tamil biography books pdf

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

We're Hiring!
Help Center

David Dean Shulman. Tamil: A Biography. pp. 416. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London 2016, ISBN 978-0674059924. $ 35 / £ 28.95 / € 31.50.—Reviewed by Olga Vecherina

2020, Cracow Indological StudiesVol. XXII, No. 2 (2020), pp. 159–168

An Encyclopedia of Tamilness The book under review examines a broad range of subjects related to the cultural history of Tamil language, starting from the first mentions of Tamil and the earliest available written evidence right to the present time. ... To whom is this monograph addressed? The author himself doubts if there might be “any reader who manages to read the whole book” (p. x), but one may safely assume that the book will be an enormously useful and thought-provoking reading for those who begin to study Tamil or love Tamil culture and want to learn more about its main features as envisaged by one of the leading scholars in the field. Nobody might pass the Tamil Literature Exam by reading the book but everybody who reads it will undoubtedly partake in a tremendous intellectual pleasure.

Related Papers

Primary Sources and Asian Pasts

Emmanuel FRANCIS

International Journal on Language, Literature, Art, Culture, History, Philosophy and Science

R.K.K. Rajarajan

Kamil Veith Zvelebil was a preeminent Dravidologist whose contribution to Tamil studies is immense. He had an occasion to write a note on “what the term ‘tamil’ means?” (Zvelebil 1987) examining the available sources from the most ancient to the modern. However, the learned professor says nothing about the redundant occurrences in the Nālāyirativviyappirapantam of the Tamil mystics, the Āḻvārs. The Āḻvārs (dated during 6th-7th - 9th centuries CE) have told us what “Tamil” is, and at the same time talking about Āriyam (meaning Sanskrit). The aim of the present article is not to examine Tamil vis-à-vis Sanskrit (in the context of the DK movement) but to say what the Āḻvārs mean by Tamil. By the way the inter-relationship between ‘Tamil’ and ‘Āriyam’ (Ārya, contextually ‘Sanskrit’) or ‘Vaṭamoḻi’ (northern language) could be pointed out as it was understood by about the 9th century CE. The Tamil mystics considered the two-languages the two-eyes of ancient Pāratam/Bhārata (Rajarajan et al. 2016). To quote: Pullāṇit teṉṉaṉ Tamiḻai Vaṭamoḻiyai (Periya Tirumatal 131 of Tirumaṇkai Āḻvār) “The Tamil of the southerner, the Pāṇḍya, and the northern language (Sanskrit)” (that are cultivated in the divyadeśa at Pullāṇi*) * Pullāṇi is a divyadeśa (Vaiṣṇava holy-land) close to Rāmeśvaram

Dravidap pozhil

Vasu Renganathan

A systematic study of the Tamil language from Sangam to Modern period from a historical perspective may reveal that there does exist a continuum of changes that occurred from one stage to another in Tamil language. Without such a study, any synchronic description of Tamil would only reflect its complexity in an overwhelming way. In other words, The Tamil language, the way it is now with a museum of complex forms, expressions and grammatical constructions, both in written and spoken variety, demonstrates a vast number of linguistic characteristics at phonological, morphological and syntactic levels, that require a comprehensive diachronic study to fully understand them in a coherence way. In this respect an extensive electronic database of Tamil texts from all of the stages along with a powerful query tool to search texts from various dimensions is indispensable. This paper is an attempt to illustrate how such an electronic database for Tamil (http://sangam. tamilnlp.com) can be used extensively to study some of the morphological and syntactic behaviors of Tamil from a historical point of view. 1

Journal of Indian Philosophy

Srilata Raman

The writing of literary histories of Tamil literature coincided with the practice of history itself as a discipline starting in the late nineteenth century. The historiographical practices conflated Tamil literary history, religious history, as well as notions of the Tamil nation, which led to such works becoming vitally important legitimising narratives that established the claim of self-defining groups within a new Tamil modernity. The absence of such a narrative also meant the erasure of a particular group, identifying itself as a caste or religious unit, or both, from Tamil history. It is in the light of these cultural and political stakes that we must view the textual and hermeneutical strategies of an old, Tamil, religious group, the Śrīvaiṣṇavas, to position themselves anew in the mid-twentieth century, in what they saw with anxiety as a Tamil, Ṡaiva Age.

Appasamy Murugaiyan

SSRN Electronic Journal

Murugaṉ Chevvēḷ

The origins of the term, Tamiḻ [t̪amiɻ], is still unclear. Even though the name, Tamiḻ, for the language is mentioned from the earliest extant Tamil literary works, the period when the name ‘Tamiḻ’ came to be used to the language is unclear; and even its precise etymology too. In this exposition, I have tried exploring the possible etymology for the term on a historical and sociolinguistic basis.

Harold Schiffman

Nandhi Varman

Collection of Articles written by N.Nandhivarman in English daily New Indian Express during 2004-2005 period and some research papers presented in symposiums are in this E-Book

Landscapes of Linguistics and Literature A Festschrift for Dr. L. Ramamoorthy

The language of inscriptional Tamil is very intriguing despite its complexity for many reasons including its properties such as extensive code-mix between Indo Aryan and Tamil, adaptation of different scripts and so on. The Tamil epigraphic routines or more specifically the Tamil epigraphic culture developed mostly under a pan-Indian cultural, historic and sociolinguistic context and model. The raise of Tamil as epigraphic language should be seen as a dynamic process. As can be seen from palaeographic, lexical, syntactic and semantic features, a separate variety of epigraphic Tamil evolved constantly alongside of the literary varieties. Much of the credit goes to many pioneering epigraphists and scholars for their continued contribution to the development of the fields of Indian and Tamil epigraphic studies for more than a century despite the lack of encouragements from the scholarly circle, whose attention was paid mostly to Tamil literature and history. However, the linguistic study of Tamil inscriptions is in a nascent stage. In this present work on the emergence of Tamil as inscriptional language, I would like to present succinctly, from a historical linguistic point of view, two aspects: 1) the process of Indo-Aryanisation and 2) a few salient syntactic features of inscriptional Tamil.

Besides excavations, evidence of Tamil antiquity is preserved in written records, such as literature, inscriptions, and palm leaf manuscripts in one form or the other. Efforts were made constantly to alter the perceptions of the past into new forms while contesting to foreign influences of many kinds. To synthesize the indigenous past from these textual sources, however, one must first have a deep understanding of them and apply appropriate inter-textual research methods. This often involves sifting through many pieces of evidence and distinguishing between foreign and native Tamil elements. In most cases, one can find a trajectory from one point in history to the other through changes that might have taken place gradually to change the indigenous perceptions to foreign. Without a sense of historiography and efforts to record history in the past, one is obligated to read in between lines and make connections where necessary. To cite an example, indigenous Tamil rituals have always been one of the significant pieces of evidence to trace Tamils' history and we find many forms of them through various means, including archeological, inscriptional, and literary. The term tiruppatiyam viṇṇappañceytal (cf. SII2 No. 65), is recorded in many Tamil inscriptions to denote Tamil's indigenous form of ritual in parallel to Sanskrit rituals during the medieval period. Subsequently, this term leads one to other related terms such as kaḻañcu poṉ, taḷiccērip peṇṭir, ōtuvār, paṇṭāram, pūcāri and so on and so forth to attribute to the dialogues of Tamils' antiquity. In Sangam literary texts we attest evidence of Tamil's rituals in the form of folk deities with special connotations of vēlan veṟiyayar, veṟiyāṭṭam (cf. Kuruntokai 53, 360), vēlan ēttum veṟi (Paripāṭal 5-15) and others. Thus, one is tempted to trace the trajectory and analyze the dialogues over the change of perceptions belonging to the ancient past to a newly introduced form of tiruppatiyam viṇṇappañceytal or tiruppatiyam pāṭutal. (see Renganathan 2021 for a detailed account of these terms and the later development of the concept of Tamil Arccanai). Thus, these terms and the cultural nuances associated with them become the cultural clue to trace the history of the Tamils. What is significant to note is that such terms form the consolidated pieces of evidence to be correlated with other evidence from literary and archeological evidence. Along these lines, this paper aims at capturing both cultural and literary evidence that can be treated as the base for tracing the history of the Tamils through change in perceptions. As for literary sources, it will be attempted how the imageries and artifacts as employed in Sangam period transitioned through the medieval and modern periods. Specifically, it examines the literary sources from the Sangam and medieval periods to explore how the use of the objects such as Āḷi and ñāḻaṛ pū reflect a shift from a secular to a religious perspective. By using these inscriptional and literary evidence to track historical trajectories and the change in perceptions that occurred throughout, one can contribute to parallel research in the fields of archeology, numismatics, and other relevant fields by shedding light on the historical changes of the ancient past.

David Dean Shulman. Tamil: A Biography. pp. 416. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London 2016, ISBN 978-0674059924. $ 35 / £ 28.95 / € 31.50.—Reviewed by Olga Vecherina

Related Papers

RELATED TOPICS