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TAMIL LANGUAGE & LITERATURE
"தமிழின்
மேன்மை அதன் தொன்மையில் இல்லை - தொடர்ச்சியில் உள்ளது"
".... probably the most significant contribution
(of the Tamils) is that of Tamil literature, which still remains to
be 'discovered' and enjoyed by the non Tamilians and adopted as an
essential and remarkable part of universal heritage. If it is true
that liberal education should 'liberate' by demonstrating the
cultural values and norms foreign to us, by revealing the relativity
of our own values, then the 'discovery' and enjoyment of Tamil
literature, and even its teaching ... should find its place in the systems
of Western training and instruction in the humanities.."
Kamil Zvelebil in
The Smile of Murugan : On Tamil Literature of South India
'Tamil, one of the two classical languages of
India, is the only language of contemporary India which is
recognizably continuous with a classical past.'A. K. Ramanujan in
The Interior
Landscape : Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology
(1967) |
It is impossible to begin writing about Tamil language and Tamil literature on the
world wide web without paying tribute to the pioneering work of Dr. Bala Swaminathan,
Dr.Gnanasekar Swaminathan, Dr. Vijayakumar Sinnathurai and Krishnaswamy Srinivasan in Canada,
Kuppuswamy Kalyanasundaram in
Switzerland,
Naa. Govindasamy in Singapore,Muthulilan Nedumaran
and Sivagurunathan Chinniah in Malaysia, Siddharthan
Ramachandramurthi, P.Kumar Mallikarjunan
in USA, and Sinniah Ilanko in
New Zealand.
Dr. Sundara Pandian, Dr. Meenan Vishnu and C.R. Selvakumar in Canada, amongst others,
contributed to the formation of the Soc.Culture.Tamil
newsgroup which provided an early electronic forum for discussion on Tamil language,
literature and culture. The work of the SCT, and the efforts of Kumar Kumarappan in
California, led to the establishment of the first Tamil Chair in North America at the
University of California at Berkeley.
Bala Pillai through Tamil dot Net made an important contribution towards the
development of Tamil in this digital age. The efforts of Jeyachandran Kopinath in Norway, also
reflect the contribution that the struggle for Tamil Eelam has
made to this digital Tamil renaissance.
Amongst non Tamils, the contributions of
Dr. Kamil.V. Zvelebil from
Czechoslovakia,
Thomas Malten in
Germany, Peter Schalk
at Uppsala University in Sweden, George Hart
at the University of California, Berkeley, Harold
Schiffman in Pennsylvania and
Jean-Luc Chevillard
in Paris are significant.
Websites devoted to the teaching of Tamil have
also begun to appear. The call for a common standard for Tamil font encoding is a
reflection of the felt need to render communication in Tamil easy and simple in this
digital age. Efforts at achieving an uniform transliteration scheme have also increased in
momentum.
Project Madurai launched by Dr.Kalyanasundaram on Thai Pongal Day 1998 is an
open and voluntary initiative to collect and publish free electronic editions of ancient
tamil literary classics.
Dr.Kalyanasundaram's Tamil Electronic Library is
a labour of love and Tamils everywhere will acknowledge his
contribution with gratitude. It is perhaps appropriate therefore that this web page on
Tamil language and literature should contain a poem by Bharathidasan which
Dr.Kalyanasundaram has featured in his web site.
 In
February 1999, the Tamil Nadu government declared its intention to set up an
Internet Research Centre and a Tamil Virtual University. In June 1999, Tamil
Nadu Chief Minister M.Karunanidhi announced that the Tamil
Virtual University would be headed by Dr.V.C.Kulandaisamy, former Vice
Chancellor of Indira Gandhi National Open University and that work on the
Internet Research Centre was progressing well. The University was
inaugurated in February 2001 and provides a growing number of Tamil related
courses.
The "Pongal-2000" Project is a collaborative undertaking of the Institute of Asian Studies (Madras),
the Institute
for Indology and Tamil Studies of the University of Cologne and the University
of California-Berkeley, and is directed to creating an electronic compilation of Tamil
texts - the Online Tamil Lexicon (OTL) - as well as a Tamil Text Thesaurus (TTT). The
stock of ready-to-use digitalized Tamil ASCII data consisting now of about 100 Mbytes,
will be doubled or tripled during the next four years. This will allow computer access to
all major Tamil literary works, classical and modern, via the Internet from anywhere in
the world.
Tamil is, perhaps, the oldest living language of India. It is commonly regarded as
belonging to the Dravidian group of languages. But, that is not to say that the whole
question of the 'Aryan/Dravidian categorisation' of the
peoples of the Indian subcontinent is not without controversy.
Kamil.V.
Zvelebil, sometime Professor in Tamil Studies at Charles University,
Prague writing in 'The Poets and the Powers' in 1973, characterised the Tamils as the
'Greeks of India':
"Tamil is a Dravidian language of South India, spoken by 30,465,442 inhabitants of
the State of Madras (Tamil Nadu), by about 2,500,000 in
Ceylon, further by Tamil settlers
in Burma,
Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam (about 1
million), East and South Africa (260,000) and
elsewhere in the world where the Tamils,
'The Greeks of India', settled as
merchants, intellectuals, money lenders, bankers and plantation workers. The earliest
literary monuments of the language belong to ca. the 3rd Century B.C...."
The number of first language Tamil speakers in the world is difficult to estimate and
this remains an useful (and important) area for further study. Dr. R.E. Asher in
'Descriptive Grammars' (published by Croom Helm) concluded in 1981:
"No accurate figures for the number of Tamil speakers at the time of writing are
available. The provisional figure for the whole of India produced by the 1971 census is
37,592,794. A reasonable calculation, based on a projection of population trends, would
give between forty-five and forty-six million for India as a whole in 1981, with some
forty-three million living in the southeastern state of
Tamil
Nadu, which has Madras as its capital and Tamil as its official language. If one
assumes four million or so in Sri Lanka (mainly in the
north
and northeast and classified as Ceylon Tamils, Indian Tamils, Ceylon Moors and Indian
Moors), something approaching one million in
Malaysia
and Singapore, and much smaller minorities in many
countries of the-world, including
Mauritius,
Fiji,
Burma,
South Africa,
some Caribbean states and
Great Britain, the
total number of Tamil speakers in the world at the present time might well be in the
region of fifty million."
That was in 1981. In 1999, the
Ethnologue
(Languages of the World) estimated the number of first language
Tamil speakers in the world at 66 and the number including second language
speakers at 74 million. It reports that Tamil
is spoken in Tamil Nadu and neighboring states and also in Bahrain, Fiji,
Germany, Malaysia
(Peninsular), Mauritius, Netherlands,
Qatar, Réunion,
Singapore, South
Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, UAE, United
Kingdom.
Tamil ranks 17th
amongst the top twenty of the world's most spoken languages.
In scriptual form, Tamil is made up of 247 scripts which comprise of 12 vowels 18
consonants and 1 aytham. It is difficult to fix with
certainty the beginnings of Tamil language and literature.
Professor S.Vaiyapuri
Pillai declares in his well regarded 'History of Tamil Language and Literature':
"Perhaps, it is safe to assume that the Dravidian alphabet was used for literary
purposes about the first century A.D... We might naturally expect that the Tamils had an
ancient literature of which they might be legitimately proud. Their civilisation is of
great antiquity and their ruling dynasties played an important part in the third century
B.C."
The earliest literature in Tamil is the Sangam poetry - regarded
by many Tamils as the voice of the Tamil nation in its origin.
It consists of anthologies of short lyrics and longer poems. The lyrics are made into
eight collections known as Ettu-thokai - the Eight
Anthologies. The longer poems are collected under the name of
Pattup-pattu -
the Ten Idylls.
Although the matter is not free from controversy Professor S.Vaiyapuri Pillai concludes
that Sangam literature should not be carried to any date anterior to the second century
A.D. and that the period of development of the Sangam works might be put as three
centuries and that Tolkapiyam, the early Tamil book on grammar, should also be given a
date posterior to that period.
Professor T.P.Meenakshisundaran points out in a paper presented at the first
International Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies in 1966 at Kuala Lumpur:
"Tolkappiyam is a book on phonolgy, grammar and poetics. Therefore it implies the
prior existence of Tamil literature. There is a distinction made therein between literary
language and colloquial or non literary language - ceyyul and valakku, thus implying
certain literary conventions not only in grammatical forms but also in literary form and
subject matter..."
He adds:
"Sangam poetry is unique as group poetry par excellence. It has a personality of
its own representing the group mind and the group personality of the Sangam age. Taken as
a whole it satisfies all the requirements of great poetry... The folk songs and the
proverbs of an age, with their authors unknown, form a unity, as the very expression of
the national personality and the language."
"Sangam poetry, though too cultured to be called folk song, consciously creates
this universal personality and that is why it has been classified as a separate group in
Tamil literature - the really great national poetry, not in the sense of national
popularity but in the sense of being the voice of the nation in its origin.
"These remind us of the
towering gopuram of
Tanjore expressing the aspiring spiritual height of the
Chola age, though it is not the handiwork of any
one sculpter but the work of a group of artists, each giving expression in rock to a
vision of his own. It is therefore necessary to realise the importance of this conception
of Sangam literature as a Thogai or anthology or group poetry which lies at the very root
of the theory of Sangam poetry." (T.P.
Meenakshisundaram, The Theory of
Poetry in Tolkappiyam, Collected Papers, Annmalinagar, 1961)
Professor A.L.Basham in Wonder that was India, comments on
some other aspects of early Tamil literature:
"Very early Tamils developed the passion for classification
which is noticeable in many aspects of ancient Indian learning. Poetry was divided into
two main groups: 'internal' (aham) and 'external' (puram). A unique feature of Tamil
poetry is the initial rhyme or assonance. This does not appear in the earliest Tamil
literature but by the end of the Sangam period it was quite regular. The first syllable or
syllables of each couplet must rhyme. This initial assonance, in some poems continued
through four or more lines, is never to be found in the poetry of Sanskrit languages, or
as far as we know, in that of any other language. Its effect, a little strange at first,
rapidly becomes pleasant to the reader, and to the Tamil it is as enjoyable as the end
rhyme of Western poetry."
Again V.K.Narayana Menon's comments are not without relevance:
" We know of the immense richness of Tamil classics, dating
back to the pre Christian era, of the many epics, anthologies of lyrics, long poems, of
the wealth and beauty of Sangam literature, all of which represent the consciousness of a
community independent of the main stream of the Aryan cultural pattern, and fully aware of
the difference...''
Father Xavier S. Thaninayagam's
contributions to Tamil studies have been monumental. His Chelvanayagam Memorial Lecture in
1982 on Research in Tamil Studies:
Retrospect and Prospect is essential reading. His comments in
Ancient Tamil Literature
reflect his diligent research and scholarship -
"...The poetry belonging to the age before and immediately after the
composition of Tolkaappiyam has not come down to us. What have reached us are the
Ten
Idylls (Pattuppaattu) and the Eight Anthologies (Ettuttokai) which are collections of
poems composed after Tolkaappiyam by various poets, most of whom belonged to one single
epoch. Most of this poetry was composed before the second century A.D.These poems, however, do not exactly belong to a Golden or Augustan Age
of Tamil literature as has been supposed. Indications point to their
being the efforts of an age when decades of convention were setting limits and marking
boundaries to poetic inspiration, and preventing the free and unfettered beat of the
poets' wings. Nevertheless, it is a great and spacious age in Tamil literature..."
The Thirukural and the Cilapathikaram belong to the classics of Tamil literature. Kamban's Ramayanam and
Sekkilar's Periya Puranam
are amongst the masterpieces of the Chola period. And in this century, the contributions
of Subramaniya Bharathy
infused fresh vigour and helped to transform Tamil into a language not simply of the
literati but of the people.
Tamil is a living language and Geetha Ramasamy's website and
Dr.Kalyanasundaram's 20th Century
Tamil Authors & their Works open windows to modern Tamil writing including
those of Sundararamasamy and Kannadasan.
And, here, many will agree with Muthulilan Nedumaran's remark:
Again, Canadian Tamil writer Navaratnam
Giritharan's views will find a persuasive reasonance in the minds of many:
"For me there is no difference between writers from
Tamilnadu or from Singapore or from Malaysia or from Sri Lanka. We all belong to one
family: Tamil writers family.Tamil writers living in many different parts of the world
should feel united. For instance, in Tamilnadu various Tamil writers from various parts
write different Tamil; they speak different Tamil. Speaking differently or writing
differently doesn't mean they are different. They all belong to the same Tamil writers
family. Sri Lankan Tamil literature or 'Pulampeyarnthor Literature' or Singapore Tamil
Literature or Malaysian Tamil Literature or Tamilnadu Tamil Literature all should be
considered as part of the same Tamil Literature.
Contradictions always exist. They shouldn't be antagonistic, instead they should be
friendly.There is a need for a serious literature. There is a need for a children
literature. There is a need for magazines like kanaiyazhi or kalachchuvadu. At the same
time for 'pamara makkal' there is a need for a news paper like Thinath Thanthi or magazine
like Ranee. There is a need for 'Ampulimama' or Kokulam for kids.
If we understood this, there won't be any fighting among various literary groups. The
purpose of the literature is for various reasons. It can be a guide; it can be an
entertainment;..... it can be useful in various ways. For instance, during my past life,
at various stages I was influenced by various writers and writings due to my age and my
knowledge. Going through these different stages are necessarry for the growth. As a child
no one can expected me to read Kafka. I had to reach certain level before I understood
Kafka.
For me, all these different '...lisims' in literature are important and
necessary for various reasons. Fighting against each literary concept is not a positive
thing to do." (Canadian Tamil Literature -
V.N.Giritharan)
The Roja
Muthiah Research Library in Tamil Nadu (and in Chicago on micro film), has been
described as "Roja Muthiah's attempt to capture the essence of his people". It
contains more than 100,000 rare books as well as journals and newspapers, and thousands of
clippings. The range of subject matter includes medicine, folklore, religion, cinema, and
women's studies--and materials, such as theater playbills and popular songbooks. Most of
the publications date from the later half of the nineteenth century and the first half of
the twentieth.
The Jaffna Public Library in Tamil
Eelam, which contained more than 95,000 books and journals, including valuable historic
manuscripts was burned down by Sinhala police in 1981. It was an act of cultural genocide
which served to consolidate the togetherness of the Tamil people - albeit, in pain and
anguish. To many thousands of Tamils it served as a Konstradt.
Karthigesu Sivathamby has made an
authoritative study of Eelam Tamil literature during the past fifty years.
Today, the growing number of
websites devoted to Tamil language and literature, are a reflection not only of the
deep and sturdy roots of the Tamil language, but also of the growing and deep felt need of
Tamils, living everywhere, to go back to those roots - in search of their own identity in
an emerging post modern world. Some may give expression to
this need in English (because their early education as a result of foreign rule, was
largely in English), but Tamil remains
a part of their being - and has something to do with the way in which they
'segment' and 'see' the world. |
