Personal Poetics: An Adapted Version of a Well-Known Treatise in Old Tamil

Abstract

: This article is a case study of one text in a multiple-text manuscript of grammatical works in Old Tamil, now kept in the Mahārājā Serfoji Sarasvatī Mahāl Library in Tañcāvūr under shelf mark 631. It gives a personal (or local?) adaptation of a well-known and important treatise on poetics, the Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ (seventh century?), normally transmitted together with the even more famous commentary by Nakkīraṉ (ninth century?), whom many regard as the founder of the Tamil tradition of theoretical commentary. The text deviates from the canonised standard version in the number of sūtras (aphorisms) it contains and, in the order in which they are listed, some sūtras having been omitted and others added to it. The provenance of the extra sūtras is clearly part of the reper- toire of anonymous quotations from older, partly lost treatises on poetics that are found within Nakkīraṉ’s commentary, thus proving that the author-copyist of the manuscript was well acquainted with the commentary and deliberately chose not to copy it along with the text. His purpose may have been to teach akam (love) poetics to his students. His choice of additions was probably motivated by what was perceived as lacunae in the standard text with respect to one important application of poetic theory, namely the writing of miniature commentaries elu- cidating the speech situations encountered in a single poem ( kiḷavi , later koḷu ) for classical poetry. This was an activity demonstrably still pursued by copyists as late as the nineteenth century, most likely in connection with one of the later poetic genres, the kōvai , the kind of poetic text that corresponded most closely to the treatise and that was alive until then.