In this paper, an attempt has been made to read classical Sangam poetry (translated into English by A K Ramanujan) as an ecological text with a distinct sense of place. Using the fundamental insights of deep ecology—dwelling in place, reinhabitation and "bioregionalism, it is argued that Sangam poetry is first and foremost a literature of place and that place here is defined as something that goes beyond the politico-cartographic concepts of territory, nation and map. Place in Sangam poetry revolves around the notion of tinai or eco-zones and this paper focuses on the poetics of tinai and what this implies for ecology as a whole. Literatures of place add an entirely new dimension to English Studies, expanding its scope of intellectual inquiry. Regional literary texts such as Sangam poetry, available to us now in English translation, broaden the possible ways in which this inquiry can be conducted.

The story goes that Swaminatha Aiyar (1855-1942), a widely-respected Tamil scholar, was unaware of the existence of early Tamil poetry—also known as Sangam poetry—until he met a munsif called Ramaswami Mutaliar in Kumbakonam. The meeting took place in October 1880. When Aiyar met him, the judge asked him what texts he had studied. Aiyar named the grammars, religious texts and commentaries he had worked on. The judge was not very impressed with his listing. "That's all? What use is that? Have you studied the old texts?" and he named some, much to the bafflement of Aiyar. The judge then gave him a handwritten manuscript of the akam and puram poems to take home and read. In his autobiography, Aiyar says that the good fortune of his past lives took him there that day. Swaminatha Aiyar, who was then 44, spent the rest of his life unearthing, editing and printing classical Tamil texts. These texts, I would like to argue, are not only important for their literary aesthetics but also for their rich insights about really inhabiting the world.

Classical Tamil literature, believed to date back to c.100 B.C.-A.D. 250 (the dates have been the subject of some controversy), consists of the Ettutokai or the Eight Anthologies, the Pathuppattu or the Ten Long Poems, and the Tolkappiyam, a grammar treatise. Sangam means an academy and refers to the three academies lasting 4,400, 3,700 and 1,850 years respectively. The legend is that these academies consisted of poets who were gods, sages and kings and that a great flood (some speculate that it was a tsunami) destroyed the kingdoms around which each of these sangams was clustered. It is believed that all the works of the first sangam are lost, of the second only the Tolkappiyam remains, and of the third, we still have the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems. In the anthologies, the poems were classified thematically as akam and puram poems. Akam (pronounced Aham) means interior and puram exterior.