Seethakkaathi Marakkaayar and Tamil poets

Seethakkaathi Marakkaayar lived in the early 18th century. He was a wealthy man, a Muslim and an owner of ships. If one is to judge from the paeans composed in his name by the itinerant and innovative Tamil versifiers of his era and later ones - and I am taking M. Krishnan’s word for this - he was an extraordinarily generous man, a benefactor of poets. The indigent freelance poet, who wandered from land to land visiting one prospective patron after another, went to him with great expectations. Apparently, the songs in his praise that have outlasted him suggest that he was a person with a great love for the Tamil language, and show that he let nothing, least of all religion, come in the way of his noblesse oblige when called upon by a poet with a hole in his pocket and free-flowing verse at the tip of his tongue.

Thus, one such verse in his praise, translated by M. Krishnan from the Tamil (as is the case with all verses in this post), reads as follows:

Spent with his blaze the sun is red; the eyes
of women redden in the toils of love:
the poet’s heart grows red reading the classes –
and Seethakkaathi’s hands are red with giving.

These lines come from the stylus of Padikkaasuthambiran, a contemporary of Seethakkaathi. This poet also has to his credit some angry, resentful verse in self-castigation of his pursuit of poetry, a calling that embraced the goddess of learning only to be abandoned by the goddess of wealth. One such vituperative poem goes thus:

Foredoomed, with many callings there, we chose scholarship witlessly, thinking it great.
We did not learn the street magician’s art, dance the pole-dance, or practise sleight-of-hand.
Not born full-breasted prostitutes, we did not, abandoning accursed Tamil, enter service with women as their go-betweens.
To what a wretched life have we been born!

The fortunes of the poet depended greatly upon the munificence, or lack of it, of the patron he went visiting. These patrons, who could be mighty kings, but more realistically speaking, were generally little more than petty chieftains, landlords or merchants, could be unpredictable, ranging from the open-handed to the tight-fisted, and from the miserly to the downright mean. It was not uncommon for the poet, trudging for days together from his village to the town, to arrive at the patron’s stately home and sing his laurels employing the latest novelty in technique and rhythm, only to find his expectations belied. For example, here is a verse by Ashtavaadhanam Saravanaperumal Kavirayar of Ramanathapuram laden with a thick patina of satire:

‘Whom visits me?’–‘A poet’–‘And where are you from?’
‘From Vadakasi.’–‘What brings you here?’
‘Your fame has brought me here.
Hearing of you we have composed sweet verses in your praise.’
‘You were not wise. Which of my long line of forefathers has
listened to verse? A slight unknown in all my ancestry
is what you bring! Go far away before there is bloodshed.’

The poet would leave no stone unturned to thaw the heart of the most pitiless of misers. Thus, Chockanaathappulavar tried to seduce the springs of kindness in the bosom of a certain Bhoja, saying:

Bhoja, when as a thunderstorm you showered
gold-rain upon the spread of the earth beneath,
not a drop touched me, for my poverty
shielded me wholly with its deep umbrella!

In the case of Seethakkaathi, one imagines, poets sang his praise in all sincerity, free from the anxiety that their lyrical labours would be found wanting by a man so generous. Legend has it that a weary poet reached Seethakkathi’s town only to hear of his death. Making his way to the cemetery where the merchant was being buried, he burst into verse, his elegy hinting that the patron’s life had been claimed by the weight of poverty that the poet had brought with him. At this, the dead Seethakkathi’s right hand, bearing a diamond ring, flung open in the direction of the disappointed seeker. Even in death, the great patron did not disappoint.

(The contents of this post are based upon M. Krishnan’s essay, Verse for a living, from Ramachandra Guha, ed. (2007) Nature’s Spokesman: M. Krishnan & Indian Wildlife, Penguin Books, New Delhi. This book is a must-read for nature-lovers, enthusiasts of Tamil literature, aficionados of cricket, and lovers of the English language.)