Writers Jam

This is an over deep, hyper specific analysis of a 5 liner poem, that I wrote sleeplessly yesterday. I think it's banger and that I ate. Hope you leave this entry with something to remember it by.

யாயும் ஞாயும் யாரா கியரோ
எந்தையும் நுந்தையும் எம்முறைக் கேளிர்
யானும் நீயும் எவ்வழி யறிதும்
செம்புலப் பெயனீர் போல
அன்புடை நெஞ்சம் தாங்கலந் தனவே.

Set in the context of Sangam era Tamil society, this small poem is one of the most widely replicated and reproduced pieces in the Tamil literary canon. I can name atleast 4 Tamil cinema songs that have lines borrowed directly from these 5 small lines. It has permeated culture in the same way that it describes love in itself.

It is written in the Kurinji thinai, or the mood of the mountains to be very literal. To the uninitiated, Tamil poems are divided into 5 mandated poetic landscapes or vibes based on the type of content that they handle and the ecological setting. Kurinji is the hills and the areas related with hills and deals with young love. Love with mountains in the way, valleys to cross, and hills to climb. Love that is clandestine, scandalous, and kept under wraps, not because it's immoral or wrong but because of its purity and devotion.

Tamil society was never shy about love out in public, with almost every other poem in the literary canon being romantic poems or something to do with capital R Romanticism. Marriages in a pre-Sanskritized culture were an individual decision made out of mutual love rather than family conveniences. With Tamil society moving from a free, hunter gatherer society to an organized, agrarian society during this age, there were increasing restrictions on love.

While there was still no strict codification and enforcement of caste-based endogamy yet, there was a certain hush-hush nature about loving someone of your own will. In poems written in these changing times, there were conventions of love being secret rendezvous out in the moonlight that end in a lawful union that's societally respectable. Marriages, in turn, transformed into an arranged affair between family friends or family and become a family-wide or community-wide spectacle.

The kurinji thinai combines these themes with themes of being loyal to the family and respecting the bounds of honour of the family you live in. In kurinji thinai, you don't speak to the beloved directly, you sneak glances out in public, you give gifts through your friends, and you always come back home even if it's pitch dark.

Mountains are also notoriously dangerous, especially at nights, which is the time associated with kurinji. So there's a kind of dashing bravery that is lent to the lovers who go against the grain to feed their hearts. With monsoons being particularly heavy in the Tamil region, it has a tendency to keep people in their homes, and lovers apart. Which means, there's also much pining to be done at the edges of waterfalls, or lakes, comparing random flora and fauna to the beloved. The Kamba Ramayanam also takes some cues from this and makes the period in Kishkindha somewhat monsoon oriented, so that it sets a nice stage for our protagonist, Rama, to wax poetry about how much he misses his wife.

Kurinji is also one of the most ecologically complex settings with an abundance of nature at its most freest. Raw honey drips from honeycombs that weigh down slender branches. Elephants, snakes, and tigers roam about, looking for young heros to swallow. The land is always wet, misleading, and casually slipping the hero to mortal danger. It is wild, it's free, it's natural, and it's dangerously bold. It's a threat to polite, civilized society. It is love.

In this poem, the hero tries to assuade his girl about the nature of their love, as she's fearing that he'll leave her over the monsoon of being apart.

He starts, "Who are our mothers to each other? Our fathers are not related to each other. We've still somehow come to know each other. Like how water takes to red-earth, our hearts have taken to each other".

There's this underlying current of both the people being active participants with family listed on both sides of the parties involved in this relationship. To go a bit more deeper,

Yaayum gnaayum yaaragiyaro- Who is my mom to yours? (They're not friends)
Endhaiyum nundhaiyum emmurai kelir- How is my dad even related to yours? (They're not even the same clan)

Arranged marriages in Tamil society tends to be within the family, or through family friends. Here, consanguineous marriages tend to go cross gender. That is, you can only marry a cousin who's your dad's sister's child/ mom's brother's child. You never marry your dad's brother's child/ mom's sister's child. Why? Because married women stay with the extended in-laws, complete with the brothers of the groom complete their families living under the same roof. The cousins grow up as siblings, and are not conditioned to look at each other as marriage material.

In an imaginary future that our lovers do get married, people WILL ask how they know each other. You have to either be friends or related. But you know them to not be so because the mothers are strangers to each other in the first place. So by asking the girl how his dad is related to her dad, the hero points out the absurdity in how they have no business marrying each other. Even if someone were to argue that they fell in love because they were relatives, you never marry your dad's brother's children. And if this family was lenient enough to let the kids to do so, they're not even related like that to make it plausible to outsiders.

Yaanum neeyum evvazhi aridhum- In someway we've come to know each other

The use of the word "vazhi" or "way" is somewhat telling of how they met. They went out of their way. They met somewhere where they usually don't go. On an off-day, in a random temple that they never frequent. More likely at a temple festival that brings the entire town together, acting as a common setting and reason precedent for young people to mingle freely.

Sembula peyalneer pola- like rain on red earth

The showstopper line. The line that gave the previously anonymous poet his eponynomous name, Sembulapeyalneerar AKA "the guy who wrote the rain on red earth poem".

This is beautiful imagery in a way that has to be experienced. Anyone who's been to the hills during the rains know that the red soil up there gets mad slippery. And it stains. It stains everything and it's such an effort to clean it. Even when the water evaporates after the downpour, the soil is persistant in the floor. It never dries out and crumbles completely. You've a red soil stain on your floor? Tough luck, you may get the soil and water out, somehow, separately. But the stain of the presence of the soil and the water intermingled, remains. The water that flows from red-stained earth, is also tinged red. It never once again becomes clear. The only perennial river in Tamil country, the Thamirabharani AKA "copper-colored leaf-river", is named so due to the water seeming so fiery due to carrying the red soil within itself during its course.

The sub-text is that both parties have been changed, their natures transmuted forever, due to love. They can never go back to their old lives, unchanged, untinged by their experiences with each other. They are inseperable, even with their distances. This is taken further with the dichotomy of the distances between the earth and the sky from which the two involved parties, the soil and the rain emerge. This is their only point of contact. They were no one to each other before. But they've been together, indifferentiable from one another, greater than the sum of their parts. And now, they can't be free of each other's influence even if they were somehow to be separated physically, using external forces.

The soil is parched for flowing water, starving for some moisture to dampen its core. The rain is urgent for steady ground, rushing to reach stability. They greedily revel in each other's sudden introduction in their lives. Hearts and minds converge into one, even when they've known each other for such a short time. They consume and subsume the other in themselves, drinking in the glory of being someone with somebody who compliments and understands them so well. They become a singular entity, tainted, and unable to extricate one from the other. No marks for identification of separate bodies, hand-in-hand, bodies crashing into one another.

Anbudai nenjam thaam kalanthanave- The loving hearts have come together to become one

The word "thaam" does some major heavylifting for the whole poem and makes it an important representation of choice in ancient love. The word "thaam" and "thaan" are often used interchangeably in common parlance to denote something that happens by itself. But a single letter, actually has the power to change the intention behind the whole thing, that often gets lost in translation.

For example, "Avargal thaanagave mudivu eduthanar" vs "Avargal thaamagave mudivu eduthanar". On first look, both the sentences convey that the parties involved made a choice on their own. But the first sentence has a tone of it being predestined, monotonous, out-of-their-control, and involuntary. It is used when you do something out of routine, not realizing that you're doing it, a natural choice.

The second sentence however implies a decision that was made to undertake that specific action. It implies the existence of choices, an intention to make a choice between two outcomes, but more importantly, the agency to make said choices. It is a stage direction that tells you that these characters purposefully took this decision, and they do it so flawlessly, like second-nature.

This is more evident in a song version of this poem, Yaayum from the movie Sagaa. There, the singers sing the line as anbudai nenjam dhaan kalandhanave, rather than thaam. In this song, the intention is lost, and the joining of hearts, becomes something that's inevitable, something that's a given. It has the ability of being taken for granted if not preserved. Also the subtle pronounciation of dhaan instead of thaan, while slightly imperceptible to a foreign ear, makes a world of difference. Dhaan is often used in sentences such as "(noun) dhaan" in a way that is like the word "just" in "it's just a (noun)". It conveys the commonplace nature of something, something that's just… there already. It's sort of demeaning as well. You wouldn't introduce your partner as "it's just my partner". It sounds like you're waving them off. It sounds like they're a second-thought, non-incidental to the situation on hand.

By giving the lovers this property of choice, using thaam the poet gives them agency. The lovers choose to choose each other. They choose to be so intertangled with each other. They choose to go from strangers to inseperable. They choose to stay as one entity in their journey of flowing along the mountains.