The Riverine Plains

The agricultural plains formed a separate region in Tamil poetry, as they actually do in Nature. Those who have seen the vast wide sea of fields around Tanjore, or still further north around Maayaavaram, the fields irrigated by the Kaaveeri and the anicuts that distribute its waters, will note how widely the landscape differs from the Nilgris and the more southern districts. Its extensive fields broken by occasional copses of the iluppai, or the bamboo, its many canals, its tanks, small and large, where the aquatic plants bloom in profusion, its greenery with no background of blue hills as in the other districts, its buffaloes wading or wallowing in placid contentment through patches of water, the white storks and cranes which search for the fresh water fishes and insects, are all today as they must have been two thousand years ago, except for the narrow strip of a negligible railway line which runs through the fields like an intruder.

This region was known as the "region of sweet water" presumably in opposition to the ocean, the region of salt water.⁴¹ What characterizes this region is actually the abundance of water, or at least the abundance of canals and tanks, and even ditches and ponds which when the rains do not fail present a very refreshing panorama. The poets invariably use adjectives expressive of the abundance of water and shade when describing the marutam region.

The region is marked by its rice-fields and sugar-cane plots. The rice-fields, before the harvest, seem like an ocean of green, and the sugar-cane fields like dense woods, so far-spread are they. A poet compares the beauty of the heroine to the "great beauty of the fields of abundant sheaves."⁴² A king bent on

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