Tamil at the border ... and yet at the center

Tirunelveli with its own dialect is where my people are from.  Well, one branch is from close to Tirunelveli, and the other is at Sengottai, which is at the foothills of the Western Ghats.  Sengottai used to be a part of the old Travancore kingdom, and then Kerala.  After the disastrous creation of language-based states, Sengottai became a part of Tamil Nadu and Tirunelveli district.

Tenkasi is the big town near Sengottai.  I have never explored that town, other than waiting at the bus stand there, or passing through.

David Shulman makes me feel that I have missed out on something important at Tenkasi.  This town that is seemingly insignificant was not really insignificant:

A line of rulers claiming to be descendants of the medieval Pandya kings consolidated a small-scale state in this far southern corner of the Tamil country in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  By the decade of the 1440s this Pandya state had attained a solid economic base, at least partly sustained by the lucrative trade passing over the Ghats, that enabled the rulers, among other projects, to build the great Visvanatha-Siva temple still standing in the city

One of the rulers was Ativirarama Pantiyan.  Tamil literature "beginning ca. 1564, witnessed a burst of activity unparalleled elsewhere in Tamil Nadu."

From Tenkasi!

How unparalleled at that time?

the king himself was a powerful poet, the author of the complex work known as Naitatam ... Once considered the basis of an education in Tamil, this work is, sadly, little read today, as are Ativiraraman's other monumental narrative poems

Again, in Tenkasi!

Contributing to poetry itself is significant.  But there is more.  Tenkasi poets produced "major works of what we could call poetry-as-prose."

In Tamil, believe it or not, one could draw a line leading from late-sixteenth century Tenkasi poetic narratives to twentieth-century prose artists such as Putumaippittan, with a big but necessary detour around late-nineteenth-century novelists such as Vedanayakam Pillai and Rajam Iyer.

Maybe I should have picked up the Putumaippittan collection.

A guy who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and an Israeli after immigrating, teaches me about Tamil and Tenkasi and Tirunelveli.  Serendipity at the bookstore!

Tamil as a world language

Back during the Neyveli years, we went to the local sabha to watch live musical performances and theatre.  I simply assumed then that most of India was into the highbrow cultural life.  And have been disappointed to find out ever since that most of India does not care a shit about the intellectual and cultural lives, even though seemingly every Indian is proud of its rich heritage!

One of the plays that we watched was by Kathaadi Ramamoorthy (?)  A character in that play was from Tirunelveli.  This character comes to Madras (as it was known then) and speaks with a strong Tirunelveli dialect that others find it difficult to understand, which then set up many comedic situations. 

Why is the Tirunelveli dialect so distinct?

Turns out that there is a historical linguistic reason, which I did not know until I read David Shulman's Tamil.

As the Pandyas weakened and other kings and invaders from the north attacked the Tamil country, the Vijayanagara forces reached well into the region by the mid-14th century.  They didn't merely attack, raid, and return with the riches, but came to stay, writes Shulman, who adds that Telugu-speaking farmers and merchants also arrived and "settled mostly in the far south of the Tamil country in the basin of the Tamraparani River."  Yes, the same river that is a pleasant walk from my grandmother's old village!

Telugu speech, present from ancient times in the border zones of northern Tamil Nadu, now became a natural presence throughout the southern region.  You can still hear it today in Tirunelveli District--a distinct dialect with archaic features preserved in relative isolation from the evolving fate of Telugu in Andhra and Telengana, somewhat like the Rabelaisian French of Quebec in relation to today's standardized French.

Again, all I have is only one reaction: Mouth wide open!

From this post, six years ago

This was in the mid-14th century, by when the three powerful forces--Pallavas, Cholas, and Pandyas--were in decline.  But, their achievements prior to that had already made Tamil a world language.  Among the many pieces of evidence that Shulman writes about is Quanzhou, which I had also blogged about a while ago.

Throughout all these, Shulman discusses plenty of poetry and literature from those periods, and how the language evolved to become more and more cosmopolitan.  I have a hard time choosing my favorite among them.  I loved his story about the eccentric improv poet Kalamekam (Black Cloud.)  I will outsource that to this reviewer:

Asked to write a poem in the form called venpa about a mountain made to shake by a fly nearby, he ups the ante: “Why not the whole universe?” The venpa is a notoriously tricky verse form, tightly restricted in its cadence, with a complicated pattern of double rhyme. The resulting Tamil poem is a little miracle of assonance and rhythm; Shulman beautifully captures its lyrical eccentricities:

The eight elephants that stand at the cardinal points,
great Mount Meru, the oceans,
the Earth herself—all teetered and tottered
when a fly came buzzing
into the wound left on Vishnu’s body

by the cowherdess with the musical voice

when she struck him
with the thick churning rod.

(It helps to know that in traditional texts the directions are, indeed, guarded by elephants; Mount Meru is the axis mundi; and Vishnu was incarnated in a village of cowherds as the mischievous, larcenous, adorable baby Krishna, whose long-suffering mother Yashoda was forced on occasion to deliver corporal punishment, with cosmic consequences.)