The Country and the City in the Kāñcippurāṇam

Abstract

Numerous pre-modern literary works in Tamil begin with a lengthy description of a country and a city. This convention is a stock element of texts belonging to the kāppiyam and purāṇam genres, which can be defined as long narrative poems and mythological narrations, respectively. Such descriptions are particularly numerous in talapurāṇams, i.e., texts dealing with the mythology of sacred sites. This article discusses the description of the country and the city in the Kāñcippurāṇam (KP), a talapurāṇam of the city of Kanchipuram composed in the late 18th century by the author Civañāṉa Muṉivar. It will be shown that the description of Kanchipuram and its surroundings in the introductory chapters of the KP, rather than aiming at a realistic portrayal, is strongly based on Tamil literary conventions that can be traced back to ancient Tamil literature, but also to influential texts of the medieval period, such as the Kamparāmāyaṇam or the Periyapurāṇam. Moreover, the article examines how Civañāṉa Muṉivar correlates the literary landscape that he describes with the real-world geography of the region around Kanchipuram and Śaiva devotional topography, thus creating a complex multi-layered landscape.