muttusvAmi dIkshitar

[S Krishna]

<<I suspect strongly that muttusvAmi dIksitar has Tamil roots.
>Unlike Tyagayya and other Telugu brahmins who settled in
>Tamil country for a long time and who wrote in Telugu,
>MuttusvAmi chose Sanskrit, even though the main courtly
>patronage and elitist tastes were toward Telugu.
Is it a compromise that MuttusvAmi settled for?>>


 MuttusvAmi dIkshitar has composed in Telugu, maNipravALam( if not
Tamil) and samskrt. He attempted compositions like "abhayAmba ninnu"
which use both Tamil and Telugu. There are compositions like "rUpamu
jUci" in Telugu by him. I believe that he was above the kind of
linguistic cross fire which is rampant nowadays.


  As far as trampling of Tamil culture is concerned, opinion seems to be
divided. If one were to ignore politically biased writings, I have seen
only N.Subramanian give the nAyakars and the marAThas bad reviews
for destruction of Tamil culture. Other historians like C.K.Srinivasan
,M.Ruthnaswami and the redoubtable S.Krishnasvami Iyengar seem to be
having a different opinion as far as the effect of marAthA rule on Tamil
Nadu is concerned. Even among the more modern works, I've seen a work
called "marATi Acciyil tamizhakam" which doesn't give the marAthas or
the nAyakars a negative review. Likewise Rajesvari
Ghose mentions one N.Visvanathan,( the curator of the sarasvati mahal
library in tanjAvUr) in her book about the tiruvArUr temple whose
admiration for sArabhOji came close to hero worship. I therefore believe
that there is a lot of division within Tamil Nadu itself about the
quality and contribution of the nAyakar and the marATha dynasties.

  As far as eroticism in Tamil literature is concerned, I don't think
that this was the result of the nAyaka kings and their literature; the
"kuruntokai" ( written before Telugu was even born) has passages which
are just as erotic as kSEtrayya's padams. The same thing is also true of
parts of the kampa rAmAyaNam. It would be interesting to see the kind of
eroticism that existed in telugu before the nAyakar days; if eroticism
got a clear boost from that era onwards, it can be posited that this was
the influence of Tamil literature on Telugu literature!!

  While it may be true that the average rate of production of Tamil
classics did go down during the 17th-18th centuries, there were people
like tAyumAnavar and vIramAmunivar who did contribute new ideas to
existing Tamil literature. I therefore believe that Tamil literature may
have been threatened, but was certainly in no fear of becoming extinct.

Regards,
Krishna

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