Recreating Daṇḍin’s Styles in Tamil

In Sanskrit poetics, the defining characteristics of poetry, its very life breath, are the guṇas, ‘qualities’. They make up the phonetic and syntactic fabric of poetic language without which there would be nothing to further to ornament. Many of these intimate features are by necessity specific to the Sanskrit language and defined in terms of its peculiar grammar including phonology and morphology. In the present article, I will describe what happens to four of these guṇas when they are transferred to the Tamil language in the Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram, a close adaptation of Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa. I wish to demonstrate that the Tamil Taṇṭi did not thoughtlessly accept the Sanskrit model but sought, in some cases, to redefine the qualities so that they are meaningful in the context of Tamil grammar and its poetological tradition. A partial translation of the Tamil text is included.