The aboriginal Tamils

I have blogged, talked, and written about how the formal education system from elementary school onward is rarely about understanding the big picture.  Instead, it is mostly about monetizing what one can do.  Learning languages and history, reading and appreciating poetry, are some of the prominent losers among many in such an education framework.

Poetry, history, language and more are all what I am learning by reading David Shulman's Tamil. In school, we were taught more about Western history and poems than about anything Indian.  Most of even the little bit that I know about India's past has been despite the school's best effort to make sure we didn't know a damn thing!

Thus, now, I am stumped at everything that Shulman offers.  A guy who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, who immigrated to Israel, seems to know more about Tamil than all but a handful of the 80 million Tamil-speakers put together!  His respectful appreciation of the language, culture, poetry, and more, makes me want to sue my old school and the government for having failed to educate me.

When writing about the Sangam literature, Shulman spends a few pages about Tirukkural, which is "a part of the larger set of the eighteen minor works."  Of course, anybody who is from Tamil Nadu knows about this collection and its author, Tiruvalluvar.  But, like almost everybody, that is all I know.  Nothing more.

After quoting and discussing a few of the couplets from Tirukkural, Shulman writes that "the reader is warmly advised to find his own favorites in translations such as P.S. Sundaram's or the beautiful French one by Francois Gros."

Shulman writes about a popular account of Tiruvalluvar as the son of a Brahmin father and a Dalit mother: "his Paraiya-Dalit nature is integral to the thick web of stories woven around him in both premodern and modern times."

"Paraiya" is no longer used for a good reason--it is like the "n" word in the US.  But, it is one of the many words that has been brought into the English language thanks to the bastard raj.  We refer to, for instance, Kim Jong-Un's North Korea as a "pariah state." 

We cannot ever retract that word from the language.  But, perhaps we ought to celebrate how this out-caste word has gone global.

Here's one of the couplets of the Brahmin-Dalit Tiruvalluvar that Shulman writes with appreciation:

If I tell her I love her more than anyone, she asks:
"Which anyone?"