Full text of "The Relation Between Tamil And Classical Sanskrit Literature"

 GEORGE LUZERNE HART 

A HISTORY  OF INDIAN LITERATURE - EDITED BY JAN GONDA 

VOLUME X Ease. 2 Vol. X: Dravidian Literature Fasc. 1: K. Zvelebil Fasc. 2i G. L. Hart R. E. Asher K. Mahadeva Sastri H. M« Hayak S. Agesthialingom, J. Filliozat, F. Gros, J. R. and others 

Tamil Literature The Relation between Tamil and Classical Sanskrit Literature Malayalam Literature Telugu Literature Kannada Literature Scientific Literatures in Dravid- Marr ian Languages 

CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek 

k history of Indian literature / ed. by Jan Gonda. - Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz. 

HE: Gonda , Jan [Hrsg.] 

Vol. 10. Dravidian literature. 

Any scholar who is familiar with Sanskrit literature knows at once upon  seeing the poems of ancient Tamil “Sangam” literature of the first through the  third centuries A.D. that they are related to Sanskrit literature of classical  times. And if he is at all well acquainted with Tamil, he is certain to feel that  there must be some important meaning to the resemblance between the two  literatures, for the two languages in which they are written are quite unrelated, and the earliest of Tamil literature does not seem to be much influenced by  Sanskrit — the si mil arities are not close enough to be copying by one literature  of another. In the past, most have simply assumed that Tamil must have  borrowed from Sanskrit, but no careful analysis has been made. This relationship is investigated in detail by me in The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and Their Sanskrit Counterparts to be published by the University of California Press. The purpose of this chapter is to point out the general character of the relationship between Sanskrit and Tamil, to discover reasons for it, and to suggest some of the consequences of the relationship. It will not be possible to give here all of the evidence that I have assembled, or to go into each aspect in detail; the book does that. Indeed, I have endeavoured here to cover areas not investigated in my book. I hope that the interested reader will find the references to the book sufficient to fill in the gaps which must necessarily occur in t his short investigation of a very large subject. 

At first glance, the most striking similarity between the two literary traditions is the use of the same or similar conventions. Examples are the messenger poem, the motif of separation of lovers during the monsoon, and the comparison of the sound of the wind blowing in a hole in bamboo to the noise of a flute. The messenger poem does not occur in Sanskrit before Kalidasa, but it is found in Tamil in the Sangam poems. An example is Akananuru 170, in which a woman speaks to a sandcrab of her lover: 

The grove will not tell him, 

the backwater will not tell him, 

the punnai tree, its fragrant flowers humming with bees, will not tell him. 

Except for you, I have no one to tell that man in w T hose bay bees swarm,

drawn by the scent of the redolent petals of waterlilies 

flowering like eyes in the dark backwater, 

and eat the cool pollen, 

and get so drunk they cannot fly. 

You must tell him, sandcrab. 

Say, “Will she cross over the grief she feels 

who many times dispelled your sadness 

on midnights when a little crow sat languishing 

on the low branch of a screwpine bush by the sea 

with his loving mate, 

unable to hunt in waters infested with sharks, 

and dreamed of white shrimps ?” 

The most famous Sanskrit example is, of course, Kalidasa’s Meghaduta, in which a Yaksa exiled by his lord Kubera from the Himalayas to the Vindhya mountains asks a cloud to take a message of consolation to his beloved. This is a good example of poetic construction being shared by the two traditions. 

Another example of this is the dramatis personae of the love poems, which include the hero, the heroine, the heroine’s female friend, the heroine’s mother, and a messenger. 1 

The separation of lovers during the monsoon is an example of a shared motif or theme. It occurs first in Indo-Aryan in the Sattasai. In poem 538 of that anthology, for example, the traveller’s wife says, “As I hear the thunder, it is like the executioner’s drum.” Similarly in Kuruntokai 216, she says, “Not knowing I am so much to be pitied, the black clouds still roar and rain and send lightning, friend, aiming at my life.” This theme appears also in later Sanskrit, as in Subhasitaratnakosa 708 : 

“Here comes the downpour, here the lightning and the cursed hail, 

the roar of thunder and the croaking frogs.” 

Thus speaking with each rapid breath, the slender maid, 

already close to death, enflames 

the fire which love has spread throughout her limbs. 2 

Another important theme that first appears in the Sattasai in the Indo- Aryan tradition but that is found before that in Tamil is the abhisdrika , the woman who goes out to meet her lover at night. In Sattasai 445, the heroine tells her lover,

“0 ingrateful one! I still see the village mud I went through 

to get to you on rainy nights. 55 In 6.43 of Kalidasa’s Kumar asa mbhava , abhisdrikds are said to find their way by the light of herbs on bad days. In Subhasitaratnakosa 829, an anonymous poet writes,

1 Geobge L. Hast, The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and Their Sans- 

krit Counterparts, Berkeley, California, 1975, pp. 214-216. 

2 In : An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry : Vidyakara’s “Subhasitaratnakosa” 

(Cambridge, Mass., 1965), translated and commented on by Daotei H. H. Ingauls. 

These beauties, silencing their anklets by knotting of their skirts 

and binding up the jewelled clasp within the extra fold, 

attempt to render silent their amorous expeditions. 

Alas to no avail, for they are marked upon their way 

by the jingling swarm of bees 

that seek the honey of the flowers in their hair.® 

To these verses may be compared Akananuru 192, where the mountain village 

of the lovers’ rendezvous is enlightened by the jewel dropped by a snake, and 

Akananuru 198, where the heroine comes to the rendezvous “scared, keeping 

her thick anklets from rattling, bent like a ****ed bow and wearing cool 

flowers so bees follow behind her at a time when the city sleeps. 55 

 Perhaps the most striking of all are specific themes which the two literatures 

share, an example of which is the comparison of the wind bloving in a hole in 

bamboo to the sound of a flute. In Akananuru 225, for example, the poet writes 

that the wind blows “in a narrow hole penetrated by a bee in swaying bamboo 

and makes a lovely sound, like the music from the flute of a cowherd leading 

his herd to water. 35 This may be compared to Meghaduta 56, where hollow 

bamboos are said to resound sweetly as they are filled with breezes, or to 

Raghuvamsa 2.12, where songs sung by nymphs are said to be accompanied 

by humming bamboos whose holes are filled by wind and which provide the 

music of flutes.