Tamil : a biography

392 Pages·2016·2.22 MB·English

by  David Shulman

Tamil

A BIOGRAPHY

DAVID SHULMAN

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

LONDON, ENGLAND

2016

Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Jacket design: Rathna Ramanathan and Tim Jones Jacket image: Based on a frontispiece from Centamil

Celvam (1911), redrawn by Guglielmo Rossi 978-0-674-05992-4 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-97465-4 (EPUB)
978-0-674-97466-1 (MOBI)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Shulman, David Dean, 1949–

author.

Title: Tamil : a biography / David Shulman.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008042

Subjects: LCSH: Tamil (Indic people)—Intellectual life. | Tamil (Indic people)—History. | Tamil language—

History. | Tamil literature—History and criticism. | Tamil poetry—History and criticism. | India—

Civilization.

Classification: LCC DS432.T3 S46 2016 | DDC 305.894/811—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008042

Book design by Dean Bornstein

For Yigal, Sashi, and Ramacandra Reddy

sasneham

Contents

Preface
Note on Transliteration

1. Beginnings

Ālāpana

2. First Budding: Tamil from the Inside

Pallavi

3. Second Budding: The Musical Self

Anupallavi

4. The Imperial Moment, Truth, and Sound

Caraṇam 1

5. Republic of Syllables

Caraṇam 2

6. A Tamil Modernity

Caraṇam 3

7. Beyond the Merely Modern

Rāgamālikā

Notes
References
Credits
Index

Preface

A language is never a thing, even if its speakers sometimes do whatever they can
to turn it into one—to make it an “it.” The ideas people have about their
language may be things, and as such may have a history; even so, the language
will always exceed those ideas and, given certain basic conditions, will continue
to grow and thus to fulfill the organic, uncertain, and lively destiny encoded in
its grammar. Old languages like Tamil, given to intense reflection over many
centuries, write their own autobiographies, in many media, though we may not
know how to read them. Sometimes they ask the assistance of a ghostwriter, a
biographer, like me.

Everywhere one looks at language, at every point that we touch it, we see

movement, aliveness, and singular forms of self-expression—usually not
amenable to translation. In the Jerusalem school of linguistics we were taught
that there is nothing trivial in language, nothing too minute to be studied and
explored. There is, implicit in each point and part, the logic of a system held
together from inside and of the world that lives inside that world. I doubt that
these worlds are representational in any meaningful sense, but I think they do
speak to us. You don’t need to know Tamil to hear them.

This is not the book a historical linguist would have written. It is more of a

cultural history of Tamil, with particular focus on the understandings and
perceptions about the language that came to the surface over the two thousand
years of its documented existence. There are thus two stories running
concurrently: one about the ways Tamil evolved in itself, generating grammars
of speaking and singing and thinking, and one about major expressive—
especially poetic and literary—drives and themes, seen in a broad historical
perspective that makes space for continuities. I thought it would be a very short
book, essayistic and nonlinear, but Tamil thought otherwise.

The best part of writing it was discovering texts I had never read, or had read

long ago and mostly forgotten, or to which I had paid too little attention (in other
words, most Tamil texts). I was regularly astonished. Most of these works, many

of them masterpieces of human civilization by any standard, belong to the past
thousand years or so of Tamil. This means that a certain dissonance has probably
found its way into the heart of the book. It is one thing to look at Tamil from the
vantage point of the year 1000, or the year 1500; another thing to look backward
from 2016 toward both the distant and the recent past. These rival perspectives,
largely incompatible, are, in a sense, what this book is about. They are its pŏruḷ
—the hidden stuff of meaning, not always spelled out explicitly.

I hesitated before agreeing to write. Almost everything about Tamil is

contentious. Some of the most important questions cannot be answered. We have
rather tentative notions about chronology and, in this generation, fierce disputes
about identity (not my favorite word). I have had to leave vast swaths of Tamil
out of these pages for want of knowledge and want of space. Almost every
Tamil reader will see, perhaps before all else, what is missing.

The book is built like a concert, or a composition, kriti, in the Carnatic style.

It has an opening ālāpana, largely focused on grammar; a pallava refrain that
speaks of in-ness; an anupallavi secondary refrain about uyir, the core of the
Tamil person; and several caraṇam verses, each with its own primary subject
and time period, eventually culminating in a modern rāga-mālikā rapidly
running through diverse rāga-scales with a meditative tillāṉā at the end. The
refrain, also the anupallavi, naturally recurs frequently throughout the
composition with its caraṇam variations, as in the performance of any kriti. Any
reader who manages to read the whole book, if such a person miraculously
appears, will notice a certain set of patterns and melodies. Sadly, unlike the
compositions of Muttusvwamy Dikshitar and others, this kriti is unlikely to be
conducive to the manifestation of any god or goddess.

Now there are those to be thanked, too many to be mentioned. Still: First

among them is my first Tamil teacher and guru, John Ralston Marr, whose love
for all things Tamil infused every line of poetry we read. A. Kandiah also taught
me, gently and firmly, in those early years. I was fortunate to read many
challenging texts with V. S. Rajam in the course of a sabbatical year in
Baltimore and Philadelphia. Many good friends on several continents, including
two new generations of brilliant scholars of Tamil, sent me their essays and
books, read and commented on chap ters as they took shape, corrected my errors,
and kept up my spirits when the task seemed impossible: Jean-Luc Chevillard,
Archana Venkatesan, Vasudha Narayanan, Blake Wentworth, S. Ramakrishnan,
Emmanuel Francis, Talavajjhala Sashi Shekhar, Yigal Bronner, Jennifer Clare,

Sascha Ebeling, and the ever-generous and insightful Whitney Cox. François
Gros very helpfully discussed issues of dating. George Hart sent me his
wonderful new translation of Akanāṉūṟu. I thank Sivan Goren for our sessions
reading Līlā-tilakam and Venugopala Panicker for sharing his tremendous
knowledge of south Indian linguistics. Ilanit Loewy Shacham plied me with
scans of rare Tamil books from the infinitely capacious Regenstein Library—
when she had far better things to do with her time. Charles Hallisey, who has
taught so many of us how to read, read this book in draft and gave me faith that
it has some value.

This book, like several of its predecessors, was finished in the utopian space

of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. I want to thank the devoted staff of
the institute and its director, Professor Michal Linial, for nurturing that space. I
wish to thank the Israel Science Foundation and the University Grant
Commission in India for a joint grant that contributed to the writing of this book.
I thank Brian Ostrander of Westchester Publishing Services, and Heather
Hughes, Louise Robbins, and Stephanie Vyce at Harvard University Press for
help and encouragement at every stage. My editor, Sharmila Sen, gently and
firmly nudged me into writing this book, and now that it’s written, I’m more
than grateful to her. As always, my wife, Eileen, who has shared the Tamil
adventure from the start and who knows how to sing the kritis so they melt my
mind, gave of her munificent nature; my sons and grandchildren willy-nilly put
up with my frequent absentmindedness and physical absences.

And there are the infinite absences to be borne in heart and mind as long as

there are mountains and rivers: Abbie Ziffren, Norman Cutler, K. Paramasivam,
K. Kailasapathy, Kamil Zvelebil, Thirupur S. Ramu, Gopal Aiyar, Bernard Bate,
and many others whom I was not lucky enough to know in person.

I dedicate this work to three soul-friends, connoisseurs, and teachers: Yigal

Bronner, Tallavajhalla Sashi Sekhar, and Karri Ramacandra Reddy. I hope they
can hear its music.

Note on Transliteration

I have tried to minimize the dots and dashes that embellish scholarly writing on
Sanskrit and Tamil, though I found that I could not dispense with them
altogether. Place names are without diacritic marks. The names of modern Tamil
authors generally appear using the English spellings they themselves adopted.
Very common and familiar names, or some modern ones that have many English
equivalents—Kamban, Caminat’aiyar, and Minatcicuntaram Pillai, also deity
names—appear in phonetic approximation without diacritics. The Sanskrit
retroflex sibilant ṣ is marked as sh. Vocalic ṛ appears as ri.

For readers who would like to try to pronounce words and names in the Tamil

way, the following rules may be helpful:

Consonant-stops, such as k, t, ṭ, and p, are unvoiced in initial position and

also when doubled. Within a word, between two vowels, they tend to become
fricatives: thus k turns into a ch sound like in German. Initial and intervocalic c
is pronounced like s in the Tamil of Chennai (but like English ch or sh farther
south, and in several dialects). After nasals, consonant-stops are always voiced:
nk = ng, nc = nj, nt = nd, and so on. There are no voiced initial consonants in
Tamil except in borrowed words. Also, unlike Sanskrit and nearly all other
South Asian languages with the exception of the Munda and Tibeto-Burmese
family, Tamil has no aspirates. Gemination is phonemic: a doubled consonant is
twice as long as a single one. Long vowels are double the length of short vowels.
The short vowels ĕ and ŏ are distinctive to Dravidian.

All translations in this book are my own unless otherwise noted.

ONE

Beginnings

Ālāpana

What Is Tamil?

The word or name “Tamil” ends in a sound proudly seen by its speakers as
characteristic of this language. Linguists transcribe it as ḻ. It would be best if
you, the reader, were simply to hear it uttered by a native speaker, but I can try
to describe it. The tongue slides backwards in the mouth without stopping the
flow of air, and the result is an r-like sound (a retroflex liquid in the terminology
of the grammarians) somewhat similar to the way many Americans pronounce
the r in “girl.” The sound survives in colloquial speech in most Tamil dialects
and in Tamil’s sister language Malayalam, spoken in Kerala. A few Tamil
dialects have transformed it to a retroflex ḷ in certain phonetic environments, but
in formal contexts—speeches, news broadcasts, recitation or singing of verses,
and the like—you can always hear the original sound, which adds a pleasant
purring quality to what may sound like the rapid rushing of a rivulet, for Tamil,
like other south Indian languages, is among the most rapidly spoken of human
languages. When I first heard it, many years ago, I wasn’t sure that it was really
akin to what one calls “language,” and even today I find it hard to believe that
the human tongue is capable of such swift twists and turns. That said, I hasten to
add that to my ears Tamil, both in everyday speech and in contexts of formal
recitation, is always a delicious, bewitching, incantational music, unlike any
other that I have heard.

Indeed, “music,” or “the Tamil that is music,” icaittamiḻ, is one of the

meanings of the name itself in the ancient grammatical and poetic sources. More
specifically, this music-Tamil is one of three categorical divisions, along with
iyaltamiḻ, that is, the “natural” (literary) language, and nāṭakattamiḻ, the Tamil
of (dramatic) performance. The normative texts thus like to speak of muttamiḻ,
the threefold Tamil. But this slightly mechanical division is very far from
summing up the meaning of the term “Tamil.” We would, I think, be better to

think of more comprehensive definitions, such as the following:

1. Tamil is, first, the name of an ancient language, spoken today by some

eighty million people in south India, Sri Lanka, and a large diaspora that
includes Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, South Africa, Paris, Toronto, and many
other sites throughout the world. This language is attested from at least the
first century B.C., though its roots go back much farther into the past, as we
will see. Among the South Asian languages, Tamil is perhaps the only case
of a very ancient language that still survives as a vibrant mother-tongue for
tens of millions of speakers.

2. Tamil is a certain body of knowledge, some of it technical, much of it

intrinsic to an ancient culture and sensibility well documented in a
continuous literary tradition going back many centuries. Specifically, tamiḻ
means something like “knowing how to love”—in the manner of the
classical love poetry with its conventions, its heroes and heroines, its
powerful expressive and suggestive techniques. Thus the great poet
Cuntaramūrtti Nāyaṉār (you will have to get used to these long names) says
to his god, the beautiful but unpredictable Lord Śiva, at a temple called
Tiruppainnili: “Do you know proper Tamil?”1 He means by this: “Do you
know how to behave properly as a male lover should? Can you understand
the hints and implicit meanings that a proficient lover ought to be able to
decipher?” The poet has some doubts about this, for in the next line he says
to the god:

Why are you just standing there
with a red-eyed serpent
dancing in your hand?

In fact, “Tamil” as a body of knowledge has a still wider application, so

that “to know Tamil” can also mean “to be a civilized being.” We could say
that “Tamil” in this sense is a kind of grammar, not merely of the language in
its spoken and written forms but of the ways of life that have been created and
lived out by its speakers.

3. Here we already touch on the next, much wider sense of the term. Tamil

was one of the languages of a great south Indian civilization and, as such, of
one of the most creative geographical domains in historical South Asia.

Some people would say that this civilization reached its apogee in the Chola
period, roughly from 850 to 1200, when Tamil speakers ruled a state that
brought large parts of the southern subcontinent under its control; this
period is often seen as “classical,” in several senses of this word. Others,
like me, might think that no less vibrant and significant achievements of
south Indian civilization began long before the Chola period and continued
on right up to the early modern age. Here is a topic we will want to explore
in this book. In general, I think of Tamil as a living being—impetuous,
sensitive, passionate, whimsical, in constant movement—hence worthy of a
biography. There is also reason to put aside the dynastic-political
periodizations that are still prevalent for south Indian history in favor of
more organic, thematic continuities that cut through the periods of dynastic
rule.
The cultural role of Tamil is not, in any case, truly analogous to that of,

say, Latin for the Roman Empire or of Sanskrit for what Sheldon Pollock has
called the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” that is, the vast swath of Asia within which
Sanskrit grammar and the political ideology couched in Sanskrit had a
pervasive and stable presence for well over a thousand years. Nor was Tamil
ever the sole or, for that matter, even the clearly predominant language of the
south Indian civilization that I’m referring to. It shared pride of place with
other languages such as Sanskrit, the various Prakrits, Telugu, Kannada, and
Malayalam. I will thus refrain, in this book, from speaking about a “Tamil
civilization,” which seems to me a modern, nationalist construction bearing
little relation to any historical reality. We can, nevertheless, agree that the
Tamil language and its particular themes, images, and traditions informed and
in many ways shaped an extraordinarily long-lived, heterogeneous, and richly
elaborated culture or series of cultures along with the political and social
orders that emerged out of those cultural matrices.

4. Tamil is, at its most basic, an intoxicating, godly fragrance (tĕyvat tamiḻ

maṇam). It is thus something light, delicate, and pervasive, an existential
undercurrent flowing through everything that lives, and as such intimately
linked to the human faculty of memory and to musical poetry as the voice
of memory and awareness.2 Not everyone can take in or recognize this
fragrance, but the First Sage, Agastya, did and, overcome by its power,
proceeded to write a grammar of this sweet vital force after learning to

speak and understand with the help of Lord Śiva.3 Moreover, as a fragrant
breath of air Tamil is also, by definition, both “bright” or golden (cĕn tamiḻ)
and cool (taṇ ṭamiḻ), like all good things in south India.4 Blake Wentworth
has shown that in the very earliest strata of Tamil literature, the so-called
Sangam corpus, the word “Tamil” is regularly paired with the idea of
something deliciously cool.5 Incidentally, like Tamil itself, the Tamil land
has a gentle nature (mĕlliyal).6

5. Finally—or perhaps this should have been our point of departure—Tamil is

a living goddess, her body constituted by the phonemes (in their oral and
also written forms) that make up the language and its grammar, in the wide
sense of the latter term intimated above. Tamil, that is, is entirely permeated
by divine forces that are accessible to those who know the language and
that may be amenable to pragmatic uses that can make, or change, a world.

Does the word tamiḻ have an accepted etymology? Do we know what it

originally meant? Unfortunately, the answer is no. The medieval lexicons, such
as the Piṅkala nikaṇṭu (10: 580), say tamiḻ means “sweetness” (iṉimai) and
also “coolness” or, literally, “waterness” (nīrmai),7 two associations we have
already noted. Modern dictionaries such as the Madras Tamil Lexicon follow
this gloss, adding others. Kamil Zvelebil, after an exhaustive discussion of the
problem, suggests an etymology from the root taku, “to be fit or proper” (medial
k being capable of elision or of shifting to m, and –iḻ being seen as a
nominalizing ending). Thus tamiḻ would mean “the excellent [resounding]
process,” “the proper [process of] speaking.”8 I find this far-fetched, but no less
so than other suggestions, for example S. V. Subrahmanian’s, deriving the word
from the reflexive pronoun tam: thus “our own (sweet sound).” The Tamil
Lexicon suggests that the name goes back to tami, “solitude,” “loneliness”—so
this would be a rare case of a language calling itself lonely or, perhaps, singular.

Whatever the correct etymology, tamiḻ clearly underlies the Sanskrit word

draviḍa. The Sanskrit word reveals the attempt by speakers of Sanskrit or other
north Indian languages to capture two distinctive Tamil sounds: the initial t,
which is pronounced with the tongue slightly backed up and touching the back
of the teeth and the alveolar ridge—thus a sharper sound than Sanskrit t—and
the final retroflex ḻ, which I have already discussed. Classical Sanskrit uses
draviḍa both to refer to Tamil speakers specifically and, at times, to indicate

south Indians generally: in the royal palace at Ujjayini in central India, in the
mid-first millennium A.D., lightly armed servants were mostly men identified by
their home region as “Āndhra, Draviḍa, and Sinhala” (the Draviḍas presumably
speaking Tamil);9 the great prose writer and poetician Daṇḍin (seventh century),
himself a Tamilian, tells a story located draviḍeṣu—in the Tamil country;10 and
the topos of the “Draviḍa ascetic” (drāviḍa-dhārmika) became something of a
cliché in Sanskrit narratives.11

Sanskrit drāviḍa (with long initial ā; also dramiḷa, middle-Indic damiḷa) has

given us the name of the language family to which Tamil belongs: Dravidian.
The existence of such a family, like the existence of the Indo-European family of
languages stretching from Calcutta to Iceland, is a modern discovery.12 Credit
for identifying the major south Indian languages as a distinct family, unrelated to
Sanskrit, goes to Francis Whyte Ellis (1777–1819), a British savant-cum-
administrator linked to the vibrant early days of College Fort St. George in
Madras. Ellis established that Tamil (both colloquial and literary), Telugu,
Malayalam, and Kannada were close relatives; he published his findings as a
“Note to Introduction” to Alexander Duncan Campbell’s Teloogoo Grammar
(1816).13 However, the first attempt to produce a comparative overview of the
Dravidian languages was carried out a generation later by Bishop Robert
Caldwell in his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family
of Languages (1856). By Caldwell’s time, the number of recognized Dravidian
languages had grown; today we count some three dozen, most of them tribal
languages with relatively few speakers, apart from the four major literary
languages of Tamil, Telugu (the language of the states of Andhra Pradesh and
Telangana), Kannada (the language of Karnataka), and Malayalam (the language
of Kerala). To do justice to medieval south Indian scholarship, we should
mention that Līlā-tilakam, probably a fifteenth-or sixteenth-century grammar in
Sanskrit of the mixed language of Kerala known as Maṇi-pravāḷam,14 already
recognized that the spoken languages of Kerala and the southern Tamil regions
were close to one another and deserved to be called “Dramiḍa” (that is,
“Tamil”); but the learned author of the Līlā-tilakam excludes the “Karṇṇāṭa and
Āndhra” languages from this category (though he admits that some people
would include them) since they are too far removed from the language of the
“Tamil Veda,” that is, the Vaishṇava poet Nammāḻvār’s canonical Tiruvāymŏḻi
poems.15