spend their days wandering about the hillside gathering flowers for their garlands, and leaves for their dresses; those of the common class would spend the day guarding their crops keeping the parrots away from the millet fields or pounding the millet with the holes in the rocks as mortars.²⁶

Family life knew little separation. Nature gave them everything, except salt, and the salt came to them from the sea-coasts, and salt is the merchandise which figures prominently as being sent to the hills.

Similarly in other regions there were other primitive modes of life. The people in the desert and waterless regions of the paalai were given to predatory habits. Those of the mullai had their own conventions regarding love. Here the maiden would be won, not by victory over a tiger, but by victory over a ferocious bull or buffalo or some other animal. The nuptials would take place not under a veenkai, but under a mullai bower.²⁷ In neytal, the sea-shore and the laurel grove afforded a beautiful setting for the meeting of lovers.²⁸ A lad would come across a lass keeping the birds away from the fish spread out to be dried, as in kuriñci the mountain lad would find her keeping the birds away from the millets.

Thus the poets of each region were truthful in describing what they saw. Even when a poet of one region wrote poetry about another region, he was scrupulously faithful in his portrayal of that region. A poet describing the hill-region or recounting an incident of the hills spoke in language appropriate to the hill-folk. As terms of comparison he chose only objects that were found on the hills.

Apart from this output of love-poetry there were also spontaneous poems about other aspects of life, in the kuṛiñci about cattle-lifting, in the neytal about sustained frays that had taken place against invaders, in the marutam where a large village by the riverside had been besieged, about the siege. There were then in each region poems praising the chiefs of the respective regions; there were reflective poems on the transitoriness of life; there were poems on statecraft, on kingship, on noble living as and when occasion or reflection demanded.

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   ²⁶ Kurincippaattu, passim; Kali. 40, 41, 42 introductory portions.