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84
Study of Civakacintāmaṇi
and queens, cities and palaces. They found poetry in fishers' lowly huts and in the dwelling of mountain people. The fisher woman wailing for the fishing boats with the day's haul, or the fisher children watching the fish being dried, the shepherds with their flocks, the lowly at their work, come in for as much poetry as the wealthy heroine of a mountain chief wandering over the hills gathering flowers with a number of maids to attend upon her. Even when they sang of kings or sang to kings, they pleased their hearers most, not by describing the palace, but by describing the people who were privileged to live under the king's protection."1 The personification with which natural phenomena are described in Vedic songs does not occur in the Cankam works. Even the occasional apostrophes to objects in nature found in the Cankam works occur only as rapid outbursts of a soul tense with emotion. The absence of mythology, and the religious element, and the interest in the common man in the Cankam poems meant that the love themes in particular were of a very different nature from Sanskrit. The kavya pattern of kings with large harems, of social acceptance of polygamy, and the diverse opportunities this afforded for describing different kinds of love and different kinds of lovers, runs on lines which are different from the traditions of the Cankam literature.
The realistic approach to nature was the result of emphasis on human interest. The fidelity with which the Cankam poets described nature can be seen in their accurate and beautiful similes. Examples of these will be given later in the discussion of the descriptions in the Cc. There are not hyperbolic conceits, and the similes employed serve to illustrate the particular subject in question and are never allowed to obscure the meaning or obstruct the narration. Graphic descriptions are of common occurrence. Occasionally one find epic similes containing elaborate imagery. They are frequently found in the works like the Kalittokai and the Paripatal. The pathetic fallacy and aphorisms are not all common in the Cankam literature.
Thus the Tamil literature of this period had a personality of its own which was manifested in the literary style, descriptions, figures of speech employed, the themes chosen and the sentiments depicted.
In the Tolkappiyam there are two sections devoted to similes and sentiments which are known as Uvamaiyiyal and Meypptatiyal. It has been suggested by J. R. Marr that both of them may be regarded as being wholly dependent on Sanskrit models in the respective fields of dramatic theory and rhetoric." In the discussion about Uvamaiyiyal he further says that "Uvamaiyiya! is fairly clearly an attempt to apply one of the aspects of rhetoric in Sanskrit namely Upama, to Tamil." He points out the resemblances between the division of Upama in the Tolkappiyam and in the Kavyadarsa of Dapdins and suggests that these two chapters could have been interpolated. Whether they are interpolated or not, it is conceivable that Tolkäppiyar
1 Ibid., pp. 46, 47.
2 ThaniNayagam, op. cit., p. 70.
3 J. R. Marr, The eight Tamil anthologies with special reference to Putanaṇāru and Patirruppattu, A thesis submitted to University of London, 1958, p. 83. 4 Ibid, p. 80.
5 Ibid, pp. 80, 81, 82.
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