History and Imagination: Tamil Culture in the Global Context (review)

This collection of essays grew out of the inaugural Tamil Studies Conference, ‘Tropes, Territories and Competing Realities,’ which took place at the University of Toronto in May, 2006. Authors discuss both traditional and modern perspectives focusing on identity ruptures in Tamilnadu (India), Sri Lanka, and Canada.

Layne Little refers to the great rupture between ancient (cankam) and medieval world views – what he calls ‘cultural bereavement’ and ‘precarious moment of birth’ – in his case study of the Tirumurukarruppatai. Archana Venkatesan focuses on the matal poems of Tirumankai and Ceyankontar to show how they are on the other side of this first rupture but still struggling creatively with it; disruption of the natural order of love in the poems is a symbol of the larger rupture in world view. According to Susan Schomburg, rupture occurred in connection with Islam’s attempt to indigenize by creating an Islamic Tamil literature between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; this provoked an identity crisis for Muslims (especially in connection with the behaviour of women), one that was exacerbated by colonialism and modernity. These historically based studies show how Tamils coped with deep cultural ruptures. Despite their pain, they did so with imagination and in ways that retained enough continuity to maintain their sense of identity. The current question is whether they will be able to do so effectively in response to recent ruptures caused by modernity, civil war, and diasporas.

Some essays are about how Tamils in Tamilnadu and Sri Lanka cope today with dramatic social and political changes. Anand Pandian, for instance, shows how one caste maintains a traditional dominant identity, which relies on an ethic that emerged in connection with cultivation or ‘moralized landscapes’ and how it generalizes that identity to other Tamils as ‘civility’ and ‘civilization.’ For V. Geetha, there are changes in fiction by or about marginal communities that would have been impossible before the development of Dalit (outcaste) literature; these rework ideologies such as feminism or socialism to produce a new social realism. Discussing the challenge of spoken language to modern Tamil writers, E. Annamalai traces the emergence of the public sphere in colonial Tamilnadu with its bilingual elite (English and literary Tamil speakers), which gradually changes as novels come to incorporate the language of ordinary people into the speech of characters who represent regions or castes. Ravi Vaitheespara examines the history of the Tamil left’s perspective on ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. He shows that the left, even though it had taken up the cause of justice for ethnic minorities, soon sided with Sri Lankan nationalism. Even when they turned their attention to Tamils, they focused on Tamil terrorism and hoped that cosmopolitanism would replace it. This amounted, he says, to the marginalization of justice for ethnic minorities. Recent Tamil literature in Sri Lanka, observes Chelva Kanaganayakam, takes up themes of displacement, nostalgia, identity, memory, cultural conflict, and power and in the process creates new myths, vocabularies, perceptions of space, and even a dramatic shift in ontology. In the words of W.B. Yeats, ‘a terrible beauty is born.’

Joseph Chandrakanthan and R. Cheran bring the idea of rupture in the literatures and lives of Tamils into Canada. Chandrakanathan’s case study, set in Toronto, is about the seemingly unsurpassable linguistic gap between two cultures, Tamil and Canadian, at its most delicate interface: communication between physicians and Tamils, especially the elderly, in connection with terminal illness. This is due to the lack of Tamil equivalents for English medical terms and Western bioethics. Cheran writes about the deep ambivalence of Tamils in Toronto over homelands and hostlands. They express this by imaginatively reinventing their former localized cultures in the form of two hundred Tamil organizations in Toronto.

This anthology not only documents how space, gender, kingship, religious experience, and identities have changed dramatically at pivotal moments in Tamil history but also contributes to comparative scholarly analysis. It will attract academics in many disciplines and also educated readers who are interested...