Sangam Period

Sangam poetry organises its world by tinai, a scheme in which five types of landscape carry five moods, five seasons, five times of day and five presiding deities. The mountains belong to Murugan and to lovers meeting; the forest and pasture to Mayon and to patient waiting; the cultivated land to Ventan and to sulking or quarrelling; the seashore to Kadalon and to pining; the arid wasteland to Korravai and to separation or elopement. A poem does not have to state its subject, because naming a flower, a bird or a drum from one landscape tells a trained listener what emotional situation is being described. That is a religious scheme as much as a literary one, since the gods are embedded in it rather than appended to it.

Norman Cutler's work on Tamil devotional poetics traces how this inherited apparatus was later turned to religious use by the bhakti poets, who took the conventions for addressing a human lover and addressed a god with them instead. What the Sangam corpus itself shows is an older layer: a religious world of local deities tied to terrain, of possession and of the hero stone raised for a warrior, before the great Shaiva and Vaishnava devotional movements gave Tamil religion the shape it now has.

The period takes its name from the sangam, an academy of poets said to have met at Madurai under royal patronage and to have judged which poems were worth preserving. Later Tamil tradition describes three successive academies over an enormous span of time, the earlier two submerged by the sea. The Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature treats these accounts as later constructions rather than as records, while accepting that some institutional patronage of poetry lies behind the anthologies. Dating the poems themselves is genuinely difficult.

The usual scholarly range runs from roughly the third century before the Common Era to the third century after it, argued from language, from references to Roman trade goods and coins found in the south, and from inscriptions, and every element of that argument has been contested. Some scholars compress the corpus into a narrower window, others extend it. There is also the question of whether the anthologies were compiled at one time from older material or grew gradually. The atlas gives the conventional range and marks it as disputed rather than presenting a precision the evidence does not support, because a period whose boundaries are argued should be labelled that way rather than rounded off.