Nature's Spokesman

by M Krishnan

  First it was an elephant; then a horse;

  Then a dark milch buffalo—

  Later an ox, and then a saree of full length—

  Then, its fabric frayed in every thread

  The gifts of Koraikkaal Aazhvaan developed

  The retiring feet of a toad

  And disappeared altogether from view!

  This verse is one of the mildest written by the lady and has lost much in translation, but I chose it because it displays a certain poetic fancy. This quality distinguishes many of the pieces attributed to this poetess, and saves them from being just slick verse. For instance, speaking of the things that are hardest to suffer in life she says:

  ‘Poverty is cruel, and especially is it cruel in one’s youth.’ I have always been struck by the deep understanding of youthful zest and aspirations that this line evinces—the rest of the verse is conventional.

  I am not quite sure if this verse does not belong to the earlier Auvvai. However, many occasional verses prove that the Auvvai of the thirteenth century was not overmuch given to didactic sentiments and smug moralization—some of them betray her zest for food and her sapient acceptance of sensuality. Here is a verse which is from the stylus of this Auvvai according to the scholar whom I consulted (diffidently, I beg leave to differ from the pundit, for its diction and form seem, to me, to belong to the Sangam period) which is worth quoting whoever wrote it, for it is typical of the attitude of many Tamil poets to life. Asked by a prospective patron who had lived in a negative, cautious sort of way to write a verse in his memory, Auvvai says:

  How shall I, who have sung of the Trinity and the three kings,

  Sing also of you!

  You, who have not even seen

  The red battlefields where war elephants die,

  Nor listened enraptured to the sweet pure strings of the Yazh;

  Nor have you fondly embraced

  Sweet-voiced, tender-breasted young love,

  And the insistent words of poets have never moved you:

  Nothing you know of elegant attire or of good food,

  You neither give nor take.

  That, the concept of worthwhile manhood as a thing that is at least capable of sensuous pleasures, is surely human and poetic, and anything but didactic.

  The third Auvvaiyar was a writer of complacent moralistic dicta. She seems to have been the latest of the three, and it was she who wrote ‘Aaththi-Cudi’, ‘Kondral-Vendan’ and other alphabetical moral precepts for the young—the first of these begins with the line ‘Desire to do good’.

  It is difficult to write that sort of thing and still be a poet. It is interesting to note that centuries later a man of indubitable poetic worth, Subramanya Bharathi, wrote a ‘New Aaththi’—Cudi’—I don’t think even his best friends will count it among his masterpieces. In fact, only one poet, Thiru-Valluwar (according to traditions he was the brother of Auvvaiyar), has written such didactic verse that has also true poetic quality (often when it is factual and not moralistic). Making allowances for all this, it is still hard to discover any poetic virtuosity in the work of the last of the Auvvais, however much moralists may praise its ‘goodness’ for children.

  I might digress for a moment to point out that another well-known didactic work in Tamil, the four-lined ‘Naaladiyar’, remains anonymous. It is recognized as the work of many poets, but their names are undisclosed. I can readily sympathize with the desire of those who would preach to remain anonymous—it is a safe way of tendering idealistic, irritating advice! The fact that ‘Aaththi-Cudi’, ‘Kondrai-Vendan’ and other such works are attributed to an Auvvaiyar may not even mean that they were written by a specific, elderly lady. But the burden of proof in literary criticism, as in law, is on him that sets up anything and I have not a shred of evidence.

  Then there is legend, much legend linking up the three dissimilar Auvvais of literature. It is miraculous legend (and not history of literary continuity) that unites these different people—that, and the sameness of their pen-names. Almost every miracle in the Auvvaiyar story has a verse supporting it supposed to have been written by the poetess to mark the occasion. This is dangerous ground for a reason that I shall state immediately, but I think there is ample evidence in Tamil literature not only of interpolations to sustain legend but also of subsequently manufactured miracles to explain (often unnecessarily) a mystic or imaginative passage. I understand that the picture, Avvaiyar, so highly praised for its realism, is based largely on the legends of the Auvvaiyar story.

  It is absurd to presume in these popular-scientific times that miracles have no currency—today we believe as much, and as hopefully and illogically, in miracles as man ever did. It is only the age of chivalry that is dead: the age of miracles, thank God, is still with us. But even so, is it not somewhat uninformed and incorrect in a literary way to call any depiction of the Auvvaiyar legend ‘historical’ and to enthuse over its realism?

  1954

  68

  Verse for a Living

  Tamil literature is of indeterminable antiquity, for nothing survives of its first few periods. All scholars agree that it is over twenty centuries old, but while traditional pundits claim that an entire age of almost a thousand years has been irretrievably lost, modern investigative scholars, sceptical of the reverential regard of these pundits for anything of great age (and lost!), place the literature later without committing themselves too narrowly to specification—but even they concede that a sizeable body of the oldest poetry has vanished without a trace.

  One of the earliest works of extant Tamil, Tholkappiam, a highly prescriptive and comprehensive treatise of prosody and grammar, probably belongs to the second or third century AD—the identity of its author is unknown. Besides this all that is left of the ancient literature is a set of nine anthologies (compiled by different anthologists whose names we do not know, at different times) of selected poems of diverse kinds, some short, some longer and one containing ten long poems. In classical Tamil, verse was the medium of literary expression: prose was limited to glosses and commentaries, though, of course, people spoke to one another in prose of several dialects.

  The foregoing is a prefatory summary. This dissertation is of the professional verse writers of the comparatively recent literature. However, to establish that there were such professionals seventeen or eighteen centuries ago, it is necessary to go back to these nine anthologies. In some of the nine, there are quite a few poems in extravagant praise of a king or chieftain. Some of the poems in Paththu-p-paatu (the anthology of ten long poems) feature the travelling minstrels called paanar, who went about from the court of one chieftain to that of another singing their lays to the accompaniment of musical instruments (and dance, at times) for the sake of reward. These are in a form peculiar to old Tamil termed aatrippadai, in which minstrels who had already benefited by the generosity of a chieftain tell their kinsmen in detail the way (sometimes long and difficult) they must traverse to reach that three-handed patron. The composition of verse and its communication to patrons was already a traditional means of making a living in the period of these primal anthologies—and no doubt much earlier. It was a calling that was continued right down the ages, through the proliferations of the Tamil language, even up to the first decade or two of this century.

  Old Tamil is direct, terse and limited in its vocabulary: it has the strength and freedom from profusion and rococo flourishes of brevity, and because of its elliptic brevity, also an ambiguity that makes the rendering of it into other languages without stultifying interpretations and annotations difficult, often even impossible. With the growth of its vocabulary and the development of sophisticated and contrived verse forms, the scope for versification in which virtuosity prevailed over poetic verve was enhanced considerably. By about AD 1500 forms featuring rhythmic jugglery, clever puns, difficult and ornamental structure, and similar artifices had been developed, and they lent themselves to the composition of flattering addresses and to impressing prospective patrons. T
his piece is about such addresses and their authors.

  The line of demarcation between these peripatetic verse writers and court poets is almost invisible at times. Both depended upon patrons, but on patrons of very different kinds—the former on prospective benefactors of whom they had only heard, who might or might not reward them, and the latter on personally known potentates and on a more settled basis.

  However, neither of these professionals was given merely to adulatory verse. Both have written much that is of considerable literary merit—brief, piquant addresses to the gods with a mythological base, rhythmic verses that depend on their words being split without metrical dislocation to yield two wholly different meanings (both these are untranslatable, because they rely on puns in Tamil and on mythological allusions), short amatory poems sustained by vivid but archaic similes, bitter, and also detached and wryly humorous, reflections on their own abject state (the latter also sustained by mythological analogies), lyrics, odes and epics. Kamban (circa AD 900), who wrote his celebrated Ramayanam (the most famous Puranic epic of Tamil), was a court poet and did not lack patrons. Kaallameghappulavar (the suffix pulavar means ‘poet’), renowned for the spontaneity of his poetic verse and sleight-of-word skill, was an out-and-out freelancer—incidentally, one of the many zestful quatrains he wrote some five centuries ago is a delightful dig at Kamban, who had once shortened a long vowel in a name without literary sanction to conform to metric requirements—in the parody, familiar Tamil words have their long vowels shortened to reduce them to gibberish! Court poets and unattached verse writers were not the chief source of the literature: a long line of religious and philosophic poets, mystics and authentic amateurs have contributed substantially to it, in varied metres.

  Naturally, it was only from the affluent that these professionals without backing could hope for reward, and these prospective benefactors were of varied kinds. Not all were equally rich, and some had amassed riches by the simple expedient of being stingy. Many were not particularly literate and, worse, some were verse writers themselves and had their own fads and fancies. Further, most were not to the manner born, as princes and potentates, but were merchants and landholders. Luckily for the itinerant vendors of verse, the obligation traditionally imposed on men of wealth and status towards the arts still persisted—noblesse oblige. But this, by itself, frequently did not suffice. Adventitious incentives to move prospective patrons were necessary.

  Some highly artificial set verse forms, already evolved, were utilized with necessary amendments, when a patron approached was unlikely to appreciate original effort. One was the santhappaa in which consecutive lines had the identical words and number of feet: by splitting the words skilfully without altering the metric flow and rhythm of the lines, different meanings were disclosed. Another, probably borrowed from Sanskrit, was the rathabandhan, in which the verse, when inscribed, had the shape of a ratha (a temple chariot). A third was the ulaa—the word literally denotes a stroll. In it, the central figure (the patron) is out for a stroll, and upon catching sight of him beautiful maidens fall headlong in love with him, and languishing, grow thin and pale, with their luxuriant coiled tresses now hanging loose in untidy strands and the bangles slipping down their wasted hands. By deftly substituting the name of the hoped-for benefactor for the name originally there (they had the skill for this, all right) an address suitable for the occasion could be had. It was not imagined that a successful merchant, elderly, bald, and wrinkled with strenuous years spent in the acquisition of capital, would fancy himself as the young, irresistible figure in an ulaa, or that a broad-acred landholder adept in the collection of lease rent could appreciate the intricacies of a santhappaa, but both would know they had been conventionally praised, and that some acknowledgment of this was expected.

  A tradition sedulously nurtured by these poets was that the refusal of aid to them would have unpleasant consequences. Curses and abuse on the frustration of fond expectations are as old as humanity itself, but these men built it up as a regular reprisal—if denied reward, they threatened to ‘sing abuse’ (the Tamil term, vasai paadal, means precisely that), which would be disastrous. Belief in the potency of sung abuse was warmly encouraged by these poets, and many of the patrons they approached had an uneasy uncertainty about its effects—no doubt it did serve to loosen tight fists on occasion.

  Vastly as they differed among themselves in their poetic and scholarly attainments, and personal attributes, these professionals had one thing in common which modern poets lack—all of them followed, literally, an outdoor pursuit, and had much experience of hunger and fatigue, the open air and the countryside. In those days there were no trains and the only means of conveyance was the bullock cart, which they could not afford. They walked. Often, the patrons they went in pursuit of lived forty or fifty miles away, and they trudged for days till they reached their destination. Some have written of the hardships endured in their quest through thorn scrub and jungle. This well-known stanza of Kaallameghappulavar is addressed to the Mudali of Aamoor, a remote rural settlement:

  What ages have we walked, till the white bones

  show through our soles! Ignorant of the way,

  gone on and on, when prince among immortals,

  the Mudali of Aamoor is right here!

  Verbal dexterity, and knowledge of prosody and verse forms, were essential to the profession these men practised, but physical endurance and stout-muscled calves were not less necessary. It was not only money that they sought of patrons. Some have asked for shawls for cover against the cold, and the present of a milch cow has been gratefully acknowledged. A few have sung even of the outrageous generosity of a potentate who had rewarded their verse with the gift of an elephant—I think the animal must have been purely metaphoric, for men seeking aid for their own subsistence could never have provided for so hearty an appetite. It seems strange that none of these marathonists has asked for durable footwear.

  The supplicatory appeals of these poets often featured stark, graphic accounts of their destitution, sometimes in symbolic terms. There were two men named Chockanaathappulavar who lived about the same time, both accomplished poets, and the one belonging to the village of Balapattadai wrote this address to the patron, Bhoja:

  Bhoja, when as a thunderstorm you showered

  gold-rain upon the spread of earth beneath,

  not a drop touched me, for my poverty

  shielded me wholly with its deep umbrella!

  I was told that this conceit is probably borrowed from a very similar verse in another language, but no details of the authorship and probable date of that other poem are available for verification. However, I doubt if any other language has anything like this poem of Madhurakavirayar addressed, not to the wellknown patron Kaallaththi, but to his own indigence:

  Long have you wandered with me, like an abiding shadow—

  what, O my poverty, will you do tomorrow?

  When I reach Kaallaththi’s seat where will I be and where you?

  Come, stay with me today.

  A few have written, not of their own distressed circumstances, but of a professional poet’s lot, with much bitterness. These do not lend themselves to close renderings in English—and all renderings here are close—for, in spite of their power, they are either sustained by allusions to incidents in mythological stories about the gods, or by being set in a milieu whose social values are now wholly obsolete—and anyway their metric ebullience and perfection are untranslatable. Padikkaasuthambiran, a gifted and original poet of the early eighteenth century, has written one of the bitterest of them:

  Foredoomed, with many callings there, we chose scholarship

  witlessly, thinking it great.

  We did not learn the street magician’s art, dance the pole

  dance, or practise sleight-of-hand.

  Not born full-breasted prostitutes, we did not, abandoning

  accursed Tamil, enter service with women as their go-betweens.

  To what a wretched life have w
e been born!

  Ashtaavadhanam Saravanaperumal Kavirayar, who had exceptional skill with rhyme and rhythm, was the court poet of Ramanathapuram in the nineteenth century. He has a set of seven vibrant stanzas about niggardly householders visited with the trader in verse. These are two excerpts:

  Who is it striding down the street, with palm-leaf slats in hand?

  Great heavens! It looks like a poet—go quickly shut the door,

  and leaving it ajar a crack, keep watch till he has gone

  far down the street and safely turned the corner at its end.

  This is a conversation between a wealthy citizen and the visiting poet:

  ‘Whom visits me?’—‘A poet’—‘And where are you from?’

  ‘From Vadakasi.’—‘What brings you here?’

  ‘Your fame has brought me here.

  Hearing of you we have composed sweet verses in your praise.’

  ‘You were not wise. Which of my long line of forefathers has

  listened to verse? A slight unknown in all my ancestry

  is what you bring! Go far away before there is bloodshed.’

  Tamil poets have never been unresponsive. The simplest meal provided by some modest householder has been lavishly praised, and its two elementary dishes described in loving detail—grudging and meagre hospitality has also provoked response! The munificent patronage that they, and their fellows, had enjoyed at the hands of kings and chieftains has been remembered and superlatively extolled, but it is no royal benefactor but a Muslim shipowner that has had the warmest and most extravagant tributes paid to him. This was Seethakkaathi Marakkaayar (early eighteenth century) who had a love of literary Tamil and an unfailing sympathy for poets. They praised him when he was alive, and they praised him long after he had been buried—they even wrote that with his death poetry was also dead. Padikkaasuthambiran has many stanzas on the patron—this is one of them: