Continuing the review of Passions of the Tongue

[Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan]

Sumathi Ramaswamy says,

<Yet, like the language she embodies, tamizttAy appears differently to 
different devotees at different moments in their lives, and is thus variously 
represented as teyvam, "goddess"; tAy, "mother"; and kan2n2i, "virgin 
maiden"> p. 79

<tamizttAy thus is yet another classic example of the objectification of 
women as a thing "to be appropriated, possessed, and exchanged in the social 
relations of cooperation and competition among men" (Uberoi 1990: 
41)
tamizttAy, like other exemplary female icons, is far from cutting a 
feminist figure in her guise as tame goddess, benevolent mother, and pure 
virgin. Visible and valorized she may be, but she is very much a figment of 
the patriarchal imaginations of modernity in colonial and post-colonial 
India.> p. 80

We see a lot of jargon here. If only she had done the needed research, it 
could have led to a real history of Tamil nationalism. It looks like she does 
not seem to be literate enough in Tamil to accomplish her chosen work. Based 
on the antiquity of the feminization of Tamil shown here, one can only 
conclude that Ramaswamy seems to have mistaken her own ignorance for 
objectivity when she says,  

<Crucial to the pietistics of devotion is the deliberate adoption of 
strategies of archaization and "subterfuges of antiquity" (Kaviraj 1993: 13). 
Although there are certainly ancient precedents to her present incarnation, 
tamizttAy is clearly a modern creation, not older than a century or so.> p. 86

As we saw, the first explicit feminization of Tamil is in the cilappatikAram. 
In his translation, R. Parthasarathy says, "In the mahAbhArata and the Iliad, 
the protagonists yudhiSThira and Achilles are male; the protagonist kaNNaki 
in the cilappatikAram, is a female. This feature alone is significant enough 
for us to propose that the cilappatikAram stands in a subversive relationship 
to mahAbhArata. By making a woman the protagonist, iLaGkO rewrites the epic 
tradition by subverting its essentially androcentric bias. He displaces the 
semidivine warrior, and the heroic ethos that surrounds him, with a mortal 
woman who is transformed into a divinity. iLaGkO's work is unmistakably 
revisionary. It does not imitate the Sanskrit epic, prestigious though that 
is. It builds upon forms indigenous to Tamil, which it perfects" (The 
cilappatikAram of iLagkO aTikaL, p.8)

Regards
S. Palaniappan