#NaccellaiyarTheCrowSinger

Naccellaiyār, the Crow-Singer · fl. c. 2nd century CE

In the books · 1 chapter

Who this is

Poetry — twelve surviving poems across three Sangam anthologies — and, by a persistent old attribution, prosody: a lost textbook of metrics, the Kākkaipāṭiṉiyam, carried her name into the medieval grammar schools.

“One woman wrote both the poem that measures what a war culture asks of mothers and the poem that repays a crow for announcing a homecoming — and a civilization kept both, plus the rumour of her textbook, while letting her life vanish entirely.”

— The Great Indians, Ch. 45

The big idea, in the book's words:

“In nine lines she wrote the fiercest poem in Tamil — a mother who goes sword in hand to disown a son reported to have fled battle, finds him hacked to pieces where the fighting was thickest, and rejoices more than on the day she bore him. The same hand wrote the era's most tender domestic poem, about owing a debt to a crow.”

— The Great Indians, Ch. 45