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4 Three Moments in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture Norman Cutler This essay focuses on a few key moments in the genealogy of Tamil literary culture that are described and enacted in, respectively, (1) the autobiography of the great textual scholar and editor U.Ve. Caminataiyar (1855–1942), which treats approximately the first half of his life; (2) histories of Tamil literature that emerged as a genre of scholarship in the twentieth century; and (3) a fifteenth-century literary anthology titled Purattirattu (Anthology of poems on the exterior world). I have chosen each of the three for the insights it affords into ways of cognizing and using literature at particular points in time and in particular environments, and also because each, in a sense, represents a distinct mode of making and performing Tamil literary culture. Thus the aim of this chapter is to illuminate three historically located perspectives on Tamil literature, rather than to offer an omniscient master narrative. At the same time, certain recurrent themes provide a mechanism for identifying salient areas of similarity and difference in some of the forms that Tamil literary culture has taken throughout its history. These include the ways the domain of Tamil literature has been constituted in different intellectual environments and at different points in time; the variable degree to which Tamil literature has been viewed through a historical lens; the degree to which literary culture and other cultural domains, such as religion or politics , have been interconnected or separate; and the relative prominence of written and oral modalities in the composition, transmission, and consumption of literature. While this chapter does not illuminate these issues for all of Tamil literature throughout the entire expanse of its history, it aims to establish a framework that can be used to extend the present explorations to other moments in the genealogy of Tamil literary culture. 271 LITERARY CULTURE IN LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY TAMILNADU In 1887, U. Ve. Caminataiyar (1855–1942), the scholar who today is synonymous in many people’s minds with the Tamil Renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, published a critical edition of Civakacintamani (The wishing-stone tale of Jivandhara; tenth century) a long narrative poem of the early tenth century attributed to the Jain poet Tiruttakkatevar.1 This was Caminataiyar’s first major editorial venture in a long and distinguished career devoted largely to recovering, editing, and publishing Tamil literary texts that, for many generations, had disappeared from the prevalent curricula of Tamil learning. Indeed, these texts played virtually no role in Caminataiyar ’s own education. Caminataiyar witnessed momentous developments in the constitution and (re)configuration of the Tamil literary world during his lifetime. His education and early career were deeply embedded in a literary culture that was closely intertwined with Hindu sacred geography, devotional expression, and social practice. He is generally singled out as the most prolific, if not necessarily the earliest, participant in the movement to recover a corpus of texts, and their concomitant literary culture, that largely lay outside of and predated the horizons of the literary world in which he himself was raised.2 Reading Caminataiyar’s autobiographical account of his life and career, one would never guess that he lived during a period when new fictional prose genres such as the novel and short story entered the field of Tamil letters .3 It is important to keep in mind that while he was largely responsible for extending the horizon of the Tamil literary past, many of his contemporaries were involved in blazing new literary pathways into the future.4 Caminataiyar’s prolific output includes close to one hundred published books; these are primarily editions of traditional Tamil texts but also include some original works. Among the latter are his autobiography and a biography of his teacher, T. Minatcicuntaram Pi>>ai (1815–1876).5 Besides intro272 norman cutler 1. The story of the hero of this long narrative in verse follows Vadibhasimha’s K3attracudamani (Crest-jewel of K3atriya power), itself based on Gunabhadra’s Uttarapurana (The lore of the later epoch), completed in 897/98 c.e. (Zvelebil 1995: 169). 2. After Caminataiyar, the best-known figure in this movement is probably the Sri Lankan Tamil scholar C.V. Tamotaram Pi>>ai (1832–1901). Among his contributions are editions of two of Tolkappiyam’s three sections, published respectively in 1868 and 1885. 3. Caminataiyar 1982. The autobiography was also published in an abridged version by Caminataiyar ’s student Ki.Va. Jakannatan (Caminataiyar...

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