This volume brings together a broad range of scholarship on various aspects of multilingualism in South India and Sri Lanka, particularly with respect to written sources from the pre-modern world. Although the rich linguistic diversity of both regions has long been acknowledged, the consequences of this variety on linguistic and literary developments has rarely been explored, and never with the breadth that is offered here. Our contributions examine the nature and discursive functions of multilingualism, largely from the perspective of philology, in a diverse array of literary, linguistic, and cultural contexts. Some of the contributors bring their particular expertise to bear on the mutual influence of the Sanskrit and Tamil worlds, while others examine the complex linguistic, religious, and cultural negotiations evident in the literary products of authors writing in Arabic, Pali, Sinhala, Telugu, and Malayalam. Many of them also cite and translate paradigmatic examples. This volume is an important compendium of current research on multilingualism in South India and Sri Lanka and offers avenues for understanding the materials and the communities discussed herein in the context of larger conversations about multilingualism in the pre-modern world.
Giovanni Ciotti is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures of the University of Hamburg. His main research interests are comparative manuscript studies, the history of manuscripts in Tamil Nadu, Sanskrit-Tamil linguistic and literary interactions, and Indian grammatical literature and its influence on the formation of modern Western linguistics.
Erin McCann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, working for the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts”, and previously for the NETamil project. Her current research focuses on the convergence of multilingualism with the production and use of multiple-text manuscripts in the Srivaiṣṇava tradition of South India.
Studies of multilingualism' in historical sources, though still somewhat rare, are beginning to make an impact on the way we understand the complexities of linguistic and cultural interaction in the pre-modern world. The products of multilingualism examined in such studies bear evidence of the interplay of languages, of course, but also of divergent religions, literary conventions, and societal norms. It has, furthermore, become abundantly clear that multilingualism, once thought to be a modern phenomenon, has long been the norm in much of the world. Thus far most studies have focused on the Graeco-Roman world and medieval Europe,' but, as scholars working in the field are well aware, the fact of multilingualism is certainly no less true of pre-modern India.
The Indian sub-continent is and long has been a hotbed of linguistic interaction. The most obvious and well-documented sources for the study of multilingualism in India lie in the literary and cultural products of the Sanskritic world vis-a-vis the various vernacular languages that have been documented through time. Apart from studies on the specific influence of Sanskrit on the languages and cultures of South and South-East Asia, however, there have been relatively few investigations into the ways in which such linguistic and cultural interactions occurred specifically in South India, with its own classical literary language (that of the Tamil Cankam corpus, c. 1st_3rd CE), how they were negotiated, and how they ultimately manifested in this multilingual environment. Already available, however, are Passages: relationships between Tamil and Sanskrit' and Bilingual Discourse and Cross-Cultural Fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in Medieval India', both of which explore the interaction of Tamil and Sanskrit. These volumes serve to highlight the interdependent nature of the relationship between two oldest classical languages of South Asia. Further, they urge a more nuanced approach to their study that, though acknowledging the many tensions between linguistic communities and the historical circumstances that led to them, aims to overcome the prejudices (on all sides) that have contributed to the isolation of Sanskrit and Tamil literature into discreet units of study. In this volume we carry on this work, not only contributing to the dialogue on Tamil-Sanskrit interaction, but also expanding the conversation beyond this binary.
In even the earliest Tamil poetic works, the Cankam corpus dated to the 1st_-3rd century CE, there is, though limited, unmistakable evidence of Sanskrit and Prakrit linguistic and cultural influence. As Filliozat notes, "we find in almost all some allusions to Vedic or Brahmanic rites and the use of some Sanskrit words, though very few". The integration of Sanskrit concepts, often accompanied by loans from the lexicon and semantic fields, only increases as we move through time.' In the last half of the first millennium, for example, the Bhakti corpora of the Alvars (Vaisnava poet-saints) and Nayanars (Saiva saints) are largely, though not exclusively, based on northern mythological topoi and incorporate a good deal of Sanskrit derived vocabulary.
Then, at the beginning of the second millennium, multilingual and `vernacular' literatures underwent a period of rapid expansion. The linguistic and cultural negotiations evidenced in the written record of South India reached now well beyond the Sanskrit-Tamil binary. Which itself is, of course, rather artificial, as much of the Sanskrit influence on languages in the South has been mediated through various Prakrits. When the public dominance of Sanskrit literary culture began to wane, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada emerged as important new modes of literary expression, along with the Manipravalam texts of the Srivaisnava corpus and the body of Tamil-Arabic writings produced in South India. And in Sri Lanka the language and culture of the Sanskritic world, especially via Prakrit and Pali Buddhist literature, co-existed with Sinhala and Tamil, the dominant spoken languages of the region. These newly public, literary languages clearly evidenced not only the impact of Sanskrit on the Dravidian languages and cultures of the South and Sri Lanka, but also the lasting influence of Tamil literary and theoretical models.
It perhaps goes without saying that the evidence that we are dealing with in this volume, like the studies of multilingualism in the Graeco-Roman world and medieval Europe referenced above, is in the form of written documents and artefacts. Inscriptions, grammars, literature, various treatises, and religious works comprise the majority of our sources. This reality, of course, necessarily restricts us to a discussion of multilingualism as it was realised by an elite or literate class. Nevertheless, as with the contemporary reality of multilingualism, the materials at our disposal reflect the fact that competence in two or more languages exists on a continuum from a basic grasp of vocabulary to perfect fluency, both in individuals and societies. Furthermore, as Mullen points out, "the increased amount of thought and care that may often be involved in the creation of a text as opposed to a spontaneous utterance may allow the researcher to be more certain as to intentionality".' Thus, while our sources attest to a more formal mode of expression, their value as the products of multilingual individuals, communities, and cultures is undiminished.'
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