I, therefore, did the smartest thing ever: I sought help from the English Department. As I have noted here, Kim loaned me one of her teaching assistants for 30 minutes each week for about six weeks. One of those was Rebecca. Once, over lunch, we talked about books, and to this day I am pleasantly flummoxed by her response to the my question on the book that she was reading. It was about grammar! Yes, it was about grammar. No kidding!
David Shulman gives me an idea of why those linguistics folks love to explore grammar. He writes about the grammar in Tamil, which makes it interesting even for blokes like me. Shulman then proceeds to write about the beauty of the language by using the example of the word undayirukka (உண்டாயிருக்கா) which means "to be or become pregnant."
I had no idea about any of these until now!
Of course, Shulman's book is not merely about grammar. It is a biography of Tamil.
So, about this old language with a rich past and apparently a beautiful grammar too, well, where did it come from?
Shulman writes that "speakers of Dravidian languages were in place in south India, and perhaps also farther north, in the first millennium B.C." But, it is all a mystery. "We do not know when Dravidian language first penetrated the subcontinent; there may be a link to the Iron Age cultures of the southern megaliths, or even to the far more ancient world of Neolithic pastoralists."
But, so much is clear: Tamil's grammar paved the way for its poetry.
One of the many examples that Shulman uses in order to convey the richness and beauty of the language is one from the Sangam period. The anthologies from this period "are broadly sorted into two thematic categories: akam or “the interior,” consisting of love poems, and puram or “the exterior,” a more diverse group, including martial eulogy, public praise, and worldly wisdom." Here is one (translation by A.K. Ramanujan):
Of course, the akam and puram duality "can only be artificially kept apart."
A seemingly outer being like the beloved, or the god, is so deeply twined into the poet's own in-ness that we soon give up on identifying any out-ness at all. The Tamil cosmos has no external boundary.That is profound.
5 comments:
Profound posts Sriram. I admire how erudite you are in your observations.
Shulman is a keen historian of South India - his work on the peasant economy in South India is a classic. I am a great admirer of his. Needless to say he is a Tamil scholar. I enjoyed what you write here.
Here is a poem by Nammalwar, translated by A K Ramanujan.
நாமவ னிவனுவன், அவளிவளுவளெவள்
தாமவரிவருவர், அதுவிது வுதுவெது
வீமவை யிவையுவை, யவைநலந் தீங்கவை
ஆமவை யாயவை, யாய்நின்ற அவரே
Ramanujan's translation is reproduced below.
We here and that man, this man,
and that other in-between,
and that women, this women,
and the other, whoever,
those people, and these,
and these others in-between them,
this thing, and that thing,
and this other, in-between, whichever,
all things dying,these things,
those things, those others in-between,
good things, bad things,
things that were, that will be,
being all of them,
he stands there.
On a personal note - in 2003 we lost a baby. In our grief I was looking through my books and found a translation of this poem by Ramanujan. It was strangely comforting.
I had no idea about Shulman until this book ... am enjoying learning about Tamil and the Dravidian South India, even more than my enjoyment from reading Wendy Doniger's book about the Aryans and Vedic Hinduism.
Ouch!
Sorry about that terrible loss, Ravi. Sorry!
Yes, Shulman spends a lot of pages on the divine poetry that also parallels the akam and puram Sangam poetry. He discusses the poetry of Andal, Nammalwar, ... and, yes, the translations he quotes are from A.K. Ramanujan and Archana Venkatesan. In the latest post, I have posted a Nammalvar poem translated by Venkatesan.
Re the Nammalwar poem - which Prof Ramanujan calls "The Paradigm">
To quote from Prof Ramanujan, in a poem like
this "grammar becomes poetry, and poetry becomes theology. If one may be
fanciful, the 'present perfect' here describes both a grammatical form and
the form of the divine. Conceptions of god are enacted by word and syntax;
furthermore, god's one-and-manyness becomes the living word to be uttered,
danced to, sung and chanted in temples as these poems are to this day".
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