War and Peace

Back in January 2019, I wrote this about David Shulman:

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!

A polyglot Shulman is.  In addition to English and Hebrew, "he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam."

Which is why Shulman comfortably writes that one of the most powerful interpretations of the Mahabharata was written in Malayalam: "By far the most powerful such interpretation that I have read, Wandering the Mahabharata, was written in the South Indian language Malayalam by a maverick scholar, Kuttikrishna Marar"

We are all better off thanks to scholars like Shulman who interpret history and old texts for the vast multitude of us who are barely literate in one language.

Shulman's essay is about a recent book on the Mahabharata.  The first paragraph alone blows my mind on how fluent he is with various aspects of life in the Subcontinent, in addition to his mastery of the epic itself:

The Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic, is a fiery, dangerous book. One is not supposed to keep a copy in the house, lest it burn down. And it is dangerous, perhaps fatal, to read it from beginning to end, in linear sequence. Similarly, translating it from Sanskrit into another language, beginning at the beginning, is not recommended. The classical Telugu version from South India has three authors; two died during its composition.

More than a year ago, when I helped my parents move, and when my parents were donating and getting rid of many of their possessions, my father complained that nobody will want his copy of a scholar's interpretation of the Mahabharata--for the very reason that Shulman notes.

Shulman weaves his phenomenal understanding of the Subcontinent when reviewing Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata.  After listing works that interpreted the epic in innovative and powerful ways--I have no clue about any of those!--he writes:

But surely the most lyrical of all such attempts to see the Mahabharata through the eyes of its characters is the remarkable dramatic poem Until the Lions by the Kerala-born, Paris-based poet, dance producer, and librettist Karthika Naïr.

She has given her book an appropriate subtitle: “Echoes from the Mahabharata.” The thirty haunting, heartrending chapters, in a wide range of forms and styles, resonate powerfully with one another; together they offer a text clearly meant for live performance, in oral recitation—or rather incantation—and in dance. ...

The poems of Until the Lions are graphically typeset on the page so that they seem to be dancing, a celebration of visible sound. Karthika plays with metrical modes—canzone, rima dissoluta, the Panjabi Sufi acrostic form known as Si Harfi, and the Tamil andadi, in which each new verse begins with the final syllables of the previous one.

Read the entire essay.  If you are like me, after reading it, you too will immediately place an order for the book from your favored retailer.

I will end with this nugget from Shulman on the continued relevance of the Mahabharata:

[This] two-thousand-year-old book is, in a way, a template for Indian civilization; it remains as vital and relevant today as it ever was, and not only for South Asia. The apocalypse it describes is something all too human, driven by greed, egotism, spite, and the usual phoney fixation on the glories of dying in war. 

... to the Tamil of today

The only problem that I have with David Shulman's biography of Tamil is that for a book authored by a person of his caliber, and for a book published by Harvard University Press, there are quite a few inconsistent spellings throughout.  Even Tenkasi is spelled as Tenkaci in one context.  In the opening pages, the pallavi of the Carnatic music is written as pallava.

But, otherwise, what an awesome learning experience it has been for me!

Shulman writes that the Tamil world had changed almost beyond recognition by the middle of the nineteenth century.  Manonmaniyam Sundaram Pillai played an integral role in the revival and revitalization of Tamil.  I recall his Tamil Thai Vazhthu from the school days.  Shulman lists many more who worked on recovering the old Sangam texts and providing commentaries about them.

In the early 20th century, the struggle to get rid of the bastard raj also became a struggle to re-establish Tamil.  Unfortunately, this became entangled with anti-Brahmin and anti-caste issues, which were also extremely important, and are important even today.  But, the co-mingling of these issues led to a political movement to also get rid of the Sanskrit--associated with Brahmins--words from the Tamil language.

Shulman writes that "the very intensity of anti-Sanskrit feeling that we see in the Pure Tamil fanatics is itself a sure sign of the deep interdependence of the two languages."  But, politics does not care for such nuances.  And despite the maniacal efforts of the fanatics, "Tamil today, like the Tamil of yesterday, indeed like nearly all major living languages, remains saturated with borrowed vocabulary."  The language lives on.

Shulman ends the book with a contemporary Tamil poem, by Manushya Puthiran.

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.

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!

Traditions, when the times they are a-changin'

Consider the following sentence:

Tradition means living while adhering to usage as befits the refined culture of particular people in a particular time and place.

What an awesome definition of tradition, right?

But, there is way more to that sentence.

What happens to the glorious Tamil literature that followed the rules of the sophisticated grammar that involved the mythical Agastya and the real life Nakkirar?  Do the old canons get thrown out?  Will a new grammar have to be created?  What about the tradition?

It is in this context, writes David Shulman, that Peraciriyar (the great teacher) took on the challenge of "defining, defending, and explicating the classical Tamil past."  Centuries have passed since the Sangam literature, and the times they are a-changin' in the 13th century.  Poets are experimenting, and Peraciriyar thinks and writes about marapu:

Tradition means making poetry while adhering to usage (valakku) as befits the refined culture (nakarikam) of particular people in a particular time and place.

Even as I read that sentence, I was struck by how contemporary the issue is.  Shulman adds:

Let's say that actual speech changes over time [...]; does this mean we need a new grammar in each new period?

That question is relevant even today.

Languages and cultures do not stay stagnant.  If they do, perhaps they will perish.  The Tamil of today is vastly different from the Sangam Tamil, from Nammalvar's Tamil, from Peraciriyar's Tamil ... even from Kannadasan's poetry.  What happens to tradition when the times they are a-changin'?

Tradition means living while adhering to usage as befits the refined culture of particular people in a particular time and place.

A verse from Pukalenti's Nalavenpa and Shulman's commentary appeal to me a lot--even though my traditions are far removed from Peraciriyar's:

I, too, think that everyone should see the world as it is.

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.)

Dandin, the bestselling Pallava author

I had always wondered about the Sanskrit in the names of the big time Tamil kings of the past.  Like Mahendravarman and Narasmimha among the Pallavas, and Raja Raja and Rajendra Cholans.  I mean, these figures loom large among the Tamil imagination and yet they have Sanskrit names?  In comparison, the great Tamil poet and grammarian had a "real" Tamil name--Nakkiran.

David Shulman writes that "modern spoken Tamil is astonishingly rich in Sanskrit loan words.  Indeed, there may well be more straight Sanskrit in Tamil than in the Sanskrit-derived north Indian vernaculars."

The usage of "modern" does not answer the question about Mahendravarman, who lived 1,400 years ago.

Even as I think about all these, Shulman throws me a curve ball.  A googly, to use a cricket equivalent.  He offers an interesting theory, which perhaps the Indologists and Tamil scholars have been arguing it out.  As this reviewer in NYRB notes:

Likely to ruffle some scholars is Shulman’s insistence that this remarkable literary culture was, since its inception, deeply in dialogue with Sanskrit, and that a great many (perhaps most) of its poets partook of the Brahmanical culture that already spanned all of South Asia by the Common Era’s early centuries.

I am willing to buy into this idea.  Shulman writes:

What we can say with confidence is that speakers of Vedic Sanskrit were in contact, from very ancient times, with speakers of Dravidian languages, and that the two language families profoundly influenced one another."

Dandin helps me understand such a possibility.

I had no idea about a historical character named Dandin until I read this book.  Seriously, how did a fellow who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, who immigrated to Israel, manage to understand all these, and then write in a delightfully simple prose so that even idiots like me--born a Tamil--can understand and appreciate the richness of the language and the people going back centuries?

Shulman writes:

Dandin, a native Tamil speaker, chose to compose his work on poetics in Sanskrit, the cosmopolitan language accessible to scholars throughout India and beyond--and indeed, the Kavyadarsa became one of India's bestsellers, known throughout Asia and eventually translated/adapted into Tamil (Tantiyalankaram, possibly twelfth century), Tibetan, and other languages.  The Pallava court was clearly open to the pan-Indian world of erudition and artistic production couched in Sanskrit and also eager to contribute to that world.

There is only one way to respond to this: Mouth wide open!

Now, when I look at the photos like the one above that I have from my visits to Kanchipuram, I wonder about the backstory is of this person who could very well be a scholar from China visiting the highly cosmopolitan Pallava capital!

In terms of political and social dynamics, a northern-oriented, highly Sanskritic state centered in Kancipuram and the Tondai plain complemented the southern kingdom of Pandya Madurai with its Tamil-centric ideology.  Powerful literary works in Tamil appeared a little later in the Pallava north than in the Pandya south, though we should not forget a great narrative poem such as the Perumpanatrupatai, from the Ten Songs.

They never even hinted about any of these in my high school history!

Verse 72 from
The Tiruviruttam of Nammāḻvār
Source

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?"

Those cunning linguists!

In my early years of teaching, which was back in California, it did not take me much time to understand that students in my classes needed to learn how to write at the college level.  But, I could not spend all my class time teaching them about writing, nor did I have the ability to explain to the class how to write well.

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.

To know Tamil can also mean to be a civilized human being

The constitution of India, which put an end to the bastard raj, noted that Hindi would become the official language, after a period of transition during which English would continue to be an official language.

I would learn about this later in school, but I already had an immersion of sorts into this history thanks to the loud political talk all around me.  The vehement opposition to imposing Hindi as the official language got into my system as well, even though by my time it was settled that Hindi and English would continue--indefinitely--as official languages.  My unwillingness to learn Hindi goes back to such a baptismal experience!

The anti-Hindi protests, which were violent as well, began in the city of Madurai.  I don't know why it was in Madurai that such opposition began, but I am not surprised even one bit.  Madurai has a long and rich history as the capital of Tamil--the language and its history.  (If only the city had also been made the capital of the new Tamil Nadu state!)

In an essay that reviews David Shulman's Tamil, Whitney Cox writes about the experience "as a college student living among Tamil speakers for the first time."

I was in Madurai, an ancient city in Tamil Nadu inextricably connected with the language’s millennia-long existence, and after much desperation, I came to find life in Tamil’s presence exhilarating. This is a frequently shared experience of the language’s foreign enthusiasts, which mirrors, however poorly, the insider perspective of many Tamil native speakers. Speaking, or even just listening to, well-spoken or (better yet) sung Tamil exerts a powerful allure over those who are at home in it. The sheer love for the language that I saw in my Madurai neighbors two decades ago shades over into an intense loyalty, even a quasi-religious devotion, of a sort rarely seen elsewhere.

From Shulman I infer a big reason for such "an intense loyalty, even a quasi-religious devotion":

"to know Tamil" can also mean "to be a civilized human being."

The current President of my adopted country perhaps think that these lands are shitholes.  He and most of his 63 million voters are clueless that they are clueless about the long and rich history in shitholes.  A history that meant even way back when that to know Tamil meant to be a civilized human being.  Centuries before Persian and French were honored as being the language of the civilized.

Madurai was a cultural center.  It was also the capital city for Pandyas.  No shithole, Mr. President!

Where did the language and people come from?   நாளைக்கு பாக்கலாம் (naalaikku paakkalaam--we will meet tomorrow)

Source

தமிழ் Tamil

I have blogged a lot about the Tamil language and the people and even its contemporary politics.  There is a fanatical admiration that I have for the language and its history, which shows up in posts like this, well, it seems strange even to me ;)

You, dear reader, can imagine then my delight in spotting a book with a title that was most fascinating.  Tamil: A Biography.

Source

The author is an American/Israeli!

I bought the book right away.

Yes, over the next few weeks, many of my posts will relate to the contents of this book.