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6 Epilogue As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the colonization of Tamil literature—the transformation of the entire system of Tamil elite literary production and consumption during the course of the nineteenth century—consisted of a set of gradual, interdependent, and complex processes operating at a variety of levels. While British colonial presence increasingly destabilized the old institutions and mechanisms of literary patronage described in Chapters 2 and 3, pulavars found new occupations as book publishers, editors, and language teachers, often in the emerging colonial metropolis of Madras which developed into a literary and cultural hub where Indians and Westerners interacted with growing intensity. With the ever-increasing spread of the printed book, the pulavars’ earlier economy of praise was inscribed into print culture through elaborate title pages which highlighted the scholarly lineage and credentials of a book’s editor or author and through the inclusion of cir¯ appuppåyiram praise poems in the books (as we have seen in the case of V´tanåyakam Pi¬¬ai’s N¥tin¶l). The shift from a culture of palmleaf manuscripts to a print culture led to a number of new practices and institutions: a growing book market, libraries, journals, and magazines, and an increasing number of readers who began to participate in what may be called a new public sphere. These new readers as well as the new authors, like V´tanåyakam Pi¬¬ai or Råjam Aiyar, belonged to a new social elite that was increasingly thoroughly educated in Western culture and that looked at their own society through the lenses of both Indian traditions and Western modernity. Literature, and the novel in particular, became a medium through which contemporary socio-political concerns were debated. The public debates I have referred to above as the colonial critique of the Tamil language and Tamil literature led to new tastes, condemning earlier literature as “obscene” and “backward,” new literary forms, such as the novel, new themes, such as the role of women in society, prostitution , or the possibility of a Tamil nation, and a new language, modern 247 248 Colonizing the Realm of Words Tamil prose. At the same time, scholars and intellectuals increasingly engaged with what they discovered about their past. The edition and re-assessment of classical Tamil texts, in particular of the ancient Tamil heritage of Ca‰kam poetry, was combined with the new disciplines of epigraphy and archaeology to systematically write a history that was uniquely Tamil. This “Tamil Renaissance” led to a wider sense of cultural self-esteem vis-à-vis the West and North India, and it paved the way for the explicit anti-colonial stance we find in the works of politically active authors, such as Va. Ve. Cuppiramaˆiya Aiyar or Cuppiramaˆiya Pårati. What might the particular case of Tamil literature tell us about the larger question of “literature and/under colonialism”? At this point, I am skeptical about larger generalizations. Certainly, the case of Tamil shows that the moments of intensified cultural exchange entailed by colonialism may produce a number of shifts and changes. One may expect new genres, themes, ideas, narrative modes, new social groups providing writers and readers, new modes of consumption (such as silent reading vs. public recitation), and new media, such as printed books and journals. There may also be epistemic “adjustments,” changes in the realm of the imagination and in ways of looking at and being in the world. Concomitantly, discourses about literature (literary history , aesthetics, philology, literary criticism) may be transformed. All this can be found in the case of other Indian literatures and even in other colonized literatures in different times and places. But the finer details of nineteenth-century Tamil literature laid out above should demonstrate the need to study the manifold social processes underlying the colonization of a given literary tradition in detail before we attempt any simple generalizations about East and West, colonizer and colonized, agency and subjection. In the case of many literary traditions in India, and elsewhere, their transformation under colonial influence may look similar, at first glance, to what we found in Tamil. In my analysis above I have frequently alluded to parallel phenomena and developments in other Indian languages. But we need many more case studies, grounded in the analysis of actual texts and life histories, to be able to generalize systematically and to draw larger connections from our data. Every region responded differently to the challenges of colonial modernity, and it...

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