13 October 2026

Of Priests and Kings

Traces of Vedic Religion in the Caṅkam Literature

Brahmins keep turning up around the crowned kings of the Caṅkam corpus: performing sacrifices, receiving gifts, and being present at moments that matter for a king's reputation. Vedic learning and ritual are tied again and again to royal prestige, and in one case, a king even withdraws from public life in old age in a manner close to the Vedic āśrama system. This paper counts how often Old Tamil words connected to Vedic ritual and learning appear in royal contexts, and checks whether this changes across the corpus's internal chronology. It then asks a more basic question: could a Tamil king, standing outside the Vedic social order, actually be accepted into it as a sacrificer, and what would that have required of him? Beyond what the poems themselves say, the paper also looks at inscriptions and external testimony that point in the same direction. It closes with some thoughts on how this bears on the standing of the three "crowned" kings and the timing of the Caṅkam corpus's canonisation.

The Tamilex monthly seminar will take place on 13 October 2026, at 10:30 CET (14:00 IST). This will be hybrid event; for the Zoom link, please contact Charles Li(charles.li"AT"uni-hamburg.de).