War, Kings, and the World

We have walked through the inner poetry of love. Now we step outside, into the open air, into the puram. If akam is the heart, puram is the wide world: kings and war, courage and loss, the public life of a people.

Much of it sings of kings and warriors. A poem might praise a ruler for his strength and his open hand. It might tell of a great battle, or of a single brave man. And it grieves, too. Some of the most moving puram poems are laments for the dead, sung over a fallen hero.

But not every voice in puram is a king's. A poor bard might sing his own hunger, and walk from court to court hoping for a gift. And a poet was bold. He could praise a king one day and scold him the next, to his very face, for a poet's word carried real weight. Song could honour a ruler, and song could shame him.

Now I want to give you the most loved puram verse of all. You might expect, from a poetry of war, a song of victory. Instead, the line Tamil children still learn by heart is a song of peace and kinship. Kaniyan Pungundranar

A poet named Kaniyan Pungundranar begins his poem with words that mean, simply: every town is our town, and every man is our kin. Sit with that a moment. From a land of three warring kings, a poet looked up and saw one human family, and called every stranger his own.^[1]

And the poem does not stop at that warm opening. It goes on with a calm and steady wisdom. Good and ill, it says, do not truly come to us from other people. So we need not swell up with pride when fortune smiles, nor rage and rail when it turns hard. We meet both with an even heart.^[1]

Think of where this came from. Not from a quiet hermitage, but from the rough world of puram, of kings and spears and cattle-raids. And yet a Tamil poet, two thousand years ago, reached a vision wide enough to hold all people as kin. That generous reach, from the world of war toward the whole human family, is the deepest gift of the outer poetry.