The Blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) has hogged the limelight since last weekend when Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Baba Siddique was shot dead in Mumbai. Though the media reportage in the wake of the murder has pointed towards the Bishnois of Rajasthan who hold the blackbuck as sacred, the antelope is found across the Indian Subcontinent and held sacred by people in other regions too.
One such region is Tamil Nadu, in the deep south of the country. At first thought, one would not associate the blackbuck with the state. But evidence of it featuring in the lives of people goes back to Sangam literature, the corpus of poetry produced by the ancient Tamil people in past millennia.
The landscape of the ancient Tamil country was divided into five thinais as per geographical location. These geographical types play an important role in Sangam poems.
These include Kurinji (mountains), Mullai (forest or pasture), Marudam (farmland), Neydal (seashore) and Palai (desert or wasteland).
Writing in the portal Tamil Literature in 2018, P Aruna Devi noted that Sangam poems “deploy nature and its surrounding landscape as a framework to express human love. Landscape assumes the status of a strong raw material that is moulded to project the perceptions of man on the inextricable relationship that exists between the lovers both at premarital stage and after marriage”.
Sangam poems are divided into the genres of Aham which constitute themes related to love and relationships. Puram on the other hand, is related to themes of war, heroism, valour, ethics, benevolence, philanthropy, social life, and customs, writes Aruna Devi.
The blackbuck (Iralai Maan in Tamil) features in the Kurunthokai, a collection of classic love poems of Sangam literature. The poems are about love and longing felt by men and women in the Sangam period.
Award-winning translator Vaidehi Herbert has translated several masterpieces of Sangam literature into English. Below is her translation of poem 317 from the Kurunthokai:
Will your lover be content to
stay away from you in this cold
blustery season, when clouds are
ruined and chased to the south
by the heavy, cold northern winds,
the man from the lofty mountains,
where a proud, black marai stag,
who loves his delicate mate,
grazes on sweetly sour gooseberries
and drinks water from fresh springs,
as its hot breath makes the surface,
nectar-laden flowers to tremble?
He will not stay away from you.
Govindaswamy Rajagopal, associate Professor, teaching Tamil and Comparative Indian Literature in the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, University of Delhi, has written on Tamil Literature that “the plants, birds and beasts depicted in Sangam love poems in one way or another symbolize something beyond their concrete meaning appearing explicitly in the poems.”
While heroes are usually described with qualities similar to powerful beings like honey bees, hawks, buffalos, male pigeons, stallions, male elephants, tigers, lions etc., “heroines were referred to by way of soft and gentle flowers or plants like lotus, water-lily, jasmine, Strobilantheskunthiana, birds like parrot, pigeon; or animals like cow, doe, she-elephant etc”.
Another instance of the blackbuck in the lives of the ancient Tamils is as the vahana or vehicle of the Goddess Korravai, the ancient Tamil equivalent of Diana, the Great Huntress and the goddess of hunting in Roman tradition. Like Diana, Korravai is the goddess of war and hunting and rides a blackbuck.
This means that hunting and eating blackbuck meat is sacrilege, even in modern-day Tamil Nadu. The animals are most famously found in the Point Calimere Wildlife and Bird Sanctuary. The sanctuary, created in 1967 for the conservation of blackbuck, is located at the tip of the Nagapattinam district, where the Palk Strait meets the Bay of Bengal.