this collection, is supposed to have lasted for 1,850 years and counted 449 poets. This gives a total of about ten thousand years before the Christian era, a period too fanciful for belief. The figures for the third epoch seem to be accurate, and there seems to have been an interest in numerology in this computation, which shows the Jain passion for numbers. The number of years seems to be multiples of 37, as 37 x 120, 37 x 100, and 37 x 50. However much this tradition seems to be fanciful, there seems to be a core of historical truth in the relevant accounts which speak of the subsidence of land under the sea as the result of a deluge and cataclysms, and of the existence of a literary academy, membership in which was limited to recognised poets. The persistent tradition of the existence of a Tamil literary academy is a unique tradition for India, and would tend to show the existence of a normative literary body during the Tamil classical period.

There is another attractive feature of this classical poetry, namely, that the poems are the compositions of poets and poetesses of all classes of society. Though there is little biographical information concerning these poets besides what may be gleaned from the poems themselves and their names and titles, and the brief colophons added by editors of a later age, their names and designations show that, of the approximately five hundred different persons to whom the poetry is attributed, at least thirty were women. About thirty of the poets were either kings or of royal descent, four of them were queens, while a large number were of the agricultural and merchant classes. There were among them some who practised a craft or other. The list includes astronomers, arithmeticians as well as potters, blacksmiths and carpenters.

We shall see in these pages other characteristics and features of classical Tamil poetry. But the antiquity of this Tamil poetry is not the least of the reasons why it should be known. It is the only language of India which while it shares antiquity with Sanskrit still continues to be a living literary language. Hindi literature did not appear before the 12th century; Bengali literature has its beginnings in the 11th century; Marathi in the 12th century; Punjabi in the 12th century. Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam literature originated after the 8th century. Tamil spans the ancient and the modern periods and deserves notice as a representative language of Indian thought and culture, as the only Indian language which is both classical and modern.

Love Poetry

The love poetry of the classical period in Tamil