Sangam Kurinji Landscape: A Geocritical Approach to Layered Representations of Palani Hills in Literature, History, Myths and Narratives

The memory that the inhabitants and visitors of Palani Hills carry is shaped by their lived, remembered and emotionally charged experiences. The study conceptualizes how literature, myths, stories, and histories create multi-vocality for a space and map the human experiences onto landscapes. Using the geocritical lens, it is identified that the Palani Hills as a space have undergone repeated transformations during the Sangam period, bhakti literature, the colonial period, and in contemporary tourism, showing its fluid state of movement, marking transgressivity. Further, it establishes that the Palani Hills have witnessed multiple layers of meanings based on the historical, textual and social representations while recognising myth’s role as a strong catalyst in shaping cultural perception of space through memory. Therefore, this study finds that by applying geocritcism to the Tamil sacred geography, the landscape gains the potential to be studied beyond its religious centrality while embracing multivocality.