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Travels of the Ancient Tamil Bards. An Outline of the āṟṟuppaṭai genre
The paper outlines a well known habit of Tamil bards (poets, singers, performers) to undertake journeys in search of rich and generous patrons. Such journeys were a part of what was termed ‘a panegyric ritual’ described by me earlier. Often bards met each other in the middle of the way and one of them gave advices as to where one should go to find a proper donator. Thus a poetic form āṟṟupaṭai (“stepping on a route” or “invitation to a route”) was formed and became a productive genre of the old and medieval Tamil poetry. Several small examples of āṟṟupaṭai poems are found in the famous anthology of heroic poetry Puṟanānūṟu (“Four hundred poems on heroic theme”) but the genre fledges up in the big poems collected under the name Pattuppāṭṭu (“Ten Songs”). The main feature of these poems (four out of ten) is a detailed description of the route the poet should follow. This feature together with some other poetical conventions (addressing a fellow-poet, sending him to a certain person, formulating a message he is to deliver) makes one see an undoubted similarity with Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta. In the present state of a comparative research in Tamil and Sanskrit literatures it is not possible to come to a resolute conclusion about possible interchanges and influences between them in a given case, but the literary data presented here may be taken into consideration.