distress are epic examples which were followed by later day poets all over India.5 In Tamil poems, the sun, the "infant sun", "the rising sun" is said to be an object of worship. Its morning and evening appearances are elaborately described by the poets, but the sun is not spoken of as "the eye of the gods" or as "the husband of dawn" in the earlier poetry. Here is a vesper hymn connected with Saavitri:6 Borne by swift coursers, he will now unyoke them;
The speeding chariot he has stayed from going.
He checks the speed of them that glide like serpents;
Night has come on by Saavitri's commandment.
The weaver rolls her outstretched web together,
The skilled lay down their work in midst of toiling,
The birds all seek their nests, their shed the cattle;
Each to his lodging Saavitri disperses.
|
This hymn may be compared with a neytal or mullai poem which deals with nature at evening, as some illustration of both the similarity and difference in outlook of the two literatures. Though Nature is admitted to be a manifestation of God in the later evolution that Tamil religion underwent, as for example, in passages of the Paripaaṭal which are professedly religious, the religious allusions in the secular poetry of lover and warfare are very few. Religion does not enter into Cankam poetry to the extent it does in contemporary Greek or Latin and Sanskrit, and that is partly because the Tamils did not possess the highly developed mythology that the Greeks, the Latins and the Northern Indian poets possessed. The Nature of Tamil poetry is just Nature associated with a Supreme Being; the Nature of Vedic and Greek and Latin poetry is a highly theological Nature divinized by man. Only the Cankam poems on Murukan and Tirumaal can offer some analogy because they are of a later age and contain evidence of growing Āryan influence. To poets who lived as a sacerdotal caste, religion was the chief subject and inspiring influence ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5 See S. B. DAS GUPTA, Aspects of Indian Religious Thought, pp. 166-188, Calcutta, 1957. 6 A. A. MACDONELL, History, o.c; p. 79. |