Leo Nelson-Jones

The Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ, also known as the Kaḷaviyal, is a treatise of sixty cūttiram-s on akam poetics. Probably composed in the fifth or sixth century CE, it is the first treatise devoted exclusively to the exposition of akam poetics and the second-oldest extant Tamil technical treatise of any kind. It marks a turning point in the development of the field, being the first text to move away from the previous systems of tiṇai-based analysis, found in the Tolkāppiyam Akattiṇaiyiyal, and from the speaker-based analysis of poetic situations found in the Tolkāppiyam Kaḷaviyal and Kāṟpiyal. Instead, it presents those situations organised by theme into a loose sequence.

Towards the end of the first millennium, perhaps in the eighth or ninth century, an extensive prose commentary on the text was composed. Attributed to Nakkīrar (also referred to as Nakkīraṉār and Nakkīraṉ), it is the earliest extant Tamil commentary and the earliest known example of Tamil literary prose. It is also central to the subsequent tradition of akam poetics. In it, the akam poetic situations are expanded into a detailed serial narrative, charting the course of the relationship between the unnamed hero and heroine and accounting for the reasons behind their actions. That structure became the blueprint for a major school of poetics for roughly the next half-millennium.

Beyond its place in the history of Tamil poetic theory, the commentary is key to the way Tamil literary society has conceived of itself. In the commentary on the first cūttiram, the legend of the three Tamil Caṅkams is first told, containing the first enumeration of the old literary corpus we now commonly call ‘the Caṅkam corpus’. To illustrate the situations set out in the base text, the commentary consistently quotes a work called the Pāṇṭikkōvai, here quoted for the first time and at greatest length, and known primarily from these quotations. The Pāṇṭikkōvai is the earliest known example of the kōvai genre.

This project will produce a new critical edition of both the base text and the commentary, with a critical apparatus, and an annotated English translation of each. The edition will appear in print and as a hypertext edition giving access to fully encoded transcriptions of all the manuscripts that transmit the Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ and its commentary, and will be integrated into a network of such editions being prepared for the Tamilex project. It will also include a systematic and literary-historical analysis of both base text and commentary, continuing the research I began in my PhD dissertation: a critical edition, translation, and study of the Tamiḻneṟi Viḷakkam.