Five Landscapes and the Gods in Them

Sangam poetry organises its world by tinai, a scheme in which five types of landscape carry five moods, five seasons, five times of day and five presiding deities. The mountains belong to Murugan and to lovers meeting; the forest and pasture to Mayon and to patient waiting; the cultivated land to Ventan and to sulking or quarrelling; the seashore to Kadalon and to pining; the arid wasteland to Korravai and to separation or elopement. A poem does not have to state its subject, because naming a flower, a bird or a drum from one landscape tells a trained listener what emotional situation is being described. That is a religious scheme as much as a literary one, since the gods are embedded in it rather than appended to it.

Norman Cutler's work on Tamil devotional poetics traces how this inherited apparatus was later turned to religious use by the bhakti poets, who took the conventions for addressing a human lover and addressed a god with them instead. What the Sangam corpus itself shows is an older layer: a religious world of local deities tied to terrain, of possession and of the hero stone raised for a warrior, before the great Shaiva and Vaishnava devotional movements gave Tamil religion the shape it now has.