B.A English Literature
3rd Year 6th Semester
Elective Paper
GREEN STUDIES (AG46D)
Unit 5:
Oikopoetics - Oikos, Integrative, Hierarchic Anarchic Oikos
5.1“Oikopoetic Method” by Nirmal Selvamony- Tinai 3
Summary:
Introduction
tiNaipoetics is the poetics of
the Tamils. Its equent term is Oikopoetics. Oikopoetics or
ecopoetics is poetics of the ‘oikos’ which, to the Greeks, meant habitat
comprising the spirits, humans, nature and culture peculiar to it. A typical
oikos is a nexus in which the sacred, the humans, natural and cultural
phenomena stand in an integrated relationship. The Tamil equivalent of oikos is
tinai that integrates specific space and time (mutal), naturo-cultural elements
(karu) and human action (uri).
Being the habitat of the people
concerned, tiNai forms the matrix of all social institutions – economy, polity,
family and communication. Art, especially, poetry, is a variety of
communication/communion shaped by the tiNai of the society in question. Being
the ground, matrix, and context of a work of art, tiNai is the first principle
of oikopoetics.
Three Basic Types of tiNai
Historically speaking, three
basic types of tiNai have discernibly shaped all poetry – integrative,
hierarchic and anarchic. In other words, one can speak of the poetry of the
integrative, hierarchic and anarchic tiNais.
Integrative tiNai
The first type of tiNai
integrates the sacred, nature, culture and the humans in a complex kinship,
even as a family of kith and kin. The kin-like tiNai of primal societies allows
freedom with responsibility. Duties, obligations and rights bind people,
spirits, and nature together quite intricately. The power relations among the
members of this familial tiNai are both horizontal and vertical; both love and
authority are normative. Black Elk, the chieftain of an American Indian tribe
summed up this intricate bonding thus: “The two-legged and four-legged lived
like kith and kin”
Hierarchic tiNai
If a kinship relationship
ramifies both horizontally and vertically, political relationship is configured
only vertically in a hierarchical manner. In the hierarchic or political tiNai
the members stand in a hierarchic relationship, with the sacred at the top, the
humans in the middle and nature at the bottom. Now, the tiNai is no more a
family, but a political unit where power is channeled only in a vertical
direction. The original familial tiNai undergoes a double transformation in
Tamil society. While tiNai as the larger social order has given way to the
Aryan varna, with a typical hierarchical structure, tiNai as a specific habitat
has shrunk to a political domain such as one involving a tax collector and tax
payer.
By attributing supremacy to the
sacred, distance between the humans and the sacred was effected, confining the
latter to a special space deemed holy.
Similarly, the human world was
also imagined as a hierarchically ordered one, with the superior ruler, and the
inferior ruled. The distance between the two was clearly determined when the
ruler was confined to a special space, namely, the court/ palace, and the ruled
to the space outside of it.
Like the sacred and the human,
nature was also hierarchized. If in the integrative tiNai different types of
land (such as the mountains, scrub land, arid tracts, riverine plains and sea
coast) were all regarded as equally important and unique, in the hierarchic
tiNai they were all reduced to two basic types – wetland and dry land – which
stood in a hierarchic relationship. Wetland was considered more auspicious,
productive and useful than dry land. Even animals were ranged in a hierarchic
order – the domestic and the wild.
Among the Tamils, monarchies of
cerar, colar and pantiyar affirmed the hierarchic tiNai even as the poetry
patronised by their courts and produced by their subjects did. The Saivite and
the Vaishnavite saints produced significant crop of such poetry during the time
of pallavar. Their poetry identified special spaces known as talam, worthy of
worship and poetic celebration, which were located usually in wetland lying
along the rivers kaveri and vaikai. If these sacred spaces were right at the
top of the hierarchic ladder, the dwelling space of people known as natu was in
the middle, leaving the bottom for uninhabitable, wasteland known as katu.
Anarchic Oikos
The hierarchic tiNai began to
rupture when the supremacy of the sacred became dubitable with an increased
emphasis on rational systems (like logic and science) and materialist
ideologies in lieu of (non-materialist) religious doctrines. Rational scrutiny
was necessary to determine the utilitarian value of the members of the tiNai.
In theistic societies, the sacred was considered useful for certain purposes
and for that reason acknowledged and invoked in ceremonies and customary
practices. Nature, on the other hand, was more tangibly useful. With
investment, it paid off considerable returns. Humans were also looked upon as
resources and assets. In short, the new tiNai was anarchic in spirit but
economic in practice. It was rather a market with a shift from the political
hierarchy to an economic negotiation. It was reason that controlled the negotiations
of the market tiNai. It helped accumulate knowledge about the sacred, nature
and man and also in working out strategies to exploit these to human advantage.
Conclusion
To sum up, this paper has defined tiNaipoetics as poetics of tiNai affirming
that poetic theory and criticism should address not only individual
constituents like language, technique, social context, nature, the supernatural
and so on, but the entire system here referred to as the tiNai. Three types of
tiNai – the integrative, hierarchic and anarchic have been identified and each
has been explained with illustrations from Tamil poetry. Being an introductory
and general exposition of the critical approach known as oikopoetics, this
paper could not tackle specific critical tasks and issues like reading a
certain poem from an tiNaipoetics perspective and contrasting that reading with
a non- tiNaipoetic reading. But such critical explorations are necessary to
draw utmost critical mileage out of tiNaipoetics.
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