Book Review: An Update on AIT (Part 1)

[Chandrasekaran, Periannan]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sudalaimuthu Palaniappan [mailto:Palaniappa at AOL.COM]
> Sent: Thursday, September 02, 1999 2:19 AM
> To: INDOLOGY at LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: Book Review: An Update on AIT (Part 1)
>
............
>
> In her book, Ramaswamy says that in the analysis of social science
> scholarship preceding hers,
> <we learn little about how specific languages are transformed
> into sites of
> such loyalty, reverence, and love. How indeed do they acquire
> the capacity
> which *enable* them to act as symbols or catalysts, or just
> as crucially,
> *disable* them from doing so?> p. 8
>
> One would hope that she would provide a history of such a
> loyalty towards
> Tamil. But she also says,
>
> <For like the nation, that other entity produced in
> modernity, tamizppaRRu,
> too is driven by the imperative to clothe itself in timeless   antiquity,
so
> that devotion to Tamil appears to be as ancient as the  language itself.
Yet
> Tamil devotion--in the sense in which I have identified it as   networks
of
> praise, passion, and practice through which the language is
> transformed into  the primary site of attachment, love, and loyalty of its

> speakers--is a more   recent phenomenon
> whose foundations were laid in the   nineteenth century with

There are signigificant number of references in CT itself to the the
heritage named
"Tamil" with reverence to it.


> From memory:
paripAdal:
"
teri mAN tamiz mummait ten2n2am poruppan2
pari mA niraiyin2 parantu an2Ru vaiyai"

teri = famous; mAn = glorious; mummai = triple;
poruppu = the [potiyil] mountain
-->"....the king of the [potiyil] mountains home to the  well-known glorious
triple Tamil..."

There are innumerable refereces to the maturai city as the "city where Tamil
grows"
or "the city that nurtures tamil".
The most powerful evidence against Ramasamy's assertion is the famous
episode from
a puRanAn2URu poem by the poet mOci kIran2Ar.
The episode involves the tired poet sleeping on the bed reserved for the
sacred
"royal drum" which has been taken away for ritual bathing; the custom was
to condemn any one who desecrates the bed to capital punishment.
But when the king returns with the drum to return it to its bed, he find the
poet
fast asleep and instead of punishing the poet, he coddles the poet further
by
blowing the royal fan!

When the poet wakes up startled, he sings...
"....
atUum cAlum tamiz muzutu aRital
..."

--->"....it is a very fitting tribute to pay, having a well-rounded
knowledge of Tamil  ..."

an indisputable evidence that millenia ago Tamil was consciously used
 as a glorified label for the native heritage.

The "political agenda" agenda of the epic cilappatikAram seems to be
expressly
to unite the fragmented Tamil society into one unified force against  alien
cultures and powers and there are passages in it from employing the word
"Tamil"
and "tamil nADu" from which this can be deduced.




> Regards
> S. Palaniappan
>


P.Chandrasekaran.