Tamil Tūtu and a Rāyalası̄ma Diversion

Beginning in the early fourteenth century, Tamil poets created a prolific literary genre called tūtu (from Sanskrit dūta), messenger poems related indirectly to Kalidasa’s prototype but with a grammar and structure of their own. There is also a secondary genre, viṟali viṭu tūtu, “messages sent by a dancer.” This chapter examines two typical tūtu works from the region of Sivagangai in southern Tamil Nadu, traces their intricate relations with the classical courier poems in Sanskrit and other languages, and focuses on the specific features of the Tamil genre—the beginning of the underlying narrative in an ulā progression by a god or a king, the love-sickness of a young woman who catches sight of this ravishing male figure, the series of attributes the latter necessarily possesses, and the concrete sign—a garland worn by the god/king—that the messenger has to bring to the sender as a sign that the message has been delivered. An excursus looks at an embedded tūtu in the Telugu Vasu-caritramu of Bhaṭṭamūrti.