Vēḷir chieftaincies

Below the crowned kings

Sangam literature distinguishes the three crowned dynasties from a larger number of vēḷ or vēḷir — chiefs holding smaller territories, often in hill country, who fought alongside or against the kings and maintained courts of their own. The distinction is one of rank and of the right to certain royal emblems rather than of kind.

Their importance to the literature is out of proportion to their political weight, because the poets depended on them. A large part of the puṟam poetry consists of praise for a chief's liberality, or of laments composed when a patron died.

The patrons

Later Tamil tradition names seven great patrons, the kaṭai eḻu vaḷḷal, of whom the best remembered is Pāri of Paṟampu — celebrated for having given his chariot to a jasmine creeper that had nothing to climb, and mourned by the poet Kapilar after the three kings combined to destroy him. Ādiyamāṉ Neṭumāṉ Añci of Takaṭūr, patron of the poet Auvaiyār, and Ay of the southern hills are others.

These figures sit on the border between history and literary memory. That chiefs of these names existed is not seriously doubted; the anecdotes attached to them are poetry, and were already stylised when the anthologies were compiled.

Some Vēḷir lines outlasted the Sangam age. The Ay chiefs of the far south continued into the medieval period as a recognised dynasty, and several later Tamil families claimed vēḷir descent.