Tamil becoming modern

Even in the title, David Shulman makes clear that he is writing a biography of Tamil, and not a history.

Old languages like Tamil, given to intense reflection of many centuries, write their own autobiographies, in many media, though we may not know hot to read them.  Sometimes they ask the assistance of a ghostwriter, a biographer, like me.

What a wonderful storyteller he is!  In this biography of Tamil, he educates me on how the grammar evolved, which then made the rich poetic literature happen, and then as the times changed, well, prose also developed.

Modernity is always a relative concept, privileging the more recent over the more distant past and thereby habitually distorting the latter.  It never happens in a single shot.

That applies to the changes in the language as well as to any aspect of life, it seems.

From the Sangam poetry to modern prose is one hell of a journey over nearly 2,000 years.  "Modern literary prose," for which the Tenkasi period played a critical role, is very different from the poetry of the past.  "Nothing can quite prepare us for the expressive power and stylistic range of nineteenth-century Tamil prose works, which 'bespeak a change of consciousness, of conscience'"

In addition to Sanskrit being woven into Tamil, "by the late seventeenth century, two new languages have entered into Tamil-ness from the outside--Persian and Arabic."  The biography of Tamil, it seems, is also about assimilation.  Perhaps this cosmopolitanism that is innate in the language in which we grew also contributes to how easily we move around and assimilate into societies that are completely unlike the Tamil country.

Shulman discusses "the great Muslim poet Umaruppulavar."  Of course, I had no idea about him either.  Even though he was from the part of the Tamil country that was home to my people. He was born in Ettayapuram, the same place that also claims as its own the poet whose verse I have in a tshirt!

Umaruppulavar's opus was:

the best-known literary work of Muslim Tamil, the Cirappuranam, probably the finest large-scale narrative poem in Tamil in the seventeenth-century; this vast work, largely modeled on Kamban, tells the story of Muhammad in a Hijaz that has reimagined as the verdant Tamil land

I had no idea that my ancestral areas in the old Tamil country played such roles in the evolution of the "modern" Tamil.