaries, are resumed with the 359th ode and are continued to the end. The necessary implication is that there are no colophons to poems numbering 267 to 358 inclusive. Now this is simply not correct; because Nos. 315, 344-5 have colophons like the other poems, and on Nos. 361-3 and some other verses we have no more information than we get on the odes that are said to have no colophons (Nos. 267 to 358). In reality, the colophons were furnished for all the odes and, as already stated it is only the decayed state of the manuscripts that is responsible for the gaps in our knowledge. This is sufficiently indicated by the learned editor of the work in his preface. Further, it is conceivable that the tiṇai and tuṟai were sometimes inserted later, because this can be done by any one who knows the rules of grammar and has before him particular poems and their contexts;
c6.23.4
but it is inconceivable that these contexts themselves, without which the tiṇai and tuṟai could not even be guessed at in several instances, were the inventions of an age much later than that to which the poems belonged. It is necessary at this point to quote (in translation) the remarks on the state of the manuscripts made by Paṇḍit V. Svāminātha Aiyar in his preface to the first edition, as these are best calculated to place the commentary and the colophons in a proper light. He says: “In this commentary are to be found many words that are not in current use. Further, here and there a few sentences seem to have been misplaced. As there are no means at present available to make necessary alterations and as I hope later to be able to do so when better manuscripts become available, I have published them exactly as I found them in the manuscripts. This commentary is extant only for the first 266 poems of this work; in no manuscript is found the commentary for the remaining poems; and after poem No. 242 the commentary has suffered damage and is somewhat confused. We do not know who wrote this commentary. The discussions of this author in his special notes on some poems indicate the existence of an older gloss on this work which has not come down to us.