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Home > Tamil National Forum > Selected Writings by Sachi Sri Kantha > On Epic Poet Kambar and the Kamba Rasam polemic of polymath Anna
Selected Writings by Sachi Sri Kantha
On Epic Poet Kambar 15 September 2007
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This I contribute as a component of the continuing series on the broad theme of DMK’s influence in the politics and culture Tamils, to mark the 50th anniversary of DMK’s entry into Tamil Nadu politics and 40th anniversary of DMK’s first ascent to power. The title of Anna’s tract, Kamba Rasam, can be literally translated into ‘Kambar’s Soup’, but in an elegant sense, it means ‘The Taste of Kambar’. It provides one of the stinging criticisms of epic poet Kambar’s masterpiece, Kamba Ramayanam, which in his times was referred to as ‘Rama Avathaaram’. If there is one medieval Tamil intellectual for whom I have deepest sympathies, it is for Kambar, the legendary emperor of Tamil poets (Kavi Chakravarthi). By any literary scale of evaluation, Kambar was one of the greats – in par with Publius Vergilius Maro aka Virgil (70 BC – 19 BC), Kalidasa (~ 4th cent.), Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), Dante (1265-1321), Shakespeare (1564-1616), and von Goethe (1749-1832). But will you care to check any decent encyclopaedia of world literature? There would be lengthy entries on the six poets I have just noted, but an entry on Kambar will be missing. Despite Kambar’s lack of recognition in popular English biographical dictionaries and encyclopaedias, he does receive passing mention in academic publications which deal with the Ramayana epic (see for e.g: Desai, 1970; Pollock, 1993). Why Kambar has been neglected? Here are my six reasons (which I consider are not exhaustive) on why Kambar has been neglected in the reference sources of literary record. (1) Time and Tamil political power deserted and failed Kambar, who flourished towards the sunset of Chola imperial power. With the downfall of Chola throne and the concurrent ascent of kings subservient to Islam religion, Kambar’s epic lost its sheen. (2) Tamil pundits possessed Kambar jealously, without sharing his masterpiece with the Tamil peasants, thus preventing wider dissemination. (3) Non-Tamil missionaries from Europe (with a few notable exceptions), who came to proselytize in Tamil Nadu and Eelam, though paying lip service to Kambar’s literary masterpiece (Kamba Ramayanam) covertly smeared him. (4) Tamil converts to Christianity and Islam religions ignored Kambar since his literary masterpiece extolled the glory of Hinduism. (5) An influential section of Tamil academics of the 20th century (the foremost being Ariĝnar Anna, the founder-leader of DMK) who should know better than the plebians of Tamil Nadu, mocked and maligned Kambar. They preferred to have Tiruvalluvar and Ilanko Adikal, as their mascots of veneration. (6) Those Tamil academics who dipped into the Marxist - Progressive pond of literature, portrayed Kambar as a servile poet who merely propagated the orthodox Hinduism of the feudal, land-owning society of medieval times. These academics revelled in paying paen to the poetry of Anna Akhmatova (1888-1966) and Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), which they read in English translation! Kambar’s Contemporaries One drawback in traditional Tamil literature scholarship is that, its articulate practitioners had failed to evaluate Kambar’s academic virtuoso in light of the contributions of his contemporaries from other cultures. For this evaluation, we need to assemble a list of Kambar’s contemporaries, in the international scene. I provide a partial list below.
Kambar’s Period Kambar’s period has been an issue of controversy for long, among Tamil historians. Simon Casie Chitty, in his 1859 anthology [The Tamil Plutarch] on the lives of poets and poetesses of Southern India and Ceylon, had noted as follows:
But, Prof.T.P.Meenakshisundaram, providing an addendum to the entry on Kambar to the 1946 revision of ‘The Tamil Plutarch’, had inscribed the following inference:
As opposed to these claims, R. Ragava Aiyangar had convincingly suggested that Kambar lived in the second half of the 12th century. Ramachandra Dikshithar of Madras University has concurred that Kambar was a contemporary of King Kulotunga Cholan III, whose reign spanned between 1178 and 1218 (Vidwan M. Rasamanickam, 1947). Overall, there are two schools of thought, on Kambar’s period. One school had proposed that Kambar lived in the 9th century, with which the available circumstantial evidences do not tally properly. Even as recent as 1981, Justice S. Maharajan, who authored a small monograph on Kambar had stated that the 9th century “appears to be the more plausible” period of Kambar. I rather doubt this advanced dating for the simple reason that in the 9th century, Chola empire was only in its early stage of ascent, and only the first two kings of Chola empire have been identified as living in the 9th century, namely Vijayalaya Chola of Suryavamsa (reigning period 848-881) and Athithya Chola (871-907). The first most prominent Chola king was Parantaka Chola I (reigning period 907-940), the son of Athithya Chola and the grandson of Vijayalaya Chola. Though details on Kambar’s personal life are scanty, that he was a native of Thiruvazhundur (Thanjavur district), Tamil Nadu, has been established. The absence of valid personal details on Kambar is understandable. Even much is still debated on the life details of Shakespeare, who post-dated Kambar by almost three centuries. Nevertheless, a wealth of legends have accumulated surrounding Kambar’s somewhat carefree life and that of the doomed love affair his son Ambikapathi had with Chola King’s daughter Amaravathi. The Ambikapathi and Amaravathi love story is the Tamil equivalent of the Romeo - Juliet story (the children of Capulet and Montague families in Verona), immortalized by Shakespeare, between 1594 and 1597. On the two Tamil movie versions of Ambikapathi’s love story (which brought a visual portrayal of Kambar to Tamils in the 20th century), I plan to write late in the year to mark the 70th anniversary of the first version (that starred singing superstar of that era M.K. Thiyagaraja Bhagavathar as Ambikapathi) and the 50th anniversary of the second version (that starred Sivaji Ganesan as Ambikapathi). As per the tentative findings painstakingly collated from indirect historical sources relating to Tamil Nadu by Ragava Aiyangar, Kambar may have been born around 1120 and died in 1197. If this is so, this year also marks the 810th anniversary of his death. Ragava Aiyangar had deduced that Kambar began his epic Kamba Ramayanam in the year 1178 and completed the work in 1185. Let me do some simple calculation, based on these two dates. Kamba Ramayanam consists of approximately 10,500 quatrains (though Simon Casie Chitty in 1859 had mentioned of “12,016 stanzas”). Some have indicated that the exact number of Kambar’s verses amount to 10,368, because quite a number of quatrains appear to be later insertions, by prankish-minded minor poets. Just assuming that (1) the round number of 10,500 as a reasonable guess (permitting for a few dozen quatrains which may have been inadvertently lost during the process of transcription from oral tradition to proto-type leaf manuscripts), and (2) the commencement and the completion years are taken into account, it had taken Kambar a whole 8 years to compose the 10,500 quatrains. This works out to nearly 1,312 quatrains per year, which in turn comes to an average of 4 quatrains per day. Kambarasam Polemic of Anna and its elicited Rebuttals I should acknowledge that, as of now, I have not enjoyed the pleasure of reading the entire corpus of Kambar’s ultra 10,000 quatrains. At most, I have been introduced to four or five dozens. But I have read the two volumes of Kamba Rasam polemic, penned by Anna. Volume 1 of Anna’s Kamba Rasam (96 pages) provides only 13 quatrains (of which 8 are presented in full) that Anna had selected for criticism for their erotic contents. Mention is made in the text, that 34 quatrains describing the physical attributes of Sita, the heroine, border on eroticism. I have in possession only the 13th edition of this tract, published in 1970. I’m not sure as to when the 1st edition of Kamba Rasam, appeared in print. If I’m not wrong, I presume the 1st edition of Kamba Rasam should have appeared in early or mid 1940s, before Anna founded the DMK. Volume 2 of Anna’s Kamba Rasam (1st edition 1961, 84 pages) presents another 8 quatrains considered to be of erotic nature, with an added mention that 67 quatrains display such erotic taste. In volume 2, Anna also informs the readers that his frontal attack on Kambar’s literary taste elicited three rebuttals from the epic poet’s admirers. These should have appeared between mid 1940s and 1960. The three rebuttals which Anna had acknowledged were entitled, (1) Death Bell to Kamba Rasam [ Kamba Rasathukku Saavu Mani], (2) Head Strike on Kamba Rasam [Kamba Rasathukku Mandaiyil Adi], and (3) A Wedge to Annadurai [Annathuraikku Aappu]. Of these three, I have in my possession the first named, Kamba Rasathukku Saavu Mani, consisting of only 32 pages. Probably due to the eminence of Anna, the author of this rebuttal identifies himself only with a pseudonym ‘Karpanai Piththan’ [literally translation: ‘Imagination Lover’]. That Anna was a ranking Tamil scholar is not in dispute and as such one can be certain that he would have scrutinized the entire corpus of Kamba Ramayanam, before committing himself to pick on Kambar’s penchant for erotic poetry. If this is so, by Anna’s count, one can infer that about 100 quatrains among the total corpus of 10,500 produced by Kambar border on eroticism. Percentage wise, 100 out of 10,500 equals <1%. As such, even this admirer of DMK founder-leader has to admit that Anna was way off balance in his frontal attack on Kambar. It may not be inaccurate to consider this as one bad patch in Anna’s stellar career as a reformer of Tamil literary tradition. Could it be that, this was a mischievous literary prank of Anna (who never questioned Kambar’s great merit as an epic poet, in his tract) which he undertook to bolster his then provocative political plank of pan-Dravidianism tinged with popular elements of Marxism? Promotion of Silappathikaram Epic by DMK polymaths The Silappathikaram epic, composed by poet Ilanko (a Hindu prince turned priest), promoted by Anna and his lieutenants like Karunanidhi, consists of 5,730 lines; and thus, is much shorter in length than Kamba Ramayanam. But, for promotion of Dravidian politics of 1940s, it had quite a few merits over Kambar’s epic. At least three could be identified. First, the Silapathikaram epic predates Kamba Ramayanam, by a millenium. Though the mini-entry on Silapathikaram in the Encyclopedia Britannica notes as, “the earliest epic poem in Tamil, written in the 5th–6th century AD by Prince Ilanko Adikal (Ilango Adigal)”, the popular Tamil view attested by the historical evidences attested by the socio-cultural exchanges between the then prevailing kingdoms in Tamil Nadu and Ceylon confirms that Silapathikaram was composed in the 2nd century AD. Thus, the pinnacle of Tamil literary merit could be advanced, from the early Medieval period of Kamba Ramayanam, to the tail-end era of Roman empire. Secondly, whereas the plot of Kamba Ramayanam was a borrowed one from the Sanskrit Ramayana of North India composed by epic poet Vaalmiki, the plot of Silappathikaram was indigenous to Tamil country and spreads over all three traditional Tamil kingdoms – the Chera, Chola and Pandya. Thus, Silappathikaram story optimally suited DMK’s then advanced political plank of pan-Dravidianism. Thirdly, the plot of Silappathikaram was more appealing to the commoners. Unlike the plot of Kamba Ramayanam which extols the virtues of divine figures and the vices of devilish elements, Silappathikaram’s plot involves average human characters from trading families trapped in a love triangle, and the story line culminating with the heroine bringing down the Pandyan kingdom’s throne. These merits of Silappathikaram, in brief, thus contributed to the demotion of Kambar, in preference to Ilanko Adikal, by the DMK idealogues in their literary campaigns which spanned from 1940s to mid 1960s. Sources Consulted
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