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.

Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue for so many speakers. David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil—language, literature, and civilization—emphasizing how Tamil speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history. Impetuous, musical, whimsical, in constant flux, Tamil is a living entity, and this is its biography. Two stories animate Shulman’s narrative. The first concerns the evolution of Tamil’s distinctive modes of speaking, thinking, and singing. The second describes Tamil’s major expressive themes, the stunning poems of love and war known as Sangam poetry, and Tamil’s influence as a shaping force within Hinduism. Shulman tracks Tamil from its earliest traces at the end of the first millennium BCE through the classical period, 850 to 1200 CE, when Tamil-speaking rulers held sway over southern India, and into late-medieval and modern times, including the deeply contentious politics that overshadow Tamil today. Tamil is more than a language, Shulman says. It is a body of knowledge, much of it intrinsic to an ancient culture and sensibility. “Tamil” can mean both “knowing how to love”—in the manner of classical love poetry—and “being a civilized person.” It is thus a kind of grammar, not merely of the language in its spoken and written forms but of the creative potential of its speakers.

There is a number of problems connected with the study and teaching of any Oriental literature in general and of Tamil literature specifically which have to date been mostly ignored, although they are indispensable for solid knowledge and correct interpretation and understanding of the literature in question. These include problems of authenticity and authorship, of transmission and tradition, writing tools and materials, of relationship of orality to literacy, of Sanskrit to Tamil, the prehistory of Tamil written literature, the numerous texts that have been lost, scholarly lineages and the rediscovery of ancient Tamil literature etc. The book deals with all these problems as well as with some specific Tamil cultural phenomena such as the concept of "threefold Tamil" or the relationship of literature ('marked') to grammar ('marker'), with the derivation of the term "Tamil" and with the history of Tamil literary historiography. It will be indispensable as an introduction to the study of the more than 2000 years of Tamil literary history. By addressing questions which have thus far been almost completely neglected, it has also decisive impact on the interpretative comprehension of Tamil literature and on the teaching of this very rich heritage of verbal art.