The Ecology of Friendship: Early Tamil Landscapes of Irony and Voice

This article is a brief study of four female characters—a pair of daughters and a pair of mothers—who give voice to the majority of the poems in the Aiṅkuṟunūṟu, an Old Tamil anthology of love poetry from the early decades of the third century CE. Taking cues from recent ethnographies on friendship in South Asia and from Alan Bray’s compelling study of friendship in modern Britain, I will examine the ways in which bonds between female friends are expressed in the dense natural imagery so characteristic of Old Tamil convention, most often found within the poems in double entendre and in brief, almost allegorical statements. I focus primarily on the figure of the tōḻi, the ‘girlfriend’, who speaks with greatest frequency in these poems as she acts as the mediator between the talaivi (the ‘heroine’) and the talaivaṉ (the ‘hero’) through every stage of their romantic relationship, and also between the talaivi and her mothers—the cevili-t-ta −y or ‘foster mother’ and the naṟṟa −y, the ‘biological mother’ of the talaivi. In passing, I will briefly contrast this quartet with the voices of their corresponding male characters, which we hear especially within the context of the pa −caṟai, the ‘war camp’. I will analyze how the voices of the characters change—both in content and in register—according to shifts in poetic settings, and will discuss what these shifts can tell us about aesthetic representations of female friendship in early South India. Through a study of the conversational settings among these characters, I will illustrate how friendship, intimacy and love are conveyed in language and rhetorical gesture.