By Ritambhara
Kapilar’s Kurinjippattu flowers make up a catalogue of 99 blossoms inside one Tamil poem of 261 lines, composed in the first centuries CE and published in full by Project Madurai. Kapilar, a poet of the Sangam period, set the list across some 35 lines, naming each flower that girls gather on a hillside.
Scholars date Kapilar to between about 50 and 200 CE. Tradition places his birth at Thiruvadavur in the Pandya country. He is credited with 206 poems in the Sangam anthologies and served for years as friend and court poet to Vel Pari, chief of the Parambu hills.
Why Kapilar wrote a poem of the hills
An old note attached to Kurinjippattu says Kapilar composed it to teach Tamil poetics to Brihadatta, a king from northern India. The Indian Antiquary recorded the same tradition in 1905. Kurinji is the hill setting in the Tamil love tradition. It is one of five tinai, the landscape types of Sangam poetry, each tied to a mood, a season and its own plants and animals.
Kurinjippattu follows a hill chief’s son and a young woman who fall in love and meet secretly in the forest. Her foster-sister later tells the parents how he saved her from drowning and from a charging elephant, and they agree to the marriage.
A catalogue of 99 flowers
Partway through the poem, the women bathe in a mountain pool and pick flowers on the slopes. Kapilar names them one after another, opening with the red kantal. Kantal is the flame lily, Gloriosa superba, which is now the state flower of Tamil Nadu. Kurinji, the flower that gives the hill landscape its name, appears in the second line of Kapilar’s list.
Kamil Zvelebil, the Czech Tamil scholar, recorded the view that the catalogue of Kapilar’s Kurinjippattu flowers is a later insertion. Other scholars read it as a memory aid for travelling bards. Either reading leaves a record of the plants that a Tamil audience of the period expected to find on a hillside. Thiruvalluvar, another classical Tamil poet, gave rain a whole chapter of the Tirukkural.
The kurinji hills today
The plant now called Neelakurinji, Strobilanthes kunthianus, is a shrub of the shola grasslands of the Western Ghats. Sholas are patches of evergreen forest in high valleys, set among open montane grassland. Neelakurinji flowers about once every 12 years, and National Geographic reported in 2018 that the Muthuvan people count their ages by its blooms.
The grasslands that hold Neelakurinji have shrunk sharply. A study by M. Arasumani and colleagues appeared in PLOS ONE in 2018. It found that the Palani Hills, a Western Ghats range, lost 66 per cent of their native montane grassland, or 249 square kilometres, between 1973 and 2014. Timber plantations grew about twelvefold over the same four decades, and the Australian black wattle, Acacia mearnsii, spread into the grass that remained.
Kapilar’s catalogue shows that a Tamil poet of the first centuries CE treated a hillside as a set of named, distinct plants. Itty Achuden, the Malayali physician behind the Hortus Malabaricus, kept the same habit of naming in 17th-century Kerala. Protecting the kurinji hills now depends on that habit too: knowing which plants grow on the slopes, and counting what is lost.
