The Three Crowned Kings of Tamilakam
Three Tamil kingdoms shared the far south of India for several centuries and left a body of secular poetry unlike anything else in the ancient world. Tamilakam covered what is now Tamil Nadu and Kerala and was never absorbed by the northern empires; Ashoka's inscriptions name the Cholas, Cheras and Pandyas as neighbours beyond his frontier. The Cheras held the Malabar coast and the pepper trade, the Pandyas the south with pearls and Madurai, and the Cholas the Kaveri delta and its rice. They fought each other continuously and were rich. The Roman trade is well attested from both ends. Pliny complains about the drain of silver to India, Roman coin hoards turn up in the south by the thousand, and Tamil poems mention the Yavanas — westerners — bringing wine in ships that come with gold and leave with pepper. The Sangam corpus is some 2,381 poems by 473 named poets, of whom around thirty are women, assembled in eight anthologies and ten long poems. Its subject matter is divided into the interior and the exterior: love in five landscapes each with its own flowers, birds and moods, and war, kingship, praise and lament. There is almost no religion in it and no caste system of the developed northern kind. It is the oldest literature in any Indian language other than Sanskrit and one of the oldest secular literatures anywhere. The name Sangam refers to a legendary academy of poets at Madurai, and the corpus was largely forgotten until a small group of Tamil scholars recovered the palm-leaf manuscripts in the late nineteenth century. It is now the foundation of modern Tamil identity.
- Year: 300 BCE
- Category: Cultural
