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I
THE STATE OF POETRY
517
he met a young scholar named Caminata Aiyar, already distin–
guished for his Tamil erudition. The judge inquired into the
scholar's learning and was unimpressed. Aiyar had not even heard of
the great collections of the Tamil classical period, and Mutaliyar
launched him forthwith on a study of those poems that would occupy
the rest of Aiyar's life.
The dates of the story, as Mr. Ramanjuan tells it, are a little
puzzling. Aiyar, in this account, was born in 1855, yet at the time of
the "fateful meeting" with Mutaliyar in the autumn of 1880 he was
forty-four. Whatever the explanation of this, I trust it does not de–
tract from the happy sequel, in which Aiyar, and "his peers, such as
Ci. Yay. Tamotaram Pi!.lai" roamed through villages following
clues, searched in attics and monasteries, and rediscovered, edited,
and printed the ancient texts.
Pi!.lai wrote, "Only what has escaped fire and water (and
religious taboo) remains; even of that termites and the bug named
Rama's Arrow take a toll. ... When you untie a knot, the leaf
cracks. When you turn a leaf, it breaks in half. ... Old manu–
scripts are crumbling and there is no one to make new copies."
Then there were the variations and errors among the manu–
scripts. Each community had studied its own texts, and the
choices - and the alterations - were the result of the tastes and sects
of individual scholars in the past. Each copy was unique. The work
of men like Aiyar and Pi!.lai brought the poems from this precarious
and scattered existence into print.
The pieces from the great classical anthologies fall into two ma–
jor divisions:
akam,
meaning "interior" poems, or love poems, and
puram,
or "exterior" poems on the subjects of war, royalty, death,
history. Mr. Ramanujan's book reflects these divisions in its first two
sections. The love poems are further arranged corresponding to the
landscapes that, according to a complex convention, represent the
moods of the poems . The
puram
poems are arranged according to
more obvious subject matter. There is also a section of comic and
satiric poems, and a final "book" of longer passages from classical
religious and narrative poetry. Mr. Ramanujan's "Afterword" is a
detailed and helpful analysis of the assumptions, formulations, evo–
lution, and context of Tamil classical poetry, and it is a valuable
guide to the translations.
It is quite appropriate that his essay appears at the end of the
book. For with a volume such as this a reader is likely to turn at
once, with the slightest possible introductory knowledge, to the
