Sangam literature
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Sangam literature
Rediscovery in the late 1800s
Adrija Roychowdhury, Feb 21, 2025: The Indian Express
Though Sangam literature is deeply intertwined with Tamil consciousness, it was only in the late 19th or early 20th centuries that the texts were ‘rediscovered’.
A visitor to the Keeladi Museum in Tamil Nadu can hardly miss the carefully printed lines of poetry from the Sangam corpus that embellish almost every nook and cranny. The purpose of the inscriptions is to corroborate the many archaeological findings from the adjoining site that are projected to push the dates of the origins of Tamil history by hundreds of years. The excavations have been at the centre of much political rhetoric in recent years and have sparked immense excitement and pride in the Tamil-speaking world – both for being a testament to their ancientness and for providing much sought-after material evidence for the beloved Tamil Sangam literature.
“All this while, the Sangam texts were ridiculed for being fictional,” says A Muthukrishnan, a Tamil author and social activist based in Madurai. “The problem was that we did not have evidence to show that urban life existed here back when the Sangam texts were being written,” he explains. But in the last 10 years, he suggests, archaeological excavations at Keeladi, Adichanallur, Korkai and Alangulam have led to large habitation sites being discovered, which in turn have thrown up “all that the Sangam texts have been talking about”.
The efforts to collate literature with archaeology are neither new nor unique to the South Indian subcontinent. In the years immediately after Independence, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), under archaeologist B B Lal, carried out a large-scale initiative to find material evidence for the Ramayana and Mahabharata through archaeological excavations.
Experts say that in Tamil consciousness, the Sangam corpus holds the same cultural and emotional value as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata do across the country. At the same time, there are interesting parallels to be drawn in the modern perceptions of these texts and their appeal as sources for history writing and archaeology.
Sangam literature and its ‘rediscovery’
Recognised as the earliest literature from South India, Sangam refers to a group of texts written in old Tamil. The corpus includes eight anthologies of poems, 10 idylls, a work on grammar, and 18 minor works. Altogether, there are about 2,381 poems by 473 poets and 102 poems by anonymous authors. While scholars are divided about the precise dates of the Sangam texts, there is a general understanding that they were composed between the third century BCE and the third century CE.
The Sangam poems can be divided into two types – the akam and the puram. While akam poems have love as their theme, puram poems deal with themes such as war, death, community, kingdom, etc.
Even though the Sangam poems are deeply intertwined in Tamil consciousness, it was only in the late 19th or early 20th centuries that these texts were ‘rediscovered’, resulting in their widespread popularity. “Before that, most of these poems were transmitted orally,” explains journalist Nirmala Lakshman, who has authored the book The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community (2025). “Some of these poems would have been passed down as lullabies for babies or as folk songs sung by traders and the like,” she adds.
Two people credited with ‘rediscovering’ these texts were U V Swaminatha Iyer and C W Damodaran Pillai. Iyer, popularly known as “Tamil Tatha (Tamil grandfather)”, was a professor of Tamil at the Government Arts College at Kumbakonam. During his tenure there, he came to be acquainted with Salem Ramaswami Mudaliar, a lawyer and independence activist, who introduced him to an ancient text called Chintamani. The text transformed his life, and from then on, Iyer devoted the rest of his life to unearthing and editing ancient Tamil literature. In his efforts, he was joined by Pillai, who practised law at Kumbakonam and was a zealous advocate for the richness and antiquity of the Tamil language.
The texts collected and documented by Iyer and Pillai were mostly written on palm leaves. Many of them were on the verge of being destroyed, and several carried incomplete verses. In his introduction to the re-printed version of Kalithogai, the first Sangam poem to be published in 1887, Pillai gives an evocative description of the difficulties encountered in documenting these hand-written manuscripts. “The manuscript was incomplete without the head or tail of the work. Moreover, I abandoned my effort of reading the work in frustration due to broken letters in each line of a poem… Only what has escaped fire and water and religious taboo remains,” he wrote.
An ahistorical exercise?
By 1920, all the Sangam works had been brought out in print. “It was during this period that classical Tamil works were made accessible to the ‘wider public’ beyond the tiny scholarly community and outside the orbit of religious sectarian monasteries,” writes historian V Rajesh in his book Manuscripts, Memory and History: Classical Tamil Literature in Colonial India (2013).
In an interview with indianexpress.com, Rajesh says that “certain developments in the 19th century, such as the expansion of print culture, were directly responsible for the publication of the Sangam corpus during this period.” That said, Rajesh also believes that a great amount of effort was made by the late 19th and early 20th-century Tamil scholars to establish the antiquity of the Sangam texts. “One cannot deny the antiquity of these texts,” says Rajesh. But, he suggests that the ‘dramatisation’ of the efforts of modern scholars and editors like Pillai and Iyer has often overlooked the fact that these texts had been anthologised and re-anthologised in the medieval centuries and transmitted into the early modern period as well. The over-emphasis on the ‘rediscovery’ of the Sangam texts, he says, has prevented scholars from enquiring into the history of transmission of these texts.
Others suggest that the whole exercise of bringing these texts under a broad category of ‘Sangam literature’ was ahistorical. Linguistics scholar K V Zvelebil, in his book Tamil Literature (1975), suggests that the classic Tamil texts had to be rediscovered in the 19th century due to the break in literary tradition that occurred in the sixth to eighth centuries CE, when the secular, bardic poetry became part of a “dead classical heritage” and was overtaken by the “religious, individual hymn body of the Shaiva-Vaishnava bhakti movement”.
When later, the 19th-century Tamil pundits turned their attention to this classical literary heritage, they grouped all works before the bhakti period of the seventh century CE under the ‘Sangam’ anthologies. As Zvelebil explains, such an exercise “ignored enormous differences in content and form, language, style, prosody, purpose and motivation, thus reducing the literary production of about 800 years to one flat level group which was assigned different dates ranging from 2000 BCE to 800 CE.” “It was a triumph of ahistoricity,” he writes.
Lakshman suggests that these poems had been written by multiple poets and that at the time they were composed, they were hardly considered to be part of a single anthology. “They all belong to a similar period, and it is mostly for convenience that we call them Sangam literature,” she says.
A tale of 3 sangams
Then, there is the legend associated with the production of the Sangam poems, which says that the Pandya kings established three literary gatherings, or sangams, attended by gods and poets in which these literary works were presented. The first was held in Madurai for 4,400 years, the second at Kapatapuram for 3,700 years and the third yet again at Madurai for 1,850 years.
In his book, Rajesh argues that the story of the three sangams was first found in an eighth-century commentary to the grammar text titled Iraiyanar Kalaviyal. This legend of the three sangams went on to be deeply entrenched in Tamil scholarly memory, “so that even during the early modern period we find the legend circulating among Tamil scholars,” writes Rajesh. Rajesh says that whether or not the sangams took place is a contentious issue. “The traditional historical account of each sangam lasting for thousands of years goes against modern historical sensibilities,” he says.
He goes on to explain that the idea of the three conferences of poets is, in essence, linked to the claims of the antiquity of Shaivism in Tamil Nadu. “So the scholars who were keen on establishing the antiquity of Shaivism in Tamil Nadu were more or less also the ones who wished to establish the authenticity of these three sangams,” he suggests.
Tamil nationalism and Sangam literature
It is worth noting that the period during which Iyer was publishing the rediscovered Sangam texts coincided with the beginnings of Indian nationalism. The Indian National Congress, which was born in Bombay in 1885, had members from the Madras Presidency right from its inception, many of whom were Tamil scholars themselves. The Congress leaders from Madras would find themselves comfortably navigating the two worlds of Indian nationalism and Tamil pride.
In his book, Rajesh writes about Mudaliar, a moderate Congressman who constantly encouraged Iyer to carry out research and publish classical Tamil literary works. Then there was G Subramania Iyer, the founder of The Hindu and Swadesamitran, a Tamil newspaper. The latter would regularly carry articles on Tamil language and literature and lauded the efforts of those who were bringing the classical literary texts to the public.
Yet another Congress stalwart from Madras was poet C Subramania Bharati, who edited a Tamil weekly called India and frequently invoked the text Thirukkural to criticise the colonial government. There was also V O Chidambaram Pillai, a militant nationalist and leader of the Swadeshi movement in Madras, who dedicated much of his time to editing and publishing classical Tamil works.
The use of the Sangam texts to stake claims on Tamil identity and Dravidian antiquity was also done by the leaders of the early Dravidian movement, especially the Justice Party, which contested the Congress’s claims of representing the nation.
Sangam literature and the writing of Tamil history
Ever since Independence, and somewhat earlier as well, the Sangam texts increasingly became a source for writing the history of Tamil Nadu. One of the most celebrated historians of South India, K A Nilakanta Sastri, for instance, writes in his book The Colas (1955) that “the main source of information on the early Cholas is the early Tamil literature of the so-called third Sangam.”
In her 1975 publication, historian R Champakalakshmi, celebrated for her work on early and pre-modern South India, explored place names from evidence in the Sangam texts in context with the habitation sites excavated from the early historical period. Then there was K R Srinivasan, who, in 1946, compared the Iron Age burials or megaliths to those mentioned in the Sangam anthologies. Similar efforts to appropriate archaeological data to corroborate information from the texts were also carried out by historian Rajan Gurukkal in the 1980s. Archaeologist Shinu A Abraham, in her article ‘Chera, Chola, Pandya: Using Archaeological Evidence to Identify the Tamil Kingdoms of Early Historic South India’ (2003), suggests that the very evidence of identifying ‘Tamilakam’ as a distinct cultural region is derived from a variety of text-based sources, the most important among them being the Sangam literature.
She goes on to caution, though, that “appreciating the Sangam corpus as a source of historical data requires understanding their poetic and bardic nature”. “A bulk of the poetry,” she writes, “is concerned with extolling the exploits of rulers, warriors, and patrons- a fact that has not prevented historians and archaeologists alike from using the information contained in the texts as referents for archaeological record.”
“This constant negotiation on how to use literary sources and material record together to understand the past is not just specific to Tamil Nadu, but is true for the entire South Asian region,” explains archaeologist Smriti Haricharan. However, she also believes that the texts can provide information that can complement the material evidence found through archaeology. Haricharan, for instance, works on megalithic burials in South India. “While we know there are different burial types which sometimes look significantly different from each other, we do not fully understand what these differences mean. They may be a reflection of socio-cultural, economic and temporal differences; however, given that the material remains excavated do not always make it into the present, textual sources give us valuable information on some of these aspects, especially socio-cultural variations,” says Haricharan. In 1946, Srinivasan discussed in an article the various nomenclature used for these different burial types mentioned in Sangam literature. This tells us that in the past, people very consciously used different burial types and had specific nomenclature for them.
Haricharan suggests that if one were to excavate with the sole purpose of validating literary texts or based purely on information from literary texts, it would be a disservice to both literary sources and archaeology. “Above all, it won’t truly help us understand the past,” she says. For instance, Silappathikaram, a post-Sangam poem, describes that its female protagonist, Kannagi, burnt down Madurai. “While we do not find archaeological evidence of any such burning down of the city, what we do get to know from both archaeology and literary texts is the occurrence or the establishment of a large settlement there,” she argues. “That is what the excavations at Keeladi do, show us that there was a large settlement here in the past,” she adds.
Archaeologist Sudeshna Guha says the excavations at Keeladi are “history in the making”. This history, she argues, entails the contestation felt in the South over the appropriation of India’s deep past by North Indian nationalism through tracing the possibilities of Vedic and Sanskritic antiquity of India’s sophisticated urban Bronze Age culture. The Keeladi excavations mark a clear effort to demonstrate the reality of the Tamil heritage of India’s earliest urban settlements, she adds.
That said, it is also true that archaeology in South India has, over the years, thrown up a large number of Iron Age sites, mostly in the form of megaliths. Until now, they have been dated to the third century BCE. “But they could just well be a lot older,” says Guha. The excavations at Keeladi suggest that civilisation in Tamil Nadu could be dated as far back in time as the sixth century BCE. Archaeologists, however, say that it is not as if excavations carried out before Keeladi showed no evidence of an early cities in South India.
Archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri, in her book Monuments Matter: India’s Archaeological Heritage since Independence (2017), has pointed to two sites, Kodumanal and Porunthal, excavated by K Rajan since 2009, which marked the beginnings of urban culture in South India in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE. Lahiri described these findings as a “major landmark” in the understanding of South Indian history.
