Preface
The first intimations. of this volume emerged in a
series of conversations in the autumn of 2008 in London and Cambridge between
the editors and our colleagues Eva Wilden and
jean-Luc Chevillard. All four of us were interested
in the intellectual and cultural history of medieval Tamilnadu,
a shared interest which had been nourished by frequent meetings with each other
and with like-minded teachers and friends at the Ecole
francaise d'Extreme-Orient
in Pondicherry. Our initial idea had been very modest: to invite several of
these fellow-researchers to a workshop on the inter-translatability of
technical terms between Sanskrit and Tamil. Vergiani
and Cox, as specialists in the former, were initially (and, looking back,
somewhat naively) concerned with the ways in which the sophisticated conceptual
apparatus of the sastric traditions we study were
imported into Tamil; Chevillard and Wilden, primarily Tamilists,
sought to unearth the wider genealogy of linguistic ideas and literary forms
they had encountered in Tamil materials.
The
workshop that resulted from these early discussions and led to this volume
ranged much more widely than our initial ambitions, and for that we are very
glad. While the concern with the technical vocabularies of various branches of
knowledge is still in evidence in a number of the essays, it is set within a
range of other cultural practices. These practices center
upon very broadly conceived interactions between the two languages. It is the
mutuality of these interactions that is especially striking and historically
significant: over and over in these essays, the poets, scholars, and other
professional literati who constitute our collective focus seem to happily
trespass the lexical and conceptual boundaries between domains that modern
scholarship has tended to compartmentalise into one or the other linguistic
code. This is in part a consequence of our chosen focus on the medieval period,
during which the interactions between the two languages (and their users) are
many and well documented, as opposed to the more opaque world of earlier times.
It is equally the case, however, that modern scholarship has been invested in
an effort often unconscious, but sometimes willful
and programmatic to keep the cultural and intellectual worlds of Tamil and
Sanskrit sealed off from each other. It is our collective dissatisfaction with
this state of affairs that we have sought to register in these essays, and each
contributor has offered a possible way forward from his or her own particular
angle as our response to this impasse.
This
is not to arrogantly dismiss all prior scholarship en bloc, for there are areas
of research on the interactions between Sanskrit and Tamil that have been
tackled with significant results in the past. Among them, the comparative study
of literature and the history of the acclimatisation of northern Indian
religious traditions in the Tamil country have proven especially fertile.
Several of the essays in this volume notably, the contributions of Schmid and Takahashi build upon this earlier work. However,
the dating of the Cankam corpus and the question of
its independence from northern literatures perhaps the most frequently
discussed as well as the most controversial theme in Tamil literary history is
all but unaddressed here. While this was not the result of any official policy
of the workshop or of this volume (i.e. "Cankam
chronologists need not apply"), the opportunity to look beyond this
much-contested area has provided a refreshing stimulus to ask new questions
about the oldest Tamil poetic works. Indeed, several of the contributions (see Wilden, Tieken, and again
Takahashi), focus upon these earliest texts.
The
study of Tamil epigraphy has been largely untouched by the debates which have
dominated the literary-historical field and possesses a research dynamic
peculiar to itself. Some of the most innovative
scholarship on Sanskrit-Tamil interactions was the product of the pioneering
generation of epigraphists: such luminaries as Eugen Hultzsch, v. Venkayya, and K. A. Nilakanta Sastri made signal
contributions to medieval history based on their superb control over both
languages. In recent decades, however, this kind of philological and
hermeneutical work has given way to what might be described as the cliometric revolution in inscriptional studies. Increasingly,
historians of medieval South India have concentrated on the collection and
analysis of the quantitative data furnished by inscriptional records. This
scholarship, whose leading practitioners include Y. Subbarayalu
of the Institut Francais de
Pondichery and his frequent collaborator Norobu Karashima, has made huge
advances in our understanding of the social and administrative history of the
Cola period especially. While in no way hostile to these methods, the
contributions of Orr, Francis, and Lubin
here all ably demonstrate that there is still much scope for
philological-interpretative scholarship as a means of approaching the Tamil
country's remarkable inscriptional legacy.
The
problems and possibilities of epigraphical study
stimulate a critical appraisal of another model with which many 01 the essays
here are in dialogue. The model of cosmopolitan and vernacular literary
interaction proposed by the Sanskritist Sheldon
Pollock, as summarised in his magnum
opus of 2006, The Language of
the Gods in the World of Men, has supplied an argumentative framework
that has become more often than not implicit in the recent comparative work on
Tamil and Sanskrit, and this volume is noexception.
This is most clearly in evidence in Francis' contribution, which offers a
meticulously documented correction of Pollock's characterisation of the epigraphical practices recorded in the Pallava
kingdom. More generally, however, the basic fabric of Pollock's historical
model, in which the superimposition of cosmopolitan Sanskrit catalyses the literarisation of a vernacular speech-form, which only
gradually attains equal dignity with the language of the cosmopolis
in the literary and political arena, fails rather dramatically to adequately
account for the long shared history of Sanskrit and Tamil. Moreover, as
Freeman's essay suggests, this basically dyadic theory leaves significant areas
of linguistic life in the subcontinent unaccounted for, notably in the case of
the emic theorisation of what would later come to be
called "Malayalam", where the emergent theory had to locate itself
with regard to two trans regional languages possessed of classical heritages,
Sanskrit and Tamil. The problematic place of Tamil within his model is
something, it need be said, that Pollock himself readily admits; and it would
be a mistake to claim (as has been done in semi-scholarly forums on the
Internet, for instance) that this simply invalidates his broad-minded attempt
at historical and social-theoretical synthesis. Instead, as we can see throughout
these essays, the degree to which historical reality exceeds the ideal-typical
limits of any theorisation is not something that should preclude such attempts:
it is only through empirical testing that any theory can be refined and
improved.
The
workshop from which these essays derive was made possible thanks to a
Conference Support Grant of the British Academy a scheme that sadly has since
been discontinued. We met over a beautiful spring week. end
in May 2009 in Wolfson College, Cambridge, which provided
a superb venue for our discussions: our thanks are due to the College staff for
their assistance and support. In addition to the contributors, a number of
other scholars participated in the workshop as presenters, discussants, and
chairs: we would especially like to mention K. Nachimuthu,
V.S. Raj am, David Shulman, B.D. Chattopadhyaya,
Daud Ali, Dominic Goodall, Eivind Kahrs, Rosalind Q'Hanlon, AR. Venkatachalapathy,
David Washbrook, Sudeshna Guha, and Jennifer Clare for their contributions. The conference
would not have been nearly so great a success without the help of Giovanni Ciotti and Mishka Sinha. We are very grateful to Valerie Gillet
for initially encouraging us to submit the volume to the Collection Indologie series, and for all of her help in seeing it
through to publication. Also in Pondicherry, we would like to thank Prerana Patel and Anurupa Naik for their quick and efficient assistance in the
volume's production. An additional special note of thanks is due to Isaac Murchie (Berkeley) who kindly solved some troubling
technical problems on very short notice. Finally, we would like to record our
gratitude to all of our co-contributors, not only for their superb essays, but
also for their patience in awaiting this volume's appearance.
Introduction
Dominic
Goodall
With
this range of articles, this book addresses several of the different ways in
which Sanskrit and Tamilliterary cultures are related
to one another. There may be persons who naively suppose that to identify
Sanskrit as the acrolect or hierolect
for much of South and South-East Asia is already to have mapped out the main
contours of this vast multi-lingual literary area. We hope that this selection
of essays will help to demonstrate that such a simple view needs to be very
considerably nuanced. A very little reflection makes clear that the nature of
linguistic and literary contacts with Sanskrit differed hugely in different
places and at different times. The presence, for instance, of Dravidian and Munda loan-words already in pre-classical Sanskrit, though
contested on points of detail,' is widely accepted, and is evidence of very
different relations with Sanskrit from those attested to for languages such as
Khmer, Javanese and Cham, from which no loans into Sanskrit have been suggested.
Evidence of non-Sanskrit literary activity in Dravidian-language-speaking areas
also survives from earlier than elsewhere, and it is by no means unambiguously
clear that such literature was produced in reaction to the catalyst of contact
with Indo-Aryan models: the degree to which the oldest surviving Tamil poetry
influenced or was influenced by poetry in Prakrit and
Sanskrit is still a subject of debate.
This
volume does not concentrate on the hotly contested prehistorical
relations between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian that can be dimly discerned behind
details of phonology, syntax or morphology in the Vedic corpus or in tiny onomastic inscriptions in Southern Brahmi,
but rather on the relations between "classical" Sanskrit and (mainly)
literary Tamil over the course of the first thousand years for which plentiful
literary material in both languages survives. The use of the expression "prehistorical" here to describe what we exclude might
seem to suggest that our chosen period is, by contrast, one of firm facts that
map out a clear framework of political and social history against which to lay
observations about linguistic and literary history. This is of course far from
being the case. While the abundance of early medieval Sanskrit and Tamil
literature obviates the need for some sorts of speculation, nonetheless, all
manner of details, not only regarding dating, are unknown and unknowable. Many
texts seem to have been transmitted down to us across the centuries with
bewilderingly little indisputably contemporary information that might anchor
and contextualise them.
One
certainty can be advanced that, although obvious, is perhaps worth spelling
out. For much of the history of Sanskrit literature, the authors who composed
works in Sanskrit did so in a learned language that was not their own. The
languages in which their first thoughts were formed would have been different
in every part of the vast territory into which Sanskritic
influences reached. For many of those areas there is now scant surviving
testimony of literary activity in languages other than Sanskrit for several
centuries into the Common Era. But the Dravidian-speaking South is well known
to be an exception in this regard, notably because of the survival of a corpus
of remarkable evocative poetry, the so-called "Cankam"
(Sangam) works, in old Tamil, and of a tradition of
grammar and poetics. This means that we can be certain that Southern authors
who wrote in Sanskrit must consciously have chosen to write in Sanskrit and,
conversely, many authors who wrote in Tamil must also consciously have chosen
Tamil over Sanskrit. Indeed, the ideas expounded by Tamil grammarians and
commentators often make reference to or reveal awareness of Sanskrit sastra as is demonstrated in different ways
by almost all of the contributions to this volume. One should not therefore
imagine this choice as being always or typically one between a high, rule-bound
and literary language and a free, living vernacular both languages had higher
and lower registers, after all -, but often a choice between two high literary
idioms. For certain authors, the commentators of Vaisnava
devotional poetry, for instance, the choice might even have been akin to a
choice between two linguistic registers, each with its own flavours and
strengths, both giving expression to overlapping regions of the same
thought-world.
Sanskrit
and the other languages of India are, in other words, so closely intertwined
that their interrelationships cannot be reduced to anyone simple model of Sanskrit
hegemony, still less seen only in terms of a Brahmin conspiracy to abase and subjugate others, a vision influenced by the
wounds of a painful social warfare whose divisions are, by some Tamil-speakers,
perceived to be rooted in or inseparably associated with the division between
Sanskrit and Dravidian languages. When those wounds one day heal or soften, we
will be able to leave behind the totemism that leads
to the arid and meaningless debates about the relative superiority or
anteriority of one or other language, about wildly implausible etymologies
deriving the words of one language from another, or about impossible dating
propositions that are based only upon a sort of nationalist pride.' Worst of
all, this totemism encourages what appears to be a
growing failure really to study their literatures and keep their memory alive.'
I say "worst of all" not only because this tendency will doubtless
foster more of the same intellectual autism or deafness, but also because the
extraordinarily rich literature of India is what makes up the bulk of the
memories of its past, and to be without memory is to be without identity.
The
mutual imbrication we have described above means that
although we often find ourselves speaking of the origin of an idiom or a concept
or a nexus of ideas in one linguistic sphere and its subsequent passage into
another, sometimes this simple model seems questionable or inadequate. When
ideas change shape and expression as they evolve in a conversation between two
speakers, can we always be aware of who contributes exactly what? Several
articles in this book illustrate this difficulty in differing degrees, perhaps
most obviously those of Charlotte Schmid and Leslie
Orr, who, speaking of the lexis of those who composed medieval inscriptions,
begins her final paragraph with this observation: "It is difficult to know
what our medieval accountants thought about Sanskrit or to know whether they
even thought it was Sanskrit".
This
is not the first volume of essays devoted primarily to exploring this
territory. A recent predecessor was published from the French Institute of
Pondicherry entitled Passages:
Relationships between Tamil and Sanskrit.' That collection lightens our
task of introduction here, for it begins with no less than three pieces of
prolegomena (pp. v-xxxvi) a preface, an introduction and a foreword -, followed
by a section with the happy title "Stepping Stones", in which are
reprinted four landmark articles from recent decades that treat the
interrelationship between Sanskrit and Tamil.' These materials generously
provide context for a further seventeen fresh contributions ranging across a
period of about twenty centuries. Our subject in this volume can therefore be
regarded as having been rather thoroughly introduced. Given the breadth of the
theme, however, there need be no fear of overlaps and redundancy, and only two
contributors are shared.
Contents
Preface |
vii |
|
Introduction |
1 |
|
I |
Literary audience and religious community |
13 |
1. |
"The contribution
of Tamil literature to the Krsna figure of the
Sanskrit texts: the case of kanru in Cilappatikaram 17 |
15 |
2. |
"Is clearing or plowing equal to killing? Tamil culture and the spread of
Jainism in Tamilnadu" by Takanobu
Takahashi |
53 |
3. |
"Early Tamil
poetics between Natyasastra and Ragamalo" |
69 |
II |
Regulating language: grammars and literary theories |
93 |
4. |
"The ten stages
of passion (dasa kamavasthal;.) and the
eight types of marriage (astavivaha) in the Tolkappiyam" |
95 |
5. |
"From
source-criticism to intellectual history in the poetics of the medieval Tamil
country" |
115 |
6. |
"The adoption of Bhartrhari' s classification of the grammatical object in
Cenavaraiyar's commentary on the Tolkappiyam" |
161 |
7. |
"Caught in
translation: Ideologies of literary language in the Lilatilakam” |
199 |
8. |
"Enumeration
techniques in Tamil metrical treatises (Studies in Tamil Metrics - 3)" |
241 |
III |
Written in stone? Shifting registers of inscriptional discourse |
323 |
9. |
Words for Worship:
Tamil and Sanskrit in medieval temple inscriptions" |
325 |
10. |
"Praising the
king in Tamil during the Pallava period" |
359 |
11. |
Legal Diglossia: Modeling discursive
practices in premodern Indic law" |
411 |
12. |
Contributors |
457 |
13. |
Index |
461 |
Preface
The first intimations. of this volume emerged in a
series of conversations in the autumn of 2008 in London and Cambridge between
the editors and our colleagues Eva Wilden and
jean-Luc Chevillard. All four of us were interested
in the intellectual and cultural history of medieval Tamilnadu,
a shared interest which had been nourished by frequent meetings with each other
and with like-minded teachers and friends at the Ecole
francaise d'Extreme-Orient
in Pondicherry. Our initial idea had been very modest: to invite several of
these fellow-researchers to a workshop on the inter-translatability of
technical terms between Sanskrit and Tamil. Vergiani
and Cox, as specialists in the former, were initially (and, looking back,
somewhat naively) concerned with the ways in which the sophisticated conceptual
apparatus of the sastric traditions we study were
imported into Tamil; Chevillard and Wilden, primarily Tamilists,
sought to unearth the wider genealogy of linguistic ideas and literary forms
they had encountered in Tamil materials.
The
workshop that resulted from these early discussions and led to this volume
ranged much more widely than our initial ambitions, and for that we are very
glad. While the concern with the technical vocabularies of various branches of
knowledge is still in evidence in a number of the essays, it is set within a
range of other cultural practices. These practices center
upon very broadly conceived interactions between the two languages. It is the
mutuality of these interactions that is especially striking and historically
significant: over and over in these essays, the poets, scholars, and other
professional literati who constitute our collective focus seem to happily
trespass the lexical and conceptual boundaries between domains that modern
scholarship has tended to compartmentalise into one or the other linguistic
code. This is in part a consequence of our chosen focus on the medieval period,
during which the interactions between the two languages (and their users) are
many and well documented, as opposed to the more opaque world of earlier times.
It is equally the case, however, that modern scholarship has been invested in
an effort often unconscious, but sometimes willful
and programmatic to keep the cultural and intellectual worlds of Tamil and
Sanskrit sealed off from each other. It is our collective dissatisfaction with
this state of affairs that we have sought to register in these essays, and each
contributor has offered a possible way forward from his or her own particular
angle as our response to this impasse.
This
is not to arrogantly dismiss all prior scholarship en bloc, for there are areas
of research on the interactions between Sanskrit and Tamil that have been
tackled with significant results in the past. Among them, the comparative study
of literature and the history of the acclimatisation of northern Indian
religious traditions in the Tamil country have proven especially fertile.
Several of the essays in this volume notably, the contributions of Schmid and Takahashi build upon this earlier work. However,
the dating of the Cankam corpus and the question of
its independence from northern literatures perhaps the most frequently
discussed as well as the most controversial theme in Tamil literary history is
all but unaddressed here. While this was not the result of any official policy
of the workshop or of this volume (i.e. "Cankam
chronologists need not apply"), the opportunity to look beyond this
much-contested area has provided a refreshing stimulus to ask new questions
about the oldest Tamil poetic works. Indeed, several of the contributions (see Wilden, Tieken, and again
Takahashi), focus upon these earliest texts.
The
study of Tamil epigraphy has been largely untouched by the debates which have
dominated the literary-historical field and possesses a research dynamic
peculiar to itself. Some of the most innovative
scholarship on Sanskrit-Tamil interactions was the product of the pioneering
generation of epigraphists: such luminaries as Eugen Hultzsch, v. Venkayya, and K. A. Nilakanta Sastri made signal
contributions to medieval history based on their superb control over both
languages. In recent decades, however, this kind of philological and
hermeneutical work has given way to what might be described as the cliometric revolution in inscriptional studies. Increasingly,
historians of medieval South India have concentrated on the collection and
analysis of the quantitative data furnished by inscriptional records. This
scholarship, whose leading practitioners include Y. Subbarayalu
of the Institut Francais de
Pondichery and his frequent collaborator Norobu Karashima, has made huge
advances in our understanding of the social and administrative history of the
Cola period especially. While in no way hostile to these methods, the
contributions of Orr, Francis, and Lubin
here all ably demonstrate that there is still much scope for
philological-interpretative scholarship as a means of approaching the Tamil
country's remarkable inscriptional legacy.
The
problems and possibilities of epigraphical study
stimulate a critical appraisal of another model with which many 01 the essays
here are in dialogue. The model of cosmopolitan and vernacular literary
interaction proposed by the Sanskritist Sheldon
Pollock, as summarised in his magnum
opus of 2006, The Language of
the Gods in the World of Men, has supplied an argumentative framework
that has become more often than not implicit in the recent comparative work on
Tamil and Sanskrit, and this volume is noexception.
This is most clearly in evidence in Francis' contribution, which offers a
meticulously documented correction of Pollock's characterisation of the epigraphical practices recorded in the Pallava
kingdom. More generally, however, the basic fabric of Pollock's historical
model, in which the superimposition of cosmopolitan Sanskrit catalyses the literarisation of a vernacular speech-form, which only
gradually attains equal dignity with the language of the cosmopolis
in the literary and political arena, fails rather dramatically to adequately
account for the long shared history of Sanskrit and Tamil. Moreover, as
Freeman's essay suggests, this basically dyadic theory leaves significant areas
of linguistic life in the subcontinent unaccounted for, notably in the case of
the emic theorisation of what would later come to be
called "Malayalam", where the emergent theory had to locate itself
with regard to two trans regional languages possessed of classical heritages,
Sanskrit and Tamil. The problematic place of Tamil within his model is
something, it need be said, that Pollock himself readily admits; and it would
be a mistake to claim (as has been done in semi-scholarly forums on the
Internet, for instance) that this simply invalidates his broad-minded attempt
at historical and social-theoretical synthesis. Instead, as we can see throughout
these essays, the degree to which historical reality exceeds the ideal-typical
limits of any theorisation is not something that should preclude such attempts:
it is only through empirical testing that any theory can be refined and
improved.
The
workshop from which these essays derive was made possible thanks to a
Conference Support Grant of the British Academy a scheme that sadly has since
been discontinued. We met over a beautiful spring week. end
in May 2009 in Wolfson College, Cambridge, which provided
a superb venue for our discussions: our thanks are due to the College staff for
their assistance and support. In addition to the contributors, a number of
other scholars participated in the workshop as presenters, discussants, and
chairs: we would especially like to mention K. Nachimuthu,
V.S. Raj am, David Shulman, B.D. Chattopadhyaya,
Daud Ali, Dominic Goodall, Eivind Kahrs, Rosalind Q'Hanlon, AR. Venkatachalapathy,
David Washbrook, Sudeshna Guha, and Jennifer Clare for their contributions. The conference
would not have been nearly so great a success without the help of Giovanni Ciotti and Mishka Sinha. We are very grateful to Valerie Gillet
for initially encouraging us to submit the volume to the Collection Indologie series, and for all of her help in seeing it
through to publication. Also in Pondicherry, we would like to thank Prerana Patel and Anurupa Naik for their quick and efficient assistance in the
volume's production. An additional special note of thanks is due to Isaac Murchie (Berkeley) who kindly solved some troubling
technical problems on very short notice. Finally, we would like to record our
gratitude to all of our co-contributors, not only for their superb essays, but
also for their patience in awaiting this volume's appearance.
Introduction
Dominic
Goodall
With
this range of articles, this book addresses several of the different ways in
which Sanskrit and Tamilliterary cultures are related
to one another. There may be persons who naively suppose that to identify
Sanskrit as the acrolect or hierolect
for much of South and South-East Asia is already to have mapped out the main
contours of this vast multi-lingual literary area. We hope that this selection
of essays will help to demonstrate that such a simple view needs to be very
considerably nuanced. A very little reflection makes clear that the nature of
linguistic and literary contacts with Sanskrit differed hugely in different
places and at different times. The presence, for instance, of Dravidian and Munda loan-words already in pre-classical Sanskrit, though
contested on points of detail,' is widely accepted, and is evidence of very
different relations with Sanskrit from those attested to for languages such as
Khmer, Javanese and Cham, from which no loans into Sanskrit have been suggested.
Evidence of non-Sanskrit literary activity in Dravidian-language-speaking areas
also survives from earlier than elsewhere, and it is by no means unambiguously
clear that such literature was produced in reaction to the catalyst of contact
with Indo-Aryan models: the degree to which the oldest surviving Tamil poetry
influenced or was influenced by poetry in Prakrit and
Sanskrit is still a subject of debate.
This
volume does not concentrate on the hotly contested prehistorical
relations between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian that can be dimly discerned behind
details of phonology, syntax or morphology in the Vedic corpus or in tiny onomastic inscriptions in Southern Brahmi,
but rather on the relations between "classical" Sanskrit and (mainly)
literary Tamil over the course of the first thousand years for which plentiful
literary material in both languages survives. The use of the expression "prehistorical" here to describe what we exclude might
seem to suggest that our chosen period is, by contrast, one of firm facts that
map out a clear framework of political and social history against which to lay
observations about linguistic and literary history. This is of course far from
being the case. While the abundance of early medieval Sanskrit and Tamil
literature obviates the need for some sorts of speculation, nonetheless, all
manner of details, not only regarding dating, are unknown and unknowable. Many
texts seem to have been transmitted down to us across the centuries with
bewilderingly little indisputably contemporary information that might anchor
and contextualise them.
One
certainty can be advanced that, although obvious, is perhaps worth spelling
out. For much of the history of Sanskrit literature, the authors who composed
works in Sanskrit did so in a learned language that was not their own. The
languages in which their first thoughts were formed would have been different
in every part of the vast territory into which Sanskritic
influences reached. For many of those areas there is now scant surviving
testimony of literary activity in languages other than Sanskrit for several
centuries into the Common Era. But the Dravidian-speaking South is well known
to be an exception in this regard, notably because of the survival of a corpus
of remarkable evocative poetry, the so-called "Cankam"
(Sangam) works, in old Tamil, and of a tradition of
grammar and poetics. This means that we can be certain that Southern authors
who wrote in Sanskrit must consciously have chosen to write in Sanskrit and,
conversely, many authors who wrote in Tamil must also consciously have chosen
Tamil over Sanskrit. Indeed, the ideas expounded by Tamil grammarians and
commentators often make reference to or reveal awareness of Sanskrit sastra as is demonstrated in different ways
by almost all of the contributions to this volume. One should not therefore
imagine this choice as being always or typically one between a high, rule-bound
and literary language and a free, living vernacular both languages had higher
and lower registers, after all -, but often a choice between two high literary
idioms. For certain authors, the commentators of Vaisnava
devotional poetry, for instance, the choice might even have been akin to a
choice between two linguistic registers, each with its own flavours and
strengths, both giving expression to overlapping regions of the same
thought-world.
Sanskrit
and the other languages of India are, in other words, so closely intertwined
that their interrelationships cannot be reduced to anyone simple model of Sanskrit
hegemony, still less seen only in terms of a Brahmin conspiracy to abase and subjugate others, a vision influenced by the
wounds of a painful social warfare whose divisions are, by some Tamil-speakers,
perceived to be rooted in or inseparably associated with the division between
Sanskrit and Dravidian languages. When those wounds one day heal or soften, we
will be able to leave behind the totemism that leads
to the arid and meaningless debates about the relative superiority or
anteriority of one or other language, about wildly implausible etymologies
deriving the words of one language from another, or about impossible dating
propositions that are based only upon a sort of nationalist pride.' Worst of
all, this totemism encourages what appears to be a
growing failure really to study their literatures and keep their memory alive.'
I say "worst of all" not only because this tendency will doubtless
foster more of the same intellectual autism or deafness, but also because the
extraordinarily rich literature of India is what makes up the bulk of the
memories of its past, and to be without memory is to be without identity.
The
mutual imbrication we have described above means that
although we often find ourselves speaking of the origin of an idiom or a concept
or a nexus of ideas in one linguistic sphere and its subsequent passage into
another, sometimes this simple model seems questionable or inadequate. When
ideas change shape and expression as they evolve in a conversation between two
speakers, can we always be aware of who contributes exactly what? Several
articles in this book illustrate this difficulty in differing degrees, perhaps
most obviously those of Charlotte Schmid and Leslie
Orr, who, speaking of the lexis of those who composed medieval inscriptions,
begins her final paragraph with this observation: "It is difficult to know
what our medieval accountants thought about Sanskrit or to know whether they
even thought it was Sanskrit".
This
is not the first volume of essays devoted primarily to exploring this
territory. A recent predecessor was published from the French Institute of
Pondicherry entitled Passages:
Relationships between Tamil and Sanskrit.' That collection lightens our
task of introduction here, for it begins with no less than three pieces of
prolegomena (pp. v-xxxvi) a preface, an introduction and a foreword -, followed
by a section with the happy title "Stepping Stones", in which are
reprinted four landmark articles from recent decades that treat the
interrelationship between Sanskrit and Tamil.' These materials generously
provide context for a further seventeen fresh contributions ranging across a
period of about twenty centuries. Our subject in this volume can therefore be
regarded as having been rather thoroughly introduced. Given the breadth of the
theme, however, there need be no fear of overlaps and redundancy, and only two
contributors are shared.
Contents
Preface |
vii |
|
Introduction |
1 |
|
I |
Literary audience and religious community |
13 |
1. |
"The contribution
of Tamil literature to the Krsna figure of the
Sanskrit texts: the case of kanru in Cilappatikaram 17 |
15 |
2. |
"Is clearing or plowing equal to killing? Tamil culture and the spread of
Jainism in Tamilnadu" by Takanobu
Takahashi |
53 |
3. |
"Early Tamil
poetics between Natyasastra and Ragamalo" |
69 |
II |
Regulating language: grammars and literary theories |
93 |
4. |
"The ten stages
of passion (dasa kamavasthal;.) and the
eight types of marriage (astavivaha) in the Tolkappiyam" |
95 |
5. |
"From
source-criticism to intellectual history in the poetics of the medieval Tamil
country" |
115 |
6. |
"The adoption of Bhartrhari' s classification of the grammatical object in
Cenavaraiyar's commentary on the Tolkappiyam" |
161 |
7. |
"Caught in
translation: Ideologies of literary language in the Lilatilakam” |
199 |
8. |
"Enumeration
techniques in Tamil metrical treatises (Studies in Tamil Metrics - 3)" |
241 |
III |
Written in stone? Shifting registers of inscriptional discourse |
323 |
9. |
Words for Worship:
Tamil and Sanskrit in medieval temple inscriptions" |
325 |
10. |
"Praising the
king in Tamil during the Pallava period" |
359 |
11. |
Legal Diglossia: Modeling discursive
practices in premodern Indic law" |
411 |
12. |
Contributors |
457 |
13. |
Index |
461 |