Sangam Literature, the Earliest Writing in Tamil, Holds 2,381 Poems in Eight Anthologies and Ten Long Poems, and Tamil Became India's First Declared Classical Language on 12 October 2004

Sangam literature is the earliest body of writing in Tamil. Britannica describes it as eight anthologies of poems, a ninth collection of ten idylls (long poems), and a grammar and rhetoric called the Tolkappiyam, and counts 2,381 poems in the early literature, ranging from four lines to nearly 800. On 12 October 2004 the Government of India created a category called classical languages, and Tamil was the first language placed in it.

What the Sangam corpus contains

The eight anthologies, the Ettuttokai, are the Ainkurunuru, Kuruntokai, Narrinai, Akananuru, Kalittokai, Patirruppattu, Purananuru and Paripatal, in the order Britannica gives. The Pattuppattu is the ten idylls, which the Central Institute of Classical Tamil names as Tirumurukarruppatai, Porunararruppatai, Cirupanarruppatai, Perumpanarruppatai, Mullaippattu, Maduraikkanci, Netunalvatai, Kurincippattu, Pattinappalai and Malaipatukatam. In Britannica’s words, they present a picture of early Tamil life. P. Bhaskar Reddy’s university text calls the anthologies and the idylls the two major groups of texts in the Sangam corpus.

The Tolkappiyam is a treatise on grammar and poetics. Its date, says Britannica, is the 1st to the 4th century CE, and its existence presupposes a large body of literature already in circulation, probably in the form of anthologies.

The word sangam means an academy of poets. These poems deal almost entirely with non-religious subjects, Britannica notes, which it calls possibly unique in early Indian literature, though some religious pieces occur. One is the Paripatal, believed to have been a collection of 70 poems of which only 22 survive in full. Its poems include verses on Tirumal, on Murugan and on the river Vaiyai, personified as a goddess.

Poems of love and poems of war

Britannica sorts the anthologies by subject. The first five collections, Ainkurunuru to Kalittokai, are love poems, called akam. The next two, the Patirruppattu and the Purananuru, are poems of heroism, called puram, which takes in the praise of kings and their deeds. The eighth, the Paripatal, holds both kinds.

Akam poems come with a map. Five tinai, or physiographic divisions, organise the anthologies, Reddy writes: hills (kurinji), dry land (palai), forest (mullai), farmland (marudam) and coast (neydal). Each has its own chief deity and occupations, such as hunting and honey gathering in the hills and cattle rearing in the forest.

Martha Ann Selby of the University of Texas at Austin, reviewing George Hart’s 2015 translation of the Akananuru in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, sets out how the system works in that one anthology. That anthology has 400 poems by 142 poets, each 13 to 31 lines long. Every odd-numbered poem is a palai poem of separation and elopement. Poems ending in 2 or 8 are kurinji poems of secret love before marriage, those ending in 4 are mullai poems of a wife waiting for her husband to return from the war camp, those ending in 6 are marudam poems, and those ending in 0 are neydal poems of anxious separation at the seashore.

The dates scholars give

Tamil tradition holds that three academies met in turn at Madurai under Pandya patronage. According to Reddy, the first two are said to have been attended by gods and sages and their works are lost, except for the Tolkappiyam, which tradition ascribes to the second. The surviving anthologies and long poems are assigned to the third. The saint Appar, in the early 7th century CE, is the first to mention the term sangam, Reddy adds, and the three-academy account first appears in a ninth-century commentary on the Iraiyanar Akapporul, centuries after the poems.

Modern scholars date the poems from other evidence. The chronology, Reddy says, is a debated topic. His fixed point is that the Chera king Senguttuvan and Gajabahu II of Sri Lanka were contemporaries, which he says the epic Cilappatikaram and two Sri Lankan chronicles confirm. With Roman coins of the 1st century CE found across the Tamil country, he calls 3rd century BCE to 3rd century CE the most probable range.

Other works give other windows. Britannica places the corpus in the 1st to 4th century CE, and says Tamil literature proper begins around the 1st century CE while some stone inscriptions go back to the 3rd century BCE. Selby writes that the Old Tamil poems were most likely composed in the first three centuries of the common era. The Central Institute of Classical Tamil treats everything before 600 CE as the classical period.

The three crowned dynasties, Chera, Chola and Pandya, are named in the poems, Reddy says. The Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology adds that Ashoka’s rock edicts 2 and 13 name the Chola, Pandya, Satyaputra and Keralaputra kingdoms. The Chola line’s later imperial age is covered in Rajaraja Chola, emperor of the seas and in the profile of the great living Chola temples.

The palm-leaf hunt of U. V. Swaminatha Iyer

The poems reached the 19th century as handwritten palm leaves held by scores of families in various parts of Tamil Nadu. S. Viswanathan writes, in a tribute reproduced by the Tamil Heritage Foundation, that the original texts of many Sangam works came to public notice only towards the end of that century, when they appeared in print with commentaries. Many families who held the leaves could not read them. DT Next adds that the texts had survived because they were copied onto fresh leaves about every half century.

Viswanathan names U. V. Swaminatha Iyer (1855 to 1942) as the foremost of those who set out to find the missing leaves. Iyer was born at Uthamadhanapuram near Kumbakonam in the old Thanjavur district. Iyer taught Tamil at the Government Arts College in Kumbakonam from 1880 and at Presidency College in Madras from 1903. By Viswanathan’s dates he printed the epic Jivaka Chintamani in 1887, the Pattuppattu in 1889 and the Purananuru in 1894, each with scholarly commentary. Accounts differ on the years of his other editions, so only these three appear here. DT Next says he compared more than 3,000 paper and palm-leaf manuscripts. Summarising his autobiography En Sarithiram, the paper reports that he wrote of being only partly successful and that termites beat him in the race almost half the time.

The Dr. U.Ve.Sa. Library in Chennai lists almost 2,170 palm-leaf manuscripts on its collections page, among them copies of the Pattuppattu and Ettuthogai. The library says most are about 350 years old or older, so they are recopyings made long after the poems were composed.

Keezhadi and the Vaigai

Keezhadi, spelled Keeladi in the state’s publications, is a mound of more than 110 acres in Sivaganga district, 13 km east and south-east of Madurai, with the Vaigai river 2 km to the north. The Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology titled its 2019 volume Keeladi: An Urban Settlement of Sangam Age on the Banks of River Vaigai. The volume recalls that the Paripatal describes the Vaigai in as many as eight long poems and that the Maduraikkanci describes the grandeur of Madurai.

The Archaeological Survey of India’s excavation branch in Bengaluru dug three seasons, 2014-15 to 2016-17. The state department took over for the fourth and fifth seasons, in 2017-18 and 2018-19. The department reports 5,820 antiquities from the fourth season and, from its own digs, 56 pottery pieces inscribed in Tamil-Brahmi, the early script of Tamil.

To date the site, the state department sent six carbon samples from the 2018 season to the Beta Analytic laboratory in Florida. All six dates fall between the 6th century BCE and the 3rd century BCE, the department says, one from a depth of 353 cm reaching back to the end of the 6th century BCE. Because the deposits continue above and below the dated layers, the department says the Keeladi cultural deposit could be safely dated between the 6th century BCE and the 1st century CE.

The ASI’s own report on the first two seasons, 982 pages long and submitted in January 2023, is still under review. In a reply in Parliament that The Wire reported in July 2025, the culture minister said the ASI would release it after verifying expert conclusions with the lead excavator. Expert comments he quoted held that the 8th to 5th century BCE bracket for the earliest period was “not justified at all” and could at most be placed “pre-300 BCE”. ThePrint reported on 29 June 2026 that the ASI’s director general wrote to a member of Parliament on 24 June 2026 that an internal committee will re-examine the report on site. None of these dates belongs to a poem. They date layers of a settlement and the pottery in them.

12 October 2004

According to the Press Information Bureau’s explainer of 3 October 2024, the Government of India decided on 12 October 2004 to create a category of classical languages, and declared Tamil the first. The original criteria were antiquity of early texts or recorded history of over a thousand years, a body of ancient literature that generations of speakers value as heritage, and a literary tradition that is original and not borrowed from another speech community. In November 2005 the antiquity criterion was revised to 1,500 to 2,000 years and a clause was added allowing the classical form to differ from later forms, and Sanskrit was declared classical.

Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia followed between 2008 and 2014. The Union Cabinet approved Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali on 3 October 2024, which makes eleven; the full list is in the 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule.

A. R. Venkatachalapathy of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, writing in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2009, describes the 2004 notification as one of the Ministry of Human Resource Development. The demand for the status dates to 1903, he writes, when V. G. Suryanarayana Sastri of Madras Christian College raised it in a history of the Tamil language. He calls the status an “academic fait accompli” because scholars had long treated Tamil as classical.

The Central Institute of Classical Tamil

Its own account of its history begins with the 2004 declaration. In July 2005 a Central Plan Scheme for Classical Tamil was handed to the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysuru, and from March 2006 it ran there as a research centre for classical Tamil. The Institute began work in Chennai on 19 May 2008 at Balaaru Illam in Chepauk and was registered on 21 January 2009 under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act, 1975. The Prime Minister opened its own building at Perumbakkam on 12 January 2022. The Institute is an autonomous body under the language division of the Ministry of Education. The PIB explainer says it was set up to facilitate translation of ancient Tamil texts, promote research and offer courses, and its list of classical works runs to 41 titles, among them the Tolkappiyam, the eight anthologies, the ten idylls and the Tirukkural. For the state’s own language law, the Tamil Nadu Official Language Act of 1956, see Tamil Nadu at a glance.

Its English home page reports on the Institute’s stall at the Frankfurt Book Fair, held from 7 to 11 October 2026, and says agreements were reached there to translate classical Tamil texts into Bulgarian and Ukrainian.