Story of a language and its evolution

Writing the biography of a 2,000-year-old language with 80 million speakers can be a minefield. Shulman treads it like a ballerina

February 19, 2017 12:10 am | Updated 12:10 am IST

The inscription at Big Temple in Thanjavur.

The inscription at Big Temple in Thanjavur.

In this sea-girt world

Two things

Rise from the hills,

Are worshipped by the noble,

And dispel darkness.

One

Is the luminous, blazing sun.

The other

Is peerless Tamil.

So goes an old poem. Nearer our times, the poet Bharathidasan declared that Tamil was born with the sun, the moon, the sky, the stars and the seas. Few would dare to attempt the biography of such a language. But when the world’s foremost Tamil scholar gives it his best shot one cannot but take notice. David Shulman does not disappoint; he dazzles us with his labour of love.

Based in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Shulman is steeped in many languages including, at last count, at least four Indian languages. His collected writings — still growing — would put to shame the 19th century poet Meenakshisundaram Pillai whom he admires so much. Writing the biography of a language with a ‘documented existence’ of over 2,000 years, with a thriving community of 80 million speakers spread across the world, can be a minefield. Rather than tread gingerly, Shulman dances like a ballerina. The scholar and the aesthete rub shoulders in this elegantly written book that is structured, incongruously in my view, like a Carnatic style kriti . Tamil: A Biography is both synthesis and interpretation, a must-read for anyone interested in the world’s great languages and literatures.

Shulman writes two intertwined stories. One is the evolution of the Tamil language itself. The other story is the making of the staggering corpus of literary texts.

Tamil: A Biography; David Shulman, Harvard University Press, ₹2,478.

Tamil: A Biography; David Shulman, Harvard University Press, ₹2,478.

 

The beginnings

The first chapter, Beginnings, surveys the evidence and provides a historical linguistic overview of the language. This overview, as in other chapters, is in dialogue with the internal history of the language rich as it is in myth and legend. Shulman does not dismiss them, but rather treats them with great intellectual respect and sees these visions as complementary. He shuffles between the two and often negotiates an intellectually thrilling compromise. In writing this, Shulman introduces a master argument that runs through the book: that there never was an ancient Tamil that existed in a pure form independent of Sanskrit.

In the next chapter, ‘First Budding’, Shulman begins his exploration of Tamil expressive texts, and considers in detail the breathtaking corpus of classical Sangam poetry. The category of akam greatly fascinates Shulman and he provides his analysis as a story from the inside. He sensitively describes the poetic conventions, especially their setting in specific landscapes that animate this literature. For Shulman “chronology is... a useful diversion from real work”, and he describes the formation and accretion of legends around the Sangam or academy of Tamil poets. And then he follows it up with a discussion of Tirukkural and the epic Silappatikaram . Contrary to conventional accounts which situate early Tamil literature in the Pandya polity, Shulman brings in the northern Pallava state as well. While conceding that Tamil literary tradition crystallised autonomously, he also credits Sanskrit sources and influences.

Shulman terms the great devotional outpourings of the Vaishnava Alwars and Saiva Nayanmars the ‘Second Budding’. In his view, these constitute the “single most powerful contribution of Tamil south India to pan-Indian civilisation.” The canonisation of this corpus of writings, both in graphic terms (scriptualisation) and in terms of performance (dance and music) marks the highpoint of medieval Tamil.

The three centuries of Chola rule from about 850 CE constitutes the imperial moment when a ‘new cultural ecology’ that is vastly different from the earlier literary culture is born. Shulman contends that Tamil is not contained by the geographical range of Cholas. Rather it far exceeds it and influences South Asia, South-East Asia and China, and becomes an international language used by merchants and monks. This new language finds expression in the great Kamban, the author of Ramavataram, the Tamil Ramayana . Shulman also brings in heterodox sects, Buddhists and Jains, into the story as they define the inner borders of the language. Special attention is given to the grammatical and prosodic texts produced in this period, although his silence on Nannul , the single most important grammar after Tolkappiyam , is inexplicable.

Contrary to Orientalist depictions of a decadent middle age, Shulman sees the period between the 13th and early 16th centuries as a period of ‘continuous creative experimentation’ and even dubs it a ‘Republic of Syllables’. Here, Shulman provides an analysis of the writings of Kalamega-pulavar, and the formation of a novel linguistic register, Manipravalam (‘rubies and pearls’) referring to the complex amalgam of Sanskrit on the one hand and Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam on the other hand.

Cultural controversy

Until this moment, the reader is largely with Shulman, as he deftly provides engaging translations of some fine poems and treats internalist accounts with respect and brings them into argument with external scholarly analysis. However, as Shulman grapples with the formation of Tamil modernity, things become somewhat controversial. Shulman implausibly argues that a Tamil modernity emerges in the unlikely site of Tenkasi in the deep south in the mid-16th century. In his view, the roots of 19th century Tamil prose lie in what he calls ‘the Tenkasi Renaissance’. Given the widening of the cultural and social horizon in this time, there is an efflorescence of Tamil Islamic writing. Bizarrely, Shulman argues that Tamil modernism derives from “the spectrum of Tantric praxis and preaching.” An otherwise spectacularly erudite scholar, Shulman seems out of depth in dealing with modern Tamil literature relying as he does on a small clutch of writers.

In the last chapter, ‘Beyond the Merely Modern’, Shulman discusses three master narratives of the history of Tamil: the severe disjunction that broke literary tradition in the colonial period; the epic story of the recovery of classical Tamil texts; and the story of a renaissance that gave birth to a new cultural sensibility. In a sense, Shulman is arguing against all these models that have dominated the writing of literary history in Tamil.

Dazzling comparisons

There is much to learn and not a little to argue with in this book. Clearly a linguistic-nationalist understanding of Tamil will not do. The point that Tamil cannot be seen in isolation is well taken. The dazzling comparisons across languages that Shulman provides will hopefully have a salutary effect on Tamil scholars. Arguable, the exclusive focus on Sangam literature has impoverished our understanding of the very rich corpus of Tamil literature.

It warms Tamil pride to see Shulman survey an amazing volume of international scholarship on Tamil. However, while his bibliography is not short of indigenous Tamil scholars, surely he would have benefited from engaging with scholars such as Vaiyapuri Pillai, V.Sp. Manickam, Mu.Vai. Aravindan and Y. Manikandan.

But my biggest argument is with a thread that runs through the book. Shulman asserts that a pure, autonomous Tamil never existed. If this was the case, why, even in his own analysis, at every moment in its long history, is Tamil continually resisting and wrestling with Sanskrit to maintain its distinction — a cross that no other Dravidian/ Indian language wants to bear?

A.R. Venkatachalapathy is a Tamil historian and writer.

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