திருவள்ளுவர் மிகத் தெளிவாக தான் பல முன் அறநூல்கள், மறைகளைப் போற்றி அதன் வழியில் எழுதுகிறேன் என 20க்கும் மேற்பட குறளில் கூறி உள்ளார். வள்ளுவத்தின் கடவுள் வாழ்த்து மட்டுமே சமணம், பௌத்தம், ஆசிவகம் எனும் வெற்று வாத மதங்களை நிராகரிக்கும், வெற்று கதை அடிஅப்படையிலான கிறிஸ்துவ மதங்கள பொய் நெறி எனவும் நிராகரிப்பார்
Modern Asian Studies 34, 2 (2000), pp. 449±482. 2000 Cambridge University Press Printed in the
United Kingdom
Corruption and Redemption: The Legend of Valluvar
and Tamil Literary History STUART BLACKBURN
SOAS, University of London
This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so
repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction,
and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).
If we now
recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is
perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an
important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a
rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and
literature.1 More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology,
literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is
re-imagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in 19th
century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as
evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities,
language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted
and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and
challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.
The study
of the history of Indian literatures, however, is still struggling to move
beyond the descriptive and chronological, the dating of texts and attributing
of authorship, the tracing of influences and movements, the rise of bhakti, the
rise of the novel and so on. While these philological wheels slowly turn,
recent historiography of the colonial period has turned its attention to texts
of the period, and thus opened up new lines of inquiry into nineteen century
Indian literature. In this study of colonial culture, literature - in its old
meaning of `that which is written', including diaries, political tracts,
journalism and history and has been brought centre stage, where a study of
literary histories can now contribute to both literary and historical
scholarship.
One virtue
of such a new literary history might be as a corrective to some recent colonial
historiography. Combining Foucault's thesis about knowledge and power with
Said's critique of colonial knowledge, a now substantial body of scholarship
has argued that the imprint of British colonialism upon Indian languages and
literatures was fundamental and long-lasting. Bernard Cohn's influential essays
on the colonial sociology of India has set in motion a series of studies of the
European pursuit of ethnographic and linguistic knowledge as inseparable from
the consolidation of political power.2 Beginning with the establishment of the
colleges at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay in the first few years of the 19th
century, it is claimed, colonial ideology and institutions standardized Indian
languages by grammars and dictionaries, by fixing their scripts (especially
through the imported technology of print) and by public educational policy, all
of which eventually conferred legitimacy on one among several competing
varieties of a language (and in the case of Hindi/Urdu created new
`languages').3
The impact
of colonialism, in this view, was no less profound on the development of Indian
literatures during the nineteenth century. The standardized and legitimized
language varieties became the forms promoted by the colonial state for literary
expression: a `high' Bengali or a `high' Marathi, already sanctioned by
colonial policy, became the norm for written literature. Again, educational
policy fixed curricula, examinations and degrees and thereby promoted certain
kinds of literary expression. In addition, Western literature provided the
genre models for the Indian writers throughout the century, culminating in that
pinnacle of literary modernity, the novel.
It is
striking that most `first novels' in Indian languages were written by
bilinguals and that most literary histories of Indian languages were first
published in English; in other words, the literary canons of Indian literatures
were established not only in European categories but in a European tongue. In
sum, it is argued, this colonial intervention in Indian languages and
literatures produced a `dislocation' with pre-colonial cultural practices and
knowledge. Drawing on Habermas, the argument is that this rupture resulted in a
new sociolinguistic hierarchy in which those who did not speak the language of
power (English) were effectively sidelined and in which the creation of a truly
public sphere was rendered impossible.4
Wisely
employed, this sociology of the colonial imagination has much to offer to a
literary historiography of the period. Such an approach, for example, would
counter the tendency in literary studies to de-historicize texts and would encourage
a study in the colonial period of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the `literary
field'. On the other hand, when driven by such powerful theoretical engines as
Said, Foucault and Habermas, studies of the `colonial project' are prone to
overstatement, in¯ating the power of colonial knowledge while underplaying the influence
of Indian cultural practices. `Rapture', `dislocation', `asymmetry',Ðcatchwords
of this scholarship tend to erect cultural caesurae where transitions,
transformations and adaptions might be more accurate desciptors. Post-colonial
theory, it appears, is ill at ease with pre-colonial sensibilities, especially
literary ones.
The
evidence presented in this essay suggests that, however powerful colonialism
might have been, it did not create wholesale new knowledges or ®elds of
meaning; rather it influenced change by
intervening in existing discourses and introducing new conceptual frameworks.
If we are
to understand the effects and limits of this intervention, we require an
historically-informed analysis that gives sufficient attention to pre-colonial
literary and cultural practices. Several recent studies of nineteenth (and
eighteenth) century India have begun to work out just such a new model of
analysis.5 Eugene Irschick's study of nineteenth-century debates over land
rights in South India presents a dialogic model in an attempt to explain the
alliances that emerged between British and south Indians in constructing a
notion of ®xed attachment to the land. Another recent book that exposes the
complexities of British±Indian discourse during the nineteenth century is
Vasudha Dalmia's study of the nationalization of Hindu tradition. Her book is
especially relevant for the present essay because it proposes an explanatory
model (modi®ed from Guha) for the development of a literary culture under
colonialism and demonstrates the multiple, competing strands of tradition,
including Orientalists and Indian intellectuals of various persuasions. Her
analysis makes it clear that the construction of a Hindi literary canon and a
normative brand of Hinduism was not the creation of a monolithic colonial
project but a complicated coalition of the reconstructed past, revivalist
movements and modernity, including the colonial state.6
The modest
scope of the present paper is to focus on the readings of a single, traditional
text and its author as an entry point into Tamil literary history in the
nineteenth century. The TirukKural (hereafter
Kural ) was no ordinary text, and during most of the century it was thought
to be the oldest extant Tamil literature. Because of this antiquity our text
stood at the centre of debates about the history of Tamil and its status
vis-a-vis Sanskrit: because its author was said to be a Paraiyar, an
Untouchable, it was prominent also in debates about the category of
`Dravidian'. Not everyone accepted the Paraiyar identity of the author,
Tiruvalluvar (hereafter, Valluvar); the alternative identities proposed for him
included Jaina, Buddhist, crypto-Christian, high-caste Hindu, Brahmin and
half-Brahmin. Clearly for Tamils the Kural was a contentious classic- it has received
more commentaries (ten) than any other Tamil text but it also became important
for European missionaries and British civil servants as well, who were
comforted by its non-idolatrous teachings and translated it many times. It was
also one of the first books printed from the College of Fort St. George, and it
was later prescribed for primary, secondary and higher education. A tall statue
of the author of the Kural stands
in a row with other Tamil cultural heroes on the seafront in Madras. Perhaps
just as significant as a demonstration of the text's role in colonial
discourse, another handsome statue of the poet, a gift from the TamilNadu
Government through the High Commission for India in London, was erected in 1996
on the campus of an institution for the study of former colonial languages and
cultures, the School of Oriental and African Studies.
The debate
about the Kural and its author during the 19th century might recommend
it as a case-study of the colonial reinscription of a traditional Indian
literature. The reality, as I hope to show, was more complicated: a colonial
intervention in a longstanding debate about the status of Tamil in terms of
Sanskrit and Brahminical learning, and about the social relations between
Brahmins and Untouchables. The debate was articulated through various readings
of the Kural and the legend of
its author, in which the European interpretations converged with and also
modified Tamil notions of their literary history. The two primary areas of
convergence were: 1) the lowly birth of Kural's author, which was
controversial within Tamil tradition and valorized by the Europeans; and 2) the
relations between Tamil and Sanskrit which were set in a new historical and
ethical framework, in which corruption gives way to redemption. Out of this
colonial discourse between Europeans and Tamils emerged a consensus, a mutually
convenient congruence between Tamil concerns about cultural difference and European
notions of moral history that produced a narrative of Tamil literary history
which continues to exert its influence today.
The Kural and Valluvar
The Kural
is a collection of couplets, or
aphorisms, on the moral life. It is so named because it was composed in the kural-venpa
(or `short-verse'), one of five such metres used especially for aphoristic
poetry. The text is divided into three parts: aram (dharma), porul(artha)
and inpam (akin to kama, but closer to the English `pleasure').
Moksha (Tamil Viidu) was left out because, the
commentators explain, it cannot be properly discussed in texts, although
ascetic renunciation (turavaram) is treated as a topic under the first
section, aram. Each of the three parts is further subdivided into
`chapters', 130 chapters in all, each with ten couplets, making for a grand
total of 1330 verses.
Most
scholarship, critical as well as appreciative, rightly focuses on the ethical
teachings of the Kural . This secondary literature in Tamil and English
is vast, but for the present purposes it is sufficient to know that the Kural
has a decidedly this-wordly
orientation, with as much to say about rain as about religion; in fact, the book
has very little to say about gods, rituals or temples. Commentators from Ellis
(Sethu Pillai 1955:11) to Caldwell (1875:131) to Zvelebil (1975:157) have
pointed out that the epithets used for `god' display a distinct Jaina influence,
as indeed does the entire work with its emphasis on asceticism in the world. On
the other hand, the candid sensuality of the last section of `pleasure' (which
nineteenth-century missionaries, like Drew and Pope, publicly avowed was not
proper to translate) shows other influences, including the Sangam love poems.
A few
couplets will illustrate the tone and range of the Kural's teachings:
When it rains, the world goes on; it is right to call rain `heavenly food'. It
is the aim of holy scripture to reveal the greatness of those men who have left
all for the sake of virtue.When lovers quarrel, the loser always wins, as is
obvious when they reunite.
In brief,
then, the Kural is certainly not a Saivite or a Vaisnavite text,
composed as it was before the development of bhakti poetry in Tamil; it is
practical, pragmatic and while it does not satirize Brahmins or ritualism,
neither does it eulogize them. It fully justifies its frequent description as a
`Book of Wisdom' or `Book of Moral Conduct' (nal neri or niiti nuÅl).
Any analogy with the Panchatantra, however, is seriously misleading
since the Tamil book has none of the earlier book's satire.
The text
itself is silent about its title, author and history. On the last point,
current scholarly consensus is that the Kural was composed approximately A.D. 500, that
is a few hundred years after the Sangam poems of love and war and at least a
century before the outpouring of religious poetry in Tamil. In part this dating
is based on the inference that its non-sectarian teachings reflect this period
between the Sangam and bhakti eras, when Jaina and Buddhist influences were
strong in the Tamil country. It is important to note, however, that during most
of the 19th century the Kural was considered to be the earliest extant
Tamil text and was dated variously from A.D. 400 to A.D. 1000.7
The name
of the Kural's author, his social identity, as well as hints about the
circumstances of the text's composition first appeared several centuries later,
in the Tiruvalluvamalai (10th c.?), a `Garland' of praise poems to the
author and his work. In the very first verse of the `Garland', we learn that a
`Tiruvalluvar' (tiru, `divine', `sacred') composed the work, which the
`Garland' later calls the TirukKural .
But the
title and the name lose some of their solidity when we realize that eight other
names are used for the author, and eight more for the work itself. To add to
the mounting confusion, `Tiruvalluvar', the name given by the `Garland' (and
accepted ever since) as the author of the Kural , is itself subjected to
competing interpretations, a process which occupied much of the debate in the 19th
century. The primary meaning of valluvar is a title for a ritual
specialist (and a sub-caste) among the Paraiyar, a numerous untouchable caste
in the Tamil country. A Valluvar, a title and office that still exists, may be
an exorcist, astrologer, fortune-teller, funeral drummer and so forth.8
Perhaps
the only thing about the Kural which
has not been disputed is its status as a classic in Tamil literature. No text
has received more scholarly commentaries (some lost) or subcommentaries.
It is also
the best-known and most frequently quoted of Tamil texts, which did not escape
the notice of Portuguese in the late 16th century.9 A German missionary, BartholomaÈus Ziegenbalg,
writing in 1708, gets it just about right: The Malabaris think very highly of
it and it is indeed one of the most learned and edifying books found amongst
them. High-class Malabaris often make it their handbook and whenever one enters
into a discussion with them they are always ready to quote a few verses from it
to prove the validity of their words. It is the habit of educated Malabaris to
confirm and demonstrate everything with one or the other verse; to be able to
do so is considered a great art amongst them. Therefore such books are not just
read but learned by heart. [Gaur 1967: 69]
As for its
poetic excellence, Valluvar's mastery of the short-verse form is beyond
dispute. The often-quoted verse in the `Garland' by Auvaiyar, his legendary sister,
puts it this way: `The kural is like a pierced mustard seed that
contains the waters of the seven seas'.
One is
hard put to outdo the hyperbolic honours heaped upon the text by Europeans:
Ziegenbalg likened it to Seneca; Gover said it was the Tamil Homer, The Ten
Commandments and Dante rolled into one. A verse from the `Garland' had this to
say:
It is
difficult, even after careful consideration of each, to say whether the Aryan
language or Tamil is best: Sanskrit has the Veda but Tamil has the `Tirukkural'
by Valluvar. Perhaps Robert Caldwell was thinking of this verse when he
reportedly commented that the Vedas had never been translated into Tamil
because it already had the Kural 10
Sources for the Valluvar Legend
The
undated Tiruvalluvamalai, as mentioned above, contains the earliest
textual reference to the `Legend of Valluvar'.11 Although this text is crucial
to any reading of the legend, since its own composition is narrated within that
legend, it has received virtually no critical attention. The `Garland' consists
of fifty-three short verses attributed to as many poets, mostly those of the
Sangam period, but also a disembodied voice (asariiri), the goddess of
speech (nanmakaal ) and Siva in the form of the poet Iraiyanar. The very
first verse of the `Garland' tersely describes the critical moment when
Valluvar's work was under examination by the poets of the legendary Sangam at
Madurai; after they had accepted it, their decision was confirmed by a heavenly
source: In agreement, from the sky a voice was heard: `With god-like Tiruvalluvar,
Rudrajanman may sit on the good Sangam plank'.12
The
commentary to this verse, written at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
then goes on to explain that the author of the Kural was named
`Valluvar' because he was generous (vanmai) in `presenting the esoteric
wisdom of the Vedas to the world'. In the commentary on another `Garland'
verse, something more is suggested about the identity of Valluvar. That verse
(attributed to Mamulanar) reads: Even if the god who explained dharma, artha,
kama and moksa in the Vedas is forgotten, there is a simple man named Valluvan,
but the learned will not hear what he has to say.13
In this
verse, the Tamil word for `simple' (petai, `naive', `young', etc.) would
seem to reveal little sociological information, and the gloss (pathaurai)
renders it as `without learning'; the explanatory commentary (vilakka urai),
however, adds that it means that Valluvar was `born in a low caste'.14 Here the
commentator appears to draw on extra-textual information, probably the oral
tradition in which the legend of Valluvar has been transmitted and continues to
be told today.
Aside from
these two verses and their commentaries, nothing more of Valluvar and his
legend is disclosed in the `Garland', whose remaining verses vie with each
other in constructing yet another analogy with which to praise the Kural and its author. The `Garland' verses are
nevertheless part of the popular tradition of Valluvar insofar as they indicate
how the Kural was imagined,
especially in relation to Sanskrit and Brahminical learning. Many verses, as is
clear in the few examples provided above, select the Vedas as the object of
comparison, suggesting either parity with the `northern text' (the usual Tamil
expression) or superiority to it, as in this verse attributed to Kotamanar: Brahmins
recited the four Vedas, fearing it would lose power if written down, but
Valluvan's Kural can be recited by the learned and the common alike and
never lose power even though it has been written down.
The
criteria for the Tamil text's superiority are revealing: the Kural need
not be protected by an esoteric oral tradition; writing it down, for wider
social circulation, does not diminish its value. The `Garland's implicit
critique of Brahminical tradition is later picked up in the commentary to this
verse which explains that although `Brahmins maintained control over the Vedas,
no one controls the Kural'.
I have
found no other pre-colonial textual sources for the Valluvar legend, although
we can be sure that the story was told and transmitted in oral tradition, as it
is even today.15 With the consolidation of British rule in south India at the
end of the eighteenth century and the establishment of the College of Fort St.
George at Madras in 1812, however, the debate about Valluvar and his Kural ceased
to be exclusively Tamil. In fact, the story of Valluvar appeared in English
almost as soon as the Company began to collect taxes and administer a
government for the British crown in South India.
In 1794,
in the very first book in English on Tamil literature, Specimens of Hindoo
Literature, the British civil servant N. A.Kindersley provided a brief
summary of the Valluvar legend (along with a translation of some couplets from
the Kural ).16 A few years later, a Dr John printed a Christianized
version of Valluvar's birth, though he claimed it was based on `ancient Tamil
writings' (1801:362). F. W. Ellis, Collector of Madras and brilliant
linguistscholar, produced a partial translation of the Kural with extensive notes, probably in 1819,
but curiously makes no mention of Valluvar's birth or legend.17 An 1822 English
translation of Beschi's 1730 grammar of high Tamil does mention Valluvar's low
birth and his position as a `sooth sayer' of the Paraiyars. H. H. Wilson's 1828
descriptive catalogue of the Mackenzie manuscripts, which quoted extensively
from Ellis, included a summary of the main events of the Valluvar legend.18
Another brief summary of Valluvar's life, written by a Telugu Brahmin who
assisted in collecting the Mackenzie manuscripts, was published in 1829.19
These
brief notices were superseded in 1835, when Rev. William Taylor, who took over
the task of editing the Mackenzie material from Wilson, produced a full summary
of the legend. Like Wilson, Taylor concentrated on the events at Madurai
inasmuch as they were useful in reconstructing the ancient history of the Tamil
country; he appears to have digested previously printed accounts (especially
Venkataramasvamie 1829), as well as the Mackenzie manuscript upon which Wilson
had relied.20 Although he passes quickly over Valluvar's controversial birth,
to his credit Taylor does include three slightly differing accounts of
Valluvar's triumph over the proud poets of the Madurai Sangam.21 Another attempt
to separate historical fact from unreliable legend was the account of
Valluvar's life published in Jaffna in 1859 by Simon Casie Chitty. Drawing on
many of his predecessors, but wishing to appear scrupulously factual, Chitty
presents a bald summary of the birth and Madurai episodes only, adding that
`nothing further is known of Valluvar which can be relied upon'.22
By
mid-century, however, after the emergence of a native press and the beginnings
of a public debate about the Tamil past, the Valluvar story required more than
these spare summaries. Already in 1831, the Kural and the `Garland' had
appeared in print; in 1840 they were printed with a full commentary and a
one-page summary of the `History of Tiruvalluvar', and in 1847 this summary of
the Valluvar legend had been expanded into an elaborate narration, covering
seven pages of closely printed text.23 But Valluvar's antiquity and literary
excellence were not the only reasons why Tamils began to print and debate his
text. Its secular content was also useful to Tamils as they attempted to
respond to Christian allegations of Hindu superstition and barbarity. As early
as 1835, a missionary noted that the `Kural' is the only one [text] which the Hindus
have as yet . . . thought proper to print and publish, as specimens of their
credence' and as their `appeals of a purer system'.24
Concurrent
with these Tamil publications, the brief sketches of the Valluvar legend in
English gave way to more detailed narration, discussion and interpretation.25
By 1870, after nearly a century in Madras, British scholars, civil servants and
missionaries had fashioned their own image of south Indian society and
religion, in which the story of the lowly-born Valluvar was central. Missionary
Charles Gover's 1871 narration of the legend and his analysis of it is the most
revealing. Unlike his European predecessors, who used the legend for
understanding past history, Gover presented the Valluvar legend as evidence of
a moral trajectory in Tamil literary history which informed the present; later
tellings, notably by Robinson (1873, 1885) and Pope (1886), simply followed
suit.26
The Legend
Below is a
composite version of the legend, drawn from both Tamil and English sources: A
Brahmin, named Bhagavan, travelled on pilgrimage when he stopped in a choultry
to rest and met a Paraiyar woman, named Adi. Because she, a low-caste woman,
approached him, he beat her with a metal ladle and cut her head. Having driven
her away, Bhagavan continued on to Benares, where he performed certain rituals
and then he returned home on the same route. Adi had grown into a beautiful
woman and seeing her but not recognizing her, the Brahmin fell madly in love
with her. Their marriage was soon arranged, but as the bridegroom poured
fragrant oil on his bride's head he noticed the healed wound and asked if she
were the woman he had attacked. When she said yes, he fled, and she followed.
Eventually
finding him, she asked that he accept her as his wife and he agreed on one
condition: that they abandon whatever children she might bear. She accepted
this, and during their travelling, seven children were born: four girls and
three boys.
The first
girl was Auvaiyar, the legendary author of ethical writings [and nearly as
famous as Valluvar]; the second girl became the Tamil goddess Mariyamma; the
third became the goddess Bhadrakali and the fourth the Tamil goddess Valliyamma
[later wed to Murukan]. The first-born son became a poet patronized by a Chera king;
the second was Kapilar [another popular poet and author of the Kapilar
Akaval]27; the third and final son, the youngest of seven children, was
Valluvar.
Subject,
like his siblings, to the strange marital pact between Brahmin father and
Paraiyar mother, Valluvar was abandoned and later raised by a Vellala woman
[high non-Brahmin, landowning caste].
Knowing
the child was an Untouchable, she named him `TiruValluvar', or the `Divine
Valluvar'. Once again, however, because her neighbours objected to the low-born
child, he was abandoned and this time picked up by a local family of Paraiyars.
At five, he went back to his adoptive Vellala parents and explained that he
would leave the village forever because he wished to cause them no further
harm.
Setting
forth in the world, he went to Pothikay Mountain and took instruction from
Agastya and other sages.28 Later certain miracles attended him. The shade of a
tree under which he sat did not move throughout the day, and he killed a demon
that was ravaging the countryside. A landowner, whose fields were saved, then
offered his daughter, Vasuki, to Valluvar in marriage. He asked that she prove here
virtue by turning sand into cooked rice, which she duly did.29
The couple
went to Mylapore, a Brahmin quarter around a famous temple in Madras, where
Valluvar practiced the craft of weaving. He also taught as a sage and performed
miracles. Once he caused a flood and then walked calmly on as the waters
receded; on another occasion, he told his disciple, a ship merchant, to jump
from the top of a tall tree, and the man was not injured. Later he touched the man's
grounded ship and it sailed off; later he advised him to sell his paddy during
the seven years of famine and yet his stores did not diminish. This ship
merchant, his son and other disciples, then persuaded Valluvar to write a book
of his teachings. When he had composed the 1330 couplets of the Kural,
they advised him to take it to Madurai and place it before the pandits of the
Sangam there for evaluation and acceptance.
On the way
from Madras to Madurai, Valluvar met his sister Auvaiyar and another poet, who
encouraged him to use his poem to humble the poets of Sangam. When he reached
Madurai and recited his Kural before them, they were `alarmed at his
ability', and since he was a Paraiyar they refused to accept the book. They put
him through an oral examination which he passed with high marks. Then, as a
last resort, the poets said, `O Pariah, a doubt has arisen in our minds
concerning the worth of your book, solve this and we will accept it. It is this
- the bench we sit on has remarkable power: it will only allow upon it books
written in pure high Tamil. So place your book on it. If the bench receives it,
we will also'.30 When Valluvar placed his poem on the plank, it miraculously
began to contract, throwing off the pandits, until only the Kural remained on it. [this is described in the first
verse of the `Garland'.] Shocked and defeated, the 49 Sangam poets could no
longer refuse to accept the Kural , and indeed they each composed an impromptu
verse praising Valluvar and his work [= the `Garland'].
Returning
home to Mylapore, Valluvar resumed his weaving and teaching. As old age
approached, he told his friends that when he died he wanted no special
ceremony; he asked them only to drag his body around the village and then
deposit it under a bush somewhere.
But when
Valluvar died, his disciples prepared a golden coffin and placed him in it;
miraculously opening his eyes as he lay in the box, Valluvar scolded them and
told them to carry out his original wishes.
They did
and left him, abandoned once again, under a bush. So he was cast out, and the
merchant `observed that the crows and other animals that devoured his holy flesh
became as beautiful as gold; and therefore, greatly wondering, he [the
merchant] built a temple, and instituted worship, on the spot where the sacred
corpse had lain'.31
The first
thing we can say about this legend is that it is composed of elements common to
international and Indian folklore. The hero as the youngest of seven children,
his being cast out (as an outcaste) and his destroying a monster to win the
daughter are all popular themes in international folktales, while the miracle
of the unmoving tree shade is found in the legend of Buddha. Still the story is
unmistakably south Indian. Individual motifs, such as Valluvar's test of his future
bride's virtue by asking her to cook rice from sand (or stones), are commonplace
in Tamil tales. More significantly, the two major episodes of the legend -the
mixed-caste parentage of Valluvar and his submitting his poem for examination
by other poets -are also widespread in south Indian oral narrative and literary
legend. Brahmin fathers and Untouchable mothers regularly produce south Indian
cultural heroes, such as Muttuppattan, popular regional goddesses, such as
Renuka, and a host of lesser-known figures.32 The second major episode, the
proving of the Kural in its arankerram,
is a necessary procedure in order to legitimize any highly-regarded Tamil composition,
as Kampan and others can attest.33
These two
episodes, Valluvar's birth and the testing of his poem, are the core of the
legend and the source of its contested readings. is hardly surprising, since
these episodes claim, ®rst, that the oldest extant Tamil text (at the time) was
written by a Paraiyar and, second, that this Kural triumphed over a degenerate, Sanskritized Tamil
at the ancient Madurai Sangam.
Readings: Valluvar's Birth
The first
of the two core episodes, the parentage of Valluvar, has been the more
contentious and generated more competing versions. Literary legends, especially
of famous poets, are often more influential and widely-known that are the texts
attributed to those poets. When the author in question is said to have composed
the culture's oldest extant text, the story of his birth is nothing less than
an origin myth of a literature. And when the poet is said to be a Paraiyar, the
origin myth is shot through with controversy. Indeed, one measure of cultural
significance of Valluvar's birth is that it often stands, pars pro toto, for
the entire legend. Many references to Valluvar mention nothing more than his
birth, in its various formulations. As one writer concisely put it in 1873,
`That he was a Pariah, no one doubts'.34 In fact, however, there were doubts.
Some
writers in the 19th-century chose to sidestep the question of Valluvar's birth
altogether and declare, on the strength of the text's teachings, that he must
have been a Jain.35 This claim, part of the pre-colonial Tamil debate about the
Kural, was brought out by Ellis in his notes to his 1819[?] translation
of the Kural, and has remained the preferred scholarly option to this
day.36 But the mainstream colonial debate centred on four versions of
Valluvar's birth: 1) that he was half-Brahmin (father) and half-Paraiyar (mother);
2) that he was neither Brahmin nor Paraiyar, but a royal of®cial; 3) that he
was a Paraiyar; and 4) that he was fully Brahmin.37
Valluvar's
mixed-caste parentage (the first version) is certainly the most common form of
the legend, and is a widespread motif in south Indian traditional narrative.38
As is often pointed out by commentators, the names for his parents, `Adi'
(Paraiyar mother} and `Bhagavan' (Brahmin father), occur in the very first
verse of the Kural , which may have given rise to the story of his
mixed-birth.39 The Brahmin + Untouchable birth may also be read
psychoanalytically as a cathartic expression of a cultural phobia about
pollution and commingling of bodily fluids, or less viscerally as a symbol of
the two classical literary traditions in south India, a kind of social hybrid
emblematic of the literary mani-pravalam. It should also be pointed out
that the office of `Valluvan' itself straddles social categories. As the
`priest' or ritual specialist of the Paraiyar and other Untouchables, the
Valluvan is not wholly Paraiyar: he lives outside the cheri (Untouchable
hamlet), if not quite in the ur with higher castes, and sometimes he
wears a sacred thread. The tiru (=`sacred', `divine') prefixed to TiruValluvar's
name only emphasizes his special status as both a Paraiyar and not a
Paraiyar.40 This sociological hybridity is undoubtedly one source of the mixed
parentage in the Valluvar legend.
Although
the mixed parentage was the most common printed version of the legend, some
Tamils explicity challenged the truth of this claim. A robust rebuttal is found
in the first history of Tamil literature, published in 1904 by the ardent
Dravidianist Purnalingam Pillai. Pillai claimed that the whole birth story was
an `ugly legend' and mere `myth' and argued that `valluvan' was not a caste
name in the poet's time.41 `Nor was he a priest of a lowly caste', Pillai wrote
in defiance of received truths; instead he was a poet and diplomat whose
combined skills earned him the office of a `proclaimer, mounted on an elephant,
of royal commands and edicts, feasts and festivals, by drum-beats'.42 The term
`valluvar', he continued, denotes this royal office.43 Pillai rounded out his
radical re-reading of the legend by denying that Valluvar was ever a weaver (a
low-status craft and caste) or that his poem contains any mention of weaving.
For Pillai, then, Valluvar was a Hindu, not a Jain. Pillai's rationalism and his
critique of Brahminical dominance meant he would not accept a Brahmin birth for
this famous Tamil poet, but neither was he able to accept that Valluvar was a
Paraiyar.
Not all 19th-century
readings, however, denied his lowly birth, and some argued that the mixed-caste
birth was a deliberate fabrication to obscure the unpalatable truth that a
Paraiyar had written the Kural On
this essential point European writers were nearly unanimous and forged an
alliance with some Tamil writers that has had an enduring influence on the
writing of Tamil literary history.
The most
succinct statement of this third position of Valluvar's birth comes from
Charles Gover's 1871 telling of the legend, which includes the mixed-parentage;
after telling the story, Gover added this observation:It is clear as light that
all this is but an example of the literary fraud that has so often been
referred to. With Kapila[r], things were carried further; and his poems were
claimed as translations from Sanskrit originals.44
Two pages
later, Gover continued his attack on the Brahminical manipulations of Tamil
literary tradition: Strip the story of its Brahmanical element and we learn
that Tiruvalluvar was a member of a low Dravidian caste, that he owned nothing
and gave nothing to the sacredotal caste (after the disappearance of Bhagavan
there is not one reference to a Brahman in all the story).45
A Tamil
intellectual, and contemporary of Gover, who followed a similar line of attack
was Ayotidas Pandithar [Pantitar].46 Born an Untouchable (panchama) in
Coimbatore district in the midnineteenth- century, Pandithar founded a Dravida
Mahajana Sanga in 1881 and later, after his meetings with Colonel Olcott and
Annie
Besant,
established a Chakya Buddhist Sangam in Madras. In Pandithar's version of
history, the original Tamils were all Paraiyars, and Buddhists, descended form
the Sakya clan of Gautama; later Brahmins made them into `Hindus' and relegated
them to the bottom of the social hierarchy. He developed this theory further in
his pamphlet `The History of Tiruvalluvar', in which he argued that the TirukKural
's original title was `Tiri-Kural ', modeling its three sections on the
tripartite division of Theravada Buddhist scriptures. He went on to say that
the legend of Valluvar's mixed-caste parentage was an attempt by Brahmins to
deny that a low-caste man could have written this most revered of Tamil texts.
Brahmins, according to Pandithar, could not completely remove the Paraiyar
element from the story but they could neutralize it by the invention of a
Brahmin fatherhood. As evidence of this Brahminical manipulation, Pandithar compared
early editions of the Kural and
found that whereas those published in 1831 and 1834 contained nothing about
Valluvar's birth, those published shortly thereafter by a pair of Brahmin
brothers did. An edition of 1835, published by Caravanaperumal Aiyar, included
a mention of Valluvar's birth from a Brahmin father and Paraiyar mother, and
his marriage to a merchant's daughter.
Emboldened
that he could defend the inclusion of this made-up story, in his 1837 edition
Visakaperumal Aiyar placed the story of Valluvar's birth in an Introduction.
The birth story is obviously fiction, continues Pandithar, since in one edition
Valluvar has seven siblings and in the other only six; in one book he marries a
merchant's daughter and in the other a Vellala woman. The Sanskritization traced
by Pandithar was completed with an 1847 edition in which Valluvar's birth is
set within a mythic framework and his genealogy traced back to ancient sages.47
Although
some of Pandithar's history is misinformed,48 and although I have not been able
to consult all the early editions of the Kural cited by Pandithar, his indictment of
Brahminical manipulations of the Valluvar legend are echoed by some of his
European contemporaries.
49 Gover,
for whom the Valluvar legend provided everything he needed to know about Tamil
religion and social history, appears to have taken his elaborate telling of the
legend from the 1847 edition cited by Pandithar. In both these versions,
Valluvar is fully Brahmin by birth: Brahma wants to perfect both the `northern
tongue' and the `southern tongue' and after engineering a few couplings and
births, Vyasa is born to accomplish this task for Sanskrit. In the south,
Brahma performs a Vedic sacrifice, from which emerges Sarasvati, whom Brahma
marries, begetting Agastya, who becomes the grandfather of Bhagavan, and thus
the great-grandfather of Valluvar. Then, as in other accounts, Bhagavan meets
and later marries Adi: this time, however, she is said not to be an
Untouchable, but a Brahmin girl abandoned by her parents and raised by
Paraiyars.50
In these
Sanskritized tellings, then, Valluvar was not half Brahmin: he was fully
Brahmin, which is a fourth version of his contested birth. It is a minority
opinion, but it has had its admirers, among them the respected scholar
Ramachandra Dikshitar, who argued in 1936 that Valluvar was completely
Brahmins.51 By inserting a prior Brahmin birth to cancel the appearance of
low-caste origin, this fourth version of the birth borrows from south Indian
folk narrative tradition. Indeed Valluvar's legendary birth bears a striking
similarity to some versions of the Muttuppattan story, a bow song from the southern
Tamil country which contains the same inserted birth motif. The core story is
that the Brahmin Muttuppattan falls in love with and marries two Untouchable (cakkiliyar)
women; some printed and oral performances, however, begin the story in Siva's
heaven where two women disturb a sage in meditation and are cursed to be born
on earth and to marry an Untouchable. Born in a Brahmin family, they are
quickly abandoned (to avoid gossip since they are born when their father is
away on pilgrimage), later raised by Paraiyars and finally married by
Muttuppattan. Just as these brides of a cultural hero worshipped in the south
Tamil country were converted to Brahmins, Valluvar's untouchable mother ( and
thereby Valluvar himself) became a Brahmin through the narrative technique of
inserting a prior birth on a mythic plane.52
Despite
obvious differences among the various social identities claimed for Valluvar by
Tamils, one commonality is noteworthy: no one is quite willing to accept wholeheartedly
a Paraiyar identity for the author of the Kural. He might be a Jain, or
a Vellala, or a Brahmin, perhaps only partially a Brahmin, but he cannot be an
Untouchable.
Even
Pandithar, who argued that Valluvar's Brahmin paternity is a lie, claimed that
the poet was a Buddhist (and thereby not an Untouchable). The problem here is
that Indian tradition does not like its heroes to have a low birth; a Paraiyar
poet could be, at best, only an ambivalent symbol of cultural pride for Tamils
in the nineteenth century. By contrast, Europeans prefer their religious heroes
to come from humble origins. During the 19th-century Christian missionaries and
European scholars in south India agreed with the anti-Brahmin stance taken by
some Tamils and promoted Valluvar as a Paraiyar literary hero. That lowly
status, in fact, conformed to European expectations and stimulated their
interest in this longstanding debate, which they soon reinterpreted through
their own moral and historical perspectives.
One of the
earliest retellings of Valluvar's birth (within the story of his sister
Auvaiyar) begins with `a bright star falling down, in a village inhabited by
outcasts'.53 Most European versions are not so transparently transpositions of
the Christ story, but they all display signs of cultural translation. Almost
without exception, the early European notices of Valluvar are consistent in
mentioning the low status of the Tamil poet's birth. Writing in 1730, in the
Preface to his grammar of High Tamil, the Italian missionary and scholar of
Tamil, Constanzo Beschi, explained that Valluvar `was of the low tribe of
Paraya', adding the `Valluvan' is the name for `soothsayers and learned men of
the Paraya tribe'.54 Later European students of Tamil, for whom Beschi's
grammars and dictionaries became required reading, echoed the Italian's phrase
when describing Valluvar.
In his
1794 publication, Kindersley included a footnote to explain that tradition
considers Valluvar a `priest of the lowest order of the Hindoos (the pariar)'.55
Wilson's 1828 notice of Valluvar refers to his `inferior birth', and Bower at
mid-century called Valluvar a `poor, despised Pariah'.56
When, and
to what extent, these European readings began to influence Tamil ones is a
dif®cult question to answer with any precision.
At the
very least we can say that there was a convergence between a pre-colonial Tamil
reading of Valluvar as a Paraiyar and a European desire to accept that version
of events. At the beginning of the century, as we have seen, the Tamil
commentator of the `Garland' constructed the `simple' (pethai) nature of
Valluvar to refer to his `low-caste birth'. Toward the end of the century, the
European reading of Valluvar as a hero of low origins achieved literary form
when George U. Pope began his translation of the Kural with a praise-poem of his own:
Sage
Valluvar, priest of thy lowly clan
No tongue
repeats, no speech reveals thy name;
Yet all
things changing, dieth not thy fame
For thou
art bard of universal man.
In
Valluvar, the low-born sufferer who wins out against social evil and religious
domination, the Europeans found a Tamil cultural hero whom they could embrace.
In Pope's words, `The last has indeed come first'.57
Readings: The Madurai Episode
As Pope's
Biblical phrase implies, Valluvar's low birth was only half the story; he must
also, and against the odds, succeed. In south Indian narrative and cultural
logic, too, his Paraiyar birth set up a necessary confrontation with high-caste
domination. Although this second core episode is thus a continuation of the
tension generated within the first episode, the nature of its contestation is
different.
Valluvar's
triumph at Madurai, when the astounded poets were forced to accept the Kural
and write praise-poems on it, has
not been accused of selective Brahminical `editing', as was the case with the
birth episode.58 Rather, the episode itself is a contestation, between
claimants to the crown of authentic Tamil literary tradition. The various
readings of this legendary struggle for control of the literary past must
themselves be read in the context of the cultural politics of the 19th-century.
In these accounts of the Madurai episode, European and (some) Tamil
interpretations of the Valluvar legend once again converge, this time in a
fortuitous alliance between the foreigners' perception of a corrupt but
perfectable civilization and the Tamils' pursuit of a literary history that
would rescue a pure language from its Sanskrit accretions.
A key
element in this alliance is the slippage that occurs, in the accounts of the
Madurai episode, between the Sangam poets and
`Brahmins'. Only a few of those ancient poets were in fact Brahmins,
perhaps as few as ten percent; but once they had been collectively identified
as `Brahmins', the entire legend fell into place (for different reasons) for
European and Tamil commentators alike.59 In order to understand how this conflation
might occur, we should begin by observing that the legend is fundamentally a
tale of caste conflict and that is it especially anti-Brahmin. In the first
major episode, following the puranic frame in some versions, Bhagavan rejects
Adi and wounds her in the head, simply because she is a Paraiyar. The Brahmin
then forces her to accept as a condition for their marriage that she must
abandon her children at birth. In due course, Valluvar is abandoned, and then
abandoned a second time because of highcaste (Vellala) prejudice against him as
a Paraiyar. Later, Kapilar, one of Valluvar's brothers, is raised by Brahmins
but ultimately rejected by them, and as a consequence composes a caustic
critique of caste and ritual in the form of a well-known poem (Kapilar
Akaval).
The
inclusion of this substory of Kapilar into the Valluvar legend indelibly stamps
the whole story with an anti-Brahmin character. Finally, when Valluvar finally
reaches Madurai, he is encouraged to humble the pride of the poets, who reject
him and his poem because of his low-caste identity.
Given this
repeated antagonism in the legend between Brahmins and Paraiyars, it is easy to
understand how the Sangam poets, the ®nal opponents of Valluvar, might be
identi®ed as `Brahmins'. Certainly this slippage occurs early on in the
European sources. Kindersley's 1794 summary of the legend speaks of the
Brahmins at Madurai, and an 1855 account observes that `[t]o humble the pride
and arrogance of the brahmans, a poor despised Pariah is raised up by
providence to be the first of Tamil philosophers and perhaps the chief of Hindu
moralists'.60 Taylor's 1835 account identifies the Madurai poets as `Brahmins'
and, going one step further, reports that
when the Kural
was accepted at Madurai, Valluvar
himself was `made a Brahmin'.61 Even if this identification of the haughty
poets as Brahmins was not entirely consistent in European readings of the
legend, the association of those poets with Sanskrit learning was. And this was
the crucial point, since once the defeated poets of Madurai were linked with
Sanskrit (and thereby Brahminical tradition), the Valluvar legend could be read
as an allegory of corruption and redemption.
The very first
English account of the Kural in
print called attention to these themes. In his introductory notes to the
translated verses, Kindersley wrote that Tamil literature had `long been deeply
on the decline . . . and this has consequently produced a corruption'.62 The
specific place of Valluvar's text in Tamil literary history is made more
explicit in H. H. Wilson's 1836 analysis of the legend. After a brief summary
of the poet's triumph in Madurai, Wilson explains that `in a literary view'
alone we can understand Valluvar's overthrow of the Madurai poets as a revival
of old, pure Tamil. The poets of the original Sangam, Wilson explained, were
`eminent in Tamil composition' but later poets directed their attention more to
Sanskrit composition and . . . neglected the cultivation of their literature .
. .With Tiruvalluvar, however, circumstances changed. The old system was
subverted, and a new impulse was given to the study of Tamil, which produced,
in the course of the ninth century . . . a number of the most classical writers
in the Tamil tongue.63
A similar
redemptive reading is offered a few decades later by a missionary, who wrote:
`Just when the Tamil language was in danger of losing its purity, there came a
Pariah Priest and a weaver from Mylapore'.64 Valluvar's presentation of the Kural
to Madurai poets, he continued,
`effected a kind of revolution in the language' and `gave a check to the
prevalence of Sanskriticisms'.65 Again, Pope at the end of the century,
dismisses the whole legend as untrue but cannot refrain from stating that
`[t]he truth seems to be the Madura School of Tamil literature, now too full of
Sanskrit influences, was supreme till the advent of [Valluvar]'.66
Once it
was understood that Valluvar had battled against the northern tradition of
Sanskrit and Brahminical learning, the European readings of the Madurai episode
could enter into and influence
the
long-running debate about the history of Tamil and its status vis-a-vis
Sanskrit. This is not the place to discuss the history of that conflict, but
one thing is clear: from a very early date, Tamil tradition regarded the
Sanskrit tradition with envy and resentment, as well as with admiration and
respect.67 Although pre-colonial interpretations of the Valluvar legend appear
limited to the few sources discussed above, the `Garland' registers the Tamil +
Sanskrit conflict by its frequently combative comparisons between the Kural and the Vedas, between Tamil and Åriyam
(`aryan') and so on. Clearly the European readings of the legend did not
create or even introduce these combative elements to the debate. What they did
bring to the debate, however, was a new moral, teleological framework that
explained the past and set an agenda for the present and future.
The
Orientalist translation of India into European categories and concepts has been
described and critiqued in several studies.68 In the case of the European
insistence on the `humble origins' of Valluvar, we recognize a colonial
interpretation of south Indian culture within the historical narrative of
European Christianity. Informing this interpretation, however, is a more
fundamental perception, a belief that `modern Hindu life in Southern India much
resembles that of Europe just before the Reformation'.69 With this statement,
Charles Gover introduced his translations of `folk-songs' of south India which,
he believed, reveal a `silent Reformation' which had been at work for
centuries, in local non-Brahmin sects, and which, while not breaking completely
with the Brahminical order, `present a scheme, more moral than religious, in which
idolatry is unknown, and the divinity is always spoken of as the great soul of
the universe, one and invisible'.
70 Gover
then presented translations of Valluvar's Kural, along with other
anti-caste, anti-ritual literature in Tamil, as a shining example of this
popular Hinduism, this `secret' reformation, undermining the priestly
domination of Brahmins. Valluvar's teachings thus represented a deism, over
against a polytheism of the Brahmins.71
Other
European readings of the Valluvar legend may lack Gover's melodrama, but
collectively they produce a Tamil literary history in which corruption is
redeemed: an authentic Tamil had been corrupted by the Madurai poets until
Valluvar's triumph restored its prior purity. Even more telling were the
details of this literary history as presented by Europeans: ancient Tamil
civilization had been corrupted by a sacredotal order, an abrogation of power
by a priestly, institutionalized and centralized elite. The European worldview
behind this writing of literary history was nowhere more succinctly revealed
than in Robert Caldwell's comment that the whole of the Ten Commandments could
be translated into a pre-Sanskritic Tamil, except for one word: `image'.72 What
was needed was to strip away these distorting accretions and revive the old
moral code, the bedrock that had been obscured by priestly pride, power and
ritual. What was needed, in a word, was a Reformation.
Colonial Discourse: Paraiyars and Dravidians
The
allegory of corruption and redemption underlying the European (and Tamil)
interpretation of the Valluvar legend had implications beyond theology. In his
recent book, Tom Trautmann suggests that 19-century was later resignified as a
Brahmin/non-Brahmin opposition, and in that form contributed to the non-Brahmin
movement in the early 20th-century.73 This argument has also been advanced by
two recent essays which focus on the influential figure of Robert Caldwell and
discuss the intellectual legacy bequeathed by his anti-Brahminism to the
non-Brahmin movement.74 Caldwell (1814 -1891) is famous as the author of the definitive
and systematic proof that Tamil was not derived from Sanskrit, A Comparative
Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856), which
certainly had a significant impact on the development of Dravidian
consciousness (although it is curious that his book was not translated into
Tamil until 1941).
The
material presented in this essay suggests, however, that this argument linking
Caldwell to the later non-Brahmin movement requires modi®cations.75 First, it
is necessary to emphasize that the Brahmin/non-Brahmin conflict has had a very
long history in Tamil tradition, as exemplified by the Valluvar legend, and was
not the consequence of a European revelation of a Aryan/Dravidian linguistic
division. Similarly, the Aryan/Dravidian split itself had a pre-colonial
history, as evidenced, for example, by the verses in the `Garland'.
But most
importantly, the readings of the Valluvar legend demonstrate that Caldwell's
writings must also be situated within its contemporary context, the 19th-century
discourse between Europeans and Tamils about literary history, and principally
about Valluvar.
For all
his individualism, Caldwell fell into line with his contemporaries in his
comments about Valluvar and his poem: he argued that the Kural was the oldest extant Tamil text (datable
to about the 10th century A.D.), and that it was a genuine Tamil classic
because it stood independently of Sanskrit.76 Caldwell also believed that
Valluvar was a Paraiyar; in his history of the Tinnevelly District, he wrote,
`Tiruvalluvar (a name which means the sacred Paraiya priest) is esteemed the
prince of Tamil poets; but having been a Paraya, it was not without miracle
wrought in his favour that he was allowed a place on the much-coveted bench'.
77 As was true of his contemporaries, Caldwell's position on the Valluvar
legend necessarily implied an opposition to Brahminism. At one point in his
grammar, for example, Caldwell remarked that Brahmins have written almost
nothing of value in Tamil and that the highest achievement by a Brahmin in
Tamil literature was a famous commentary on the Kural [prompting an editor to note in the 1976
edition that this is untrue].78 Caldwell's anti-Brahminism is evident also in
his theory of `Dravidian' folk religion (extrapolated from his study of Nadars
in Tinnevelly district) in which he claimed that northern traditions had
obscured and de®led a primordial Tamil culture.79
One of the
contributions of Trautmann's recent book is to make clear what was known only
in a small corner of Tamil studies: namely, Caldwell's justly famous grammar is
heavily indebted to the earlier work of F. W. Ellis.80 What is less well-known
is that Caldwell followed Ellis in another respect: the propagation of the idea
that Paraiyars were the Tamil sons of the soil. As Eugene Irschick shows in his
book on the 19th-century, Ellis was instrumental in advocating that Paraiyars
be considered legitimate landowners, as part of the tax regime (mirasidar
system) that he supported.81 A generation later, Caldwell lent further support
to this identification of Paraiyars as the original Tamils. In his essay, `Are
the Pariars of southern India Dravidians?' (appended to the second edition of
his grammar but omitted from later editions), he argues that they are the
Adi-Dravidians. He also states that the myth that Paraiyars are a result of
miscegenation with Brahmins is false, `invented and propagated' by Brahmins in
order to maintain their superiority.82 This discourse on Paraiyars, from Ellis
on land rights at the beginning of the century to Caldwell (and others) on
history and religion at the end of the century, is a direct consequence of
their readings of the Valluvar legend. Just as Valluvar came from humble
origins and suffered because of it, Paraiyars as a group were seen as the
original Tamils who were displaced by more powerful castes. And this ethicized
literary history went beyond intellectual debate and penetrated public policy,
as is evident in the following quotation from a document written by the
Collector of Chingleput in 1892:
The
Pariahs were not always in their present condition of degradation. The most
popular poem ever produced in Tamil country, the Kural, was written by a Pariah
named Tiruvalluvar `the divine Pariah' as he has been called. (Irschick
1994:182).
Conclusions: Corruption and Redemption in Tamil Literary History
Among the
various forces behind the colonial mission was the self justifying perception
that India was ritual-ridden and dominated by a priestly elite.83 This
prejudice was not simply an inflection of southern linguistic politics, for no
less an influential figure in the colonial definition of Hindustani than John
Gilchrist thought that Sanskrit was `a cunning fabrication . . . by the
insidious Bruhmuns'.84 The intellectual origins of this anti-Brahmin bias among
so many early Europeans in India are beyond the scope of this essay. What we
can say at this point is that in south India those attitudes found a natural
home in the local and long-standing conflict with Sanskrit and Brahminical
learning. The moral and historical models which the Europeans brought with
them, the narratives of corruption and redemption that underlay the Reformation
model, dovetailed with Tamil readings of their own cultural and literary
history. This was a powerful alliance, driven on the one hand by a European
belief in the moral imperative to reform and improve, and on the other by a
Tamil perception of loss and a desire to regain a purer past.
This
congruence between European and Tamil readings of the Valluvar legend and his Kural
rests on three interpretive moves.
First, the humble birth of the Paraiyar poet fit into a European tradition of
the low-born, suffering hero. Second, his triumph at Madurai was interpreted as
a victory against a priestly elite, as a reformation of Papist ritualism, while
his Kural was valorized as a
deism superior to polytheism. Third, Valluvar and Paraiyars generally were seen
as primordial sons of the Tamil soil, the Adi-Dravidians displaced by crafty
Brahmins. As a result of these convergences, the dominant reading of the
Valluvar legend to emerge from the 19th century was a story of
corruption and redemption. Pure Tamil had been corrupted by Sanskrit/Brahmins
but then redeemed by Valluvar and his Kural , which ushered in the
highpoint of Tamil classical literature.
Loss and
deliverance is of course a theme that threads through Tamil literary tradition:
loss of the ®rst and second Sangams (by flood), loss of Vedas, loss of Lemuria.
When this theme was alloyed with biblical morality, however, it was ethicized
as a narrative of corruption and redemption.
Themes of
corruption and redemption, I would argue, have influenced the writing of Tamil literary history from
the 19th century down to the present. Valluvar's overthrow of the
proud poets in ancient Madurai became a paradigmatic event, to be reimagined
and re-enacted again in the nineteenth-century by reformist Europeans and
Tamils. Valluvar had redeemed ancient Tamil from corruption, but the language
had been debased once again in the medieval period and required a second coming
to rid it of Sanskrit and Brahminical accretions, such as ritual idolatry,
priestly pedantry and literary artifice.
Around
1850 many public figures in Madras believed that Tamil, having suffered
centuries of neglect, was in deep decline and in need of deliverance from some
quarter. For the advocates of Tamil language reform, that solution lay in a
modern Tamil prose, modeled after English. This position was taken by the
Campaign for a New Vernacular, a mid-century association of British and Tamil
reformers, including Bruce Norton (President of the Board of Madras University)
and later G. Subramaniya Iyer (editor of The Hindu and Swadesamitran).
For others, who blamed Sanskrit (and later English, to a certain extent) for
the destitute condition of Tamil, the answer was a revival of old Tamil. Toward
the close of the century, these voices coalesced into the Pure Tamil Movement,
so well documented by Sumathi Ramaswamy's recent book.85 What is not always
appreciated, and what I have attempted to bring out here, is that long before
the Pure Tamil Movement, Europeans took a similar position, blaming Sanskrit
for the demise of Tamil and recommending a return, if not to ancient Tamil, at least to a pure
substratum.
This model
of corruption and redemption, as read into the legend of Valluvar, not only
motivated programs for language reform in the 19th-century but also continues
to influence Tamil literary history written in the late twentieth-century.
Kamil Zvelebil's last book on Tamil literary history (1992) is a good case in
point. In it Zvelebil places enormous emphasis on the significance of `lost'
Tamil literature, which he lays squarely at the feet of Brahmin `religious
fanaticism' and `militant Hinduism'.86 Zvelebil bases his account of this `loss
and corruption' of Tamil literature in the late medieval period primarily on
two sources. One is Gover's 1871 book (discussed above), from which Zvelebil
selects this passage:
It is
almost impossible [writes Gover] now to obtain a printed copy of any early
Tamil book that has not been systematically corrupted and mutilated . . .
Indigenous poetry . . . was hidden under a load of corruption . . . The
Brahmans corrupted what they could not destroy.87
After
quoting this extract as if it were reliable literary history, Zvelebil then
concedes that Gover `exaggerates' but still maintains that much of what he says
is true because we have `several independent witnesses for it'.88 As one of
those reliable witnesses, Zvelebil quotes from Taylor's 1835 summary of the
Mackenzie manuscripts. In effect, Zvelebil's late 20th-century literary history
recycles the allegory of loss, decadence and salvation that underpinned the
Valluvar legend and the writing of literary history in the 19th-century.
The other
source for Zvelebil's narrative of corruption and redemption is a survey of
Tamil literature in the nineteenth-century (Ventakacuvami 1962). It is from
this book that Zvelebil obtains his case against two Saiva Brahmins
(seventeenth/eighteenth-century) who proscribed the reading and teaching of
pre-bhakti Tamil texts.89
They,
Zvelebil claims, are responsible in large part for the `militant Hinduism' and
`religious fanaticism' which resulted in the loss of so many early Tamil texts.
Reading this source book, one sees the theme of corruption and redemption
assume cataclysmic proportions.
`This
attitude [Saiva proscription of pre-bhakti texts]', writes Venkatacuvami, `was
the fundamental reason for the total destruction of old Tamil civilisation,
arts and culture'.90 But, the author consoles us, a `new dawn' (nalla kalam)
was soon to come. This new age, when past corruption was redeemed by salvaging
an even more ancient age, came in the second half of the 19th-century, which
witnessed the printing of the lost classics. And this period, as any history of
Tamil literature will inform us, is known as the `Tamil Renaissance'. If Gover
saw a Reformation at work, others found a Renaissance.
Literary
history in 19th-century India was a field of knowledge substantially
influenced by Europeans and the colonial
state, though the extent of that influence is often exaggerated. In the south
Indian context at least, the colonial impact was filtered through a
re-existing, though never static, debate about the origins of Tamil and its
position vis-a-vis Sanskrit. The TirukKural, written after the Sangam
poems but before the bhakti movement, was a contentious text in Tamil literary
history long before Europeans came to India.
Directed
to this extremely popular text and its legend by Tamil tradition, Europeans
found a story that allowed them to participate in and influence debates about
Tamil literary history. In Valluvar's low birth, the Europeans discovered a
hero of their own making; in his ecumenical teaching, the Europeans' pursuit of
an acceptable Indian religion coalesced with a Tamil desire to imagine a past
independent of Brahminical control, rituals and texts. In Valluvar's triumph at
Madurai, the outsiders' need to view (south) India as an ancient and fallen,
yet redeemable culture matched the need felt by many Tamil intellectuals for a
literary history that rescued a pure Tamil from a decadent Sanskrit.
The
Valluvar legend can only be fully understood, however, in the context of other
Tamil literary histories. While there is no grand narrative of Tamil literary
history, a common feature is that competing narratives differ according to the
positions taken on the issue of Tamil's relation to Sanskrit. Some texts
explain that Tamil and Sanskrit were the two heads of Siva's creative drum;
others state that the two languages sprang from Siva's two eyes. But the most
influential narrative is the story of Agastya, who is said to have brought to
the south both Sanskrit and Tamil. Some versions claim that Agastya created
Tamil, others that he first learned it from Siva; one of his disciples was
Tolkappiyar, to whom the earliest Tamil grammar is attributed. The Agastya
story, in other words, is an origin myth for the Tamil language, just as the
Valluvar story is an origin myth for Tamil literature.91 But the origin in the
Agastya myth is mixed -a northern derivation for the southern tongue -an
ambivalence which some tellings of the Valluvar legend attempt to resolve with
an unambiguously non-Brahmin poet's decisive victory at Madurai.
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