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!