18 Tamil Renaissance
In the second half of the 19th Century, one may discern two mainstreams in the development of Tamil belletristic writing: one is the stream of pedantic, traditional, polished, severe scholastic writing, fed by commentatorial prose-the two greatest representatives of this style in prose are probably Āṟumuka Nāvalar and somewhat later Dr. U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar. The other—very thin, almost non-existent—is the line tending to identify written and spoken language; in the modern period, this stream begins perhaps with Aruṇācala Kavirāyar (1712-1779) and his Irāmanā- ṭakam, and it develops in two directions: on the one hand, in the “opera” Nantaṇār Carittirak Kīrttanai, about a poor Paraiya serf becoming a Saiva saint, composed by Gōpālakṛṣṇa Pārati; and, on the other hand, in ballads like Kōvalankatai, Rāja Tēcinku, Purāṇic ballads—in short, in a rich undergrowth of literature representing in a charmingly naive, crude, often sentimental and silly way all spheres of life, political, social, religious-but always with sure strokes of convincing realism and in a language which is not far removed from the day-to-day spoken idiom of the Tamil masses. However, all these pieces are in verse; there is a mass of popular poetry at the beginnings of modern Tamil literature-often popular poetry which is derived from “classical” sources; but there is almost no popular prose.
Modern Tamil literature, specifically the prose, has rather tended to be nourished by scholastic food; and this high-style, academic stream became the mainstream of Tamil writing later, when it came under direct impact of English literature.
The scholastic, high-flown type of writing, is practised in the mutts, but “a slight relaxation of style, an accommodation of common speech and life, can also be traced in the palļus and the kuravancis”,1 like Rājappa Kavirāyar’s (1718) Kurṛālakkuṛavaňci, or in the Mukkūṭalpaļļu. The sentiments expressed are coarse, and here and there we get a glimpse of the daily experience of genuine folk but the language is highly literary and even these pieces have to be considered”highbrow” literature.
1 C. and H. Jesudasan, op. cit. p. 248.
2 Literature on this feature of Tamil is now steadily growing. Cf. Charles A. Fergusson, “Diglossia”, Word 15 (1959, 325-340); id. and John J. Gumperz, “Linguistic Diversity in South Asia”, IJAL 26, 3, 1960; K. Zvelebil, “Spoken Language of Tamilnad”, ArO 32,3 (1964) 237-64; Bright, W. and Ramanujan, A.K. “Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Change”, Intl. Cong. Ling., Proc. 9. 1107-13 (1964); Pillai, M. Shanmugam, “Tamil-Literary and Colloquial”, IJAL (1960) 26,3, 27-42, Ramanujan, A.K., “The Structure of Variation: A Study in Caste dialects”, Structure and Change in Indian Society, Chicago (1968), 467-74. Attempts are now increasing to introduce spoken (informal) Tamil into prose-fiction (and even poetry). So far, these attempts are singularly few, and there is opposition to this trend.
It is one of the most characteristic features of modern Tamil prose that the informal, spoken, colloquial language has never become, not even in part, the language of literature. And vice versa, the formal literary language is not spoken as day-to-day informal speech by any Tamil speaker, not even by the intellectuals and highly educated who use it in writing. The diglossia—”two-language” ―situation is perfectly clear-cut in Tamil. There is no analogy to the Bengali calitbhāṣā, a language which is spoken and written simultaneously. There are only different types and styles and kinds of the Tamil equivalent―in the Bengali situation-to the sadhubhāṣā- that is the formal, written, literary language. And then there are local and social dialects.2
These two characteristic features of modern Tamil prose-writing ―i.e. the fact that it was based on the model of scholastic, commentatorial literature, and the fact that it was composed in a highly formal, un-spoken language-prevailed in Tamil literature until the day of Bharati. The tremendous importance of Subrahmanya Bharati for the development of Tamil literature-both prose and poetry lies, apart from other things, in the fact that he made an attempt to synthesize both main streams, the classical, the scholastic with the popular, the “realistic”; and that he has succeeded, in the best of his writings, in having released Tamil literature from the fetters of the purāṇas and prabandhas and all those medieval genres which became inadequate to express modern consciousness and reality. But in language it is not so; Bharati’s language remains ―apart from a few isolated exceptions of several verb-forms-the formal, literary language, though his syntax and idioms, his choice of lexical items is almost always based on the live speech of the masses.
In the second half of the 19th Cent., the aestetic function of literature—that is, basically, the creation of rasa or ‘mood”-lost its predominance, and was no longer first in the scale of values. The first function in the new hierarchy of literary values is now (once again) the didactic function: literature should teach, inform, criticize, increase awareness, and, above all, foster the social reform. Before Tamil writers started even to use their senses and discover and describe reality as it was around them, learning how to achieve that particular “artistic” reflection of reality in creative writing, they aspired at reforming and remaking that reality. Like in Bengal, they began their struggle against child-marriage, against the extremities of the caste-system, against decline in morality, against social oppression, for the widows’ right to remarry and, finally, against national oppression.
In 1879, the first attempt at a novel was made in Tamil writing, when Samuel Vedanayagam Pillai (1826-1889), a retired district munsif of Mayavaram, published his Piratapa Mutaliyar Carittiram. Direct stimulus for his writing the book was provided by his acquaintance with English and French literature. But-and this is very important—the experience, underlying his writing, was his own. The data, the raw material for his loosely-knit, naive and silly romance, was provided from his own rich knowledge of the facts of life. As a judge at a district court he had ample opportunity to come into touch with very real life. As far as the language and style of the book are concerned, the most important source of it is, again, the prose of the commentaries. Thus we have, in this single literary work, the three main sources of modern Tamil prose, reflected and typified, and what is true about The Life and Adven- tures of Prathapa Mudaliyar is generally true of all early modern Tamil fiction: the sujet is provided by Indian, Tamil reality itself, and fed by the author’s own experience; the language and diction is basically that of the indigenous Tamil prose of the scholarly, academic tradition; and the direct stimulus to write, together with some minor plots and episodes, comes from the author’s Western education, provided by French and English models.
In the English preface to the 1885 edition of his novel Vedanayagam Pillai writes: “My object in writing this work of fiction is to supply the want of prose works in Tamil, a want which is admitted and lamented by all”. In this preface, he also mentions the prose of the commentators. In chapter 42 of his novel we read: “We have to admit that it is a great want that Tamil does not have the vacaṇa kaviyankal, the epics in prose, like English, French, and other languages”. He even makes the European novel responsible for the high achievements in culture and civilization of the Western nations, and he adds: “Thus, as long as there will not appear prose-epics in our own languages, this country will definitely make no real progress.” This is indeed not so naive as it may sound. The great novel of the 19th Century-English, French, Russian-was, in many ways, what the great epic was for feudal societies: the mirror of the achievements of an entire national civilization. And one of the reasons why some ‘small’ nations were ‘small’ was the fact that they lacked this great cultural force, the national novel (this is, e.g., the view expressed several times by the sociologist, philosopher and politician, T. G. Masaryk, about the Czech community of the 19th Century). Vedanayagam Pillai was aware of this intrinsic connection between epos and novel on the one hand -cf. his term vacana kaviyam “epic in prose”-and between the birth and development of the great novel and national destiny on the other hand.
His own work is rather loose in structure: a string of narrations, loosely connected, or appended to the central character, who is hopelessly innocent and disarmingly naive, “a well-educated native gentleman of brilliant parts, wit and humour”. The story is told in the Ich-form. It is badly constructed and tedious. It is also crammed with anecdotes, and often tends to improbabilities. The didactic, preaching note is very predominant; the author makes a plea for a number of social and cultural reforms.
It is thus an approximation to a novel, a prose-epic which was written with a definite purpose in mind—“to supply the want of prose” in Tamil. In other words, Vedanayagam Pillai is not a creative writer driven by an irresistible urge to write; he writes because he wants to fill a gap in Tamil culture and society. Fortunately for Tamil writing, the stuff out of which this loose romance was made, was to a great extent real, and the eye which observed life as it was parading in the courtroom was a keen and critical eye. The prose of Vedanayagam Pillai is not without the ornateness and stiffness characteristic for all writing of this period: it is academic, pedantic, but the sujet itself forced the writer’s hand to such extent that it is even today quite readable, “last but not least for its quaintness” (R. E. Asher). Vedanayagam Pillai was, however, more of a scholar, reformer and enthusiast than a creative writer.
An entirely different book in many respects is Rajam Iyer’s Kamalāmpā! Carittiram or “The Fatal Rumour”. The story was appearing in a journal by the name of Vivēkacintāmaṇi between 1893-1895, and in 1896 it was first published as a book. Its author, Rajam Iyer, who was perhaps the greatest Tamil prose-writer of the 19th Century, was born in 1872 in Vattalakundu near Madurai. He began writing soon, and his interest in philosophy and journalism, as well as his broad, truly pan-Indian outlook, brought him into contact with Svami Vivekananda, who appointed him as editor of his Prabuddha Bharata. Because of two articles written and published by him in the journal he was to be arrested; but when the police arrived to take him he was dead. He died two days earlier, in the 26th year of his life, in 1898.
The life was like a short brilliant flash. But his novel remains. It has all the features of a young literary genius on the threshold of true creative writing. It was not by chance that Vivekananda appointed this very young Tamil Brahmin as the first editor of his important journal. Subrahmanya Bharati said that Rajam Iyer has achieved true greatness in the new field of Tamil prose, and N. Pichamurti, a well-known contemporary prose-writer and poet, says that Kamalāmpāḷ Carittiram is one of the peaks of Tamil prose, the > first real novel in the language.
The weak point of the novel is its plot and its solution, though there is plenty of exciting action (including robbery, arson and manslaughter). But the plot is not the most important feature of the work. What is important are the characters and the style. Rajam Iyer has for the first time in Tamil prose-writing-created a number of characters which belong irrevocably to Tamil literature and will never disappear into oblivion. Kamalāmpāḷ, the heroine of the novel, and Poņṇammāļ, the lovely scandal-monger, Pēyāṇṭi Tēvan, the robber, Amaiyappa Pillai, the teacher in the village school, Cuppu, the scandalous shrew who is unable to pronounce her r’s correctly. A rare sense of humour pervades the book. From time to time, there are brief flashes of successful parody, biting irony and social satire. Rajam Iyer observes life as a realist, and often very critically, though, of course, he is not a “critical realist” in the strict technical sense of the term. His novel is primarily a romance, but, at the same time, there is hardly any work in Tamil fiction which would reveal so much about life in rural India of the 19th Century. The village Brahmin community is portrayed with much precious detail and in vivid colours. Rajam Iyer’s eyes—and not only his eyes, but all his senses—are open; he sees, he listens, he even smells and touches things. And that is more than can be said about a number of modern Tamil writers!
His prose is basically rooted in the academic, commentatorial tradition, and it is profusedly Sanskritized. The Sanskritization was inevitable in his case, and its absence would be unnatural, since he was writing primarily about Brahmins. On the other hand, he has introduced into his dialogues quite a number of colloquialisms and dialectisms. This mixture of highly Sanskritized language and colloquial-like, informal dialogues is quite functional in Rajam Iyer’s work, and has become the model for many modern Tamil Brahmin writers.
Let us now look somewhat closer at the work. This is Rajam Iyer’s portraiture of a village coquette: “Poņṇammā! was a very ornamental woman. She knew well that when she walked, the whole world stood still and admired, without a twinkle of the eye, her beauty. Sometimes, as she went along, one could see how, suddenly, the following thought occurred to her: ‘Indeed, I am walking like a swan’. At once a mixed feeling of insolence and shame was born in her, and she would walk as if treading upon fire-brands with her shapely feet, all transformed, all pretence and affectation, and people would observe her, how she stops, here and there, and then walks swiftly home”. There is a great promise in such characterisation and description. Rajam Iyer, as pointed out above, was capable of surprising irony and sarcasm. E.g. “Muttucāmi Aiyar loved his wife passionately. He adored her. That’s why he beat her. He was unable to cope with the slightest fault in his beloved”. His dialogues are extremely lively; they are frequently a true echo of rows between husband and wife, of village talk and gossiping at the well, and they include a great wealth of sayings, proverbs, bywords, adages, and abusive terms: “You donkey! You widow! You mirror of Yama! You buffalo! You Mūtēvi!” etc.
I think Rajam Iyer’s book, being a classic, is still the best novel ever written in the Tamil language. And it is indeed good tidings that this great book is going to be published soon in English.3
3 According to personal communication by R. E. Asher (Summer, 1969), he and K. N. Subrahmanyam are currently working on a translation into English which will be published by the UNESCO.
The end of the 19th Century is characterized by a rich growth of different stylistic variants of one stylistic level-the formal, literary Tamil based ultimately upon the academic tradition which by now set definitely aside the other, non-academic line. The main stylistic variants of the formal literary language and diction have all been labelled, and they have definite characteristics. They have their origin in the last decades of the 19th Century, and in the first 15-20 years of the 20th Cent., and they are all more or less alive, though deep and probably rather decisive changes have taken place in Tamil writing-both in prose and poetry-after approximately 1960, so that the general picture, painted some 80-60 years ago, now waxes and wanes and is transformed into something new (cf. Chapters 19 and 20 of this book). It seems that much that has occurred in Bengali or Marathi literature decades ago, is occurring in Tamil prose and poetry now, and that the end of this century will witness the emergence of truly creative forces in Tamil literature.
The various language-styles and styles of writing will now be discussed one by one.
The centamiḻnaṭai is the polished, strongly academic Tamil of essays and belletristic prose, which represents the most direct development of the medieval prose-commentaries of the premaņipravāļa period. This style of writing is closely connected with the establishment of the Fourth Maturai Tamil Caṅkam, Tamil Academy, which was founded in Madurai on Sept. 14, 1901. The greatest representant of this type of prose is undoubtedly Dr U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar, the scholar who, with Damodaram Pillai, was in the first place responsible for the rediscovery of old classical heritage, who bridged as it were the very ancient and the very new. Apart from his enormous work in the field of ancient classics he wrote what can be probably called the foremost of Tamil biographies (about his teacher, Mīnāṭcicuntaram Pillai) and his own excellent autobiography4 as well as some sketches and reminiscences,5 all very engaging reading.
4 En carittiram, “My life-story”. Publ. 1940-42 in a magazine, 1950 as a book. A mine of information about the literary world he moved in, sometimes rather naive, but always useful.
5 Nan kantatum kēṭṭatum, “What I saw and heard”, Palaitatym putiya- tum, “The old and the new”.
It was indeed a marvellous work which was done by U. V. S. Aiyar, D. Pillai, and their contemporaries and students. And yet one wonders if this rediscovery of the past (known as the “Tamil Renaissance”), coming as it did at a juncture when Tamil literary activities might have broken vitally with some of the aspects of this past, was only from the point of view of the evolution of modern prose and poetry-quite fortunate. The past, however great it may be, must always be absorbed, digested, transformed and overcome; it is good to have tradition and modernity; it is bad to have only modernity and no tradition; but it is equally bad to have only tradition. For sixty years, the Tamils-with exceptions, of course could only bow to that great, rediscovered and resuscitated, truly fascinating past; and in spite of the literary radicalism of the Thirties, signs of real change, of deep transformation and of emergence of things new are visible only now, in the decade 1960-1970.
Apart from Swaminatha Aiyar, a great number of prose-writers follow this stylistic line, the most notable among them probably Tiruvārūr Viruttācala Kaliyāṇacuntara Mutaliyār (“Thiru. Vi. Ka.”), 1883-1953, Dr. Somasundara Bharati, T. K. Chidambaranatha Mudaliar (“Ti. Kē. Ci.”), S. Vaiyapuri Pillai and K. V. Jagannathan. All these outstanding and important men of letters, though quite different in many aspects of their writings, have some fundamental features in common: they wrote in a more or less formal style (more formal in the case of Swaminatha Aiyar or “Thiru. Vi. Ka.”, less formal in the case of “Ti.Kē.Ci.” or K. V. Jagannathan); they wrote rich, polished prose, using unhesitatingly Sanskrit and English loanwords whenever they felt it was necessary and appropriate. They were all “academic” people-most of them professionally so, all of them in outlook. Most of them were connected with the political and social life of Tamilnad. However, the most important feature common to all of them: none of these men was truly a creative writer of belles-lettres; non of them has ever produced a truly great, path-breaking piece of original, creative prose or poetry.
Love of Tamil took a strange and militant shape. Having neglected their language for four or five centuries (and preferring Sanskrit, Urdu, Telugu, Marathi and finally English to their own mothertongue), the guilt-conscious Tamilians overdid their love of the language in a kind of jingoistic enthusiasm that has hardly any parallel in any other country. They became overconscious of the past. They found everything old good, and this tendency to exalt the old and “pure” has worked havoc in many fields—notably in the field of the novel and the drama; but also in poetry. This brings us to the second mainstream of modern Tamil prose-style, and language-style, the tūyatamil or taṉittamiḻ naṭai, i.e. the “pure”, read “purist” (“Tamil only”, “Pure Tamil”), prose (and poetry). The typical features of this style are, first, its linguistic purism-merciless and total elimination, a real purge of Indo-Aryan, Sanskritic loanwords; second, the removal of written Tamil from the spoken language as far as possible, and the pretence that one day spoken Tamil will “automatically” follow the frozen written style; third, sterility as regards creative art, creative writing. This trend has never produced any truly great master in the field of belletristic prose.
As far as poetry is concerned, the situation is somewhat different; the model which this taṉittamiḻ trend takes for its own to imitate -that is the “purest” and hence most ancient poetic works of the Tamil language-is, for certain kinds and genres of even modern poetry, a “productive” model: that is why a man like Bharatidasan, the most prominent exponent of “Tamil only” in poetry, was, no doubt, a prominent poet. But even Bharatidasan -only a few years after his death-sounds slogan-like, proclamative, flat, and full of hollow rhetoric nowadays.
As far as this type of prose is concerned, the most influential among the protagonists of this movement was Maraimalai Aṭikaḷ (Svāmī Vētācalam Pillai, 1876-1950). “Purity should not be sacrificed for the sake of effect . The free use of foreign words in a language will ultimately lead to its degeneracy”. After 1916, Vedachalam “Tamilized” his name into Maraimalai and proclaimed himself a svāmī (aṭika!); the title of the journal he published Nanacakaram “Ocean of Knowledge”’ -was also changed, into Arivukkatal. A number of Tamil scholars, writers and intellectuals followed his example, and the “Pure Tamil Movement” gathered strength day after day.6
6 I would hate to be misunderstood. Maraimalai Aṭikaḷ no doubt deserves much gratitude for many good things he did: in 1920 he founded one of the most prolific publishing houses for Tamil classical and medieval literature, the Tirunelveli Saiva Siddhānta Works Publishing Society; in 1931 he started a very important public library; he wanted inter-caste marriage to be legalized, Tamil to be made one of the subjects for the B. A. Hons. examination, etc. However, in the questions pertaining to language and literature, his approach was, in many ways, narrow-minded, negative and sterile.
The reaction to this linguistic purism was the so-called putumaņipravala natai, the “new maṇipravāļa”, a style so heavily Sanskritized that the result may be justly called a hybrid. In itself it is quite unimportant, naturally highly unpopular, and only a few Sanskrit-oriented pandits, mainly Vaiṣṇava ācāryas, still write in this style.
The two main streams, the folk, popular tradition, and the academic, formal tradition, were, fortunately for Tamil, synthesized in the writings of Subrahmanya Bharati (1882-1921) who wrote in the first two decades of this century. In his prose and poems, we encounter the modern, the topical, the temporary and contemporary, as well as the “eternal”. And it was chiefly Bharati who made Tamil adequate for all literary expression: modern journalism as well as bhakti-type lyrical poetry, short-story as well as patriotic songs, politically or philosophically oriented essay as well as epic poetry. This is his real greatness and his most important contribution. Probably he should not be regarded as the great light, the mahākavi of modern Tamil literature, but as the great predecessor, the great path-breaker who makes ready the way for him (or them) who has (or have) yet to come. So far, there was none greater than Bharati in modern Tamil poetry, but some of the very contemporary young poets are more interesting. And Bharati-let us have the courage to admit it-does not belong to the greatest. He is not a Vyāsa, nor a Vālmīki, nor a Kampaṉ, not even a Tagore. But he has saved Tamil from the clutches of the purāṇic and pedantic tradition, and to counterbalance the purist, the pedantic, the false harking back to the past, there has always been his ever-increasing influence which was felt much more strongly ten years after his death, in the Thirties, than when he was still alive.
Under his name, the true literary rinascimento in Tamil grew to important dimensions, and the maṟumalarcci naṭai developed-the style of the renaissance. This is the only linguistic and literary trend which has produced truly creative literary personalities. The language they use is indeed formal, literary Tamil; but most of them try to come near to the phraseology, syntax and lexis of the spoken, informal Tamil, as far as it is possible under the given political, social and cultural conditions.
The short story as such appeared first from the pen of V. V. S. Aiyar (1881-1925).7 Among the stylists who demanded that “one should write as one speaks” the best was probably V. Ramaswamy († 1951). The great short-story writer Putumaippittaṉ († 1948) should probably be not mentioned in one breath with the prolific writer of voluminous novels, R. Krishnamurti-Kalki (1899-1954) who was much more popular but no doubt much less of a true artist than Putumaippittaṉ. The two had however something in common: they both belonged to the maṟumalarcci naṭai line. There were tremendous differences among the writers of this group—in their sujets, ideology, political views, skills, importance and populaarity, and even in their language and style. But all of them had one in common: vitality, promise, and the fact that they were writing modern fiction. And, basically, their language and diction, in spite of the differences among them and though formal and “literary”, was an echo of the spoken, live language of the people. By the Thirties, pedantic, scholarly writing was practically dead, and the purist trend was sterile.
7 Maṅkaiyarkkaraciyiṉ kātal, a collection of eight stories, written between 1910-1920.