New Cities and Old Poetry

While descriptions of cities and urban life have formed a part of Tamil literature from its inception in the early first millennium, these consisted largely of conventionalised and hyperbolic verses praising a city’s greatness as an extension of the poem’s hero. This paid only limited attention to realistic elements and excluded any reference to negative and insalubrious aspects of city life. Realistic imagination of cities and cityscapes is usually connected with the transformation of Tamil literary culture under the impact of colonialism and the elements borrowed from English literature. But the colonial period also saw transformations in the way cities were depicted in more ‘traditional’ styles of literature. This article traces how ‘traditional’ Tamil poetry in the colonial period imagined cities by focusing on poems composed in and about the Straits Settlements between 1872 and 1914. In this article I argue that rather than remaining focused on the conventional, these poems realistically map the cities of the Straits Settlements by having characters walk or otherwise traverse the space. But in the process, they also concentrate on the exotic, and occasionally scandalous sights provided by these cities. In turning cities into assemblages of consumable novelties and unfamiliar experiences, these poems imagined and presented an ideal member of the social class that produced and consumed such poems. These people ultimately formed the real city of the poem, a section of society united by their capacity to enjoy the novelties of the Straits city and live to write about it.