Көне Тамил-Жейн дастаны: Білезік жөніндегі әңгіме

Ancient Tamil Hindu–Jain epic

Cilappatikāram (, , IPA: ʧiləppət̪ikɑːrəm, lit. "the Tale of an Anklet"), also referred to as Silappathikaram is the earliest Tamil epic. It is a poem of 5,730 lines in almost entirely akaval (aciriyam) meter. The epic is a tragic love story of an ordinary couple, Kannaki and her husband Kovalan. The Cilappatikaram has more ancient roots in the Tamil bardic tradition, as Kannaki and other characters of the story are mentioned or alluded to in the Sangam literature such as in the Naṟṟiṇai and later texts such as the Kovalam Katai. It is attributed to a prince turned monk Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ, and was probably composed in the 5th or 6th century CE. The Cilappatikaram is set in a flourishing seaport city of the early Chola kingdom. Kannaki and Kovalan are a newly married couple, in love, and living in bliss. Over time, Kovalan meets Matavi (Madhavi) – a courtesan. He falls for her, leaves Kannaki and moves in with Matavi. He spends lavishly on her. Kannaki is heartbroken, but as the chaste woman, she waits despite her husband's unfaithfulness. During the festival for Indra, the rain god, there is a singing competition. Kovalan sings a poem about a woman who hurt her lover. Matavi then sings a song about a man who betrayed his lover. Each interprets the song as a message to the other. Kovalan feels Matavi is unfaithful to him and leaves her. Kannaki is still waiting for him. She takes him back. Kannagi and Kovalan leave the city and travel to Madurai, the capital of the Pandya kingdom. Kovalan is penniless and destitute. He confesses his deceit to Kannagi. She forgives him and tells him the hurt his adultery caused her. Then she encourages her husband to rebuild their life together and gives him one of her jeweled anklets to sell to raise starting capital. Kovalan sells it to a merchant, but the merchant falsely frames him as having stolen the anklet from the queen. The king arrests Kovalan and then executes him, without the due checks and processes of justice. When Kovalan does not return home, Kannagi goes searching for him. She learns what has happened. She protests the injustice and then proves Kovalan's innocence by throwing in the court the other jeweled anklet of the pair. The king accepts his folly. Kannagi curses the king and the people of Madurai, tearing off her breast and throwing it at the gathered public. The king dies. The society that had made her suffer, suffers in retribution as the city of Madurai is burnt to the ground because of her curse.]] The Tamil tradition attributes Cilappatikaram to the Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ ("the venerable ascetic prince"), also spelled Ilango Adigal. He is reputed to be as Jain Monk and the brother of Chera king Chenkuttuvan, whose family and rule are described in the Fifth Ten of the Patiṟṟuppattu, a poem of the Sangam literature. In it or elsewhere, however, there is no evidence that the famous king had a brother. V. Kanakasabhai opined that Ilango was a mon of nirgrantha sect of Jain. The Sangam poems never mention Ilango Adigal, the epic or the name of any other author for the epic. The Ilango Adigal name appears in a much later dated patikam (prologue) attached to the poem, and the authenticity of this attribution is doubtful. According to Gananath Obeyesekere, the story of the purported Cilappadikaram author Ilango Adigal as the brother of a famous Chera king "must be later interpolations", something that was a characteristic feature of early literature. The mythical third section about gods meeting Kannaki after Kovalan's death, in the last Canto, mentions a legend about a prince turned into a monk. This has been conflated as the story of the attributed author as a witness. However, little factual details about the real author(s) or evidence exist. Given the fact that older Tamil texts mention and allude to the Kannaki's tragic love story, states Parthasarathy, the author was possibly just a redactor of the oral tradition and the epic poem was not a product of his creative genius. The author was possibly a Jaina scholar, as in several parts of the epic, the key characters of the epic meet a Jaina monk or nun. The epic's praise of the Vedas, Brahmins, inclusion of temples, Hindu gods and goddesses and ritual worship give the text a cosmopolitan character, and to some scholars' evidence to propose that author was not necessarily a Jaina ascetic. According to Ramachandra Dikshitar, the ascetic prince legend about Ilango Adigal as included in the last canto of Cilappadikaram is odd. In the epic, Ilango Adigal attends a Vedic sacrifice with the Chera king Cenkuttuvan after the king brings back the Himalayan stone to make a statue of Kannaki. If the author Ilango Adigal was a Jain ascetic and given our understanding of Jainism's historic view on the Vedas and Vedic sacrifices, why would he attend a function like the Vedic sacrifice, states Ramachandra Dikshitar. This, and the fact that the epic comfortably praises Shaiva and Vaishnava lifestyle, festivals, gods and goddesses, has led some scholars to propose that author of this epic was a Hindu. Ilango Adigal has been suggested to be a contemporary of Sattanar, the author of Manimekalai. However, evidence for such suggestions has been lacking.

In the modern era, some Tamil scholars have linked the Ilango Adigal legend about he is being the brother of king Cenkuttuvan, as a means to date this text. A Chera king Cenkuttuvan is tentatively placed in the 100–250 CE, and the traditionalists, therefore, place the text to the same period. In 1939, for example, the Tamil literature scholar Ramachandra Dikshitar presented a number of events mentioned within the text and thereby derived that the text was composed about 171 CE. According to Dhandayudham, the epic should be dated to between the 3rd and 5th century. Ramachandra Dikshitar analysis that the epic was composed before the Pallava dynasty emerged as a major power in the 6th century is accepted by most scholars, because there is no mention of the highly influential Pallavas in the epic. His chronological estimate of 171 CE for Cilappadikaram cannot be far from the real date of composition, states Alain Daniélou – a French Indologist who translated the Cilappadikaram in 1965. Daniélou states that the epic – along with the other four Tamil epics – were all composed sometime between the last part of the Sangam and the subsequent centuries, that is "3rd to 7th century". Other scholars, such as Kamil Zvelebil – a Tamil literature and history scholar, state that the legends in the epic itself are a weak foundation for dating the text. A stronger foundation is the linguistics, events and other sociological details in the text when compared to those in other Tamil literature, new words and grammatical forms, and the number of non Tamil loan words in the text. The Sangam era texts of the 100–250 CE period are strikingly different in style, language structure, the beliefs, the ideologies, and the customs portrayed in the Cilappathikram, which makes the early dating implausible. Further, the epic's style, structure and other details are quite similar to the texts composed centuries later. These point to a much later date. According to Zvelebil, the Cilappathikram that has survived into the modern era "cannot have been composed before the 5th to 6th century". According to other scholars, such as Iyengar, the first two sections of the epic were likely the original epic, and third mythical section after the destruction of Madurai is likely a later extrapolation, an addendum that introduces a mix of Jaina, Hindu and Buddhist stories and practices, including the legend about the ascetic prince. The hero (Kovalan) is long dead, and the heroine (Kannaki) follows him shortly thereafter into heaven, as represented in the early verses of the third section. This part adds nothing to the story, is independent, is likely to be of a much later century. Other scholars, including Zvelebil, state that this need not necessarily be so. The third section covers the third of three major kingdoms of the ancient Tamil region, the first section covered the Cholas and the second the Pandya. Further, states Zvelebil, the deification of Kannaki keeps her theme active and is consistent with the Tamil and the Indian tradition of merging a legend into its ideas of rebirth and endless existence. The language, and style of the third section is "perfectly homogeneous" with the first two, it does not seem to be the work of multiple authors, and therefore the entire epic should be considered a complete masterpiece. Fred Hardy, in contrast, states that some sections have clearly and cleverly been interpolated into the main epic, and these additions may be of 7th to 8th century. Daniélou concurs that the epic may have been "slightly" reshaped and enlarged in the centuries after the original epic was composed, but the epic as it has survived into the modern age is quite homogeneous and lacks evidence of additions by multiple authors. Iravatham Mahadevan states that the mention of a weekday (Friday) in the text and the negative portrayal of a Pandya king narrows the probable date of composition to between 450 and 550 CE. This is because the concept of weekdays did not exist in India until the 5th century CE, and the Pandya dynasty only regained power in 550 CE, thus meaning that Jains could freely criticise them without any threat to their lives.

The Tamil epic has many references and allusions to the Sanskrit epics and puranic legends. For example, it describes the fate of Poompuhar suffering the same agony as experienced by Ayodhya when Rama leaves for exile to the forest as instructed by his father. The 17th cannot of the epic explains the Beauty and greatness of Lord Vishnu with respect to his forms and Various incarnations. Vishnu was the deity most mentioned in Tamil Sangam literature and is said to be one of the favourite gods of the people who lived in the Sangam time. The epic states that "Vain are the ears which do not hear the glory of Rama who is Vishnu, Vain are the eyes which do not see the dark hued Lord, the great God, the Mayavan Vishnu, Vain is the tongue that will not praise him who triumphed over the deceit of the foolish schemer Kamsa (Krishna), Vain is the tongue which does not say ‘Narayana’. According to Zvelebil, the Cilappatikaram mentions the Mahabharata and calls it the "great war", just like the story was familiar to the Sangam era poets too as evidenced in Puram 2 and Akam 233. One of the poets is nicknamed as "The Peruntevanar who sang the Bharatam [Mahabharatam]", once again confirming that the Tamil poets by the time Cilappatikaram was composed were intimately aware of the Sanskrit epics, the literary structure and significance of Mahakavyas genre. To be recognized as an accomplished extraordinary poet, one must compose a great kavya has been the Tamil scholarly opinion prior to the modern era, states Zvelebil. These were popular and episodes from such maha kavya were performed as a form of dance drama in public. The Cilappatikaram is a Tamil epic that belongs to the pan India kavya epic tradition. The Tamil tradition and medieval commentators such as Mayilaintar have included the Cilappatikaram as one of the aimperunkappiyankal, which literally means "five great kavyas". According to D. Dennis Hudson – a World Religions and Tamil literature scholar, the Cilappatikaram is the earliest and first complete Tamil reference to Pillai (Nila, Nappinnai, Radha), who is described in the epic as the cowherd lover of Krishna. According to the Indologist Friedhelm Hardy, this canto and others in the Tamil epic reflect a culture where "Dravidian, Tamil, Sanskrit, Brahmin, Buddhist, Jain and many other influences" had already fused into a composite whole in the South Indian social consciousness. According to Zvelebil, the Cilappadikaram is the "first literary expression and the first ripe fruit of the Aryan Dravidian synthesis in Tamilnadu".

In early 20th century, the Cilappadikaram became a rallying basis for some Tamil nationalists based in Sri Lanka and colonial era Madras Presidency. The epic is considered as the "first consciously national work" and evidence of the fact that the "Tamils had by that time [mid 1st millennium CE] attained nationhood", or the first expression of a sense of Tamil cultural integrity and Tamil dominance. This view is shared by some modernist Tamil playwrights, movie makers, and politicians. According to Norman Cutler, this theme runs in recent works such as the 1962 re rendering of the Cilappadikaram into Kannakip Puratcikkappiyam by Paratitacan, and the 1967 play Cilappatikaram: Natakak Kappiyam by M. Karunanidhi – an influential politician and a former Chief Minister behind the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Dravidian movement. These versions, some by avowed atheists, have retold the Cilappadikaram epic "to propagate their ideas of [Tamil] cultural identity", along with a hostility to "the North, the racially different Aryans, the Brahmins", and the so called "alien culture", according to Prabha Rani and Vaidyanathan Shivkumar. The Tamil nationalistic inspiration derived from the Cilappadikaram is a selective reading and appropriation of the great epic, according to Cutler. It cherrypicks and brackets some rhetorical and ideological elements from the epic but ignores the rest that make the epic into a complete masterpiece. A review by George L. Hart, a professor of Tamil language at the University of California, Berkeley, "the Silappatikaram is to Tamil what the Iliad and Odyssey are to Greek — its importance would be difficult to overstate."

The first translation of Cilappadikaram was published in 1939 by V R Ramachandra Dikshitar (Oxford University Press). In 1965, another translation of the epic was published by Alain Danielou. R. Parthasarathy's English translation was published in 1993 by Columbia University Press and reprinted in 2004 by Penguin Books. Paula Saffire of Butler University state that Parthasarathy's translation is "indispensable" and more suited for scholarly studies due to its accuracy, while Danielou's translation was more suited to those seeking the epic's spirit and an easier to enjoy poem. The Parthasarathy translation won the 1996 A. K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation. The epic has been translated into French by Alain Daniélou and RN Desikan in 1961, into Czech by Kamil Zvelebil in 1965, and into Russian by JJ Glazov in 1966.

Veteran Tamil writer Jeyamohan rewrote the whole epic into a novel as Kotravai in 2005. The novel having adapted the original plot and characters, it revolves around the ancient South Indian traditions, also trying to fill the gaps in the history using multiple narratives. H. S. Shivaprakash a leading poet and playwright in Kannada has also re narrated a part from the epic namely Madurekanda. It has also been re narrated in Hindi by famous Hindi writer Amritlal Nagar in his novel Suhag Ke Nupur which was published in 1960. He had also written a 1.25 hour radio play on the story which was broadcast on Aakashvani in 1952.