Interestingly, the place of the tiger is taken up the by the lion in Sanskrit and Prakrit literatures. In their homes, women would frequently call on the tiger-saying “Tiger! Tiger!”-to quieten naughty children.Īnother phenomenon involving the tiger is the way it is pitted against the elephant as its traditional foe. Like the scarecrows used to scare away birds, people of the ancient Tamil land used a decoy of a tiger's figurine to deter wild animals from entering their crop fields. A tiger wouldn’t eat grass even when hungry, goes a popular proverb in Tamil.
It would rather starve till it hunts another and make it fall on to its right before feeding on it. Tamils considered it a blow to the tiger’s pride and demeanour to feed on a prey that falls on to its left. The poem asks not to befriend people who live like rats, but those who live like tigers that discard their prey not ‘rightly’ brought down. A poem from Puranānūṟu, one of Tamil’s Sangam classics (200 BCE to 300 CE), compares the hoarders of wealth to rats storing stolen grains in their burrows. In the ancient Tamil land or “Tamilakam” comprising of a large part of modern-day South Indian states, the tiger was considered a symbol of honour and righteousness. But what Google doesn’t reveal is the unique place the tiger occupies in the psyche and ethical consciousness of Tamils. That is what Google would also throw up when searched with the words “Tiger” and “Tamils”. Think of tigers and Tamils, what comes to our mind is the recent past of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s cadres in Sri Lanka, who were called “Tamil Tigers”. The tiger was the royal emblem of the Cholas Credit: Wikimedia Commons) ( An artist's depiction of the "Jumping Tiger" royal standard of the Medieval Tamil Chola Empire that stretched over South India, Northern Sri Lanka and even Bengal and parts of Southeast Asia.
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