BY V. NARAYANAN M.A., M.L.

The religion of the Vedic Aryans has been popularly described as polytheistic and by some competent scholars as anthropomorphic. Really it is neither; the Vedic hymns deal with one God, though they call him variously. When a hymn extols Indra, it calls Him the All-Highest whom all Intelligences obey. When another hymn extols Varuna, it deals with Him similarly. From the apparently contradictory praises of the various Intelligences, one truth emerges clear, that the hymns extolled, not the particular Intelligence to whom they were specially addressed, but the One otherwise indescribable God whom the devotee felt as immanent in the particular intelligence he hymned about. The doctrine of Ishtam or choice from among the Intelligences of the One, through whose form the Great Unknowable beyond all forms is reached, may not have been clearly formulated in the Vedic hymns; but it was impliedly there already. The reconciliation of the differences in the attributes of particular Intelligences in different hymns, and sometimes in the same hymn, lies in the perception that all those attributes were meant, not for the particular Intelligence, but the Power beyond and behind it.

The hymns of the Vedas were mostly meant for sacrificial occasions; and in so far as sacrifices were seasonal, the worship of the Intelligences was also seasonal. But many sacrifices were at the option of the sacrificer, who therefore could easily choose his Ishtam or the Intelligence that appealed to him most. At the same time, emphasis was laid in each and every sacrifice on the, perception of the unity of the Godhead that permeated all the several Intelligences. It is not unusual to meet with hymns by the same Rishi apparently in praise of different Intelligences. For, once the unity, or to be strictly accurate, the identity of the Power behind the several Intelligences was recognised, we can understand how the choice was made, sometimes in accordance with one's own inclinations, and sometimes to suit the particular occasion and the external circumstances of the psalmist. Later on, philosophical schools emphasised the one-ness of Brahman or God and prevented any possible misunderstanding of these hymns in praise of an apparent plurality of Gods; but by a fallacy the one God came to be identified with Siva or Vishnu or any other Ishtam of the philosopher and not with the Power behind them all.

We find a similar development of religious ideas in Tamil literature. In the Sangam works and works of the age immediately following it, we find the one Deity extolled under different forms as Intelligences. The titles of some of the Sangam Princes show that yagas or sacrifices were largely prevalent among the Tamils of that period. Later on, probably because of the Jain and Buddhist influences, the Tamils ceased to perform sacrifices. But the idea of reaching to the One God by extolling one or other of the various Intelligences survived. We find one Perum-Devanar, for example, furnishing us with such a notable treasury of golden verses about the several deities that the pandits or court-poets of the Tamil kings, who were responsible for the Sangam collections, prefaced most of those collections with a hymn from the out-pouring of this poet.

When the reading public understood that the praise went to the One God and not to the particular Intelligence, who merely served as the channel of thought and of devotional expression, it was easy for the grammarian to insist as a poetic grace or ani and for the poet to follow the rule that the Intelligence invoked at the outset of the poem must be appropriate to the subject matter and serve as an introduction to the poem itself; to cite an example from the poet Perum-Devanar already referred to, his own poem Bharatam begins with an invocation to the elephant-faced Ganesa, who is referred to as the Intelligence who wrote with his tusk the story of the Bharata War. The reference to this particular pauranic story of Ganesa's achievement is appropriate and the dexterity with which the allusion is combined with the usual practice of invoking Ganesa at the opening of any enterprise is considered a poetic grace.

When the choice of the Intelligence to sing in praise of was thus limited only by rules of grammar and one's own sense of poetic grace, and not, as in the case of the Vedic Aryans, by the sacrificial or other occasions at which one sang, other poetic graces were developed and were stereotyped into rules of poetics as regards the Intelligence to be invoked and worshipped. The Sangam poets, shrewdly perceived that in describing a bit of land or surrounding scenery, and in referring to the people, to their habits and modes of life, there was always an aptness in confining one's self to what may be called local colour. All soil came to be classified under five heads:- 1. Kurinchi or hills and the hilly tracts, 2. Mullai or jungle and the woodlands, 3. Marudam or meadows and the cornfields, 4. Neidal or seashore and the coastal regions, 5. and lastly, Palai, deserts and the sandy wastelands. If the poet were describing hills, he uses; not merely in his actual description but even in his similes and other figures of speech (or anis), the birds, the beasts, the waters, the flowers, the trees, the food-grains, the musical instruments etc., peculiar to the locality, for the purpose of heightening the effect. An easy example is the tenth stanza of the Naladiyar which says: ‘Those who without spending on dress and food or on charity, amass wealth sacrificing their health and merely hoard that wealth, lose it ultimately, O Lord of the sky-scraping hills: For proof look at the bee.’ The illustrative bee fits in with the hills. This five-fold classification or Ain-thinai is a much admired feature of Sangam poetry. The poet did not stop with merely giving local colour by such poetic devices; he aimed at a certain harmony of ideas to surroundings; for a particular idea to be expressed adequately, a particular time of the day and a particular season are specially adapted. Therefore, the seasons and the hours of the day were also divided into the five Thinais or fundamentals. The grammarian did not stop there, but went further and subjected even the intelligences to his five-fold classification. Thus Muruga or Subrahmania was assigned to the hills, Mal or Vishnu to the forests, Indra to the fields, Varuna to the seashore, and Kali to the deserts.

This poetising of religion, this classification of Intelligences for worship according to the soil, degenerated in course of time into conventionalism when the poets gradually succumbed to the artificial rules of the grammarians. And this factor, probably more than other things, contributed to the easy ascendancy of Jainism and Buddhism which put an end to the soulless conventional polytheism into which the Tamils were lapsing. The Alwars and the Nayanars, who led the reaction against Buddhism and Jainism, laid great emphasis on the One-ness of God and His identity with Siva or Vishnu (whichever was their Ishtam) irrespective of the laws of Tamil poetics. There is a notable instance of this spirit of rebellion against the meaningless laws of Tamil poetics in the two Madals of Tiru- Mangai-mannan. Madal Oordal or going about declaiming one's own love to one's beloved, was by the laws of Tamil Poetics forbidden to a woman; it was improper for a woman to declare openly her unrequited love, and no poet celebrated a woman openly declaring such unrequited love. Tiru-Mangai-mannan spoke of the soul as a woman in search of God, her Beloved, and sang the tale of her unrequited love in a little poem Siriya Tiru-Madal; and probably an impertinent and irrevelent grammarian pointed his finger of scorn at the poet's iniquity; the poet Alwar immediately burst forth into a larger poem Periya- Tiru- Madal and declared that he did not in the least care for the rules of Tamil poetics, but was guided solely by Truth and by the noble examples of the women of Sanskrit literature, who were not slow to make open avowals of their love.

But it is not often that these hymns of the Tamil religious renaissance make a bold departure from the established rules of poetics in this fashion. The Alwars and Nayanars utilised as far as possible the existing customs and manners of the people and the existing forms of poetry for the purpose of their religious propaganda. A perusal of the Sangam literature will therefore greatly help in the proper understanding of the hymns of these saints.