A section from the journey

The Eight Anthologies and the Ten Idylls

The Sangam poems did not come down to us loose. They were gathered into two big collections. The Eight Anthologies hold the shorter poems, sorted by theme. The Ten Idylls hold ten longer poems. Together they keep around two thousand three hundred poems by some four hundred and seventy poets. Many of those poets were women.

A song sung once and not written down can vanish on the wind. So how did the Sangam poems survive across so long a time? They were gathered, with care, into collections. Two of these are famous, and every Tamil reader knows their names.

The first is the Eight Anthologies. In Tamil it is the . These are eight books of mostly shorter poems, sorted by their theme and their length. Think of eight baskets, each holding poems of one kind.

You already hold the key to two of these baskets. One book is the Akananuru, four hundred poems of the inner world of love. Another is the Purananuru, four hundred poems of the outer world of war and kings. Hear it? Akam and puram, right there in the names. The old division shapes the very shelves.

The other books of the eight gather their own kinds: tender short love-poems, longer ones, poems on the Chera kings, hymns of devotion, and more. Each was its own well of song. Together the eight hold a wide and varied world.

The second great collection is the Ten Idylls. In Tamil it is the , which means simply the Ten Songs. Where the anthologies hold many short poems, these are ten long ones. Each is a sustained piece, a fuller picture: praise of a king, a guide to a god, the life of a great port-city.

Now think of the size of it all. These collections keep roughly two thousand three hundred poems. They are the work of about four hundred and seventy poets. Some signed their names; some are unknown to us. It is a whole chorus of voices reaching across the years.

And one part of that chorus deserves to be named now, for we will return to it. Many of those poets were women. Not at the edges, but at the centre, honoured and quoted. We will meet the greatest of them, , a little later in this chapter.

So when someone speaks of the Sangam corpus, this is its body: the Eight Anthologies of shorter poems, and the Ten Idylls of longer ones. Two collections, one classical age, thousands of voices kept alive because someone, long ago, took the trouble to gather them.

Almost all of this poetry would be gone if no one had gathered and kept it. Think of a song, a story, or a saying that someone older passed to you. What would be lost if no one had bothered to carry it forward?