The War Elephant
the original heavy armour Everyday IndiaSangam kings measured wealth in elephants. So did their poets, loudly, in the hope of receiving one.
Find it on the floor: The Sangam Verandah
Sangam & Satavahana
The classical south: poets counted in the hundreds, love and war divided into two neat categories, and Roman gold arriving by the shipload in exchange for pepper.
10 entries on this part of the floor. 300 BCE – 300 CE.
The Sangam Verandah
c. 100 CE
R. D. Burman
put a comb, a beer bottle and a hosepipe into an orchestra Music & DanceRecorded percussion by blowing across bottle mouths and rubbing sandpaper, and generally treated the studio as an instrument twenty years before anyone called it production.
Find it on the floor: The Sangam Verandah
Aurangzeb
r. 1658–1707 Rulers & EmpiresExpanded the empire to its largest extent and hollowed it out doing so. Copied Qurans and sewed caps to avoid living off the treasury, which sits oddly beside almost everything else about his reign.
Find it on the floor: The Sangam Verandah
Avvaiyar
poet, ambassador, and nobody's fool Letters & ThoughtWrote for children and for kings with equal bluntness, negotiated peace between warring chieftains, and produced the two-line moral verses that Tamil schoolchildren have been reciting ever since.
Find it on the floor: The Sangam Verandah
Kannagi
of the Silappadikaram Myth & EpicHer husband was executed for a theft he did not commit. She walked into the king's court, proved it with an anklet, and the shock of being wrong killed the king on the spot. Then she burned Madurai.
Find it on the floor: The Sangam Verandah
Dr Rajendra Prasad
President of the Constituent Assembly Rulers & EmpiresChaired nearly three years of argument with unbroken patience, then became the Republic's first President and served twelve years.
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The Sangam academies
c. 300 BCE – 300 CE Moments in HistoryAround 2,381 surviving poems by 473 named poets, of whom at least 27 were women. Love and war, split into two neat categories, argued about ever since.
Find it on the floor: The Sangam Verandah
Ilango Adigal
prince turned monk turned novelist Letters & ThoughtWrote the Silappadikaram, the first Tamil epic, about ordinary merchants rather than gods and kings — which made it, arguably, the subcontinent's first novel.
Find it on the floor: The Sangam Verandah
The Bronze Dancer
Mohenjo-daro, 10.5 cm tall Cinema & ScreenOne hand on the hip, chin up, twenty-four bangles on one arm and an expression of complete self-possession. Four and a half thousand years of attitude in a figure the size of a spoon.
Find it on the floor: The Sangam Verandah
The Roman pepper trade
c. 1st century CE Moments in HistoryForty ships a year from Egypt to the Malabar coast, riding the monsoon out and back. Pepper was worth its weight in silver, which is why your grandmother still guards it.
Find it on the floor: The Sangam Verandah