பஞ்சபட்சி சாஸ்திரத்தில் வல்லூறு: ஐந்தொழில் நிலைகளும் மரபுக் காலக் கணிப்பும் — ஒரு குறியீட்டியல் ஆய்வு: The Vulture (Valluru) in Pancha Pakshi Shastra: The Five Activity States and Traditional Time Reckoning — A Semiotic Study

Abstract

Pancha Pakshi Shastra is a South Indian traditional system of time reckoning that divides the day and the night by the names of five birds: the vulture (valluru), owl, crow, cock and peacock. Focusing on the vulture, which ranks first of the five, this study compares across four sources the order, time allotment and star associations of its five activity states: eating, walking, ruling, sleeping and dying (oon, nadai, arasu, thuyil, saavu).

The sources compared are the Tamil verse text attributed to Agathiyar, the Sanskrit Pancha Pakshi Prashna edited by Sivarama Padi (1906), the Pancha Pakshi sections of muhurta texts such as the Kalaprakasika, and present-day computer-generated almanacs. The basic structure of five birds, five activities and five yamas is constant in all the sources, but they differ in the grouping of stars, in the distinction between the waxing and waning fortnights, and in the weekday on which the cycle begins.

From a semiotic point of view, the study shows that the name valluru works less as a reference to a bird than as a time symbol carrying several layers at once: the vowel ‘a’, a group of stars, an element (bhuta) and an activity state. The bird’s bodily activities of eating, walking, ruling, sleeping and dying become a metaphor for the human life cycle, revealing a Tamil cultural outlook that experiences time as something ‘alive’.

Keywords

• Pancha Pakshi Shastra
• vulture (valluru)
• five activities (aindhozhil)
• yama
• nazhigai
• traditional time reckoning
• semiotics
• Agathiyar
• Siddhar tradition
• ethno-ornithology