நூலியல் பதிவு

தமிழ் விக்கிப்பீடியா “Educational thoughts in ancient Tamil literature”ஐ அவரது படைப்புகளுள் பட்டியலிடுகிறது. இக்காப்பகத்திற்காக Open Library பதிப்போ கட்டுப்பாடற்ற எண்ணிமப் படியோ இன்னும் உறுதிசெய்யப்படவில்லை. 1995 Collected Papers உள்ளடக்கத்தில் தொடர்புடைய கல்வியியல் கட்டுரைகள் பட்டியலிடப்பட்டுள்ளன.

இக்கட்டுரை பற்றி

விக்கிபீடியாப் பட்டியல் தலைப்பு; தனி நூல் படிமம் இல்லை. தொடர்புடைய மூன்று Tamil Culture கட்டுரைகள் இங்கு உள்ளன.

எப்படி வாசிப்பது

நூல் / கட்டுரை உரை இப்பக்கத்தில் கீழே இணைக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது. OCR பிழை இருந்தால் மூலப் படிமத்தைப் பார்க்கவும்.

Educational Thoughts in Ancient Tamil Literature

Three Tamil Culture essays on education in ancient Tamil literature. Re-OCR’d from Internet Archive page images and lightly edited for readability (hyphenation rejoined; obvious character errors corrected). Footnotes remain noisy in places — prefer the scan view for citations.

Essay I: Vol. V No. 1 (Jan. 1956), pp. 1–15 · IA leaves 1417–1431

Essay II: Vol. V No. 2 (Apr. 1956), pp. 105–119 · IA leaves 1523–1537

Essay III: Vol. VI No. 4 (Oct. 1957), pp. 273–285 · IA leaves 2099–2111

Ancient Tamil Literature and the Study of Ancient Indian Education
The Educators of Early Tamil Society
Ancient Tamil Poet-Educators

Ancient Tamil Literature and the Study of Ancient Indian Education

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · Tamil Culture, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 1–15

The contribution that Comparative Education bids fair to make towards the promotion of international understanding and fellowship in this latter half of the twentieth century is similar to the contribution made by Comparative Philology, Comparative Law, Comparative Religion and Comparative Literature in the last two centuries. There is already the promise of educational Bryces and Montesquieus classifying and analysing educational institutions of the Western World, but Comparative Education opens up yet wider horizons, and these include the evaluation of the ideals, aims and values of educational systems and thought in the ancient world as a whole, and not merely in the sector represented by Graeco-Roman culture. It is but natural that the educationists of Europe and America should be concerned with the well-springs of their educational thought, but Comparative Education in an era of internationalism has the opportunity to extend its scope and purposes both in time and in space. Just as research workers in Comparative Education today and Modern Year Books of Education would consider it necessary to include India, Africa, China, Japan and Indonesia within the range of their studies and their surveys, a cultural history of Comparative Education would always remain incomplete without the inclusion of thought in India and China when, for instance, Plato was outlining his Republic and formulating his Laws, and Quintilian was instructing students for the Roman bar.¹

European scholarship, particularly that branch of it engaged in historical, cultural and philosophic studies, has been mostly Hellenocentric and Europacentric and has neglected to a large extent synoptic and synthesising studies of the World that belongs to Mankind as a whole. For this restricted world-view the specialist should shoulder much of the blame. Excessive specialisation has resulted in the most restricted meanings applied to “humanism” and the “humanities”. The classification of specialists into Egyptologists, Indologists, Sinologists under a general trade-mark “Orientalists” has not contributed to their acquiring respectability on an equal plane with those engaged in classical scholarship. The narrow outlook engendered by a certain type of Hellenocentric scholarship sometimes leads to the most startling and unscientific conclusions, as in the following passage in which the author dismisses the consideration of non-Grecian cultures with much the same sweep as Macaulay dismissed the study of Indian literatures.

“We are accustomed,” says the author of Paideia, the Ideals of Greek Culture,

“to use the word ‘culture’ not to describe an ideal which only a Hellenocentric world possesses, but in a much more trivial and general sense to denote something inherent in every nation of the world, even the most primitive. We use it for the entire complex of all the ways and expressions of life which characterise any one nation. Thus the word has sunk to mean a simple anthropological concept, not a concept of value, a consciously pursued ideal. In this vague, analogical sense it is permissible to talk of Chinese, Indian, Babylonian, Jewish or Egyptian culture, although none of these nations has a word or an ideal which corresponds to real culture.”

Humanism could hardly be less humanistic, at least not in a world that reads Max Müller and Berriedale Keith and Lafcadio Hearn, Ezra Pound and Radhakrishnan. Plato himself would repudiate this branch of humanism, for his liberal education consisted partly in his travels and in his study of institutions of those countries and peoples associated with Hellas. Like the histories of literature and the histories of the world that by-pass the East, even histories of Education forget one-half the world in spite of their comprehensive titles; and even if they do provide a section or two to India and China, they seem to do so to satisfy some qualm of historical conscience or much in the fashion of a sop thrown to an intellectual and cultural Cerberus.³

The student of Comparative Education, therefore, has a vast and unexplored field before him, and it is yet possible for him to work as a pioneer in synthesising the world’s experience and cultures at given epochs and at given periods of her history. The world is not understood and the achievements of mankind are not understood except “by an appreciation of the intangible, impalpable, spiritual and cultural forces” operating in various parts of the world at given epochs. It comes naturally to persons familiar with Eastern and Western thought to desire that standard works on the History of Secondary Education and the History of Universities and reference books on educational wisdom should include the wisdom of the other half of the world which they tend to neglect.⁴ The interplay of

international forces and the communication and communion of ideas between peoples of the world may be traced even further than the age of the dolmens, and the deeper we go into history, the more surprising are the common characteristics of a uniform development to be traced among groups divided both in space and in time. The vision of reality, for instance, which dawned upon the thinkers of Greece and Asia Minor about the sixth century was not confined to Europe. It was broadly the age of Zarathustra in Persia, of Confucius in China, of the Buddha in India, and of the Hebrew prophets in Palestine. If we go still further, it does not become impossible to trace relationships between the Indus Valley Civilization on the one hand and Sumer, Akad, Egypt and the Aegean Civilization on the other.⁵ Our failure in synthesis arises from the fact that we wish to educate for international understanding, on a curriculum and a literature meant for instruction in nationalism.⁶ We have also failed to note that the school is so much dependent on the scholarship of the University, that so long as scholarship takes a restricted view, education in internationalism and a synthesis of world-knowledge,

what should be the twentieth century realisation of the pan-sophic ideal of an Alexander and a Comenius must remain distant and remote. If the ideal of one world is not to become an empty word, children of different continents should hear not only of Alexander but also of Asoka, not only of the Parthenon and the Ara Pacis but also of Anuradhapura and Angkor Wat, Prambanan and Panataran, not only of the Iliad but also of the Ramayana, and the Silappadikaram. It is not unlikely that at some future time it will be possible for the student of Comparative Education to have a synoptic perspective of educational thought down the ages. It is stimulating to see how certain ideas and techniques dominate parts of the world, at the same epoch or at different epochs. A comparison of the Indocentric area with the Hellenocentric points to certain dominant factors which show a parallel development across the centuries. There were eras, not necessarily synchronistic, when wandering minstrels and poets were the great educators of the two continents. There were periods when great epics like the Iliad, the Ramayana, the Silappadikaram constituted the content of popular education. There were long periods when exegetical works and commentaries on grammarians, philosophers and poets formed the subject of study and scholarship. University life at Taxila, at Nalanda, post-Christian Athens and at the Mediaeval Universities of Europe offer striking resemblances. Monks and monasteries in India and Ceylon played a similar role to that played by monasticism in the West in spreading learning and preserving the traditional lore. Chantry schools and Cathedral schools find their Eastern counterparts in the educational institutions that were attached to Buddhist and Jain monasteries and Hindu temples. Just as a great missionary movement carried the torch of learning to new peoples and remote places of Europe, a similar movement carried the Indian religions and Indian learning to the many states and peoples of South East Asia.

It is instructive to trace how literature, the theatre and the Fine Arts were the media of adult education in both regions. Whole systems of Comparative Education study await the - enterprising students that will function as interpreters of one part of the world to another so that men may see human destiny and human thought steady and see them whole. Such vision is an absolute necessity for a world that needs to understand Asia and her peoples., Further, these studies become indispensable at this stage of Asian history when countries that have once again achieved independence are searching for the roots of their culture and their beliefs. Few Europeans and Americans are in a position to imagine the extent to which the history, philosophy and culture of these countries as extant before their contact with Europeans is being studied by these nations. There is every indication that educational thought, which in these countries has been mostly European in content during the colonial era, will be modified and altered by the study of the nation’s past. It is but proper and natural that while on the one hand they are open to the influences of the outside world, they set up their educational house after their own indigenous traditions and in answer to their own social and economic needs. This will secure for them the most natural and organic development. Indian and Ceylonese education during the period of English rule has not been characterised by any great philosophy of education. It has been mainly utilitarian, arising as it did out of administrative needs. If foreign ideas were imported under foreign rule, they were mainly in the domain of methods, not of values, and hence a rethinking of education is observable in all countries which have become independent.” rt wun Wen eb pam

Dr. Nicholas Hans in defining the international scope of Comparative Education says: “The task is tremendous and can be successfully completed only by team-work of educationists of all countries and international educational agencies. The first step is to study each national system separately in its historical setting and its close connection with the development of national character and culture.”⁸ - An attempt should be made to trace in the spirit of team-work that Doctor Hans has envisaged the educational thought contained in one of the most ancient literatures of the world, written by a very ancient people in a very ancient part of peninsular India and Ceylon. It is true that ancient Indian education has been the subject of a number of studies by various scholars but like most studies on India they have been concerned almost exclusively with Northern India and the ancient Sanskrit and Pali literatures.° The notion that the Sanskrit and Pali literatures are fully representative of the entire field of ancient Indian culture is widely prevalent. This view overlooks the fact that an accurate and complete understanding of Ancient India and Ancient Ceylon is well nigh impossible without a study of the history and the only remaining literature of the Dravidian language-speaking peoples. On the distinctive and independent culture of the non-Aryan peoples of India and Ceylon in ancient times and on their importance in the evolution of the composite culture of India and Ceylon, I prefer to quote from non-Tamil speaking critics. Dr Suniti Kumar Chatterji in a notable contribution to a new series of volumes on the history of India says:

“When the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion and ' occupation of India was first proposed some four genera tions ago, it was believed that the white-skinned, blue-eyed and golden-haired Aryans, like their kinsmen of Northern Europe, entered India from the plateau of Central Asia, which was then a land of romantic mystery, came to this land of the black-skinned non-Aryans, made an easy and matter-of-course conquest of them, and imposed upon an inferior race or races their superior religion, culture, and language. It was believed that all the better elements in Hindu religion and culture—its deeper philosophy, its finer literature, its more reasonable: organization, everything in fact which was great and good and noble in it—came from the Aryans as a superior white race; and whatever was dark and lowly and superstitious in Hindu religion and civilization represented only an expression of the suppressed non-Aryan mentality. This view is now being gradually abandoned. It has been generally admitted, particularly after a study of both the bases of Dravidian and Aryan culture through language and through institutions, that the Dravidians contributed a great many elements of paramount importance in the evolution of Hindu civilization, which is after all (like all other great civilizations) a composite — creation, and tiiat in certain matters the Dravidian and Austrie contributions are deeper and more extensive than that of the Aryans. The pre-Aryans of Mohenjodaro and Harappa were certainly in possession of a higher material culture than what the semi-nomadic Aryans could show.’!0 And again: “By far the most significant elements in the ancient civilization of India as it had evolved by the middle of the first millennium B.C. were contributed by the Dravidians.” ¹⁰ The Dravidian language groups today are represented by the Telugu (33 m.) the Tamil (28 m. in India, Ceylon and Malaya) the Kannada (14 m.) the Malayalam (13 m.) AE RE ain oli, ements neinie ln wumbunes.

and by smaller populations in the Southern part of India and in isolated pockets in Central and North India.“These chief Dravidian language groups formed a solid bloc south of the Vindhyas in Ancient India and at least the Tamil area arrested active and intense Aryanisation at the frontiers during the period under survey while permitting the inflow of trade and to some extent of religious thought. Their country, their language, their culture and what we have of their literature are different from those of the Rig- Vedic Aryans. Southern India, therefore, especially the Tamil-speaking area, at least up to the period of Pallava ascendancy was not the scene of an ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural interfusion of Dravidian and Aryan elements, the like of which was vigorous and active in the land roughly north of the Vindhyas. Pāṇini whose knowledge of Indian geography is extensive mentions none of these races except the Andhras, and his silence may be taken as an indication that his literary contemporaries recognised no linguistic or literary affiliations with the Southern societies.”. The Dravidian speaking peoples of Ancient India are best known in history by the kingdoms which the Kalingas, the Andhras and the Tamils.established in the Deccan and by their overseas trade and colonisation.” The Tamil speaking areas being at the southernmost extremity and having other Dravidian language groups as buffers between — Aryavarta and themselves were not open to the non- Dravidian influences that were so active during this period

in the Northern and Central parts of India. Ceylon, though in the South and in ‘the pre-Buddhist period for cultural purposes dependant on South India, may have been an exception, since Central Indian influences, before the how up to the beginnings of the Pallava period - (3rd century A.D.) when strong political forces penetrated the Northern boundaries of Tamilakam (the Tamil land), the Tamil language area enjoyed an autonomy in culture, and how it becomes culturally and historically an independent source and subject of enquiry. I am aware that the term ‘cultural autonomy” is misleading and might suggest a complete absence of foreign impact. No culture of civilised people, especially of a sea-faring and commercial people, is ever isolated. But if it be legitimate to speak of Rigvedic culture or Sanskrit culture or Greek culture or Aegean culture as separate autonomous independent cultures, then it is equally legitimate to speak of the autonomous and period. Our field of enquiry ranges broadly from the third century B.C. to the second century A.D., a period of five centuries to which may be ascribed the corpus of ancient Tamil literature known as literature of the third Academy or Academy literature or Cankam literature.® At the beginning of this epoch itself, during the reign of Chandragupta Maurya and of Asoka, the Tamil. states appear island (Ceylon) were probably people from the Malabar Coasts who Naya being but the Prakrit form of the od. me iaa«, 15 i as academies to approve Tamil works of ira nat Sone ys teray

possessed of a developed language and a literature and enjoying commercial relations with the Western world and possibly also with the East.° The evidence of Megasthenes, it should be. remembered, is fragmentary and second-hand, but it is remarkable that of the fragments of his four books preserved for us, those fragments pertaining to the South are valuable for their witness to Southern political stability and trade. The political stability is confirmed by the second and thirteenth rock edicts of Asoka, from which may be argued that the Tamil kingdoms were independent states with which the Mauryan emperor had established good-will relations. While Tamil sources of probably a little later date refer to the wealth of the Nandas and the military prowess of the Mauryas, non-Tamil sources of this period, both Indian and foreign, are evidence of the commercial intercourse between Tamilakam and the outside world.” Endowed as were the Tamil kingdoms with a. coastline of more than a thousand miles and with islands in the neighbourhood, the Tamil kingdoms probably developed seafaring from very early times, a calling in which the Austrics, their predecessors on the Indian peninsula were accomplished.“The pearls of the coasts of Ceylon and the Pandyan kingdom, the soft muslin of Madura, the peacocks, teak, and sandalwood of the western range reached Northern India and the Mediterranean regions, and a few Tamil words for exported commodities lingered in the Hebrew and Greek and Sanskrit tongues to indicate the extent of 16 NILAKANTA SASTRI, K. A, Foreign Notices on South India, University of Madras, Madras, 1939.

southern trade earlier than Chandragupta Maurya and Megasthenes.” The case for an independent and developed Tamil society at the opening of this epoch receives most strength from the independent cultured vocabulary and the literary conventions of the earliest Tamil poems extant which argue a very long period of literary and social culture preceding them.”” The absence of direct evidence for the growth of Tamil literature from its primitive and earliest stages is no indication that these stages did not exist, and it is the function of the critic to attempt reconstructions of earlier societies from the available evidence and from the laws of human development observable in similar. societies. When Tamil literature makes its appearance in history, it does so as in a flourishing age of letters. But within this literature of a flourishing age are to be found the relics and reminiscences of tribal customs and primitive conventions and old forgotten far off things and battles long ago.”4 In spite of the independent light thrown by Ancient Tamil literature on the non-Aryan influences prevalent on the Indian peninsula, no non-Tamil speaking scholar appears to have hitherto published any work which necessitates the study of the entire volume of this literature in its original, The reasons for this neglect are many. The notion pointed out earlier that Sanskrit literature along with Pali is representative of the totality of Indian thought is widespread both in, India and outside of India. Since the Sanskrit language is an important representative of the tipping 1875 5 ERISHNABVAMY. AIYANGAR, Some Contributions of South BURROW, T, The Sanskrit “Lantern oot Calcutta, Calcutta, 1942; Influence on Sanskrit guage, 0.C., pp. 373-388, Non-Aryan at. Pg IYENGAR, P. T., Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture, University

Indo-European family of languages, it has been a subject ‘of most industrious and laborious scholarship in Europe and America. Its affiliations with Old Iranian, with Greek and Latin, with Baltic and Slavonic, with Hittite and Celtic make it an indispensable study in Western Linguistics. Rig-Vedic literature is the earliest of the literatures of the Indo-European languages and has an importance that can be scarcely attributed to any other literature in the world. Further, in the field of Indian studies, there is a false assumption that the historic process in India is one of progressive Aryanisation of the Indian peninsula, a process which, according to the same assumption, was complete several centuries before Christ and which did not accept of any exceptions. This assumption is responsible for the ignoring of the Austric and Dravidian constituents of Indian culture and of the process of Dravidisation of the Aryan speaking colonisers and the extent to which Dravidian cultures and languages held the field in Central and Northern India over long periods of time. Scholars like Max Müller and Sylvain Levi did deprecate the “too exclusive examination of India from the Indo-European standpoint,” but so far it is only in the field of Linguistics that the non-Aryan elements have received a certain recognition. Pali literature, of course, as the sources for the study of Theravada Buddhism has been consistently examined with Sanskrit in the examination of pre-Christian Indian thought, as also the Jaina literature written in the Prakrits.; - The study of Sanskrit literature in Europe and even America has been also promoted on the basis of supposititious blood relationship between the Aryans of India and the Aryans of Europe. Max Müller did repudiate in later life the transfer of his linguistic nomenclature to ethnology by saying: “T have declared again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair, nor skull; I

an an language... blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.”

picture of early society portrayed by Ancient Tamil poetry. He says:

If, as is commonly believed, the colophons embody a tradition, which, apart from the corruptions and losses due to neglect and time, may be ‘accepted as correct, then we must recognise in these poems a quantity of literary evidence of unique value; because then, no other part of India can be said to provide such sober and realistic pictures of contemporary life and politics as these early Tamil classics furnish.

Notes (Essay I)

Footnote text from the journal pages is only partially recovered by OCR. Prefer the scan (IA leaves 1417–1431) for full citations. Principal references include Kandel, Jaeger (Paideia), Monroe, Cole, Brubacher, Ulich, Hrozný, Hans, Chatterji, Nilakanta Sastri, and related works on comparative education and Dravidian culture.

The Educators of Early Tamil Society

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · Tamil Culture, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 105–119

The Sangam literature and the twin-epics represent Tamil society essentially between the years 200 B.C. and 300 A.D. The anthologies do perhaps contain poems of earlier and later periods, but that the great bulk of poetry belongs to this epoch is accepted by most scholars who have examined this body of literature. When it comes, however, to stratification of the poems contained in the anthologies on the basis of the contemporaneity of the poets and their respective patrons, or on the basis of language and grammar, or when it comes to assigning even approximate centuries and generations to them, the student is faced with some intransigent and, in the present state of evidence, insoluble problems. But the attempts at chronological stratification from different angles are all the time making the panorama of early Tamil life clearer and clearer, and reducing the obscurity which hangs over the centuries represented by this literature.

The educators of this early society are the parents, and pre-eminently also the bards, minstrels and poets; but towards the end of the period, particularly in the society reflected in the twin epics, religious teachers, Vedic Brahmins, and Jain and Buddhist monks become also the chief educators of the Tamil country. While the system in the earlier part of the Sangam epoch is secular and informal, towards the latter part of the epoch it becomes religious and formal. What is remarkable about the growth of the educational process as reflected in this literature is that it seems to correspond to the main lines of development in other ancient countries like Northern India and the Greek and Celtic worlds, and as in those countries illustrates a normal uniform development whereby a certain type of society evolves a pattern of education in response to the social and economic needs of that particular type of society. The more numerous the societies examined, the greater is the possibility of illustrating with more examples a certain uniformity of development in the educational process among peoples. It would seem that education originates with religious rites and songs and dances, and with prophecy and mantic poetry as may be seen by the origin of the Vedic mantra and the Greek molpe. From these religious and magical beginnings, education seems to proceed to a period of reliance on the powers of man. It becomes progressively anthropocentric, and the chief educators are those who sing the praises and the deeds of heroic men. This second stage which may be known as the bardic age of literature as of education is succeeded by a third stage in which not bards and minstrels but poets play the important part as the educators of a country. Close upon the poets come the philosophers and religious educators of a sophisticated and civilised society which represents a fourth stage in the history of education among ancient peoples. These stages of development do admit of variations in different societies but the variations are not of such a nature as to invalidate the general principles, and the stages of development have been classified according to those who were the chief educators of each epoch, though such a classification does not exclude at any given stage of growth the presence of educators characteristic of a preceding or succeeding stage.'.There is all over the ancient world the phenomenon of single persons being invested with multiple functions in a social phenomenon among both primitive and civilized peoples; MURRAY, GILBERT, The Classical Tradition in Poetry, O.U.P., London, 1927: pe elgg a hn he gen sorter Lig oo“of Greek philosophical

primitive and tribal stage of society, and as social development becomes more complex, these functions come to be distributed among different individuals. Thus in primitive society, whether Tamil or Indo-Aryan or Greek or Celtic, priesthood, prophecy, poetry, philosophy and teaching are seen to reside in one and the same individuals while later there is a differentiation of functions and persons. There is already in early society a dim association of religious, prophetic and poetic inspiration with the intuitive wisdom of the philosopher. Five types, priest, prophet, poet, philosopher and pedagogue repose in a single figure. Even today among the Tatars and other Siberian peoples, the shamans and bakshas are described as “singers, poets, musicians, diviners and doctors, the guardians of popular religious traditions and the preservers of ancient legend”.² This may be said also of the quasi-priests of several tribal societies not excluding the Pre-Dravidian and semi-Dravidian tribes living in India and Ceylon today.³ J. G. Frazer’s “Golden Bough” is perhaps one of the most comprehensive works in which this multi-functional priesteducator type may be traced in the customs of the five continents. I. THE SHAMANS ### I. The Shamans

Though the Sangam anthologies reflect predominantly a panegyric and anthropocentric age and the twin epics reflect predominantly a philosophic and didactic age, all these works do contain references to religious rites, taboos and social customs which are remains or developments of an earlier mantic period when in the priest or priestess resided multiple functions like ritual dancing, prophecy and augury. The earliest phase-of Tamil society as inferred from this literature was a social organisation based on physiography with a differentiation and specialisation of functions and customs proper to each of the five regions, hunting and cultivation of wild plants in the mountain districts, pastoralism in the “bush”, rice and sugarcane cultivation in the riverine belts, and fishing, diving and sailing along the sea-coast, and plunder in the less inhabited districts. These societies which are adumbrated: seem to have been of the early food-gathering type in which populations were sparse, social classes were unknown, mates were selected by freedom of choice within the regional clan, government was under local chiefs and social life was imbued with a keen sense of kinship and community.⁴ The first formal educators of these earliest societies were persons endowed with shamanistic power. Their office was neither full-time nor hereditary, but they seem to have been often elderly persons. The priest (Kuruntogai 53) or priestess (Puram; 253, 5) of Murugan, the hill-god, danced vigorously “like the gambols of herds” in an open ‘Space covered with white sand and performed the sacrificial ritual of the offering of the blood of rams, rice, roasted rice grains and red flowers. He entered into a trance as a result of his ritual ballet, and both dance and offerings were meant to appease the god and thus prevent him from afflicting people with illness and calamities (Aham; 22). There is also evidence for men and women and even children engaged in community religious dancing in order to obtain prosperity or to avert impending disaster. When the fisherfolk found that their nets failed to bring sufficient

reward for their toils, they planted the horn of a shark and danced around it a ritual dance with offerings of flowers; when there: were portents of impending disaster the shepherds and shepherdesses danced in order that the god: of the flocks might avert the calamity; when marauding tribes found their cattle-wealth diminishing, they danced before their mother-goddess in order to obtain greater prosperity for their villages and more abundant plunder® Worship in its earliest recorded form was ritual dance joined with offerings both animal and vegetable, especially flowers of the region. The dances were mimetic in that the priests and priestesses imitated the action of the god and wore the insignia of the god. Sometimes a person was accoutred like the god or goddess and offerings were made before him. This custom may possibly be among later developments of the original religious dance.⁶ The priests and priestesses were also the authentic interpreters of omens and were credited with prophetic vision. Their songs and sayings were probably the earliest poetry and oral literature to which society paid any heed. For the origin of Tamil poetry from a mantic stage, there is a very interesting piece of evidence in the name given to the ancient fortune-teller who divined the future from the configuration of rice-grains spread on her winnowing-fan. Her appellation was ‘akaval-makal’ or “the woman who calls”. The word “akaval” by itself means a call, an appellative utterance, and referred in this context to the custom of the priestess calling upon the gods and spirits. This usage led to the designation given to the “The means of cure were not solely supernatural, for, as the hilly region abounded in simples, the magic of the priests and priestesses was fortified by the use of drugs. Hence the early priest was also the medicine-man ‘and even today, notwithstanding millenia of philosophical evolution, the devil priest-cum-medicine-man of the degraded Kuravar tribe drives a flourishing trade among the elite of society, on the sly.” —

earliest Tamil poetic metre which originally must have been a recitative chant like the religious chant of early ritual.⁷ The role of these early priests and priestesses was also prophetic, In the course of their ritual ballet they entered into a trance and revealed what was occult and predicted what might happen to the tribe. The cantos describing the dances of the shepherds, of the marauding-tribe and of the mountain-folk in the epic Silappadikaram are reminiscences of earlier periods, and the dance and mantic declarations of Salini give us a short but illuminating indication of the importance of the seer in early regional and clan organization. Because the village of the tribe is destitute of cattle wealth and its rivals flourish, Salini dances into a trance and recommends a more martial and plundering attitude on the part of the tribe and offerings and worship to their traditional goddess. She makes mantic declarations in a voice of authority, and a people used to plunder and cruelty watch her dance and listen to her. with awe. The entire canto is worth close study by an anthropologist as each word in the description of the dance may contain significance for anthropological knowledge of an ancient tribal class of which there is such early recorded evidence in literature.’. Vedic literature also contains pointers to a time when the priesthood had not as yet been organized into a rigid caste, and sacrifices were offered by the paterfamilias. Some writers are inclined to believe that there is sufficient evidence for ritual dance and mime in the Rig-veda. The Atharva-veda contains sufficient evidence for the existence of shamanism and for the power which the atharvans could have wielded with their spells, incantations and magic. The Atharva-veda is indicative of a society and a stage of thought more ancient than the one represented by the

Rig-veda arid is of greater anthropological interest than the Rig-veda itself. The atharvans, corresponding to the “magi” in Persia were the earliest shamans and teachers as revealed by Indo-Aryan sources. ' In Greek literature, however, the evidence for shamanism in the earliest hellenic society is not so patent. “The Greeks with their love of fact and reason, disowned the old magical chains, but they lay somewhere in the background and were connected by tradition with their first poetry.” The origins of Greek poetry are also intimately connected with song, music and dance. To Musaeus and Orpheus, the authors of the first poetry, are attributed magical powers. While Apollo and the Muses inspire mantic declarations, Dionysius is the inspirer of the kind of prophecy which is exercised to discover the ancient wraths of offended spirits whose vengeance causes hereditary maladies and afflictions, such as regional spirits and gods like Murugan were said to cause in the Tamil world.” In Celtic society, the institution of Druidism points to an earlier period when a priestly class developed as a result of its priestly and shamanistic power. This class developed later into the intellectual class among Celtic peoples. From the evidence of classical writers like Caesar, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo it would appear that in Gaul, in Britain, in Scotland and in Ireland, the history of education began with them and that they functioned in a plural capacity as ritual officiants, poets, law-makers, judges and teachers.¹⁰. THE BARDS AND MINSTRELS ### II. The Bards and Minstrels

A second stage in the manifestation of educative impulses in early Tamil society is to be seen in the growth of a hereditary class of professional singers, dancers, musicians and panegyrists known as ‘pāṇar’. The earliest poems concerning this class point to a stage of societal evolution in which the regional culture and regional community has broken into many villages with chiefs and super-chiefs presiding over a village or over a number of villages. The Tamil names for the chiefs of the different regions are reminiscent of this period.” A good few of the Puram poems are illustrative of this society in which warfare of the feud-vendetta type took place. In these poems recognition and merit are attached to physical strength and bravery, and persons who are connected with feud-vendetta for the seizure and plunder of cattle and of land are greatly eulogized, namely, the chief who leads the foray and distributes the spoils, the blacksmith who makes weapons of warfare, the potter who makes the jars for the corpses or ashes of heroes, the drummer who infuses a martial spirit and the bard who sings to the accompaniment of his lute heroic and panegyric songs in honour of his patron both in the battle-field and at home.” While a sense of community grows around the leader and chief who leads forays and distributes plunder, the bard becomes the voice of the community which expresses in song its past achievements, and its present ambitions and ‘hopes and fears. He sings the heroic deeds of the tribe, chiefly of the leader, and thus keeps alive the spirit of bravado and bravery, and other qualities associated with a warrior especially hospitality and liberality. In the village community centre, the manram, the bard entertains the members of the village with his song and music and dance, and with his accounts of the deeds of his tribe and of the warriors it has bred living and dead.! J2SRINIVAS IYENGAR, PT, History of the Tamils, OG. S300” aes to ee 7. lane oe we Rei in ale Antiquary i2c Patir., 43, 26—28.

The origin of bardic poetry demonstrates a bifurcation of functions which were originally resident in the priest or priestess. Since a martial society tends to centre its ideals, thoughts, ambitions and praise around the achievements of men themselves, exclusively secular persons are needed to make them articulate for the clan and tribe. The function of the bard is both to inspire to heroism as well as to entertain, and thus fer entertainment purposes he has with him his troupe of men and women and children, dancers and’ musicians. Bardism and minstrelsy in the Tamil country become gradually the hereditary occupation of a class of people. The Tamil name for the professional bard is itself} derived from the word “pan:” which stands for any kind. of instrumental music.“* Instrumental accompaniment was an indispensable feature of early song and dance as in Greece. The bards were differentiated by the kind of musical instrument they played, the large lyre or the small lyre; by the posture they adopted while singing panegyrics in court, whether they were entitled to sit or stand before their patrons; and by the kinds of dances they performed. We have no means of assessing the number of bards or bardic troupes which existed in the period, but all evidence points to their having been numerous. Each village seems to have had its class of panars. Many of these troupes led a wandering life in search of patrons in various parts of the Tamil country; and they are 124'The common origin of early literature from dance and song is further illustrated by the early association and derivation of Tamil terms like <gi-o) (lit, movement, dance), and wrt. (ur and gt) (song with dance). In prosody, besides #&@@), are the terms Ms (originally movement) and #9. A number of primary activities of early society contain the word for movement e.g. S&rwri@ (play, creative movement); aerrme@ (lit. dance with food and drink); @grevtmrew (feasting; lit. to dance with someone or something);Gumrgmto (to battle) tert, stort (to bathe in stream or lake, or to bathe in the sea). sO SRINIVAS IYENGAR, P.T., History of the Ancient Tamils, O.C., p. 16, derives pa:t:t:u (song) from pan: (instrumental music). oe

extremely important not only in the development of oral and written literature but also in the growth and popular appreciation of the Fine Arts like music and dance. Wherever they travelled they carried their different musical instruments with them, harps, lyres, flutes, horns, tambourines and.cymbals. Several poems about the troupes of bards and dancers, men and women, refer to the soiled tattered clothing and lean worn-out hungry frames with which they enter the palace of a chief or king and the. rich silks and sumptuous entertainment with which they are rewarded so much so that the abundance of food and drink makes them forget the very arts which procure for them a living. The gifts they received from chiefs and kings were the conventional ones of a bunch of lotuses of gold fastened together by a band of silver given to the head of the troupe, and jewels of gold given to the women. Bards and minstrels were also given gifts of elephants, horses, and chariots as well as gifts of land. These gifts may seem exaggerated, but gifts made to bards seem to have been equally wealthy and precious in panegyric and heroic ages in other parts of the world. The Huns, Celts, and Saxons were used to presents of jewels, bracelets, bags of gold, and extensive lands being given by their chiefs and kings to bards and minstrels. Princely patronage was the bard’s reward for his service to the community,” Through the Tamil bards and their troupes a tradition was maintained in society and in literature and the fine arts, though like all panegyrists they are mostly concerned with contemporaries, their patrons, whom they praise or whose: passing away in the palace or in the foray, they lament. Almost their entire literature, even if it was recorded, has perished and what remains are probably a few eulogistic poems which were preserved in the courts of the patrons they celebrated. Heroic Age, University wide jaan -; K, The and KERSHAW, B The Growin af Liversnes Go ey MONRO, H.

An evolution in the role of the bard is easily traceable in these poems. He began as an individual necessary, like the drummer, to stir up the martial spirit of the clan engaged in battle and to sing the praises of the chief and the warriors when after victory they danced and drank and feasted. At a later stage song and dance became choric and musical instruments developed, and thus the bardic tradition became more organized and turned into a troupe from a hereditary class. Anonymity is generally a feature of bardic life, and the names and particulars of these bards have not been preserved, not even in colophons. When at a later stage the poet becomes the respected personality of a more developed and literate society, music and poetry which hitherto were combined separate to. a certain extent. The bard and his troupe continue with music, and song and dance, but poetry, reflective, didactic, and panegyric of a higher order becomes the property of poets. The Tamil distinguished between the bard (pāṇar) and the poet (pulavar) as much as the Greeks did between the bard (aoidos) and the poet (poietes), and Indo-Aryan society between the bard (suta) and the poet (kavi). The bards were so prominent and numerous members of early society and were so identified with panegyrics, that in subsequent development when poets compose panegyrics in praise of kings and chiefs they do so in a “bardic convention”, as if a bard were praising the hero of the poem. The āṟṟuppaṭai is such a situation where the poet imagines a bard who has received bounteous gifts for himself and his troupe encountering a similar band of minstrels in search for a patron, and recounts to them the reception and wealth his troupe received from a particular king or chief and recommends his fellow-bards to betake themselves to SINCLAIR, T.A., A History of classical Greek Literature, pp. 4—9; Rout ledge, London, 1934.

the same patron. The following is a short poem composed in a bardic convention by a poet:.

Minstrel, with little lute of sweetest strain! Suppliant with words of wisdom full! Importunate thou askest me to rest and listen to the pleasant sounds of thy tambourine. But hear what I shall say! The modest homes of Paṇṇaṉ, whose hands are full: of gifts, is near the wide city.. If thither,—together with thy songstress, whose hair ‘diffuses fragrance of the ‘trumpet-flower’, the brightbrowed, sweetly smiling,—you softly advance, you shall prosper well. His gifts are not mere chance, like gold found by the woodman in the forest. Hesitate not.

‘“Long may he flourish. (Pur: 70.)

The bards being panegyrists by profession were extremely skilled in the use of words, and when poets gained ascendancy in society their institution degenerated in certain ways. They are used in the poems of a subsequent stage of development as. conventional pimps and as companions to young men in love, obviously because of. their gifts of persuasive speech. A poem in the kuruntogai expresses the marvel of a damsel at a bardic messenger’s flow of language which she argued should be far more copious in his own village if he could be so eloquent before strangers In a strange place. (Kuruntogai; 33). The expression ‘é” °: e youthful student” (@ers wrenéser) used in this poem is significant as one of the rare examples in Sangam literature of evidence for formal studentship.’* For the same competence in language, the bards were used by chiefs and kings to carry messages from the battlefield or camp to their queens in the palace. ISPOPE, GU. The Fou hoa Vol. XXIK, (13005, See cur hundred Lyrics in the Indian Antiquary, 16 Kur., 33, 12: bei) YaCe herurentadc SU BT wer ps Qsererar QariGer

It is significant that women constituted an integral part of the bard’s. troupe, and that they were the principal singers and dancers at the performances in courts and village community centres in programmes of entertainment. They do not appear to have been panegyrists directly apostrophizing the patrons of the band. Transmission of the arts within the class was easy since entire families, children included, went from chief to chief, and kingdom to kingdom, entertaining the villages on their way and receiving their hospitality. Their diverse musical instruments they carried with them protecting them in cases sewn of thick cloth. — - Tamil society did not have in its early stages religious traditions of the kind Indo-Aryan society had. Along with the religious tradition in Indo-Aryan society there grew pari passu a secular tradition. The Rigveda contains a kind of panegyric poetry in the praise for gifts (dānastutis). The Brahmanas contain songs in praise of men (gāthā nārāśaṃsī) which are laudatory as their title indicate. Further at the time of the Buddha himself, there were already a large store of narratives in prose and verse. All this secular literature in pre-Buddhist India is evidence of a twin tradition, one mantra or religious and the other suta or bardic.”” It is from Sanskrit bardic literature that the two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, took shape and form. The sutas were the charioteers of chiefs and accompanied the chiefs to battle. They sang the praises of their chiefs both in war and peace and they formed part of the court. The role sutas played in the courts were played by

wandering minstrels and singers (Kusilavas and Magadhas) among ordinary people. The Mahabharata presents: Sanjaya the suta, describing the battle-scenes to Dhritarashtra; and Kusa and Lava, the two sons of Rama, are said to have. wandered from place to place singing in assemblies the tale of Rama they had heard from Valmiki. The sutas like the magadhas formed a separate caste in Aryan-speaking India. According to the lawbook of Manu, the sutas are represented as a mixed caste originating from the union of kshatriya warriors and brahman women, and the -magadhas as the offspring of inter-marriages of vaisyas with kshatriya women. Originally, says Winternitz, the magadhas were bards from the land of Magadha and the sutas were bards from a country situated to the east of Magadha. Hence there is room to surmise that this bardic tradition in Northern India may have received its greatest strength from non-Aryan sources, especially so as the Aryanisation of Magadha and neighbouring provinces had not been accomplished at the time the earlier mantra literature was composed. In Greece also education both among princes and people evolved along similar lines. The original religious lyric and dance gave birth to man-centred arts of which the bards surrounded by their choruses of women, were the chief exponents. Homer himself refers to bards older than himself, and even if Musaeus and Orpheus seem legendary, there is no doubt that Homeric poetry was preceded by the poetry of wandering minstrels, some of whom may have been blind, who took to professional singing and recitation at courts and at festivals. After Homer, a guild of bards called Homeridae or “sons of Homer” existed at Chios who professed to popularise Homer’s compositions. When Homer became the “educator of Greece”, the rhapsodes mostly made dramatic recitations of Homeric epics.¹⁸ A certain decline in the nature of minstrelsy and i a

the importance of the rhapsodes synchronises also in Greece with the increase of the social prestige of poets, sophists and ‘philosophers. Plato’s Ion is.a revealing dialogue on the nature, popularity and artificiality of the rhapsode’s calling during the classical period. The place of the minstrel and bard as popular educators, and in some societies as formal educators, is made clear again by the study of educational factors among Celtic and Teutonic peoples. In Pre-Christian Ireland, for instance, instruction was not only in the hands of druids, but also of the filidh or bards. They were generally peripatetic, teaching in the open air, and the profession seems to have become hereditary among certain families. Both the chiefs and the agricultural population had to support these bards and their pupils. They were so numerous that the people resented their privileges. Their influence became more systematized when bardic schools were organized in each chieftaincy.¹⁹ Wandering minstrels and the troubadours are the persons to whom the beginnings of literatures in the Romance tongues are attributed. The minstrel and bard have been studied by critics and. historians of literature but their role as educators deserves greater notice in histories of the education of early societies.

(To be continued — see Essay III, Ancient Tamil Poet-Educators, below.)

Notes (Essay II)

Footnotes on IA leaves 1523–1537 remain partially noisy after re-OCR. Prefer the scan for full citations. Principal references include Mackenzie, Murray, Cornford, Bowra, Chadwick, Thurston, Linton (The Tree of Culture), Srinivasa Iyengar, Winternitz, and Edgar on bardic education.

Ancient Tamil Poet-Educators

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · Tamil Culture, Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 273–285

The role of the poet as educator of groups of disciples as well as of the community in general corresponds to a society in which kingship prevails, and the chieftaincies and clans have been welded into feudal monarchies. With the evolution of a chieftaincy into a larger political unit embracing other chieftaincies, an additional dignity is attached to the singer of praise the range of whose vision and whose gifts have to be broader and more elevated than those of the bard. Political and social life are developed on a larger scale and with a more extensive and variegated background. The problems which confront the king and his administration as well as society are much more complex and include moral and ethical values involving inter-action between individuals and groups. The inflow of wealth into the capital cities and the seaports makes the problem of wealth and poverty, of taxation, trade, war, peace and good government, subjects of reflection on the part of the poets who have become the friends and counsellors of kings. Thus, from the panegyric role of the bard, emerges the poet of a complex and wealthy stage of society, relinquishing popular entertainment and education to the bard, but retaining for himself and developing those aspects of formal teaching which were contained among the bard’s functions.

The increase of wealth and splendour at the court, the higher and more universal values with which the poet deals, his cultural activities at courts, and his friendship with the royalty of the land and his interventions with kings on behalf of his friends confer on the poet an aristocratic standing even though the poet is almost entirely dependent on royal patronage.¹

The poems which describe the rule in the Tamil monarchies show that kingly society was developed on a money economy and that there was wealth and affluence in the royal household. The forest defences, the regular armies and provisions made for the elephants, the horses and chariots of warfare, the different parts of a palace and their costly appointments, the gold and silver vessels in which food and drink are served, and the imported articles of ornamentation in the royal households are evidence of the economic prosperity which marks the poetic stage of culture, a correlate of an aristocratic tradition of education. The organisation of clan has given place to the feudal monarchy and the bard’s functions in tribal forays are taken over by a formal war-drum, enthroned in the palace, the sounding of which summons a regular army in the hour of danger.

The Tamil kingdoms during the poetic period are predominantly agricultural, commercial and militaristic.² The Tamil kings encounter their rivals not only on land but also on sea, and navies and naval battles are recorded in the poems.³ Nedunceralatan, victorious alike on land and sea, is said to have taken into custody a group of Roman soldiers, probably stationed in a territorial concession near Cochin, and released them only after the payment of a ransom.⁴ This period (first century A.D.) is also the period of the largest volume of trade of the Tamil kingdoms with the Roman Empire. From the Tamil country the Roman Empire received spices, fine muslins, pearls and beryls and in exchange for these commodities Tamil India received gold and silver, wine, coral, crude glass, lampstands and gold and silver vessels.⁵ Hence there was a surplus economy and a progressive growth of cities, not only of the inland capitals like Karur and Kudal (Madurai), but also of the many sea-port towns which were important in the sea-trade, for instance, Musiri, Tondi, Korkai, Kaveripattinam, sea-ports on the western and eastern coasts of Southern India which were nourished by secondary industries and foreign trade. Thus more people were released for occupations other than primary production, and thus opportunities were created for the introduction and development of formal education. Though Tamil society continues to cherish the values of a warrior society and even voluntary suicide by fasting to death is undertaken to vindicate a point of honour in the same manner as the religious suicide of the Jains,⁶ there is an insistence on intellectual perfection and a moral enrichment and an uninhibited development of music and other arts in addition to the warrior ethics and arts of the bardic period. From the warrior ethics developed gradually more universal values. For instance, the Kosar, a fierce and warlike tribe, are said to be as true to their word as are their arrows to hit their targets.⁷

What are the differences in function which appear between the categories of bard and of poet? The bard is a peripatetic with his troupe and his family whereas the poet journeys alone; the bard and his troupe entertain, act plays, sing, praise and dance and use musical accompaniment, whereas the poet instructs and counsels as one having authority, scholarship and learning with an unaccompanied technique of poesy; the bard is the voice of the community, whereas the poet goes under his own name and his poems are mostly personal, expressive of his own relations with his patron and his own reflective thoughts; the bard is more the entertainer of the people and of the court while the poet is found mostly in the court and in gatherings of poets of his own standing and learning; the bards sing panegyrics, martial exhortations and heroic verse, while the poet’s preoccupations even when praising a king’s valour are with human conduct and ethics and morals; the bard may be found in the battlefield during this period to exhort the troops to bravery, but the poet has no place in the battlefield except as a peacemaker or through excess loyalty to a king or chief who is his valued friend. The Tamil names for a bard and his troupe were derived from roots which are associated with music, drama and dance, while the name for a poet is associated with a word which signifies general knowledge, reasoning and learning.⁸

That the period represented by the anthologies was truly a poetic stage of culture and education is admirably illustrated by comparing it with the subsequent epoch of the longer poems, the Silappatikaram–Manimekalai period when the place of the poet has been almost taken by the religious teacher and the philosopher. The poet seems to vanish from the foreground and it is the philosopher who uses the language and the conventions of poetry. But during this poetic stage, the number of poets and the range of their activities more than amply illustrate the formal function of education which they performed among their groups of disciples and the informal education which they imparted as the moral guides, informal law-givers and counsellors of society. K. N. Sivaraja Pillai has distributed the four hundred and fifty-nine Tamil poets of the earlier anthologies over ten generations extending from 50 B.C. to 200 A.D., which gives an average of about forty for each generation of twenty-five years. From the several allusions to gatherings of poets at the courts and the institution of poesy as the educational technique of the age, we may rightly infer that the average of forty poets for each generation represents but a very small number among their contemporaries whose works have perished.⁹

An analysis of these poets and poetesses according to their places of origin shows that they belonged to various cities, townships and villages of the Tamil kingdoms, and an examination of the occupational and social groups to which they belonged shows that the poets and poetesses came from royalty, from agricultural and merchant classes and from various trades and crafts. Of the one hundred and forty-seven different poets in the Purananuru anthology alone, about fifteen are women and fourteen are kings.¹⁰ This and other anthologies include princesses and men and women of different groups, such as the mountain and marauding clans, as well as medical men, mathematicians, astronomers, carpenters, blacksmiths and potters. Avvai, the most renowned of the poetesses, moves about royal courts and is as much the friend of kings and chiefs, their counsellor and as powerful a teacher of Tamil society as any of her poet contemporaries. The names and occupations of the poets and poetesses of the Tamil country show that learning and poesy were not restricted to any particular sex or occupation and that poetic composition was indulged in not only by professional poets but also by others who found in poetry an accepted form of expressing their knowledge, their thoughts and their emotions.

The bards and poets by their frequent visits to kings and chiefs all over the Tamil country brought about a certain cultural, language and literary uniformity within the Tamil kingdoms, and contributed not a little to political stability, unity and understanding between various Tamil kings and chiefs. Further their frequent allusions to cities, festivals, friendly meetings of kings, to celebrated patrons and to famous battles established a sense of tradition and history within the Tamil country.

Tamil society had its own religions. The anthologies contain references to the worship of Murugan, Siva, Visnu and other lesser deities, but the priests of the religions at this stage do not appear to have formulated even formal systems of religious education. Probably a strong current of Saivaite philosophy and personal devotion (bhakti) to the God of one’s choice was existent, but, unlike the North Indian society, Tamil society included no dominant priestly caste or organised monasticism to impart even an “official” religious education. Neither did Tamil society have a revealed book or revealed scriptures to establish ethical and moral norms. The poetic period in the Tamil country was like the poetic period in Greece, and the poets themselves, and not priests, were the teachers of ethics and morals.¹¹

The social standing of the poets in the Tamil country is shown by the numerous examples of poets who refuse to be slighted by kings and curse kings and chiefs and rebuke them should they fail to confer on them the regard, patronage and gifts which are their due.¹² A poet who is slighted by a king hastens to another chief famous for his gifts, returns with an elephant received as a gift from the chief and ties the elephant to a tree in the defence-thickets of the king who slighted him, an act tantamount to an insulting declaration of war.¹³ Another poet discriminates between two princes whom he meets, embraces one and does not embrace the other. On being asked by the prince who was slighted why he should have treated him so, the poet replies:

This other prince belongs to a family which, if the chief were away from home, has conferred gifts to us (poets) through their women-folk who would even adorn themselves for the occasion; but you belong to a family which has shut its door in our face. Since then we have avoided your hills.¹⁴

The poet Kapilar, a great friend of Pari, a patron chief of bards and poets, advises the kings who besiege his mountain fortress that it cannot be taken by elephants and armies. They might capture it if the kings went dancing and singing with bardic troupes following them.¹⁵ A poet’s praise is accounted worthy of heaven while his curse results in an entire town ending in ruins so that the town remains only a memory and a name.¹⁶ Something of the fierce moralising of the Hebrew prophets and their championship of social justice and truth is seen vested in the Tamil poets, and this is no surprise, since it is the prophetic function of original shamanism which appears developed among the Hebrew prophets while the poetic function of the shaman is found developed in Tamil society.

The social prestige of the Tamil poets is again evident in the manner in which they are received and feasted at courts, and in their frequent interventions in political affairs, often counselling against war either because of its baneful effects or because of the power of the enemy, sometimes urging Tamil unity against non-Tamil foes, or a confederation of two or more kings, or dissuading unjust taxation or pleading on behalf of rebel sons and subjects and innocent victims condemned to torture.¹⁷ The kings had their assemblies of counsel and government, but the poets enjoyed an advisory and teaching capacity even more than they. The following poem which urges the minor king Pekan to return to his lawful wife whom he had condemned to a life of loneliness is a subject about which four celebrated poets have sung poems upbraiding Pekan and interceding on behalf of his lawful queen, Kannaki, that he might live with her again. Arisil Kilar is persuasive even in his imperious manner:

Be thy rare gems and treasures what they may,
We seek not these, O Pekan, great in war,
When with our little lyre, in tender strains,
The fruitful fields of thy good land we sing,
If pleased thou boon on me bestow, O King,
Thy spouse, erewhile with choicest gems adorned
Now suffers bitter grief because no love is hers.
Let her this night perfume her tresses bright
Like pea-fowl’s plumes upgathered by the wind,
And wreathe her brow with fragrant blooms—
Yoke to thy mighty car thy swiftest steeds.¹⁸

Another poet dissuades a king from a heavy taxation of agriculturists. As the economy became diversified and as foreign trade brought greater wealth, rulers seem to have overlooked agrarian welfare. The poet points out that even “the victory of the army that is engaged in a last-ditch combat is the result of the efforts of the army of the plough” and adds:

If thou has marked and known this well:
Reject the wily counsels of malicious men,
Lighten the load of those who till the soil,
The dwellers in the land protect. If thou do this
Thy stubborn foes shall lowly bend beneath thy feet.¹⁹

There occur in the Purananuru anthology accounts of close friendship between kings and poets. Some of them even choose to die of voluntary starvation together with their royal friend when he decided upon that warrior manner of death.²⁰

Learning and poesy were transmitted at this stage by formal discipleship. The titles of some of the poets in the colophons indicate that they were renowned teachers and had famous disciples.²¹ Two aspects of learning were said to make the complete man, kalvi, the positive, personal effort at learning and apperception, and kelvi, the student’s acceptance of instruction imparted by another. The word kelvi, literally “hearing”, shows the oral and aural origin of learning, and even the most learned poets are praised by their contemporaries because of their twofold competence, their learning and their having heard instruction from learned men.²² Both personal effort and learning by hearing learned men are of little value unless the learner acquires the ability to impart his learning by clear, coherent, logical discourse and convince his hearers in the assembly of learned men (avai) or in the assembly of the king’s advisers. The ideal of the poetic stage of education is a preparation for prominent civic life and the scene of intellectual activity shifts from the village community centre (manram) to the royal courts and assemblies of learned men. The life of learning is for the purpose of service to the community, and if time is expended in the acquisition of wealth it is in order that that wealth may serve those who are in want and that hospitality may be increased.

Though about twenty-two poetesses are counted among the four hundred and fifty-nine persons whose poems are found in the anthologies, no system of formal instruction is outlined for women. There is no strict segregation of the sexes, and courtship and mixed dances are described as popular, and women accoutred with daggers are found serving even in war-camps.²³ The ideal which is constantly kept before women in the Ancient literature is that of the chaste, loyal and loving wife. In a culture in which plants and flowers acquired a high degree of symbolism, chastity and marital love and loyalty are symbolised by the whitest and most fragrant of indigenous flowers, the mullai (jasmine). Poetic conventions in the Tolkappiyam and in the anthologies have young women trained in aristocratic fashion and amidst aristocratic surroundings by an elderly nurse (sevili) with the companionship of a maid (toli) who are both experts on the depths of love psychology plumbed by the Ancient Tamil poets.

The universal value of formal education is stated in an oft-quoted poem in which formal education is taken for granted as the basis of self-realisation and recognition by the world:

It is good to learn though it may involve a humble discipleship, humble service and paying an emolument. A mother among her many children is apt to like him most who is distinguished (by learning); among a group or class the king is apt to follow the counsel not of the eldest but of him who is well instructed, and even among those (Aryans) who preserve a fourfold division of society, suppose one of a lower caste were to be known for learning, one of a higher caste would be compelled to respect him (or seek his help).²⁴

The education and learning which are referred to in this poem and understood in the anthologies is not religious education even when learned men are known as “resplendent men”.²⁵ It is a learning which perfects the learner and equips him for this life and for an honoured place in the assemblies of learned men and of the elders of a locality. It is no world-denying learning but one which affirms the world, its joys, and finds a self-sufficiency in human powers. It has a great love for children and for the home and knows little of a state of homelessness.²⁶ It is an education which equips the learner for courtship, marriage and a life of altruism. A great hero of the period, Ay, a warrior chief and patron of bards and poets is praised because he does not do good for “mercenary motives, in order to win praise in this life or happiness in the next”, or because of the example of wise men but because good should be accomplished for its own sake. A. C. Bouquet has no grounds whatsoever to assume that “self-forgetful service of others” is in origin a Christian idea.²⁷ Altruism and “living not for self but for others” is recommended because of its own intrinsic worth and not for any future reward or for the benefit of a future birth.²⁸ Albert Schweitzer has pointed out the discovery of this ethic of goodness and benevolence in the Tirukkural, but it occurs even earlier than the book of gnomic verse and is an active and creative concept among a people whose literary records testify to a humanism, an optimism and an altruism which are the fundamental characteristics of ancient Tamil culture as yet uninfluenced in the main by the priestly and monastic cultures from Northern India.²⁹

In order to assess this Tamil humanism one has to consider the entire complex of attitudes prevalent and fostered in Tamil society, and the abstractions and universals which comprise the conscious and unconscious metaphysic of the age as expressed in the anthologies. The love poetry and the panegyric poetry show the range of psychological insight of the poets themselves and the Tolkappiyam is probably derived from one of the several compendia which existed as aids to the study of the phonetics, grammar, prosody and the conventions and psychology which were to guide poetic compositions. Life is considered pleasant and joyful, and death a sad ending; there is no attempt to obtain release from life except to vindicate honour and bravery and the love for a husband who has passed away; there is a note of nostalgic sadness in the poems about senescence and old age; liberality and ethical goodness are indulged in without motives of expiation and penance; rebirth is seldom spoken of in the earlier poems but the life after death is represented as an abode of permanent happiness for the good and permanent suffering for the wicked; happiness in the future world is conceded only to those who by their bravery and altruism have established their glory in this world;³⁰ love and courtship, marriage and children are considered necessary modes of human fulfilment and perfection of personality; and the norms and ideals of statecraft, ethics, truth, justice, equity, gratitude and love which run through the anthologies and the Tirukkural seem to make by comparison Kautilya, Manu and Vatsyayana small, exclusive and petty in the ideals and concepts they teach of moral and ethical goodness.³¹

The following poem tersely expresses certain dynamic and creative thoughts underlying the poetic period:

Does this world really exist? If it does, it is because therein live persons who if they came by even Indra’s nectar would not consume it selfishly alone; they bear ill-will towards none; they fear not nor quail before what others fear; they waver not. With ideals of striving not for their own good but for the good of the rest of men they live—hence one may believe the world exists.³²

This development of secular poetic thought was not to blossom forth immediately into a full and pure philosophy as it did in Greece. The political movements in India and Ceylon and international trade were bringing Indian kingdoms and foreign countries into very close relationship, and the political and commercial routes were also the highways along which Vedic Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism and Ajivikism travelled to the Tamil kingdoms. The Silappatikaram, Manimekalai and the Tirukkural represent an age of philosophic thought, religious and secular and of inter-cultural contacts and inter-cultural conflicts.

Notes

Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 71–130. Page 124: “The poet is looked upon as the guest-friend of his patron, even at times when he is utterly dependent on him.”
S. Krishnaswami Aiyengar, The Beginnings of South Indian History, p. 59 ff., Modern Printing Works, Madras, 1918; id., Ancient India and South Indian History and Culture, Vol. I, p. 435 ff., Vol. II, p. 668 ff., Oriental Book Agency, Poona, 1941.
E.g. Puram., 66, 126, 130.
See K. N. Sivaraja Pillai, The Chronology, op. cit., p. 117.
See Mortimer Wheeler, Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers; J. M. Casal, Fouilles de Virampatnam–Arikamedu, Librairie Klincksieck, Paris, 1949; Pierre Meile, “Les Yavanas dans l’Inde Tamoule,” in Mélanges Asiatiques, pp. 85–123, 1940–1942.
Puram., 65, 66, 236.
Puram., 169; Kur., 15, 73.
Compare panan, kuttan, virali with pulavan.
K. N. Sivaraja Pillai, The Chronology, op. cit., p. 192; S. Vaiyapuri Pillai, “History of Tamil Language and Literature,” in TC Vol. III (1954), p. 346 ff.; S.I.S.S.W. Publishing Society, Lectures on Purananuru (Tm).
See sources cited in note 9.
See W. Jaeger, Paideia, op. cit., p. 148: “In the age of the Presocratics, the poet was still the undisputed leader of his people; and he was being joined by the lawgiver and statesman. There was no change in this situation until the rise of the sophists…”; cf. W. A. Smith, Ancient Education, Philosophical Library. The following article by an eminent Hindu scholar is important confirmatory evidence of the conclusions reached in these pages with regard to early Tamil religion: Swami Vipulananda, on the development of Tamilian religious thought, in TC Vol. V (1956) number 2, p. 254 ff.
Puram, 196, 205–211.
Puram, 162.
Puram, 151.
Puram, 109, 15–18.
Puram, 27 and 202. In Puram, 72 the young sovereign who has composed the poem swears that should he fail to achieve victory against the other kings who have joined against him, may he turn out to be an unrighteous sovereign whose subjects curse his cruelty, and may his territory be forever forsaken by the band of illustrious poets headed by Mankudi Marutan.
See e.g., Puram, 43–47, 58, 92, 95, 97, 102, 104, 109, 110, 143–145, 212–213, 246, 336. Cf. Patir., passim re gifts given to poets.
Puram, 146. The translation is by G. U. Pope in IA. See also 143–145 and 147.
Puram, 35.
Puram, 214–223.
The titles added to the names indicate and differentiate between the more celebrated and the less celebrated poets and sometimes show the lineage of discipleship and special teaching functions.
See Puram, 26, 12; 53, 12; 72, 13. See Tirukkural, chapters on learning.
Mullaippattu (Ten Idylls) 45–49; e.g. Puram, 116; Nar., 159, 331; Aham, 190.
Puram, 183.
E.g., oliyor in Puram, 39.
The anthologies of love poetry and the Tolkappiyam amply demonstrate this humanism. See, for instance, Puram, 188.
Comparative Religion, op. cit., p. 147.
Puram, 134, 138, 20 ff.
Albert Schweitzer, Indian Thought, op. cit., p. 200 ff.
Puram, 50, 14, 18; also see 18, 13; 21, 13; 24, 34; 135–6; 165; 174; 179, 9; 206, 8.
Albert Schweitzer, ibid., p. 201: “What a difference between the Kural and the Laws of Manu which originated some four centuries before it! In the latter under the dominance of the Brahmanic spirit, world and life affirmation is still just tolerated alongside world and life-negation. In the Kural world and life-negation is only like a distant cloud in the sky.”
Puram, 182. See Aham, 55. High ideals are constantly emphasised. See simile in Puram, 69, 5.