The Aesthetics of the Heroine’s Grief in Kurunthogai

Abstract

Sangam agam poetry, particularly Kurunthogai, is part of the Ettuthohai collection which shows both union and separation between the hero and the heroine through 400 collected poems. The anthology depicts separation not merely as a phase of  love but as a means to attain love, creating an unique aesthetic of grief.

This aesthetic can be observed through a close textual analysis of selected poems from Kurunthogai (Vaidehi translations), taking it as a primary text, and employing Kübler-Ross’s model of 5 stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as an exploratory entry point. This framework when situated within the heroine’s grief and analysed through the heroine’s body positions it as an ‘aesthetic medium of grief’, where her wasting body itself becomes an aesthetic. The heroine utilises this ‘medium’ to achieve an aesthetic ‘completeness’ or ‘wholeness’, as demonstrated in her gaining happiness in her own love even in the hero’s absence. Consequently, these poems reframe Tamil poetics within broader aesthetic discourse illustrating how women fulfill their ‘whole love’ even in the separation phase subverting prior notions of passivity associated with her in this phase.