In fact, vancippattu or boat songs do not strictly follow the vanci meter, but alternate between six-beat vencir apt for chanting and vanci meter.

POETRY OF HIERARCHIC OIKOS

If a kinship relationship ramifies both horizontally and vertically, political relationship is configured only vertically in a hierarchical manner. In the hierarchic or political oikos the members stand in a hierarchic relationship, with the sacred at the top, the humans in the middle and nature at the bottom. Now, the oikos or tin@ai is no more a family, but a political unit where power is channeled only in a vertical direction. The original familial tinai undergoes a double transformation in Tamil society. While tinai as the larger social order has given way to the Aryan varna, with a typical hierarchical structure, tin@ai as a specific habitat has shrunk to a political domain such as one involving a tax collector and tax payer.

By attributing supremacy to the sacred, distance between the humans and the sacred was effected, confining the latter to a special space deemed holy.

Similarly, the human world was also imagined as a hierarchically ordered one, with the superior ruler, and the inferior ruled. The distance between the two was clearly determined when the ruler was confined to a special space, namely, the court/ palace, and the ruled to the space outside of it.

Like the sacred and the human, nature was also hierarchized. If in the integrative oikos different types of land (such as the mountains, scrub land, arid tracts, riverine plains and sea coast) were all regarded as equally important and unique, in the hierarchic oikos they were all reduced to two basic types – wetland and dry land – which stood in a hierarchic relationship. Wetland was considered more auspicious, productive and useful than dry land. Even animals were ranged in a hierarchic order – the domestic and the wild.

Among the Tamils, monarchies of cerar, colar and pantiyar affirmed the hierarchic oikos even as the poetry patronised by their courts and produced by their subjects did. The Saivite and the Vaishnavite saints produced significant crop of such poetry during the time of pallavar. Their poetry identified special spaces known as talam, worthy of worship and poetic celebration, which were located usually in wetland lying along the rivers ka$veri and vaikai. If these sacred spaces were right at the top of the hierarchic ladder, the dwelling space of people known as natu was in the middle, leaving the bottom for uninhabitable, wasteland known as katu.

POETRY OF ANARCHIC OIKOS

The hierarchic oikos began to rupture when the supremacy of the sacred became dubitable with an increased emphasis on rational systems (like logic and science) and materialist ideologies in lieu of (non-materialist) religious doctrines. Rational scrutiny was necessary to determine the utilitarian value of the members of the oikos. In theistic societies, the sacred was considered useful for certain purposes and for that reason acknowledged and invoked in ceremonies and customary practices. Nature, on the other hand, was more tangibly useful. With investment, it paid off considerable returns. Humans were also looked upon as resources and assets. In short, the new oikos was anarchic in spirit but economic in practice. It was rather a market with a shift from the political hierarchy to an economic negotiation. It was reason that controlled the negotiations of the market oikos. It helped accumulate knowledge about the sacred, nature and man and also in working out strategies to exploit these to human advantage.

In India the rationalisation and the subsequent marketisation of the oikos began with the colonial development project of the British when they initiated the Industrial Revolution in this country by introducing megatechnology in the areas of iron and steel, automobile transport, cotton processing, power plants and huge dams.

The shift from the hierarchical oikos to the anarchic oikos could be seen as the beginnings of modernity in Tamil. But anti-hierarchical tendencies are not visible in all social institutions (family, polity, economy, and communication) simultaneously. The first signs of these tendencies appear in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the institution of family as evident in the writings of mayuram vetanayakam pillai. He challenged the earlier feudalistic and hierarchical gender relations and revolutionised the institution of family. Besides challenging gender hierarchy, pillai also challenged a much subtler hierarchy in the domain of metaphysics, a hierarchy of the spiritual world and the secular world. Though pillai adhered to the Catholic Christian faith, he subscribed to a theology, which regarded the spiritual and secular world as interdependent, and equally important. This led him to sing of man in the middle of these everyday harsh realities, rather than in an ideal, poetic world. A parallel could be drawn with the poetic project of Wordsworth as set forth in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. One would also see that in pillai’s search for the rational foundations for religion, he was engaged in a constant rationalisation of Christianity more for his own enlightenment.

However, it was not for pillai to challenge hierarchy in the domain of polity. That was incumbent on his followers like cuppiramaniya parati and his contemporaries in their organised efforts to challenge the British rule.

The poetry of the anarchic oikos has undergone three distinguishable phases of change. It entered its initial phase when the writers looked upon nationalism, industrialism, and rationalism as forces that could liberate them from the hierarchic oikos. The patriotic poets like cuppiramaniya partai, paratitacan, tecika vinayakam pillai upheld the cause of freeing India from the clutches of the British rule. If political liberation was envisaged as freedom from a hierarchical order, economic liberation meant breaking away from the hierarchically structured feudal economy and adopting industrialism promoted by Britain.

Again, liberation in worldview consisted in problematising the belief in God and the notion of a divinely energized world. This resulted in advancing the cause of reason by discrediting mythology and superstition in favour of either atheism or rational theology or materialist ideologies like Marxism or socialism.

Tamil verse saw the next phase when the poets who challenged the colonial project in one way or another probed the anarchic oikos. Poets were neither blind to the contradictions and weaknesses in the new political order, namely, democracy, nor in the new industrial economic order nor in the rationalism courted zealously by poets. The disenchantment with democracy is quite transparent in N. piccamurtti’s ‘tecap paravai’ (1969):