On Tamil Poetical Compositions and their ‘Limbs’, as described by Tamil grammarians (Studies in...

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ON TAMIL POETICAL COMPOSITIONS AND THEIR “LIMBS”, AS DESCRIBED BY TAMIL GRAMMARIANS (STUDIES IN TAMIL METRICS-1)*

Jean-Luc ChevillardCNRS, UMR7597, HTL, Univ Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité,

F-75013, Paris, France

* I wish to express here my thanks to Christian Puech and Valérie Raby who overcame my initial hesitation to write a contribution for this “dossier thématique”, which appears in a journal concerning which my role is normally to be the editor. I also thank Eva Wilden and Dominic Goodall, who read a preliminary version of this paper and made very useful suggestions. This article is the first in a series of articles, which is continued in Chevillard[2012a] and Chevillard[2012b].

RÉSUMÉ : Écrire l’histoire de la tradition grammatical tamoule, c’est essayer d’expliciter la genèse, les éléments constitutifs et la finalité d’un dispositif qui s’est progressivement mis en place au cours du premier millénaire de notre ère. La cible principale de ce dispositif semble avoir été la caractérisation détaillée d’une langue raffinée, qui était peut-être l’un des composants dans une situation de diglossie, ressemblant à la situation actuelle, et qui serait adéquate pour la composition métrique (yāppu) par des poètes d’une variété de textes poétiques (ceyyuḷ), répartis en différents genres, le plus important étant pāṭṭu « chanson/poème ». En conséquence, on observe la transmission en parallèle d’un corpus poétique qui s’enrichit progressivement et d’une série de traités grammaticaux. Le plus ancien traité disponible est le Tolkāppiyam, dont l’avant-dernier chapitre, le Ceyyuḷiyal, donne une caractérisation des 34 « membres » (uṟuppu) de la poésie. La liste des membres peut être divisée en sous-groupes, dont certains sont examinés dans cet article, notamment du point de vue de leur adéquation descriptive par rapport au corpus poétique aujourd’hui disponible, ainsi que du point de vue du caractère naturel (par rapport à la langue tamoule) des catégories utilisées. Vient ensuite un examen de l’articulation entre les catégories utilisées par le Tolkāppiyam (et

ABSTRACT: In writing a history of the Tamil Grammatical Tradition, one must try to make explicit the genesis, the constituent elements and the purpose of an ensemble that was gradually put together during the First Millenium of the Common Era. The main purpose of that collective endeavour seems to have been the detailed characterization of a refined language, which was possibly one of the components in a diglossic situation (analogous to that of Tamil today). That refined language would be used for the metrical composition (yāppu) by poets of a variety of poetical texts (ceyyuḷ) falling under different genres, the dominant one being pāṭṭu “song/verse”. As a consequence, we observe the simultaneous transmission of a poetical corpus, progressively enriched, and of a series of grammatical treatises. The oldest treatise available is the Tolkāppiyam, which gives in its penultimate chapter, the Ceyyuḷiyal, a characterization of the thirty-four “limbs” (uṟuppu) of poetical compositions. Those limbs are subdivided into several groups, which are examined in this article, particularly with a view to matching them with phenomena attested in the existing poetical corpus and to assessing how naturally they fit the Tamil language. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between the conceptions found in the Tolkāppiyam (and its first commentator, Iḷampūraṇar) and

Histoire Épistémologie Langage 33/II (2011) p. 121-144 © SHESL

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1. INTRODUCTION

At the onset of this exploration, 1 I shall begin my presentation by mentioning several fundamental questions which have been and are important for several societies: (1) “what is poetry?”; (2) “who is a poet?; (3) “who is the best poet?”; (4) “what is the highest permanent authority for evaluating poetry?” (5) “How to be sure one possesses the right interpretation for an ancient treatise?”. Among the societies which have tried (and still try) to answer those questions, we must count the Tamil-speaking society of South India, as may be seen from texts (and stories) which stem from many periods, some of them datable to precise centuries and some of them undatable, at least for the time being.2 Questions (1) and (4) must have been repeatedly asked and answered, in a ritual way, inside several segments of that society, as a part of an initiatory process and two of the key elements involved in the questioning and answering process can now be seen by us, on library shelves, (A) as corpora of poetical compositions (ceyyuḷ), often containing grammatical annotations, added by learned editors, and (B) as a series of almost fifty grammatical treatises (ilakkaṇam), edited more or less satisfactorily. That so many grammatical treatises should have been composed and partly preserved, often under difficult conditions,3 over a period probably spanning more than one and a half millennia4

1 This is, in a sense, a récit de voyage across a corpus of technical texts (and across anthologies of poems) which still remains very much (for me) an uncharted territory of fascinating complexity.

2 Absolute chronology of the ancient Tamil literature is still very much debated. And even the relative chronology is sometimes hotly debated.

3 South Indian climate is not suitable for the long preservation of palm-leaves, which seem to have been the most frequent traditional support for writing. For many works which we have now, as fragments or as (apparently) whole books, it is of course very difficult to make definitive statements as to what they may have looked like in their earlier incarnations.

4 The book Tamiḻ Ilakkaṇa Nūlkaḷ (Cuppiramaṇiyaṉ [2007]), a compilation based on other books, reproduces on 800 pages (A4 size, 2 columns) the source texts (without the various commentaries) of forty-nine distinct Tamil grammatical treatises, nine of them being known only fragmentarily. Dates are provided in a chart (pp. 10-11). Among the forty-nine treatises, forty-eight are dated by the compiler from the 6th century AD to the 19th century AD. The dates proposed for the forty-eight treatises, correcting two obvious typographical mistakes for Toṉṉūl Viḷakkam (18th and not 17th century) and Viruttap Pāviyal (19th and not 20th century) have the following distribution.

century 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th 18th 19th

grammars 5 3 1 2 4 1 4 2 2 6 3 1 14

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MOTS-CLÉS : Grammaires tamoules ; métri que tamoule, corpus poétique tamoul ; diglossie ; Tolkāppiyam ; Ceyyuḷiyal ; Iḷampū-raṇar, Yāpparuṅkalam ; yāppu ; ceyyuḷ.

KEYWORDS : Tamil grammars ; Tamil metrics ; Tamil poetical corpus ; diglossia ; Tolkāppiyam ; Ceyyuḷiyal ; Iḷampūraṇar ; Yāpparuṅkalam ; yāppu ; ceyyuḷ.

son premier commentateur Iḷampūraṇar) et celles que nous trouvons dans des traités postérieurs tels que le Yāpparuṅkalam (et son commentaire).

those found in later metrical treatises such as the Yāpparuṅkalam (and its commentary).

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seems to clearly show that they fulfilled a need, that need being, if we examine the tables of contents of those treatises, rooted predominantly in the desire to create, preserve, recite and/or understand “poetical compositions” (ceyyuḷ). We do not know for sure whether successful Tamil poets thought that grammar was important, but it is quite clear that Tamil grammarians thought that poetical composition (ceyyuḷ) was their primary target.5 And that conviction must have been shared by grammar teachers, some of whom became grammatical commentators, and quoted many poetical compositions, while still others became grammarians, and composed new treatises, most of which deal with poetry.6 Part of the “audience” (i.e. those who were neither grammarians nor poets, but were appreciative of the poetry), probably thought they could reach a deeper understanding of the poetry by studying the grammars. Thanks to the work of a series of philologists, who have transformed what was once the sole property of a very limited community into books universally accessible to all those who make the strenuous effort to study them, we now have the possibility7 to imagine what it must have been8 to be

The first one in the list, the Tolkāppiyam, is however, much less realistically, dated in the 5th century B.C. Although this contradicts the dating of the Tolkāppiyam in the 5th century AD by many modern scholars, it must be said that this a “moderate” view because, in the “real” world of Tamil Nadu politics, some nationalist “scholars” have recently tried to incite the Tamil Nadu government to decree an official date of 800 BC for the Tolkāppiyam. That such attempt might succeed can be seen from the fact that in 1989, the Tamil Nadu government had passed a “government order” instituting a “Tiruvaḷḷuvar Āṇṭu” (i.e. an Era based on the supposed birthdate of the author of a famous work called “Kuṟaḷ”), the decision being officially based on the conclusions supposedly reached by an assembly of 500 scholars in the 1920-s, who had approved the conclusions reached by a Tamil writer whose pen name was Maṟaimalai Aṭikaḷ [1876-1950], that Tiruvaḷḷuvar (Saint Vaḷḷuvar), to whom the composition of the Kuṟaḷ is attributed, was born in 31 B.C. Modern scholarship, however, generally places the Kuṟaḷ in the range between 450 and 550 AD (see Zvelebil [1995, p. 669-671]). A number of books recently printed indicate both dates. For instance, the item referred to as “TPi” inside the bibliography is not only dated 2003 but also dated “Tiruvaḷḷuvar Āṇṭu 2034”.

5 A secondary target seems to have been vaḻakku “(educated) usage”, but I shall discuss it only occasionally here.

6 And the trend still exists, if I judge from the local success of books produced in the 20th century, such as Tirumurukaṉ [1997] (Pāvalar Paṇṇai) and S. Pasupathy [2011] (Kavitai iyaṟṟik kalakku), not to talk about the existence of mailing lists such as “http://groups.google.com/group/santhavasantham”.

7 We should however always remember that this situation is somehow unnatural, in that having potential immediate access to all knowledge may not be the best way to really understand (and explain) what the possession of knowledge was, in those days, for those who had it, for those who wanted to acquire it, and for those who were outside the process. Similarly, only a very sophisticated performer would interiorize the knowledge that there exist variants to the text which he or she recites.

8 Although I use the past, it should be said that there still exist nowadays people who compose poetry and have debates about it. These people sometimes meet in physical places but they can also meet on the internet (see for instance the “Santhavasantam” mailing list already mentioned in footnote 6) and they continue to this day to look for authoritative statements in traditional grammars. Additionally, several of the poetical corpora are considered as canonical by the respective religious communities which have transmitted them, from generation to generation, across the course of many centuries, and are still recited today, in ritual circumstances. I have been told by my colleague, Professor G. Vijayavenugopal (EFEO, personal communication) that he has himself witnessed (in the 20th century) the reciting by teachers of the 317 lines of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, a Classical Tamil poem,

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a participant in several of those situations where a (reference) corpus of poetical compositions (i.e. a poetical tradition) was present and where, sometimes, one or several grammatical treatises may have been invoked. The philologist, or the historian of linguistics, who can examine and compare the variant readings found in various transmissional strands,9 must try to imagine the personal perspective of the members of some segments of Tamil society, for whom the received collective wisdom10 at various points in time must have been that

(1) There already exists a corpus of poetical compositions

(2) Those compositions have been made by poets and the tradition is alive, because many in the community know how to recite and to understand the poetry, although it must be said that it requires effort and training.

(3) Occasionally a new poet may arise and his/her value will be recognized (in due time, before or after his death), as has already happened a number of times.11

(4) Grammar can help one to understand, recite or compose poetry.

In the larger perspective, where various segments of society interact, we may have to consider separately several instances, some of which may be other-worldly.

(a) the group of poets and scholars, collectively known as pulavar. The poets and the grammarians may sometimes have been the same, but not every good poet can talk about grammar and not every grammarian can compose good poetry. It is nevertheless difficult to imagine them as totally separate groups.

(b) the kings and the other people having power, who patronized the poets and the grammarians, or at least should12 have supported them because it was well-known that some kings had done it in the past and that there had even existed kings who had written poetry.13 Besides, the king also expected, of

before they started their teaching to their students.

9 See for instance, in Chevillard[2009b, p.82-83] how, in the context of grammatical literature, a list of 32 items, the tantiravutti-s, has to be examined as a list of 40 items, if we want to deal simultaneously with the interpretations of two distinct commentators of the Tolkāppiyam, Iḷampūraṇar and Pērāciriyar.

10 I am trying to distinguish here the “internal history”(traditional/insider’s perspective), obtained when we read those texts at face value, from an “external history”, which is what epigraphists try to reconstruct.

11 See the telling of the (Shaiva) story of 3 Academies (muc caṅka varalāṟu) [or Three “Sangam-s”] inside the commentary on Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ [see IA, 1976, p.5-6], where the numbers of poets (and academicians) of the 3 academies are given respectively as 4449 poets (including 549 academicians) for the First Sangam, 3700 poets (including 59 academicians) for the second Sangam and 449 poets (including 49 academicians) for the Third Sangam. The academies are said to have lasted 4440, 3700 and 1850 years respectively. The Tolkāppiyam is said to have been one of the grammars used by the Second and the Third Sangams, whereas the Akattiyam, attributed to Agastya (See Chevillard[2009a]), is said to have been a grammar for all 3 Sangams.

12 Poets who are poor can thus console themselves in evoking a glorious past and hoping for a glorious future.

13 Some are mentioned in the Sangam legend (See footnote 11).

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course, to be glorified by poets.

(c) the gods (or the God), who liked to be lauded (or adored) by human beings reciting hymns. Some of them had even been involved in the composition (and interpretation) of Tamil grammatical treatises.14

(d) Tamil society at large, which recognized the value of poetry (especially of religious poetry) and of poets (especially if they were saints), and was conscious of the fact that the manners of expressing oneself were not all equivalent, that differences and hierarchies existed, which had to be respected, in the realm of language.

The point I am trying to make, in (d), concerning Tamil society at large, may not be clear to one who is not familiar with the Contemporary Tamil diglossia. We do not know of course with absolute certitude whether that diglossia has always existed, but some passages in the grammatical literature seem to indicate that it was already present a long time ago,15 and possibly even at the time of the Tolkāppiyam.16 Direct linguistic observation of the past is of course not possible, because no tape recorder existed then, but in order to put forward hypotheses concerning some of the circumstances, not now directly observable, under which the ancient texts just mentioned were produced, used and transmitted, I believe it can be useful to briefly present the linguistic reality of Modern Day Tamil Nadu, and this will be done in the next section, before we return to our presentation of ancient grammatical literature.

2. THE MODERN TAMIL DIGLOSSIA

In order to be perfectly adapted to life in modern Tamil Nadu, including the ability to exchange abstract ideas and to take part in debates, one has to be a competent diglossic speaker. This means, as a first approximation, that in every day practice one must be capable of oral expression in at least two varieties17 of the Tamil language, which I shall refer to as Oral-A and Oral-B (the latter one being often designated by the label “Standard Spoken Tamil”). In addition to that, the competent diglossic speaker must also be able to express his/her ideas, wishes, etc. in writing, and what he/she writes will normally be read aloud using Oral-A, but a reasonably competent diglossic speaker will also be capable of doing simultaneous

14 See the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal (“Sacred Sports”) stories in Desigan/Pattabiramin/Filliozat [1960, p. 86-88], where a poet (Iṭaikkāṭaṉār) blackmails the king into supporting him, by having Shiva and Parvati move out of the temple (inside the town of Madurai) to another location, as a revenge for the fact that the king has not recognized his poetical merits. See also the Sangam legend already discussed, where some gods are mentioned as being members of the 1st academy, and where Shiva helps the academicians who had lost an important part of Grammar [IA, p. 7]. Stories about the interaction of Shiva with the academicians also appear in the Tiruviḷaiyāṭal stories (see Desigan/Pattabiramin/Filliozat [1960, p. 78-86]).

15 See for instance the verse 82 in the Vīracōḻiyam, often dated to the 11th century, and the references inside the commentary to pronunciations such as “vāyaip payam” and “kōyi muṭṭai” (instead of “vāḻaip paḻam” and “kōḻi muṭṭai”). See Gopal Iyer[2005, p. 277].

16 See the sūtra TP638i: vaḻakkeṉap paṭuva tuyarntōr mēṟṟē [...] “(Educated) usage rests on superior people”.

17 This is in fact a simplification, as we shall see afterwards.


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translation, which means that on the basis of a written text, that speaker can read aloud, making use of Oral-B instead of Oral-A. To this must be added the fact that it is also possible to give an almost explicit written “rendering” of Oral-B, using the standard writing system, although some features, such as nasalisation, cannot be perfectly represented, but a competent diglossic speaker will know how to pro-nounce what is written. This is summarized in the graphic found below:

Figure 1

This preliminary description is however a simplification because the real situation is that a competent native diglossic speaker masters in fact at least three varieties of Tamil, which I shall call A, B and C, the third one being the local dialect, which can itself be strikingly different both from B and A. It can be added that a very competent Tamil speaker can identify and sometimes actively master several local dialects,18 and would thus be orally competent in A, B, C1, C2, C3, etc. And when it comes to writing, there is, as for B, a possibility to do “Explicit-C1-writing, Explicit-C2-writing, etc.”.19

At this point, the reader may want to ask what the exact use of Oral-A is. Performances making use of that variety, which is sometimes referred to as “Formal Tamil”, can be found for instance in the following three situations, which I enumerate by decreasing degree of “naturalness” This means that competent diglossic speakers will find each item in the task list more difficult to perform than the preceding items. They are:

(A1) Singing a cinema song (an activity which any “true” Tamilian can perform without difficulty)20

(A2) Reading from a book [this will nowadays often apply to the narrative passages because dialogues tend to make use of Explicit-B-writing or Explicit-C1-writing, etc.

(A3) Talking in front of an audience, for delivering a lecture [professors and teachers are expected to do that] or for performing a political speech. It is rare however not to see frequent code-switching to variety B, and even to variety

18 Some shibboleth tests might however be hard to pass, and the use of a dialect which is not one’s own might be considered illegitimate or treacherous.

19 This possibility has been used by several modern writers.

20 Some of them know by heart hundreds of songs.

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Standard writing Oral-A

Oral-BExplicit B-writing

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C, for the purpose of inducing a special effect, such as creating complicity, stigmatizing someone, making people laugh, etc.

With respect to the first of these three, it should be added that many cinema songs have borrowed elements from Oral-B (and sometimes from C1, C2, etc.), and could therefore be considered as composed in a hybrid language. However, many of them, especially the old ones, are pure representatives of Oral-A. This can be compared with the dialogues in old films, where the king, the gods (and the other superior characters) spoke in Oral-A while the commoners spoke in Oral-B (or in Oral-C-s). The same practice was also seen in the theatre.

3. TAMIL GRAMMATICAL LITERATURE: THE CEYYUḶIYAL OF THE TOLKĀPPIYAM

I hope to have made it clear, by these introductory sections, why it is likely that the Tamil grammatical tradition did not deal with the varieties of language which were used in normal, spontaneous, every-day communication but with texts prepared in a language register which we could variously characterize as being an “artificial”21 one, a “fabricated” (confectum)22 one, a “composed” one, none of these terms being perfectly adequate. Those texts were prepared by scholars (pulavar) in order to be used as the basis (or vehicle) for a number of ritualized activities, many of them having a repetitive nature, because, to take an example, a hymn to a deity will be composed once by a poet (possibly a future saint), but it will be repeatedly recited thousands of times, as long as the community for whom this poem is significant continues to exist, and it can even survive beyond that, if it finds a second life as an example quoted by a grammarian commenting on a metrical treatise.23 Metre is indeed a key word and most of the ancient texts are metrical, the main exception24 being the commentaries (urai), which must have started their existence as oral explanations,25 but were written down at some point and are found, along with the source texts in the manuscripts (and now in the books) belonging to those traditions.

21 Saying that the language register was “artificial” does not mean that the texts were not “real”. They still exist, because most of the textual artifacts which have been preserved across the centuries by the “scholars” (pulavar) and have reached us are composed in this variety.

22 This can be compared with Aussant[2009, p. 106, fn. 74], who, in the case of Sanskrit, explains that saṃskṛtā vāk means “langue/parole apprêtée”.

23 This is the case for some poems from the (mostly) lost Tamil Buddhist literature. This is for instance the case with the poem starting with keṭalaru māmuṉivar which was preserved inside the YV (see YV_1998, p. 317 and p. 391) and also in Iḷampūraṇar’s commentary on TP449i (and which refers [in the curitakam part] to Accutaṉ, a name said to be linked to the dynasty of the kaḷappāḷar (Kalabhras).

24 Another exception is found in the texts that mingle prose and verse (cf. TP475i).

25 They are probably our best approximation of what the word vaḻakku “(educated) usage” may have referred to (see fn 5 and fn 16). However, as we shall see, the Tolkāppiyam includes, nevertheless, an item called urai among the “Seven loci” (eḻu nilam), which are derived from the act of yāppu “composing” (cf. Chart 1). It is the occasion for Iḷampūraṇar to provide some careful explanations under TP475i, in order to explain how “prose”, although it does not have pā, “metre”, still falls under ceyyuḷ “composition”. More precisely, four types of urai are distinguished by TP475i, but a full discussion lies outside the scope of this paper.


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I shall now proceed to summarize what some of the texts belonging to the Tamil Grammatical Tradition (TGT) tell us about poetical compositions (i.e. what they were and what they were supposed to be), starting with the one which is considered as the most ancient one, namely the Tolkāppiyam (henceforth T), which is, as most other such texts, a composition in metrical form (and more precisely a nūl) [see TP468i], which can be subdivided, almost as per the specifications which it reflexively spells out for itself (see TP470i),26 into Books (paṭalam, or atikāram), three of them (TE, TC and TP),27 each of the books being further subdivided into nine Chapters (ōttu, or iyal). All the 27 chapters are collections of verses, of varied lengths (in a metre called nūṟpā)28, traditionally referred to as cūttiram-s (Sanskrit sūtra).29

The chapter that will attract most of our attention is the 26th chapter of the T and is by far (if we take the cūttiram as a unit of measure) the longest one in the T. It is traditionally called Ceyyuḷ iyal “Chapter on poetical compositions” (henceforth TPcey) and has reached us accompanied by the urai “commentaries” of three commentators who are, in chonological order, Iḷampūraṇar,30 Pērāciriyar and Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar, and who divide its text in, respectively, 235 verses, 243 verses31 and 243 verses. It should also be said that those three commentators have sometimes widely divergent interpretations for the cūttiram-s, and sometimes dif fe-rent readings and, as indicated, different ways of splitting TPcey into cūttiram-s.

Its first cūttiram, TP310i32, which is the longest one, being a verse of fifteen lines, acts as a local table of contents for the chapter, by enumerating thirty-four topics, among which the first twenty-six33 seem to be primary topics, relevant for any type of poetical composition, whereas the remaining eight appear to be the names of particular genres34, although there is no complete agreement as to what those genres may have been because those designations were later supplanted by

26 There are in fact two sets of specifications for nūl inside the T. One is inside the Ceyyuḷiyal (TP468i to TP474i) and the other one is inside the Marapiyal (TP639i to TP656i).

27 These abbreviations (and others) are explained in the last section, which also contains the bibliography.

28 According to Iḷaṃpūraṇar, commenting on TP391i, a nūl “treatise” and a pāṭṭu “verse/song” share many metrical characteristics but they are not identical. He explains, under TP475i, that a nūl, although it is a composition (ceyyuḷ), does not possess ōcai “(poetical) sound”. However, the commentary on YA69 (see figure 3) uses the technical expression nūṟpā akaval ōcai to refer to the “sound” of certain types of compositions. (See YV_1998, p. 281).

29 See more details in Chevillard [2009b].

30 We possess Iḷampūraṇar’s commentary for all the twenty-seven chapters of the T.

31 There are eight cūttiram-s in the version of TPcey known to Iḷampūraṇar that are split into two by Pērāciriyar: TP313i corresponds to TP316p and TP317p; similar are the cases of TP349i, TP361i, TP378i, TP441i, TP446i, TP457i and TP484i. It is possible that Pērāciriyar saw it as his duty to rectify mistakes in the text of T and that he ended up rewriting it.

32 The lower case “i” which follows number 310 in TP310i, indicates that the numbering follows Iḷampūraṇar’s splitting of the TP. A “p” would indicate Pērāciriyar, a “n” Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar and a “c” Cēṉāvaraiyar (for the TC).

33 They are, more precisely referred to as āṟu talaiyiṭṭa an nāl aintum “those four-times-five which have six as a head”. The editor of the 1938 revised edition of Viruttappāviyal, E. N. Tanikachala Mudaliar, thinks that this means that the first six are the most important.

34 They are named ammai, aḻaku, toṉmai, tōl, viruntu, iyaipu, pulaṉ and iḻaipu. See TP310i.

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those used in more recent classification schemes.35 All thirty-four are said to be the uṟuppu “limbs” of the ceyyuḷ36 “(poetical) compositions”, made by the nallicaip pulavar i.e. the “pulavar-s of good fame”.37 The word pulavar, which occurs eighty-two times inside the whole of the T, probably refers to the members of a class of people, who were specially trained and competent in poetry (and possibly also in grammar).

The first of the limbs mentioned in TP310i is māttirai “measurement, quantity”38 and it is followed by eḻuttu, which is itself connected with the third item, acai.39 The subdivisions (vakai) of both māttirai and eḻuttu are said by TP311i, the following cūttiram, to have already been explained, and this reference connects us with another part of the T because the key term eḻuttu has given its title to TE, the first book (paṭalam) of the T, and because māttirai “measurement (i.e. duration)”, the most important attributes of eḻuttu, for a metrician, is one of the topics introduced and made use of in TE (see TE7i).

What, then, are the eḻuttu-s? The word is used in the TPcey for referring to the basic (syllabic) elements40 from which other, higher-order, entities are ultimately made. Those higher-order elements are, summarizing the T, called:

acai. Those items are made of one or more eḻuttu (see TP313i to TP319i)

cīr. They are often combinations of two acai, but sometimes three and sometimes just one (see TP320i to TP339i). The term cīr is often rendered in English by “(metrical) foot”, although it is also often left untranslated, as is also the case for acai,

aṭi. They are most frequently made of 4 cīr-s (TP340i), although other possibilities41 exist (see TP340i to TP382i). The most frequent English translations for aṭi is “line”.42

35 Those fall under the label pāṭṭiyal, one well-known classification system listing up to ninety-six genres (or pirapantam). See Madras Tamil Lexicon, p. 2680-2681 for a full list.

36 The noun ceyyuḷ is clearly derived from the verbal root CEY “to do”.

37 Tanikachala Mudaliar [1938] thinks that nal-l-icaip pulavar refers to musicians, whereas P.S. Subrahmanya Sastri [1936] understands it as “Scholars of fame”. This results from icai having several possible meanings.

38 Sanskrit “mātrā”. See the chart 5 for an application of this parameter to the distinction between various types of eḻuttu.

39 The verbal root iyal (“to consist of, to be made of”) connects eḻuttu and acai. The line ends up with vakai “subdivision”, followed by the enumerative particle eṉāa. We could translate this first line in TP310i (māttirai eḻutt-iyal acai vakai y-eṉāa) in the following way: “[enumerating] the subdivisions (vakai) of the acai-s which are made of eḻuttu-s [which possess] measurement (māttirai)”.

40 Several meanings co-exist in the usage which is made of eḻuttu inside the T. See Chevillard [2002], where I tentatively translated eḻuttu as “lettre syllabique” (syllabic letter), which is one of the frequent uses of the word. But in TE1, where it is said that there exist “thirty eḻuttu” in Tamil, the meaning of eḻuttu is different, and “phoneme” would be closer to the point, although anachronistic.

41 See figure 2 for an example of a line having three cīr-s.

42 However, P.S. Subrahmanya Sastri, sticking to the ordinary meaning of aṭi, translates it as “foot” and leaves cīr (and acai) untranslated.


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pāṭṭu “song/verse”,43 which is made of several aṭi, and which is officially introduced44 in TP384i, as being one of those “seven loci” (ēḻ nilam, [= eḻu nilam]) which follow the [seven types of] yāppu45 current among those who live inside (akattavar) the four big geographical limits (nāṟ pēr ellai) in which the three [kings] (mūvar) have generosity-based fame (vaṇ pukaḻ).

Among the seven items which “follow yāppu” (yāppiṉ vaḻiya), the other six, mentioned after pāṭṭu “song/verse”, and enumerated along with it in Chart 1, are all of them (excepting perhaps nūl “treatise”) treated only very briefly in the TPcey, sometimes under several names:464748

pāṭṭu “song/verse”

urai “speech/commentary” TP475i-TP477i

nūl “treatise” TP468i-TP474i

vāymoḻi “mantra”46 TP480i

pici “riddle” 47 TP478i

aṅkatam “satirical poem” 48 TP481i

mutucol “proverb” TP479i

Chart 1: the eḻu nilam “seven loci”

At this stage, rather than continuing to examine the “limbs” one by one, and before giving more explanations concerning the five limbs already mentioned, it appears necessary, if we want the readers to understand what the TPcey is meant to achieve, to provide them with a bird’s eye view of its organization. Although I have presented the first cūttiram of TPcey as a “table of contents”, it is not an easy one to use. There are sections which are devoted to a particular topic (playing the role of an adhikāra49), but the topic may already have played a role in the discussion of an earlier topic, and be due to reappear later in an ulterior section. Besides, no statement is to be seen as valid in isolation. It can always be partly cancelled by a later statement, dealing with some “exceptional” case, the goal of such an organization being probably to have a grammatical text which will not be

43 I have often translated pāṭṭu by “verse” in order, perhaps wrongly or anachronistically, to maintain a distinction between iyaṟpā “natural verse” and icaippā “musical verse”. See Chevillard[2012a] (forthcoming).

44 It has in fact already been mentioned in TP343i.

45 Iḷampūraṇar enumerates them under TP384i: pāṭṭiyāppu, uraiyāppu, etc. A (poetical) composition (ceyyuḷ) [root CEY “to do”] is the result of the action of yāttal/yāppu [root YĀ “to tie”]. The word yāppu itself could also be translated as “poetical composition”, if we wish to preserve a degree of ambiguity, because it can potentially refer either to the activity of composing (poetry) or to the result of that activity.

46 Another designation for the same item in TPcey is mantiram (see TP480i and TP467i), from Skt. mantra.

47 The exact meaning of the term is not clear to me. It is mentioned again in TP483i.

48 Several types are distinguished. But the whole classification is unclear. The main cūttiram-s concerned are: TP432i to TP434i andTP461i. But the term is also part, inside the T, of another network of terms, such as vāḻttiyal “praise”, etc. A full account lies outside the scope of this preliminary presentation. I have already partly started to discuss this question in Chevillard[2009b, p.105]: I note that a grammarian whose work has been lost, Palkāyaṉār, added an 8th item, vāḻttu “praise” to the list of “seven loci” (see YV_1998, p.453).

49 Concerning this feature, see Chevillard[2009b, p. 109-112].

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too long. But it may of course make matters difficult to follow for one who has not memorized the whole text. Coming back to the necessity of an overview, I suggest that we have the following very unequal subdivisions:50

TP310i TOC (6+20+8 “limbs of compositions”)

(ceyyuḷuṟuppu)

1 cūttiram

TP311i māttirai (1)50 & eḻuttu (2) (treated in TE) 1 c.

TP312i-TP319i acai (3) (intermediate unit) 8 c.

TP320i-TP339i cīr (4) “metrical foot” (see Chart 9) 20 c.

TP340i-TP382i aṭi (5) “metrical line” (see Chart 4) 43 c.

TP383i-TP535i yāppu (6) (“Seven loci”,

starting with pāṭṭu [Chart 1]

153 c.

TP536i-TP543i Eight “(minor) genres”[(27) to (34)] 8 c.

TP544i Puṟanaṭai 1 c.

Chart 2: overview of TPcey

As can be seen in Chart 2, there is a growing complexity in the exposition of those six limbs, and the reader may wonder where the remaining limbs are treated. It is my perception that they are used as secondary topics (or secondary adhikāra) inside the huge section which has yāppu (6) as its main topic, and where the eḻu nilam “Seven loci” are explained, especially pāṭṭu, which seems to be the most important one for the T. We have the following disposition:515253

TP383i-TP384i yāppu51 (6) [eḻu nilam] 2 c. MTP385i marapu (7) 1 c.

TP386i-TP392i tūkku (8) 7 c. MTP393i-TP408i toṭai (9) 16 c. MTP409i nōkku (10) 1 c.

TP410i-TP458i pā (11) 49 c. MTP459i-TP485i aḷavu (12) [limited or unlimited] 27 c. MTP486i-TP511i

(mostly

poetological

topics)

tiṇai (13) [1 c.], kaikōḷ (14) [6 c.], poruḷ/kūṟṟu52 (15) [4 c.],

kēṭpōr (16) [5 c.], kaḷaṉ (17) [1 c.], kālam (18) [1 c.],

payaṉ (19) [1 c.], meyppāṭu (20) [2 c.], eccam53 (21) [1 c.],

muṉṉam (22) [1 c.], poruḷ (23) [1 c.], tuṟai (24) [1 c.].

Total:

26 c.

TP511i -TP512i māṭṭu (25) 2 c.

TP513i-TP535i vaṇṇam (26) 23 c. M

Chart 3: overview of the Yāppu section, with the six core items [indicated by M]

From the point of view of metrics, the items contained in this list do not all have a central position. For instance, the major part of the group of limbs which starts with tiṇai (13) and end with tuṟai (24), and which is treated in the group of twenty-six

50 The number in boldface indicates the limb number.

51 It must be said that Pērāciriyar has a different interpretation for the limb yāppu. But space does not permit me to present that interpretation here.

52 According to Pērāciriyar, limb 15 is kūṟṟu “[to say] who talks”. But for Iḷampūraṇar, limb 15 is poruḷ.

53 This item, for which a rough translation is “[the] missing [of something]” does not belong to the group of poetological topics, but rather to the domain of syntax. It is dealt with primarily inside TC, notably in TC430c and the following cūttiram-s, notably TC439c, TC440c and TC441c (See Chevillard[1996: p.526-527 & p. 535-540).


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cūttiram-s going from TP486i to TP511i, looks like an abridged summary of some other parts of the TP. It may be a remnant from a time when the TPcey possibly was an autonomous treatise, not (yet) incorporated inside the T. Otherwise, the redundant character is difficult to explain. Similarly, the limbs marapu54 (7), nōkku (10) and māṭṭu (25) do not seem to belong to the core of metrics.55 The really central limbs, apart from the all-encompassing yāppu (6), are tūkku “rhythm” (8),56 toṭai “alliteration” (9), pā “metre” (11), aḷavu “count (number of lines)” (12) and vaṇṇam “colour, texture” (26).

4. VARIETIES OF “LINES” (AṬI)

We now come back to aṭi, which is the fifth limb of ceyyuḷ. There is a group of cūttiram-s (TP344i to TP348i) in the TPcey, classifying (and naming) the lines (aṭi) on the basis of the number of eḻuttu-s, which they contain. The possibilities are:

very short lines (kuṟaḷ aṭi) “dwarf lines” 4 to 6 eḻuttu (TP344i)

short lines (cintaṭi) 7 to 9 eḻuttu (TP345i)

normal lines (nēraṭi or aḷavaṭi) 10 to 14 eḻuttu (TP346i)

long lines (neṭil aṭi) 15 to 17 eḻuttu (TP347i)

very long lines (kaḻi neṭil aṭi) 18 to 20 eḻuttu (TP348i)

Chart 4: classification of lines in the TPcey

These preliminary remarks being made, I now return to the question “What is a eḻuttu?”, which has not yet been completely answered. The most unambiguous way to answer that question is to provide the reader with one of the examples

54 This is said to consist in versifying in accordance with the “nature of the four [types of] words” (nāṟ-col iyal). This limb establishes a relationship between TPcey and the TC, 2nd book of the T, but the commentators hesitate between two possible interpretations. The four types of words might be the four parts of speech. They might also be the four types of words discussed from TC397c to TC402c, and mentioned again in TC403c, in a context which is of direct interest to poetical composition, because TC403c deals with the phonetic side of poetical license. (See Chevillard[1996, p. 479-481]).

55 Unfortunately, time and space do not permit me to say more about them, except very briefly. For marapu (7), explanations have been given in footnote 54. As far as māṭṭu (25) is concerned, it consists in establishing a syntactic connection between two words which are very distant. Finally, concerning nōkku (10), which literally means “[the action of] looking [at something]”, the examples given by Iḷampūraṇar, who considers three possible cases (A. “single ‘looking’” [oru nōkku], B. “plural ‘looking’” [pala nōkku] and C. “intermittent ‘looking’” [iṭaiyiṭṭu nōkku]), also belong to the realm of syntax, because in the examples he provides, we have (A.) a verse containing a single sentence, (B.) a verse containing several juxtaposed statements and (C.) a verse where a syntactic relationship has to jump over an intermediate component. A possible translation of nōkku would be “construal”. Such a usage of nōkku would be compatible with the usage we see in the expression ciṅka nōkku alias arimāṉ nōkkam (Skt. siṃhāvalokana) which is normally used for a cūttiram (Skt. sūtra) which looks both backwards and forwards towards other cūttiram-s with which it will be connected (in terms of topic). This usage is briefly mentioned in Chevillard (2009b, p.110). All these explanations are tentative and partly speculative.

56 According to Iḷampūraṇar, commenting on TP386i, tūkku is synonymous with ōcai “[rhythmic] sound”.

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by which a commentator such as Iḷampūraṇar illustrates the various categories of lines (aṭi). We shall examine specifically for that purpose the example which he provides (under TP359i) for a “short line” (cintaṭi) made of nine eḻuttu. That example happens to be one of the most famous lines in Sangam literature, being the first in a five-line “song/verse” (pāṭṭu)57 found in the Kuṟuntokai (henceforth KT), an anthology of short verses.58 The line reads, in metrical form, if we only indicate, using space, the separations between the cīr-s (or metrical feet). 59

(A) koṅku̇tēr vāḻkkai yañciṟait tumpi (Kuṟuntokai 2, line 1)60

How can we understand Iḷampūraṇar’s statement that this line is a “short line” of nine eḻuttu? Another way of describing this line, based on writing practices, would be to say that it contains seventeen elements,

(B) ko ṅ ku̇ tē r vā ḻ k kai ya ñ ci ṟai t tu m pibut that among those elements, only those [in boldface] which have a duration (māttirai) superior or equal to one māttirai are in fact to be counted as per the rules enunciated by the T (see TP351i)

eḻuttu duration

group 1 tē, vā. 2 māttirai 2 elements counted

group 2 ko, kai, ya, ci, ṟai, tu, pi. 1 māttirai 7 elements counted

group 3 ṅ, r, ḻ, k, ñ, t, m. ½ māttirai 7 elements NOT counted

group 4 ku̇. ½ māttirai 1 element NOT counted

Chart 5: types of eḻuttu in line 1 of poem KT-02

The elements in group 3, which could be described, anachronistically, as part of the coda of a closed syllable (CVC type), and which the T calls oṟṟeḻuttu “single eḻuttu” in TP316i and uyirilleḻuttu “eḻuttu without vowels” in TP351i are, in virtue of a statement made in TP351, not to be used in the count. This, as a consequence, makes (1a) into a “short line” (cintaṭi). As for the item found in group 4, which is also not counted and which illustrates the occurrence of an “over-short u” (kuṟṟiyal ukaram, represented here in my notation, which follows P.S. Subrahmanya Sastri[1936/2002] by u with a dot above, i.e. “u̇”), it is discussed at great length in the TE.61, and we shall see it again in the coming sections.

57 The composition of this verse has been attributed by medieval Shaiva legends to Shiva himself (see Dessigane et alii [1960, p.81-83].

58 The Kuṟuntokai is a collection of 401 short love poems (plus an invocatory verse). These poems do not tell a connected story, being independent of each other.

59 The four cīr in example (A) correspond to the elements labelled 1a, 1b, 1c and 1d in the template which will be given later (as figure 2). This ways of referring to the cīr-s represents the coordinate system used by philologists, while critically editing such texts. See for instance Wilden[2010].

60 “O, beautifully-winged bee, whose life consists in selecting pollen” (or “selecting honey”, according to MTL). See the full poem and its translation in (C).

61 Summarizing this discussion lies beyond the scope of this presentation.


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5. THE TOLKĀPPIYAM AND THE CORPUS TO WHICH IT IS APPLIED

The nature of eḻuttu being now, hopefully, clearer for the reader, I return to the poem (KT-2), in which (A) was the first line. The text of its five lines (here separated by “double slashes”) reads

(C) koṅku̇tēr vāḻkkai yañciṟait tumpi // xkāmañ ceppātu̇ xkaṇṭatu̇ moḻimō // ypayiliyatu̇ keḻīiya naṭpiṉ ymayiliyaṟ // zceṟiyeyiṟ ṟarivai kūntali // zṉaṟiyavu muḷavōnī zyaṟiyum pūvē62 “O, beautifully-winged63 bee, whose life consists in selecting pollen, without trying to please me, (just) tell me what you have seen! Does there exist a flower known by you, which is more fragrant than the tresses (the hair) of the ((young)) woman (arivai), with the densely (planted) teeth, the peacock’s nature, and whose affection pervades everything in me” (Kuṟuntokai 2) [my translation]

It consists of 19 cīr-s, which can be referred to easily by making use of the labels found in the following template (figure 2):

1a 1b 1c 1d

2a 2b 2c 2d

3a 3b 3c 3d

4a 4b 4c

5a 5b 5c 5d

figure 2: the nineteen cīr-s of a typical 5-line verse in āciriyam meter (such as KT-002)

I call this a “template” because the KT contains ninety 5-line poems and all are built on the same model, with four cīr per line, and a penultimate line which is shorter than the other lines.64 The T, while mentioning constraints of that type (and others to which we shall allude later) tells us that they are characteristic of the

62 Exponents are used here to indicate toṭai. x =poḻippu mōṉai; y = orūu etukai; z = aṭi etukai and poḻippu etukai. These remarks are now made (in anticipation) for “future use”.

63 “Beautifully-winged” is not the only interpretation which has beeen given for añ-ciṟai. Some scholars (such as U. Vē. Cāminātaiyar, think that añ-ciṟai is a contraction of akañ-ciṟai, where akam “inside” qualifies ciṟai “wing”, and that this is an allusion to a type of insect (a beetle?) which has both external and internal wings. Such questions are of course outside the scope of this brief presentation.

64 If the poem had six lines, the line shorter than the others would be the fifth, etc. Poems of this category are called by later grammarians nēricai āciriyappā (see YV under YA-27), an expression known to Iḷampūraṇar (who refers to nēricai āciriyam under TP422i) but not to the T itself.

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tūkku “rhythm” (called cen-tūkku “straight tūkku”) of a metre (pā) which he calls āciriyam, and which is one of the main four “metres” (pā) enumerated in TP410i.

How do we know that the T is applicable to the KT? We are of course told by grammatical commentators and other scholars that this is the case. And we can make ourselves a few verifications. In addition to the ninety 5-liners already mentioned, the KT contains shorter poems, with four lines and longer poems, the maximum length being eight lines, if we except two exceptional 9-line poems. The statistics are:65

Line length 4 5 6 7 8 9

Poems count 38 90 95 102 75 265

Chart 6: distribution of poems by length inside the KT

It is of course beyond the scope of this study to do a full scale examination of the way the categories defined by the T can be applied to “Sangam” poems such as those found inside the KT. Performing small statistical tests, however, is a necessary initial step. On a total of seventy-five 8-liners from the KT, the first ten were selected, and furnished me with a sample of seventy lines (totaling 759 “countable” eḻuttu-s).66 The number of eḻuttu-s in each of those seventy lines were determined, and they are recorded in the following chart:

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Number of eḻuttu per line

2 12 20 15 11 5 2 3 Count of such lines [total: 70]

20% (cintaṭi) aḷavaṭi (53 items: 76 % of total sample) neṭilaṭi

Chart 7: line lengths in the first ten 8-liners from KT

A similar test was done for all the thirty-eight 4-liners, which furnished us with a sample of 114 lines, totalling 1266 eḻuttu-s.67 The statistics is given in the following

chart:

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Number of eḻuttu per line

8 11 19 30 22 17 7 Count of such lines[total: 114]

16,7% (cintaṭi) aḷavaṭi (83,3% of total sample)

Chart 8: line lengths in all the 38 four-liners from KT

Although those two samples are small, they seem to indicate that the medium-size line is dominant and, therefore, the names chosen for this type of line (see Chart 4) appear natural.68 We should however, before saying a few more things on lines,

65 There are some anomalies in the distribution, because poems having 9 lines should normally be in another anthology, the Naṟṟiṇai, in which the poem length goes (mainly) from nine to twelve, with however two “anomalous” 7-lines poems and two “anomalous” 8-lines poems (they should have been in the KT) and an upper limit group of seven 13-lines poems, which overlaps with the distribution found in still another anthology, the Akanāṉūṟu (AN).

66 The rules governing those types of compositions (i.e. pāṭṭu; but not nūl) are that the penultimate lines contain almost always only three cīr-s (see figure 2). Those have to be excluded from the sample.

67 Here also, the penultimate line has only three cīr-s and is excluded from the statistic.

68 The designation nēraṭi is used six times in TPcey, whereas aḷavaṭi is used two times. When used as a technical specifier, nēr, which means “direct, regular, equal” and the like, is often


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explain the last of the basic elements from which poems are made, namely acai, which has already been mentioned, as being the category which stands between eḻuttu (“syllabic element”) and cīr (“metrical foot”), but which has not yet been explained. We return for that to the verse cited in (A) and to the whole poem, from which it is extracted, cited in (B), and we shall occasionally make use of the coordinate system which is given in figure 2.

6. HOW ACAI AND CĪR ARE USED

The T recognizes four types of acai, which it names, iconically, nēr, nirai, nērpu̇ and niraipu̇, and which I shall occasionally denote here, for the sake of brevity, by the abbreviations E, I, Ev and Iv. The first two types are called iyal acai “natural acai” and the last two are called uriyacai “possible acai (or specific acai)”. The most frequent combination of acai is by pair, i.e. having two acai combining in one cīr, but there are also other possibilities. Additionally, there is a strong requirement that word boundaries should coincide either with acai boundaries, or at least with cīr boundaries, when the word is long. In the verse cited in (A), the 4 cīr are all combinations of 2 acai, and there are 6 words, among which four have acai size and two have cīr size. They are ordered by increasing degree of complexity, and I use a hyphen in order to mark acai boundary

(1b) vāḻk-kai: pattern nēr-nēr (EE); a single word (meaning “life”).

(1d) tum-pi: pattern nēr-nēr (EE); a single word (meaning “bee”).

(1c) añ-ciṟai: pattern nēr-nirai (EI); two words, combined in one cīr; ciṟai means “wing”.69

(1a) koṅku̇-tēr: pattern nērpu̇-nēr (EvE) ; two words, combined in one cīr; koṅku̇ means “pollen” (or “honey”) and tēr is a verbal root, meaning “to select, to evaluate”.

It lies far beyond the scope of this presentation to fully explain here how to recognize such entities as the nēr, nirai, nērpu̇ and niraipu ̇ types of acai.70 I shall content myself with saying here that a nirai71 must start with a short syllabic element, that short syllabic element being immediately followed, inside the same word, by another syllabic element, which can be short or long, and which may be followed by one or two single consonants. In the case of the nēr, we either have a long syllabic element, sometimes followed by one or two single consonants, or we have a short syllabic element which is not immediately followed inside the same word by another syllabic element, but which can be followed by single consonants. And as far as nērpu̇ and niraipu̇ are concerned, they normally consist of an initial part, identical to a nēr or a nirai, followed by a coda containing the overshort u̇, but a full presentation will not be attempted here.

These categories being thus introduced, it seems, natural to see how they are

used to point out the standard variety of the item specified.

69 For the meaning of “am”, see footnote 63.

70 For details, see Chevillard [2012b]

71 Literally, nirai means “row, column, line, train, series”.

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applicable to the poetical corpus in general, and to the KT in particular. This would however be a herculean task, although very useful, if it had to be done in full, and I shall content myself with first giving here the statistics for the full poem KT2 and then for the two small subsets of the KT already examined in charts 5 and 6. The poem can be scanned as follows:72

(D) koṅku̇-tēr vāḻk-kai yañ-ciṟait tum-pi // kā-mañ cep-pātu̇ kaṇ-ṭatu̇ moḻi-mō // payi-liyatu̇ keḻī-iya naṭ-piṉ mayi-liyaṟ // ceṟi-yeyiṟ ṟari-vai kūn-tali // ṉaṟi-yavu muḷa-vō-nī yaṟi-yum pū-vē {EvE EE EI EE // EE EEv Esv IE // IIv II EE II // II IE EI // II IEE IE EE} (Kuṟuntokai 2)

We see that among the nineteen cīr, eighteen are made of two acai-s, while one (namely 5b, “muḷa-vō-nī”= IEE) is made of three acai. Among the cīr-s made of two acai-s, fourteen are combinations of “natural acai” (iyal acai), while three73 are combinations of one iyalacai with one uriyacai, the last one (2c) being a special case. The combinations of 2 iyal-acai are called iyaṟcīr “natural cīr”. We have the following distribution:74 75

EE IE EI II Esv75 IEE Others Total

5 items 3 items 2 items 4 items 1 item 1 item 3 items 19 items

vāḻk-kai, tum-pi,kā-mañ, naṭ-piṉ, pū-vē

moḻi-mō, ṟari-vai, yaṟi-yum

yañ-ciṟait, kūn-tali

keḻī-iya, mayi-liyaṟ, ceṟi-yeyiṟ, ṉaṟi-yavu

2c 5b 1a, 2b & 3a

Chart 9: Distribution of cīr in KT-02

These figures are of course far too small to provide us with any useful statistics. Therefore I now provide the reader with the figures for the two small corpora already partly explored: they are:

72 Hesitations are of course possible in some cases, but a statistical approach should diminish the importance of individual errors in the scanning. The hyphens here separate the acai-s.

73 This three items (1a, 2b & 3a) are koṅku̇-tēr (EvE), cep-pātu̇ (EEv) and payi-liyatu̇ (IIv).

74 As far as acai themselves are concerned, the distribution is as follows :

E I Ev Iv other (coda of ñāyiṟu ̇) [see next footnote] Total20 15 2 1 1 39

75 This item, cīr 2c, kaṇ-ṭatu̇, is technically almost a “nēr-nirai” (II), but its eḻuttu count, which is two, differs, because of the presence of the over-short u̇, from the eḻuttu count of a normal nēr-nirai, which is three. Some Tamil metricians give it the (iconic) technical name of “ñāyiṟu̇”. My abbreviation for it is Esv. We have, similarly, another item with the (iconic) technical name of “valiyatu̇” (abbreviated as Isv and mentioned in chart 10). More details are given in Chevillard[2012b].


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8-liners (10 poems) 4-liners (all the 38 KT poems)

EE 128 196

IE 78 156

EI 35 102

II 39 78

Esv/Isv 4 5

XXE (veṇcīr)76 5 7

Others 21 28

Total 310 572

Chart 10: Distribution of cīr in some subsets of KT76

The first remark on this set of data is that in both cases, the iyaṟcīr “natural cīr” constitute the overwhelming majority. In the case of 8-liners, the proportion of iyaṟcīr is 90.3 % of the total and in the case of 4-liners, the proportion of iyaṟcīr is 93.0 %. If we now try to examine the distribution of acai-s, restricting ourselves to those that occur inside natural cīr-s, we find that:

In the small corpus of 8-liners, among the acai that occur as first element in a “natural cīr”, 58.2 % start with a nēr (E) and 41.8 % start with a nirai (I).77

In the small corpus of 4-liners, among the acai that occur as first element in a “natural cīr”, 56.0 % start with a nēr (E) and 44.0 % start with a nirai (I).78

These figures seem to indicate that there is a dissymmetry between nēr and nirai. This should be explored further, on the basis of much bigger corpora of texts.79 The question can however, in my opinion, be legitimately raised whether the opposition between nēr and nirai, which the poets of the Sangam corpus seem to have made use of is a “natural” category, being transferred from the “entropy” characteristics of the underlying natural language to the “artificial, poetical” language which grew on it, for many centuries. More detailed studies might bring more light on this question.

7. THE LIMBS OF POETRY ACCORDING TO THE YĀPPARUṄKALAM (YA)

Although this elementary (and incomplete) presentation of the first items in the list of 26 (primary) ceyyuḷ uṟuppu “limbs of compositions” found in the T may have

76 I use here the notation XXE for referring to any cīr belonging to the set {EEE, IEE, EIE, IIE}. The TPcey calls them veṇpāvuriccīr or veṇcīr (see for instance TP331i and TP338i)

77 If we consider all the acai that are found inside a “natural cīr”, 65.9% are nēr (E) and 34.1% are nirai (I).

78 If we consider all the acai that occur as inside a “natural cīr”, 61.1 % are nēr (E) and 38.9 % are nirai (I).

79 Compared to the small corpora used, of 8-liners and 4-liners, which have, respectively, 70 and 114 lines, the 3 anthologies of love poetry, Kuṟuntokai (KT), Naṟṟiṇai and Akanāṉūṟu, having circa 400 poems each, contain respectively 2504, 4180 and 7151 lines, totally 13835 lines (compared to which 184 lines is 1.3%), and they are of course not the only ones to be considered. But having the full statistics, in the form of a database, would be useful.

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appeared as dry and technical, it is really necessary to go into the technicality of things if we want to have a chance to understand the dynamics of what was at stake in the debates between Tamil grammarians/metricians. We shall now return to the 1st verse in the TPcey in order to compare it to the first verse in the Yāpparuṅkalam (YA), a much later (medieval) treatise, in traditional nūṟpā metre, and with the treatment of the same topic in the Yāpparuṅkalak kārikai (YK), a compendium in kaṭṭaḷaik kalittuṟai metre (a medieval innovation, unknown to the T), which must originally have grown as a kind of appendix (or summary) to the commentary on YA, but which became autonomous and is now available with its own (relatively short) commentary, in which there are quotations from the YA. The YA, on the other hand, is now available with a very detailled commentary, which is generally referred to as Yāpparuṅkala Virutti (YV), in which twenty-nine of the forty-four YK verses are cited. Both the YV and the commentary on the YK also quote a number of verses from the T, as well as verses extracted from treatises which are now lost, but for which they often provide us with an authors’s name. Five of those names seem to have been, at a late date, incorporated into a Shaiva legend.80 The network of citation relationships can be represented in the following diagram, where a thin arrow between text A and text B indicates that text A cites text B and boldface arrows indicates that text A is the standard commentary on text B.

figure 3: citation relationships between the works of metricians

These basic relationships being now stated, I shall now compare the list of uṟuppu found in the T, the YA and the YK, starting with the YA. That treatise, as we have it now, comes along with a commentary and is divided into 3 chapters (or iyal), preceded by an introductory section (called pāyiram). The chapters are:

uṟuppiyal “chapter on limbs” (53 cūttiram-s)

ceyyuḷ iyal “chapter on composition” (40 cūttiram-s)

oḻipiyal “chapter on remaining topics” (3 cūttiram-s)

The first cūttiram in the Uṟuppiyal explains that yāppu “the composition (of

80 In that legend, which is totally unknown to the YV itself, those five names (Vāyppiyaṉār, Paṉampāraṉār, Aviṉayaṉār, Kākkaipāṭiṉiyār and Naṟṟattaṉār) are presented as the names of some of the twelve disciples of a legendary figure, the Vedic seer (Skt. ṛṣi) Agastya (Akkattiyaṉār) and Tolkāppiyaṉār (the author of Tolkāppiyam) is presented as the first disciple. See Chevillard [2009a, chart 5].


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poetry)” takes place on the basis of 7 limbs which are: (a) eḻuttu, (b) acai, (c) cīr, (d) taḷai, (e) aṭi, (f) toṭai and (g) tūkku. The following cūttiram-s, from 2 to 53, are devoted to a detailed presentation of the first 6 items (from eḻuttu to toṭai). After that, the next chapter (the Ceyyuḷ-iyal) is devoted to a detailed exposition of the 4 pā-s “metres” and of the 12 pāviṉam-s “secondary metres”. Before commenting on this, and explaining the meanings of the technical terms which are new to the reader, I shall present, in a chart, the correspondence between the lists of “limbs” (uṟuppu) for the T and the YA. It is as follows:81

uṟuppu “limb” TPcey Yāpparuṅkalammāttirai “quantity” 1 (Chart 2)

eḻuttu 2 (Chart 2) 1 (YA1, YA2- YA4)

acai 3 (Chart 2) 2 (YA1, YA5-YA9)

cīr 4 (Chart 2) 3 (YA1, YA10-YA16)

taḷai ABSENT 4 (YA1, YA17-YA22)

aṭi 5 (Chart 2) 5 (YA1, YA23-YA32)

yāppu 6 (Charts 2 & 3)

marapu 7 (Chart 3)

tūkku 8 (Chart 3) 7 (YA1)

toṭai 9 (Chart 3) 6 (YA1, YA33-YA53)

nōkku 10 (Chart 3)

pā 11 (Chart 3)

aḷavu, etc.81 12 (Chart 3)

Chart 11: primary limbs of poetry according to TPcey and YA

As seen in this chart, there is a difference of treatment between the first six limbs (from eḻuttu to aṭi) and the seventh one, tūkku, which is simply mentioned in YA1, but does not have a separate section inside the uṟuppiyal of YA. This is probably the reason why, in the YK, we have a simplified version, the initial announcement, YK1 (contained inside an invocation to a divine being) telling us that the author will talk about eḻuttu, acai, cīr, pantam,82 aṭi, toṭai, pā and (pā-v)-iṉam, and the understanding being that the first six are dealt with in the uṟuppiyal, while the remaining two are dealt with in the ceyyuḷ iyal. The reason for the YA to mention tūkku, while YK, a compendium leaves it out, is probably that the YA wants to appear as more rooted in tradition and this is certainly the point of view of its commentator, as appears when reading the YV part which follows YA1, where several ancient grammarians are mentioned and cited.

An important term which has not yet been explained is taḷai, which is one of the “seven limbs” for YA, but does not figure in the list of limbs given by TPcey, although the term occurs nine times inside TPcey.83 There is also a non-technical occurrence of the term in TP144i, inside the 4th chapter of TP (which deals with

81 After pā (11th limb), the remaining primary limbs (see Chart 3) generally do not have a corresponding element in the YA organization.

82 The term pantam (Skt bandha) is another designation for taḷai.83 The places of occurrence are TP336i, TP341i, TP361i (twice), TP362i, TP364i, TP367i,

TP370i. Also to be noted is the occurrence of taṭpiṉum (a verbal form derived from the same root) in TP366i.

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marital life). The phrase is: neñcu taḷai aviḻnta puṇarccik kaṇṇum (“in the union which takes place when minds/hearts have their constraints undone”). The word taḷai refers to the social “fetters” (or hindrances) which existed at the time of clandestine love. In the case of metrics, the word taḷai is used for describing the constraints which (in certain types of metre) govern the relationship between the final acai of one cīr with the initial acai of the following cīr.84 From the point of view of the TPcey, taḷai was not perceived as a compulsory component, as stated in TP361i. The later metricians however developed a grid of analysis in which it was possible to assign (descriptively) one specific taḷai (from a list of seven taḷai) to every sequence of two cīr-s. They completed the description by distinguishing the metres in which one had to adhere strictly to one (or to two) types of taḷai and the metres in which it was “optional” to follow a specific taḷai.

Another item which it is also important to explain is toṭai (literally “stringing”) which consists predominantly in choosing for one’s composition words between which there is an alliterative relationship. At the time of the composition of the TPcey, it must have been perceived as an optional ornament, and it appears in TP310i as limb 9. The most important type of toṭai is the etukai, which consists in having identity of second elements between two cīr-s, provided that the first elements have the same duration. Another type is the mōṉai, for which there is identity (or quasi-identity) between the first elements of two cīr-s. The cīr-s concerned can be the initial cīr-s of two consecutive lines [aṭi etukai, or aṭi mōṉai], but it can also take place, between the first and the third cīr in a line [poḻippu etukai, etc.], or between the first and the fourth cīr in a line [orūu etukai, etc.]. The KT poem examined in (C) contains examples of: poḻippu mōṉai (between 2a and 2c); orūu etukai (between 3a and 3d); aṭi etukai (between 4a and 5a) and poḻippu etukai (5a and 5c).85 The TPcey seems also to consider that the absence of alliteration also deserves to be named and apparently calls it centoṭai “straight toṭai” (see TP395i and TP405i).86 In later poetry, and especially in all those compositions which fall under the label pāviṉam, such alliterative features had become ubiquitous (and almost compulsory). This explains why they occupy, proportionally, a much bigger part of the YA (twenty-one cūttiram-s out of ninety-six) than of the TPcey (sixteen cūttiram-s out of 235).

8. HOW TO NAVIGATE BETWEEN CONTRADICTORY AUTHORITIESWe shall now return to the commentary on YA1. The commentator, while giving justifications for the list of seven limbs (uṟuppu), cites the opinions of two metricians, Naṟṟattaṉār and Palkāyaṉār, whose work is known only fragmentarily.87 He also cites several anonymous verses and one of those verses refers to both Tolkāppiyap pulavar and to Kākkai pāṭiṉiyār, the latter being also a metrician whose work has been lost, except for eighty-nine verses, preserved as quotations. As already mentioned, three of those four names were, at a late date, incorporated into a legend centered

84 For more details, see Niklas[1993], p. 72-83 (kārikai 10 and 11).

85 Those are indicated in footnote 62, which is attached to it.

86 The interpretation of the cūttiram TP405i is, however, not completely clear to me.

87 We have twenty-four verses from Naṟṟattaṉār and forty verses from Palkāyaṉār. See Cuppiramaṇiyaṉ [2007, p. 116-118].


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around Akattiyaṉār (Skt. Agastya).88 Although Iḷampūraṇar and the author of YV do not know this legend, they know a grammarian called Akattiyaṉār and quote some of his verses.89 The creation of the legend, which took place progressively,90 is probably symptomatic of a time when the explanatory power of grammar was diminishing. While reading the Tolkāppiyam and its Ceyyuḷiyal, one gains the impression that someone is attempting to describe an existing literary corpus and is coining a terminology. When one reads later literature, the impression obtained is that the main task of commentators is often to navigate between contradictions. Part of the grammatical literature has lost its explanatory power, but not its authority, and has become something to be studied for its own sake. A striking example is the case of acai and cīr. The TPcey defines, as we have seen, four types of acai (nēr, nirai, nērpu ̇and niraipu̇), and defines the cīr as being, mostly, combinations of two or three acai. That means that sixteen distinct combinations exist for a cīr made of two acai, and sixty-four distinct combinations exist for the cīr-s made of three acai. All those combinations exist in the ancient part of Tamil literature (often referred to as Sangam literature), but the most frequent combinations are, as we have seen (see charts 9 and 10), the simplest combinations (EE, IE, EI and II). While commenting on TP313i, Iḷampūraṇar observes that some grammarians, starting with Kākkaipāṭiṉiyār, have tried to get rid of nērpu̇ (Ev) and niraipu̇ (Iv) in their metrical system, reanalyzing them as nēr-nēr (EE) or as nirai-nēr (IE), but that they have not completely succeeded in that, because otherwise the ōcai “[rhythmic] sound” of many veṇpā-s would be destroyed, given the fact that they must end with a short cīr of one acai, and that includes the possibility to end with nērpu̇ (as in Kuṟaḷ-5) or niraipu̇ (as in Kuṟaḷ-7). For that reason, says Iḷampūraṇar, those metricians have been forced to reintroduce them, in an ad hoc manner, under new names: kācu̇ and piṟappu̇.

In a similar manner, the commentator whose voice we hear while reading YV, and whose primary task is to comment on YA, but who seems to have the whole of ancient Tamil technical literature at the tip of his fingers, seems sometimes embarrassed while having to explain the (new) doctrine put forward by the YA, which is probably a synthesis of all the new proposals made by the metricians who lived after the time of the T. For instance, when he has to comment on a new type of cīr, made of four acai, and called potuc cīr, which theoreticians have been forced to propose, as an occasional occurrence, because of the reanalysis which has done away with nērpu̇ and niraipu̇, he cites twice91 a wise saying, a distich

88 See fn 80. The three names are Tolkāppiyaṉār (1st disciple), Kākkaipāṭiṉiyār (10th disciple) and Naṟṟattaṉār (11th disciple). See Chevillard[2009a].

89 Under TP426i, the four Akattiyaṉār citations by Iḷampūraṇar concern the characterization of some components of paripāṭal, a type of poem in mixed metre. Under TP435i, there is one citation concerning the meter called kali. For the Akattiyaṉār citations inside YV, see for instance YV1998, p. 593 and p. 598. I have not made a complete list of the Akattiyaṉār citations. I mention them simply in order to show that legends can be built as religious reinterpretations of real historical facts.

90 Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar tells the story of Akattiyaṉār cursing his disciple Tolkāppiyaṉār (see Chevillard [2009a, p. 263]), but he does not give a list of twelve disciples. The full list seems to appear only in the 19th century, in a context of militant shaivism.

91 The first citation is found under YA10 (see YV_1998, p. 60) and the second is found under YA95 (see YV_1998, p. 469-470).

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from the famous Kuṟaḷ. That distich says:

ula-kan taḻī-iya toṭ-pa malar-taluṅ // kūm-palu mil-la taṟi-vu “Intelligence consists in embracing (the ways of) the world, [BUT] wisdom consists in abstaining from [alternating between] blooming and shutting [as does the fickle lotus]” (Kuṟaḷ 425).92

How better to express the fact that it is probably painful for him to have to choose between the opinions of great scholars, such as Tolkāppiyar, Kākkaipāṭiṉiyār and Palkāyaṉār, while describing the limbs of the poetry composed in a language which he possibly wishes to see as unchanging, across time, without having to be involved in a debate between “les anciens et les modernes”?

9. BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ABBREVIATIONS

Annamalai, E. (2010). Social Dimensions of Modern Tamil, Cre-A, Chennai.Aussant, Émilie (2009). « Nommer/penser sa langue et celle des autres : le cas des Gram-

mai riens du Sanskrit et des Prakrits », Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 31/2, 89-116.Cāminātaiyar, U. Vē. (uraiyāciriyar) (1962). Kuṟuntokai, nāṉkām patippu, Chennai.Chevillard, Jean-Luc (1996). Le commentaire de Cēṉāvaraiyar sur le Collatikāram du

Tolkāppiyam, Publication du Département d’Indologie N°84-1, Institut Français de Pondichéry & Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient.

Chevillard, Jean-Luc (2002). « Les mots dans la tradition tamoule classique », Histoire Épistémologie Langage 24/1, 11-32.

Chevillard, Jean-Luc (2009a). « The Pantheon of Tamiḻ grammarians : a short history of the myth of Agastya’s twelve disciples », Colas Gérard & Gerschheimer, Gerdi, (éd.), Écrire et transmettre en Inde classique. Études thématiques 23, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris, 243-268.

Chevillard, Jean-Luc (2009b). « The Metagrammatical Vocabulary inside the Lists of 32 Tantrayukti-s and its Adaptation to Tamil: Towards a Sanskrit-Tamil Dictionary », Wilden, Eva (éd.), Between Preservation and Recreation : Proceedings of a workshop in honour of T.V. Gopal Iyer, Collection Indologie 109, IFP/EFEO, Pondicherry, 71-132.

Chevillard, Jean-Luc (2012a) (forthcoming). « Metres in Tamil Bhakti Literature and the Problem of their (eventual) Description in Treatises », Gillet, Valérie (ed.), Proceedings of a workshop on Bhakti (Pondicherry 2009).

Chevillard, Jean-Luc (2012b) (forthcoming). « Enumeration techniques in Tamil metrical treatises. », Vergiani, Vincenzo & Cox, Whitney (ed.), Proceedings of a workshop « Bilingual Discourse and Cross-cultural fertilization : Sanskrit and Tamil in Mediaeval India » (Cambridge 2009).

Cuppiramaṇiyaṉ, Ca. Vē. (2007). Tamiḷ Ilakkaṇa Nūlkaḷ, Meyyappaṉ Patippakam, Citamparam.

Dessigane, R., Pattabiramin, P.Z., Filliozat, J. (1960). La légende des jeux de Çiva à Madurai, Publications de l’Institut Français d’Indologie (PIFI) 19, Pondichéry. [Fasc.1: Texte. xvi, 130 p., Fasc. 2 : Planches. 50 plates.]

Ganesh Iyer [Kaṇēcaiyar, Ci.] (1937). Tolkāppiyam, Eḻuttatikāra Mūlamum Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar Uraiyum, Cuṉṉākam, Jaffna.

Ganesh Iyer [Kaṇēcaiyar, Ci.] (1943). Tolkāppiyam Poruḷatikāram (iraṇṭām pākam), Piṉṉāṉkiyalkaḷum Pērāciriyamum, Cuṉṉākam, Jaffna.

Gopal Iyer, T.V. [Kōpālaiyar, Ti. Vē.] (éd.) (2005). Vīracōḻiyam, Peruntēvaṉār iyaṟṟiya uraiyum, Śrīmat Āṇṭavaṉ Ācciramam, Śrīraṅkam.

92 Metrically speaking, that distich, made of seven cīr-s, and adhering strictly to the taḷai called veṇṭaḷai can be scanned as {IE II EE II // EI EE Iv}. The TPcey would have called it a kuṟuveṇpāṭṭu (see TP460i). The hyphens separate the acai-s (as in example D).


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Gopal Iyer, T.V. [Kōpālaiyar, Ti. Vē.] (2007). Kaṭṭuraikaḷ (3 volumes), Tamiḻmaṇ Patippakam, Chennai.

IA (1976). Kaḷaviyal eṉṟa Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ, Teyvappulamai Nakkīraṉār aruḷiya uraiyuṭaṉ, Kazhakam, Chennai. [mutaṟ patippu : 1953]

KT : see Cāminātaiyar[1962] and see Wilden[2010].MTL : Madras Tamil Lexicon (1982 [reprint]). Tamil Lexicon, Published under the authority

of the University of Madras, 6 volumes and 1 supplement. [original publication date: 1924 -1939]

Niklas, Ulrike (1993). Amitacākarar iyaṟṟiya Yāpparuṅkalakkārikai Kuṇacākarar iyaṟṟiya uraiyuṭaṉ. Text, translation and notes. Institut Français de Pondichéry, Publications du département d’Indologie N° 79, Pondicherry.

Pasupathy, S. (2010). Kavitai iyaṟṟik kalakku, LKM Publishers, Chennai.Rajam, V. S. (1992) A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry, Memoirs of the

American Philosophical Society, Volume 199, Philadelphia.Subrahmanya Sastri, P.S. (2002 [1936]). Tolkāppiyam, The Earliest Extant Tamil Grammar,

with a short commentary in English, Volume II, Poruḷatikāram, The Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute, Chennai.

Tirumurukaṉ, Irā. (1997). Pāvalar paṇṇai, Ēḻicaic cūḻal, Putuccēri, India.Tanikachala Mudaliar, E.N. (éd.) (1938). second edition [with «Editor’s preface», «A short

sketch of the life of the Author», and «The evolution of Tamil viruthams», all three written by the editor] of Viruttappāviyal, written by T. Virabadra Mudaliar [1855-1910]. [the original edition appeared in 1885, National Press, Madras].

T: TolkāppiyamTCc: Tolkāppiyam, Collatikāram (second book of T), with Cēṉāvaraiyar’s commentary.

See Chevillard[1996].TEn: Tolkāppiyam, Eḻuttatikāram (first book of T), with Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar’s commentary.

[the edition used here is Ganesh Iyer [Kaṇēcaiyar, Ci.], 1937]TPcey: Tolkāppiyam, Poruḷatikāram, Ceyyuḷiyal. Part of TP (8th chapter).TPi: Tolkāppiyam, Poruḷatikāram (third book of T), with Iḷampūraṇar’s commentary. [the

edition used here is the 2003 edition published by the Tamiḻ Maṇ Patippakam, Chennai, the patippāciriyar being Ti. Vē. Kōpālaiyar and Na. Araṇamuṟuval]

TPp: Tolkāppiyam, Poruḷatikāram (third book of T), with Pērāciriyar’s commentary. [the edition used is Ganesh Iyer [Kaṇēcaiyar, Ci.], 1943.]

YA: Yāpparuṅkalam. See YV_1998.YV_1998: Yāpparuṅkalam (paḻaiya viruttiyuraiyuṭaṉ), patippāciriyar : mē. vī. vēṇukōpālap

piḷḷai, International Institute of Tamil Studies, Chennai. [this is the 1998 “re-edition” of a book which was originally published in 1960 by the Government Oriental Manuscript Library (GOML)]

Wilden, Eva (2010). Kuṟuntokai, Critical Texts of Caṅkam Literature, n° 2 (3 vol.), Tamiḻ Maṇ Patippakam and EFEO, Chennai/Pondicherry.

Zvelebil, Kamil, V. (1995). Lexicon of Tamil Literature, E.J. Brill, Leiden/New York/Köln.

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