The nūṟpās

The original Iraiyanar Akapporul consisted of sixty brief verses – called nūṟpās – that, in total, contain 149 lines. The verses show a number of similarities with the poruḷatikāram section of the Tolkappiyam – an older manual on Tamil grammar, poetics and prosody – both in its vocabulary and the core concepts it discusses.^[2] Takahashi suggests that this work was originally composed as a practical handbook for writing love poetry in accordance with the conventions of the akam tradition. The intent behind its composition, according to him, was to produce something that was more accessible and useful to poets than existing theoretical works on poetics, such as the poruḷatikāram.

The author of the sixty verses is unknown. Nakkiranar's commentary states that the verses were found inscribed on three copper plates under the altar to Shiva in Madurai, in the time of the Pandiyan king Ukkiraperuvaluti, who is also mentioned in the Akananuru as being the king who ordered its compilation. Nakkiranar says their author was Shiva himself, "the flame-hued lord of Alavayil in Madurai". Later sources, such as Ilampuranar's commentary on the Tolkappiyam, name the author of the sixty nūṟpās as "Iraiyanar", which literally means "lord", but is also a common name of Shiva. Apart from this legend, there is no tradition or concrete evidence as to who their human author was. Zvelebil and Marr suggest that the author was a poet or grammarian, possibly called Iraiyanar, and that the text itself had probably been stored in the temple at Madurai under Shiva's altar, where it was rediscovered in the time of Ukkiraperuvaluti.^[3] A poem in the Sangam anthology Kuruntokai is also attributed to Iraiyanar, and Marr goes on to suggest that the author of the nūṟpās may have been the same person as the author of that poem.^[4]

The verses are also difficult to date. The commentary says that they were composed in the Sangam period, but the scholarly consensus is that they are from a later date. Takahashi and Zvelebil assign them to a period between the fifth and sixth centuries, on the basis that their relationship to the poruḷatikāram suggests that they were composed a few generations after the final redaction of the poruḷatikāram, which they date to the 4th–5th centuries. Marr takes the view that the similarities between the nūṟpās and the poruḷatikāram indicate that the two were broadly contemporaneous, and drew upon common poetic ideas and definitions.^[5]

Nakkiranar's commentary

The second component of the work is Nakkiranar's treatise on love poetics which, although structured as a commentary, is treated by modern scholars as an erudite work in its own right. It is several times the length of the verses themselves, running to over two hundred pages in Tamil. The treatise is written in the tone and style of a discourse of the type that might be heard at a literary academy. The commentary uses a number of rhetorical devices. Nakkiranar repeatedly poses hypothetical questions and objections, to which he presents answers and rebuttals which are directly addressed to the reader, as if the reader himself was the questioner. He also uses stories, anecdotes and legends to illustrate specific points, and draws extensively on the then-existing corpus of Tamil akam poetry to provide examples of the poetical techniques he discusses.

The commentary says that it was written by Nakkiranar, son of Kanakkayanar. A number of traditions connect Nakkiranar with the Sangam age. The commentary itself claims to have been written in the Sangam age, and names Nakkiranar as one of the poets of the Third Sangam. Later legends recorded in the Tiruvilayadarpuranam say he was the president of the Third Sangam, and there are extant Sangam poems attributed to a poet by that name. The scholarly consensus, however, is that the commentary was written some centuries after the end of the Sangam period, on the basis that its language differs significantly in structure and vocabulary from that of Sangam literature, and that it cites verses which use a metre – kattalaikkalitturai – not found in Sangam literature.^[5] Zvelebil suggests that the Nakkiranar who wrote this commentary may be the same as the composer of the Tirumurukarruppatai.^[6]

The commentary records that it was transmitted orally for eight generations, until it was finally committed to writing by Nilakantanar of Musiri, a tradition which Zvelebil and Marr find credible.^[7] Early scholars, such as S. Vaiyapuri Pillai, dated the commentary to a period as late as the 10th–12th century, on the basis that the author appeared to be familiar with the 10th-century Civakacintamani. Modern scholars, however, tend to view these as later interpolations into the text, and date the commentary itself to a period closer to the 8th century on the basis of its relationship with the Pāṇṭikkōvai. Zvelebil suggests that many of these may have been inserted by Nilakantanar of Musiri, who he suggests added an introduction and more modern quotations into the text when he wrote it down.^[8]

The Pāṇṭikkōvai

The third component of the text is the Pāṇṭikkōvai, a work containing a series of related akam poems about the seventh century Pandiyan king, Nedumaran. Nakkiranar's commentary uses a number of verses from this poem to illustrate points he makes concerning the poetics of Tamil akam poetry – of the 379 quotations in the commentary, all but 50 are from the Pāṇṭikkōvai. The Pāṇṭikkōvai is believed to have had 400 quatrains in its original form, 329 of which are preserved in Nakkiranar's commentary. The author of the Pāṇṭikkōvai is unknown; however, the poem is interesting in itself as one of the earliest literary works written in the form of a kōvai – a series of interlinked poems which became one of the mainstays of akam poetry in mediaeval Tamil literature.

Modern editions and translations

The text of the Akapporul is almost always printed together with the commentary of Nakkiranar, and the two are usually treated as a unity. T. G. Aravamuthan suggests that Ilampuranar, the author of a celebrated 11th-12th century commentary on the Tolkappiyam, also wrote a second commentary on the work, but this is no longer extant.

The Akapporul was transmitted for several centuries in the form palm-leaf manuscripts. The first printed edition was prepared by Damodaram Pillai in 1883. The first critical edition, based on a comparison of all manuscript copies that were then available, was prepared in 1939 by K.V. Govindaraja Mudaliyar and M.V. Venugopala Pillai. A second critical edition, which took into account a few additional manuscripts that came to light subsequently, was published by the Saiva Siddhantha Works Publishing Society in 1969.

An English translation of the nūṟpās and commentary was published by Buck and Paramasivan in 1997. A new translation, with annotations, is currently under preparation by a team of scholars including Jean-Luc Chevillard, Thomas Lehmann and Takanobu Takahashi, and was scheduled to be published in 2008.

Poetical context

The treatise contains the oldest full-length exposition of poetical devices central to akam poetry, including the five tiṇais or landscapes into which all love poems were classified, and the various kuṟṟus or speakers whose emotions and expression the poems sought to articulate. However, its principal purpose was not to clarify or explain the ancient akam tradition.

At the time the work was written, a new class of work – called ciṟṟilakkiyam, or "short literature" – was emerging in Tamil literature. Unlike the old akam tradition, which mainly focused on short poems dealing with a single, detached scene in the life of a pair of lovers, these works sought to depict a complete story. This was not in itself alien to Tamil literature, in that epics – peruṅkāppiyam in Tamil – such as the Cilappatikaram dealt with whole stories. Works of the ciṟṟilakkiyam tradition, however, sought to do so on a less grand scale, through longer series of related poems which described successive episodes that cumulatively chart the entire course of a relationship.^[9]

It is in relation to these that the text had its longest-lasting impact. By chronologically ordering the isolated moments which Tamil akam poetry, and describing how they fit into a serialised plot, the text – and in particular, Nakkiranar's commentary – related the emergent ciṟṟilakkiyam tradition to the ancient akam tradition, and thereby helped create a new approach to literature, on the basis on which a plethora of new literary forms developed in succeeding centuries.^[9] The kovai, in particular, came to dominate secular and religious akam poetry in the mediaeval period. The very last example of akam poetry, written before the tradition was suppressed by seventeenth century religious revivalism, is a 600-verse kōvai, composed by Kachchaiyappar Sivachariyar and embedded into his Tanikaippuranam.^[10]

Stylistic influences

Nakkiranar's commentary also created a basic template which all subsequent commentaries on Tamil texts followed. Each verse of the original text is followed by a commentary on that verse, which explains its content, and presents examples chosen from extant literature and where necessary quotes previous authors in support of the commentator's claims. Nakkiranar, for example, frequently quotes rules from the Tolkappiyam, Akattiyam and other works on grammar and poetics to support his literary theories, and illustrates these theories by quoting from the Pāṇṭikkōvai, Cilappatikaram and poetry of the Sangam age, weaving all these into his prose commentary in a manner that highlights his points. In addition, the comments on the initial verses, and on the final one, present additional material dealing with general themes, which goes beyond a simple elucidation of the verses on which they comment. Thus Nakkiranar, in addition to simply commenting on Iraiyanar's verses, here outlines rules for the structure and content of a commentary, discusses the manner in which conventions regarding love-poetry should be presented, and sets out general observations on history.^[11]

Historical and social context

The work, and in particular the commentary of Nakkiranar, reinterprets the Tamil akam tradition in the light of the Shaivite bhakti tradition, which was then sweeping through Tamil Nadu in a wave of Hindu revivalism. A commentary, in the Indian tradition, plays an important role in reinterpreting and reworking the applicability of a text or tradition in the context of changing historical or social circumstances.^[12] Nakkiranar's commentary thus plays the role of reclaiming the Tamil akam tradition – secular in appearance, and associated with Jainism – for the Tamil Shaivite tradition. This reappropriation had a significant effect on the Tamil bhakti tradition, whose poems, from the ninth century onwards, make extensive use of the conventions of the akam tradition, but in the context of describing the love of a devotee for God.^[13]