Perhaps the greatest change impacting on the idea of “Tamil identity” is the formation of an international Tamil diaspora in the past three decades or so. The idea of change and changing identities is linked with some national movements such as the Progressive Writers’ movement, or the struggle for women’s rights and caste equality, but they are shaped also by local and regional forms of political expression such as the anti-Brahmin Self Respect movement led by Periyar in the 1930s. suya adaiyaalam, self-identity, tamizh adaiyaalam, Tamil identity, and adaiyaala arasiyal, identity politics. The modern sense of “identity,” and the shift in meaning is apparent in new compounds, e.g. The original sense of the word is “mark,” or a means of identification (of a person, by others). The Tamil word for identity is adaiyaalam. So changing landscapes are also about changing identities. But we also get confrontations and collisions between these different perspectives and worldviews between the old and the new. So we get in their writing cityscapes of alienation, snowscapes of exile and diaspora, landscapes of the imagination, fantasy worlds. Of course, modern writers don't seek to replicate it, but rather, to glance at it, allude to it, dialogue with it, or even reconfigure it. The poetics of landscape continues to haunt Tamil writing. Both akam and puram are further divided into five main types, each associated with a particular landscape, tinai, and a system of images associated with that landscape. Puram refers to the outer world and consists of the praise of kings and patrons, and about war and the death of warriors. Akam refers to the inner world, and is, effectively, to do with love.
Early Tamil literary theory and poetics, from around the beginning of the Christian era, classified the subject matter of all literature into two main genres, akam and puram.