Tamil Literary Histories

7/27/2019 Tamil Literary Histories

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Antiquity and Sacred Writing: Tamil Literary Histories

in the late 19th - early 20th centuries

Srilata Mller

Corrected version of a paper presented at the 15th European Conference

on Modern South Asian Studies, Prague, August 1998

The nineteenth century, a period of growing pan-Indian as well as regionalnationalism, was also the era when "antiquarian" studies came into

prominence and flourished. Numerous works of Tamil literary history, dealingwith the culture of the ancient Tamils, emerged in this period. They wereproduced by scholars from entirely different milieus and with varyingperspectives which one can only broadly, and with caution, categorise as"traditionalist" and "modern", keeping in mind the vast and complexinteraction between the two1

All these studies sounded one common theme: the ancient Tamil past wasseen as glorious, in comparison with which the present was a sad

degeneration. Further they were, to a greater or lesser extent, underpinnedby the same historiographic approaches, which were themselves based onideologies of race and its relation to language and religion, current at thattime. Relying upon these, scholars of Tamil literature produced descriptions ofthe ancient and most authentic Tamil race, its language and religion. Thesehistoriographic approaches, as Sivathamby (1986:49) complains, haveendured till present, making it difficult for scholars even today to ask newquestions in the study of Tamil literature or seek other answers. The aim ofthis paper is to examine the evolution of one construct which was to emergein the Tamil literary history of the late 19th early 20th centuries: the idea

of the authentic Tamil religion.

In 1856 the Rev. Robert Caldwell published his landmark comparative studyof the Dravidian languages2. The introduction to the book took to taskOrientalists like Wilson and Max Mueller who had attested to the "Aryan"origin of much of the subcontinental peoples, based upon the linguistic


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correspondences between Sanskrit and the Germanic languages. Caldwellpointed out that, by the same logic, it was possible to deduce that thepeoples of peninsular India, speaking as they did an entirely different groupof languages from the Indo-European ones, were racially, as a group, of non-Aryan origin (1856:1-2).

He suggested that the same "Dravidian" may be applied to these languagesand, by extension, the people. Caldwell further argued that of theselanguages Tamil was both the oldest and the least dependent upon Sankrit(p31). But even while granting the antiquity of the language, he dismissedthe antiquity of Tamil literature. The oldest of it could not be older than the8th 9th century C.E. Jaina literature, of which theKural was probably theoldest Tamil work in existence (p85). Caldwell further questioned ancient

Tamil society's exposure to the higher forms of civilization, such as art,

science or religion, prior to the arrival of Brahmins (p77); Dravidian religion,for instance, prior to their advent, had been a sort of demonolatry orprimitive Shamanism (p78). Nevertheless, he concluded, even whilecivilization came with the Brahmins, the beneficial effects of this had beenmore than counter-balanced by the fossilising caste system (p79).

Though Caldwell's analysis of the antiquity of the Tamil language and theDravidian race unleashed a socio-cultural euphoria among Tamil scholars ofthat period, several of his other conjectures proved problematic3. Not the

least controversial was his reduction of ancient Tamil religion to primitiveShamanism. In the alternative discourses which emerged on the nature of

Tamil religion, which conspicuously ignored Caldwell's views, the model heldup for comparison was, inevitably, Christianity. It seemed particularlyimportant to show that Tamil religion had the same strong ethical mooringsand that it was grounded upon the same sort of monotheistic premises asChristianity. Such features were then "found" already in the earliest extant

Tamil literature, in that of the "Sangam Age".

This paper suggests that these imperatives led to the early privileging inTamil literary history, of two kinds of Tamil religious literature: one kind wasthat of a universal, "non-sectarian" humanism embodied best by the Kural(seen as belonging to the Sangam Age), the other was the Saiva Siddhantacorpus of scriptures, seen as representing a native monotheistic counterpartto Christianity. We shall examine, briefly, these imperatives at work, in highlydifferentiated ways, in the writings of G. U. Pope (1820-1907) and M. S.


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Purnalingam Pillai (1866-?), while contextualising their views in the light ofthe then contemporary Tamil historiography.

G. U. Pope (1820-1907) lived in southern India from the age of nineteen forapproximately a period of thirty-five years. He

joined the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Tirunelveli (following inthe footsteps of Robert Caldwell) where he first studied Tamil language andliterature. Pope lived and worked in various parts of South India Thanjavur,Ooty and Bangalore before returning to England in 1880 and becoming thechaplain of Balliol College, Oxford. In the remaining years of his life hebrought out successive translations of works of Tamil literature of which thefirst was his translation of the Kural in 1886.

Written by the poet known as Thiruvalluvar, the Kural is a poem of 133sections, dealing with three themes: religious merit/duty (aram), prosperity(porul) and desire (inpam). Caldwell and Pope dated the text to the 8th9thcenturies C.E., while the majority of native scholars(4) placed it in the lateSangam period whose terminus ante quem they variously located between100500 C.E.5 Modern scholars like Zvelebil favour a date earlier than thatof Caldwell and Pope, and nearer to the native dating.

It is no coincidence that Pope's first translation was that of the Kural. The texthad attracted the attention of a series of European scholars in the Tamilregion from as early as Constantin Beschi (1680-1742), who had produced anunpublished Latin translation of it. 6 Pope's work, therefore, was muchindebted to that of his predecessors and constituted part of a European,Christian understanding of the text. From a Christian point of view, thedefects of Brahminical religion could be summed up in three words: caste,idolatry and sectarianism (as one of the consequences of polytheism). It isthese defects which Pope found to be refreshingly absent in the Kural.

Pope begins his introduction by discussing the issue of Thiruvalluvars caste.While Thiruvalluvar's biography was generally acknowledged to be legend,certain aspects of the legend were seen by most scholars as based uponhistorical fact. One of these was his low-caste origin. As Pope explains, thename Valluvar was an honorific, meaning teacher or priest, traditionally givenby the paraiyar (the untouchables of the Tamil country) to the learned men of


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their community (1980:p i). Thus, Pope points out: "It is strange that the titleby which alone the greatest poet of South India is known should be oneindicating an origin most degrading and contemptible in the eyes of the vastmultitudes of whom he has been for ten centuries the Oracle. The last hasindeed become the first." (p ii)

Further, the author's low-caste origin was also clearly reflected in the "caste-free" ideology of the Kural itself. Pope quotes a French scholar, M. Ariel, onthis issue:

"That which above all is wonderful in the Kural is the fact that the authoraddresses himself, without regard to castes, peoples or beliefs, to the wholecommunity of mankind; [...]" (p i).

This eclecticism of the text was reinforced by its lack of reference to temples,and by extension, to idolatry. "[i]t would be impossible to gain from hiswritings any idea of the kind of temple in which he [Thiruvalluvar] lit thesacred lamp and presented the offerings of his people." (p ii) Thus, theuniversalism and the broad-based appeal of the Kural to all Tamils: "EveryHindu sect claims the great poet, and strives to interpret his verses so as tofavour its own dogmas." (p v) Pope proceeds to consider what, in fact, couldbe the real ideology of the Kural and comes to the following conclusion:

"Remembering that its author was not fettered by caste prejudices, that hisgreatest friend was a sea-captain, [...] that he was evidently an `eclectic,'that Christian influences were at the time at work in the neighbourhood, andthat many passages are strikingly Christian in their spirit, I cannot feel anyhesitation that the Christian Scriptures were among the sources from whichthe poet derived his inspiration." (p iv)

In his Comparative Grammar Caldwell had already provided linguisticevidence to suggest that the Tamils had been free of

both caste and idolatry before the Aryan immigrants, the Brahmins, arrived intheir land 7. One assumption to follow from this was that caste and idolatrywere essentially "alien" to the Tamil culture. In Pope's analysis of the Kural, itsideology and


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the high esteem in which it is held by Tamils provides additional literaryevidence for this view. Pope goes even further and

suggests that it could even be a crypto-Christian text. Considering all this, theKural represents, however unwittingly, a powerful Tamil critique of

Brahminical Hinduism.

In 1900, Pope brought out his translation of the Thiruvasagam ofMannikavasagar, one of the most popular texts of the Saiva

Siddhanta corpus. Here, in the preface, he posed the question of why therewas a need to translate such books at all and proceeded to answer it atfollows. Firstly, Saivism was the Tamil religion. "These poems [...] are dailysung throughout the whole Tamil country with tears of rapture." (1979: pxxxii) Hence, it was necessary for Europeans, especially Christian

missionaries, to engage themselves with it, if they wished to understand theTamil people at all (p ix-x). Appreciating the impact of this religion on theTamils he, Pope, was undertaking this translation in a spirit of respect. Eachreligious system had its truth and the preface would point out the commontruths between Saiva Siddhanta and Christianity. This he proceeded to do asfollows:

"He [Manikkavasagar] taught the people that there was one supremepersonal God, no mere metaphysical abstraction, but the Lord of gods andmen. He also taught that it was the gracious will of Siva to assume humanity,to come to earth as a Guru [...] He announced that this way of salvation wasopen to all classes of the community. He also taught very emphatically theimmortality of the released soul [...] It will be seen how very near in some notunimportant respects the aiva system approximates to Christianity; [...]" (pxxxiii-iv).

Thus, it was in the Saiva Siddhanta that the Tamils found a religion whichdefeated the atheism of the Buddhists and the Jains

and, in addition, found, "[a] personal God, an assurance of immortality and acall to prayer" (xxxvi).

In the great many studies of Tamil literature by native scholars to emergebetween 1850 and 1920, Pope's thesis of the links between Christianity, on


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the one hand, and the Kural and Saiva Siddhanta, on the other, wereignored8. That which was repeatedly emphasised, though, were his otherconclusions about this religious literature along with the claim that itrepresented the authentic Tamil religion.

With the publication of M. S. Purnalingam Pillai's A Primer of Tamil Literaturein 1904 9 both the Kural and Saiva Siddhanta, in addition, come to belocated within a clear-cut periodization of Tamil literary history which is seen,simultaneously, as the history of the Aryan-Dravidian struggle in South India.

In Tamil Literature Purnalingam Pillai assigns the Kural to the Sangam periodwhose terminus ante quem he gives as 100 C.E. This is a period when, in hiswords, Tamil literature had "[i]ts most flourishing period," was "essentiallymoral and religious," and independent of the influence of "Aryam" andSanskrit (1994:p1). The Kural is seen as the greatest masterpiece of thoseidyllic times and, in his estimation of it, Purnalingam Pillai both quotes andechoes Pope: "The great weaver-poet was an electic [sic] in religion andphilosophy, [...]" and the poem contains "[a] universal code of morals" whichis "read and appreciated by the civilized world." (p 76)

The Sangam Period is followed, between 100600 C.E., by the age of theBuddhists and the Jains. Purnalingam Pillai makes it clear that, from a Tamilpoint of view, Buddhists and Jains were non-Tamil outsiders as were theirreligious systems. Thus he explains that in this period the Tamil country ispopulated by three different ethnic groups: the Tamils, the Aryans and theBuddhist/Jains who also came from North India (p112). But, unlike the Aryans,the Buddhist/Jains "[l]ived peaceably with their neighbours," "[n]everattacked the ancient, unadulterated Saivaism" and were not caste-oriented(ibid.). Thus, this too was a period conducive to the growth of Tamil literature,though not Tamil religion.

The next period, "The Age of Religious Revival" from 700900 C.E., is whenthe ancient Tamil religion begins to reassert itself after several centuries ofdarkness, though it undergoes several shameful compromises with"Aryanism" in order to do so. Purnalingam Pillai explains:

"In the course of centuries the Tamil Saivas, who were vegetarians and who


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had looked upon the Aryas as mlecchas for their [habits of] meat-eating anddrinking intoxicants and as untouchables came, by the force of juxtaposition,of aryan adaptability, and of political contingencies, to be reconciled to theways and habits of their neighbours and to accept the authority of the Vedas,[...] Saivaism, accepting the Vedic rule, became metamorphosed into Vedic or

Vaidika Saivaism." (p154-55)

In Tamil Literature, this compromised state of the religion is seen ascontinuing to prevail till the contemporary period10. Thus, in a later sectionentitled "A Warning Note", Purnalingam Pillai appeals to Tamils to purge theSaiva Siddhanta of all its Aryan and "puranic" influences and to return it tothe pristine condition it had enjoyed in antiquity. To quote:

"The Saiva Siddhanta is the indigenous philosophy of South India and thechoicest product of the Tamilian intellect. [...] This high and noble system,based on the Agamas or Saiva scriptures, was corrupted by the puranicwriters, whose sole object was to reconcile the Vedas and the Agamas [...]

The Tamilar, overbourne by the political ascendancy of the Aryans, acceptedthe system, [...] Bhakti or loving piety, the root idea of the Saiva system,ennobled the persons, whatever their caste, colour or creed [...] Such awidely tolerant, ennobling, rationalistic faith has been made to assume thegarb of a thoroughly intolerant, fictitious, and meanly selfish system. The

Tamilar, therefore, are in duty bound [sic] to throw off the puranic veil which

dims their vision and to realise the old conception of Him as enshrined in theancient Tamil poems based on the Tamilian Agamas." (p 254-55)

A Primer of Tamil Literature was written specifically to fulfil universityexamination needs, even including an appendix with sample questions forM.A. candidates. Through its widespread usage it might be truly said to havehelped shape what became the majoritarian view of "Tamil religion" at thistime.

The process, in some sense, of "creating" an authentic Tamil religion in thelate 19th early 20th centuries both parallels and inverses similar processesin other parts of the sub-continent. As Vasudha Dalmia (1997) in her work onnineteenth century Benares has pointed out, this is the very period inBenares when Vaishanava bhakti comes to be seen as the monotheistic,Aryan counterpart to Christianity and as the "only real religion" of Hindus. It


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is, therefore, no mere coincidence that Tamil nationalism in the same period,manifesting itself in a search for a glorious past and positioning itself against"Aryan religion," found sufficient support in contemporary Dravidologisttheories to present the Kural and the Saiva Siddhanta together as the non-Aryan counterpart to Christianity.

Thus, even though the same period saw the production of several literaryhistories by Tamil Vaishnavas attempting also to stress the "Tamilness" ofVaishnavism and its rich lode of Tamil literature, their overwhelmingly high-caste status11 as well as the undoubtedly small population of Vaishnavas(both Brahmin and non-Brahmin) in the Tamil country ensured that thisremained a minoritarian view. Thus, Vaishnavism as much as Buddhism and

Jainism (with their greater claims to antiquity) and, later, Islam, as well astheir religious literature (even when written in Tamil), came to be considered

either as "non-Tamil" or only secondarily Tamil. The result was that this periodboth created and consolidated what Sivathamby (1986:95) has called "theSaivaite hegemony in the literary history of Tamil."

Further, the word "hegemony" with its inevitable association with dominant-class ideologies leads one to ask how comprehensively this construct of a

Tamil religion voiced subaltern aspirations in the Tamil country. The privilegingof the Kural and the Saiva Siddhanta had been done, primarily, by stressingtheir caste-free ethics based upon an egalitarian bhakti

theology. By doing so, Dravidian or Tamil nationalism reacting to the socialand cultural hegemony of Brahminism delivered a

strong rebuke to it.

But, as Purnalingam Pillai felt compelled to admit in his warning note,contemporary Saiva Siddhanta, as it was practised, could not be called trulyegalitarian and even appeared to sanction the social divide between high-caste and low-caste non-Brahmins. His solution to this was to call for thereturn to a purer Saiva Siddhanta, imagined as existent in an antiquarianpast. But some members of the most downtrodden castes in the Tamilcountry in this same period had also recognised the need to seize upon theconstruct of "Tamil religion" and to shape it to their own needs andaspirations, which did not necessarily coincide with that of the non-Brahminelites. In rejecting the majoritarian construct of Tamil religion in entirety and,by proclaiming Buddhism as the real religion of the Tamils, they too looked to


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antiquity for an authentic Tamil religion which would give them a voice incolonial Tamil India12.

Works Cited

Aloysius, G. 1998. Religion as Emancipatory Identity. A Buddhist Movementamong the Tamils under Colonialism. New Delhi: New Age International (P)Limited, Publishers.

Caldwell, Robert. 1856. A Comparative Grammar Of The Dravidian or South-Indian Family Of Languages. London: Harrison, Pall Mall.

Dalmia, Vasudha. 1997. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions. BhratenduHarichandra and Nineteenth-century Banaras. Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress.

Geetha, V. 1993. Re-writing History in the Brahmin's Shadow. Caste and theModern Historical Imagination. In Journal of Arts and Ideas 25-26:127-37.

Pope, G. U. [1886] 1980. The `Sacred' Kurral of Tiruvalluva-Nayanar. NewDelhi/Madras: Asian Educational Services.

[1900] 1979. The Tiruvasakam or Sacred Utterances of the Tamil Poet,Saint and Sage Mannikavasagar. Madras: University of Madras Press.

Purnalingam Pillai, M. S. [1929] 1994. Tamil Literature. New Delhi/Madras:Asian Educational Services.

Rajadorai, S. V. and Geetha, V. 1993. Dalits and Non-Brahmin Consciousnessin Colonial Tamil Nadu. In: Economic and political Weekly XXVIII 39:2091-98.


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Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 1997. Passions of the Tongue. Language Devotion inTamil India, 1891-1970. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sivathamby, Karthigesu. 1986. Literary History in Tamil [a historiographicalanalysis] Thanjavur: Tamil University Offset Press.

Notes

(1) For example, a "traditionalist" scholar like Sabapathy Navalar (1844-1903)was fully aware of and took issue with the "modernist" scholarship of histimes in his history of Tamil literature entitled "Tirviap pirakcikai eumtami varalu" (1899).

(2) Prior to Caldwell, Alexander Campbell in his "Grammar of the TeloogooLanguage" (1816) and Francis W. Ellis in his introduction to it, had alreadyargued that Tamil and Telugu formed part of a body of languages which werenon-Sanskritic in origin. Caldwell's work was the landmark one, though, inthat he extended their work to draw up a map of the Dravidian" languages asa whole.

(3) Sumathi Ramaswamy (1997:40) refers to the fact of several of Caldwell'stheories being controverted by subsequent scholars: his attempts to establishan affinity between the Dravidian and the "Scythian" families of languageswas questioned as his suggestions that the Dravidians were early migrants toIndia, an idea which was rejected by those Tamil nationalists who insisted onan autochthonous origin for the Tamils.

(4) This list includes C. W. Damodaran Pillai, V. G. Subramania Shastri, M.S.Purnalingam Pillai and M. Srinivasa Aiyangar among others.


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(5) The dating controversies, of which there are several in the 19th century,entailed attitudes which were best summed up in the observations of SeshaIyer in 1908: " ... the tendency for the Indian scholar is to assign great namesthat have enriched his literature to an early a period as well he can ; ... Thetendency ... of the European scholar is just the reverse. ... As a natural result

of these conflicting tendencies the dates arrived at by Indians only serve inthe eyes of the European to point the moral (sic) that the Indians aredeficient in the historic sense, while the conclusions arrived at by theEuropeans are regarded by the Indians as only demonstrating their inborndisabuse and intolerance of his ancient civilization." (quoted in Sivathamby1986:65)

(6) In 1794 N. E. Kindersley, who worked for the English east India Company,brought out the first translation of the Kural into English. This was followed, in

the nineteenth century, by the German and Latin translations of Dr. Graul andthe English one of F. W. Ellis. Pope's edition incorporates both Beschi's andEllis's translations.

(7) Caldwell states that old Tamil (centamil does not have a non-Sanskriticword for caste or caste-related words like sudra

(1856:71-75) and that the Tamils' religion had also been without hereditarypriests or idols (78).

(8) Some important works of this period include "Some Milestones in theHistory of Tamil Literature" (1891) by P. Sundaram Pillai; "Tiraviap pirakacikaieum tamil varalaaru" (1899) by Sabapathy Navalar; "The Tamils 1800 YearsAgo" (1901) by V. Kanakasabhai Pillai and "A Critical Review of the Ramayanand an Account of South Indian Castes" (1908) by V. P. Subramania Mudaliar(with Nallaswami Pillai's introduction to it).

(9) This was later brought out in a new edition in 1929 called Tamil Literature.It is this work which is henceforth quoted.

(10) Purnalingam Pillai gives three more period divisions: i) "The Age ofLiterary Revival" (800 - 1400 C.E.); ii) "The Age of the Mutts or Matams"(1350 - 1600 C. E.) and finally iii) "The Age of European Culture" (1700 - 1926


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C. E. ).

(11) They were all Brahmins. Some of these authors and their works includeS. Krishnaswami Iyengar and M. Raghava Iyengar with their contributions to"The Tamilian Antiquary" (1908), M. Srinivasa Iyengar's "Tamil Studies"(1914), T. R. Sesha Iyengar's "Dravidian India" ( 1925) and P. T. SrinivasaIyengar's "Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture" (1928).

(12) I am speaking in particular of the Tamil, "dalit" Buddhist thinker PanditAyothee Thass (1845-1914) and the organisation associated with him, theSakhya Buddhist Society. It must be added that recent scholarship "Ethics/Authority" ("Aham/Atikaram") (1977) by the Dalit writer Raj Gautamancritiquing the Kural and other post-Sangam literature , as well asK.Sivathamby's work, might be seen as recent attempts to create space foran alternative Tamil literary history to emerge.

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