Iraiyanar Akapporul
The Akapporul consists of a set of sixty nūṟpās – terse epigrams written in verse which codify rules – attributed to Iraiyanar.
The received text of the accompanied by a long prose treatise on akam poetics attributed to Nakkiraṉār, which is structured as a commentary on the nūṟpās, but significantly expands on them and introduces several new ideas.
Finally, the work also contains the oldest account of the Sangam legend, which has played a significant role in modern Tamil consciousness.
The verses show a number of similarities with the poruḷatikāram section of the Tolkappiyam – an older manual on Tamil grammar, poetics and prosody – both in its vocabulary and the core concepts it discusses.
[2] Takahashi suggests that this work was originally composed as a practical handbook for writing love poetry in accordance with the conventions of the akam tradition.
Zvelebil and Marr suggest that the author was a poet or grammarian, possibly called Iraiyanar, and that the text itself had probably been stored in the temple at Madurai under Shiva's altar, where it was rediscovered in the time of Ukkiraperuvaluti.
Marr takes the view that the similarities between the nūṟpās and the poruḷatikāram indicate that the two were broadly contemporaneous, and drew upon common poetic ideas and definitions.
He also uses stories, anecdotes and legends to illustrate specific points, and draws extensively on the then-existing corpus of Tamil akam poetry to provide examples of the poetical techniques he discusses.
[6] The commentary records that it was transmitted orally for eight generations, until it was finally committed to writing by Nilakantanar of Musiri, a tradition which Zvelebil and Marr find credible.
[7] Early scholars, such as S. Vaiyapuri Pillai, dated the commentary to a period as late as the 10th–12th century, on the basis that the author appeared to be familiar with the 10th-century Civakacintamani.
Modern scholars, however, tend to view these as later interpolations into the text, and date the commentary itself to a period closer to the 8th century on the basis of its relationship with the Pāṇṭikkōvai.
[8] The third component of the text is the Pāṇṭikkōvai, a work containing a series of related akam poems about the seventh century Pandiyan king, Nedumaran.
A new translation, with annotations, is currently under preparation by a team of scholars including Jean-Luc Chevillard, Thomas Lehmann and Takanobu Takahashi, and was scheduled to be published in 2008.
[needs update] Iraiyanar Akapporul is concerned with setting out the literary conventions that govern Tamil love poetry of the akam tradition.
In addition, each poem must consist of actual words spoken by one of the persons involved in the relationship, without any commentary by an omniscient narrator.
Unlike the old akam tradition, which mainly focused on short poems dealing with a single, detached scene in the life of a pair of lovers, these works sought to depict a complete story.
Works of the ciṟṟilakkiyam tradition, however, sought to do so on a less grand scale, through longer series of related poems which described successive episodes that cumulatively chart the entire course of a relationship.
By chronologically ordering the isolated moments which Tamil akam poetry, and describing how they fit into a serialised plot, the text – and in particular, Nakkiranar's commentary – related the emergent ciṟṟilakkiyam tradition to the ancient akam tradition, and thereby helped create a new approach to literature, on the basis on which a plethora of new literary forms developed in succeeding centuries.
The very last example of akam poetry, written before the tradition was suppressed by seventeenth century religious revivalism, is a 600-verse kōvai, composed by Kachchaiyappar Sivachariyar and embedded into his Tanikaippuranam.
Thus Nakkiranar, in addition to simply commenting on Iraiyanar's verses, here outlines rules for the structure and content of a commentary, discusses the manner in which conventions regarding love-poetry should be presented, and sets out general observations on history.
