This indispensable work for Tamil love poetry of South India deals with the relationship between the oldest grammar and poetics, Tolkāppiyam, and the ancient literature (Sangam literature) of the 1-3 C. A.D., providing the original meanings and historical changes of many technical terms of love poetry.

This indispensable work for Tamil love poetry of South India deals with the relationship between the oldest grammar and poetics, "Tolk ppiyam," and the ancient literature ("Sangam" literature) of the 1-3 C. A.D., providing the original meanings and historical changes of many technical terms of love poetry.

This classic anthology of translations has long been out of print. The poems come from one of the earliest surviving texts of Tamil poetry, the Kuruntokai, an anthology of love lyrics probably recorded during the first three centuries AD. Seventy-six of these classical poems have here beengiven a modern language and form. In an effort at fidelity to the effect of the images and their placement in the original, Ramanujan has given a visual shape to the poems by typographic devices. An essay on Tamil poetry explains its techniques and enriches the reader's pleasure in these quiet, controlled, yet dramatic poems.

10/13/201010/13/2010

Old Tamil Caṅkam poetry consists of eight anthologies of short poems on love and war, and a treatise on grammar and poetics. The main part of this corpus has generally been dated to the first centuries AD and is believed to be the product of a native Tamil culture. The present study argues that the poems do not describe a contemporary society but a society from the past or one not yet affected by North-Indian Sanskrit culture. Consequently the main argument for the current early dating of Caṅkam poetry is no longer valid. Furthermore, on the basis of a study of the historical setting of the heroic poems and of the role of Tamil as a literary language in the Caṅkam corpus, it is argued that the poetic tradition was developed by the Pāṇṭiyas in the ninth or tenth century. This volume deals with the identification of the various genres of Caṅkam poetry with literary types from the Sanskrit Kāvya tradition. Counterparts have been found exclusively among Prākrit and Apabhraṁśa texts, which indicate that in Caṅkam poetry Tamil has been specifically assigned the role of a Prākrit. As such, the present study reveals the processes and attitudes involved in the development of a vernacular language into a literary idiom.

A true tour de force, this book documents the transformation of one Indian literature, Tamil, under the impact of colonialism and Western modernity. While Tamil is a living language, it is also India's second oldest classical language next to Sanskrit, and has a literary history that goes back over two thousand years. On the basis of extensive archival research, Sascha Ebeling tackles a host of issues pertinent to Tamil elite literary production and consumption during the nineteenth century. These include the functioning and decline of traditional systems in which poet-scholars were patronized by religious institutions, landowners, and local kings; the anatomy of changes in textual practices, genres, styles, poetics, themes, tastes, and audiences; and the role of literature in the politics of social reform, gender, and incipient nationalism. The work concludes with a discussion of the most striking literary development of the time—the emergence of the Tamil novel.