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1 The Place of Kåraikkål Ammaiyår in South Indian History Kåraikkål Ammaiyår’s poetry bridges the classical Tamil world and the devotional milieu in which Sanskritic myths are localized in a Tamil landscape and infused with Tamil modes of relating to the divine. Although Ammaiyår does not directly praise the Tamil land or Tamil language as the later Íaiva poets do, her poetry is animated by literary and cultural elements that are defining features of the classical Tamil world. Ammaiyår makes reference to many of Íiva’s heroic deeds as related in Sanskrit myths and epics, but she is especially devoted to Íiva dancing in the cremation ground, a scenario that resonates profoundly with Tamil ideas of death and dessicated wastelands. In order to understand how Ammaiyår’s poetry situates Íiva in the Tamil landscape, in this chapter I present a brief historical overview of the milieu in which Kåraikkål Ammaiyår composed her poetry, including the literary traditions that inform her work. A vivid portrait of life in Tamilnadu in the early centuries of the Common Era emerges from the earliest surviving Tamil literature, which was likely composed or compiled between the first century BCE and the fifth century CE. Literature can convey certain social and cultural facts, but since it “refracts as much as it reflects,” it is necessary to “enter the realm of the symbolic values that writers express through the ‘facts’ and ‘objective entities’” (Ramanujan 1999a, 52). In classical Tamil literature human behavior and natural landscape are key components of a poetic system that reflects and structures the values and aesthetics of the Tamil world during the centuries leading up to the beginnings of devotional Hinduism. By outlining a chronological development of cultural and literary ideas and practices in Tamilnadu, I aim to convey the complex environment that Richard Davis describes as the “shared religious culture where divine figures, literary tropes, and ritual forms could all be reincorporated, reformulated , and resituated for polemical purposes” (Davis 1999, 218). 7 8 Íiva’s Demon Devotee This early literature consists of the first Tamil work on grammar and poetics, the Tolkåppiyam; ten long poems by ten different poets called the Pattupp円u; and eight anthologies (E††utokai) of poetry that is divided into two types: akam, “inner” or love poems; and pur -am, “outer” or public poems about kings, war, heroism, death, codes of conduct, and so on. These poems were composed by PulavaÂs, “wise men.” Although the poems are clearly rooted in an oral culture, they are syntactically too complex to have been simply extemporized, and may have been composed in writing; A. K. Ramanujan calls the poems “witnesses to a transition” (1985, 273). The Bråhm¥ script, which was probably the first script used for Tamil, was introduced into Tamilnadu in approximately the second or third century BCE. From ancient times two forms of Tamil seem to have been in use: a spoken form with many dialects, and a written, standardized language. Several centuries after the texts’ composition, this classical literature was labeled “Ca∫kam” literature, referring to three ca‰kams or academies of poets that, according to legend, each met for thousands of years in ancient kingdoms in or near the city of Maturai that were subsequently washed away by floods. In addition is the Tirukkur -a¬, traditionally attributed to Tiruva¬¬uvar and probably composed 450–550 CE, a compendium of aphoristic verses about ethics, virtue, love, politics, and economic issues that continues to be esteemed in Tamil culture.1 The Tirukkur -a¬ delineates the social and moral milieu in which Ammaiyår composes her poetry, but it is the akam and pur -am poetry that Ammaiyår draws on to give voice to her uncompromising love of Íiva and her conviction that he is the divine hero who conquers evil and through whom the devotee can conquer death. The varied scenes of love and heroism in the classical poetry become the stages of devotion to Íiva and the arenas of his heroic activities. In the Tolkåppiyam the akam and pur -am poems are characterized by ti£ai, which is most often translated as “landscape” or “poetic situation .” But Martha Ann Selby suggests these words are inadequate to convey the scope and boundary of this concept. She says, “Ti£ai is, in a very real sense, the artistic space circumscribed by the poets, along with everything contained therein. I...

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