Paripāṭal, one of the celebrated eight anthologies of the Caṅkam period, contains twenty-four poems and a few fragments in a meter called Paripāṭal, the length of each poem varying from 32 to 140 lines. The pieces on Murukan and Tirumāl are considered to be “the earliest bhakti poems in India, the earliest religious poems in a mother tongue” (Ramanujan 310). It is also widely believed that Kalittokai and Paripāṭal are the latest of the eight anthologies while Kuṟuntokai and Puṟanāṉūṟu include the earliest poems.
Paripāṭal is the only text among either Eṭṭutokai or Pattuppāṭṭu which gives the name of the musical mode in which it has to be sung and also the name of the composer. In his edition of iḷampūraṇar’s commentary of Ceyyuḷiyal of Tolkāppiyam, Aṭikaḷāciriyar clarifies the meaning each of the commentators had attributed to the term Paripāṭal. To Iḷampūraṇar, the term pari meant, “successive.” It is not a genre made up of a single verse form like veṇpā, but one in which several limbs occur successively (213). To Pērāciriyar, the term, “pari”, meant “mixed.”
Of the six songs attributed to Māl (1-4, 13, 15), not even one mentions the name Tirumāl nor do any in Eṭṭutokai and Pattuppāṭṭu.
Scholars have pointed out that Paripāṭal songs treat both akam and puṟam matters. If the poems on vaiyai are predominantly about akam, the other songs about Māl and Cevvēḷ are about akam. It is true that Paripāṭal is not wholly based on the akam conventions like the other Caṅkam works which pertain to akam. Nevertheless, it does involve the hero, heroine, the other woman (who does not enjoy the social approval like her counterpart, kāmakkilatti did in earlier tiṇai society), confidante and pāṇan.
Siegfried Lienhard in his “Tamil literature Conventions and Sanskrit Muktaka Poetry” demonstrates with telling examples how several kavisamayas are of Tamil origin. George L. Hart in his The Poems of Ancient Tamil, their Milieu, and their Sanskrit counterparts came out with striking examples of Kāḷidāsā’s direct and indirect borrowings from Caṅkam Poets. A close reading of Kumārasambhavam in the light of Caṅkam works will force us to conclude that it was not a case of indirect influence through Maharastri Prakrit or even of a nodding acquaintance with ancient Tamil poetry but of a profound impact of some of the early as well as late Caṅkam writings though we may never know how this happened. Tirumurukārruppaṭai and Paripāṭal seem to have served as exemplary sources of inspiration for Kumārasambhavam for which there is no known Sanskrit model.
