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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Canons, Conventions and Creativity: Defining Literary Tradition in Premodern Tamil South India Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7644r5bn Author Clare, Jennifer Steele Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Canons, Conventions and Creativity: Defining Literary Tradition in Premodern Tamil South India by Jennifer Steele Clare A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in South and Southeast Asian Studies in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Committee in Charge: Professor George L. Hart, Chair Professor Anne E. Monius Professor Alexander von Rospatt Professor Eugene Irschick Fall 2011 Canons, Conventions and Creativity: Defining Literary Tradition in Premodern Tamil South India © 2011 by Jennifer Steele Clare Canons, Conventions and Creativity: Defining Literary Tradition in Premodern Tamil South India by Jennifer Steele Clare Doctor of Philosophy in South and Southeast Asian Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor George L. Hart, Chair This dissertation looks at debates over the Tamil literary tradition in treatises and commentaries on poetics composed in South India between the eighth and the seventeenth centuries. Central to these discussions of what constitutes the literary was the relationship of new literary developments to the language and conventions of an ancient poetic system established in the earliest stratum of Tamil literature, known as “Sangam literature” or “literature of the assembly.” The chapters that follow look at these competing attitudes towards the classical tradition, beginning with the debates over defining the Tamil tradition found in Pērāciriyar’s thirteenth- century commentary on the section of poetics discussed by the ancient grammar Tolkāppiyam, and the Virutti commentary on the metrical treatise Yāpparuṅkalam, dated between the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The different interpretations of the Tamil past adopted by these commentaries reveal the capacity of the Sangam tradition to serve both as the foundation of an authoritative canon worthy of preservation as well as fertile material for experiments with new theories of literature and language, including those derived from Sanskrit. If the first two chapters explore the central role played by the Sangam conventions in Tamil literary theory, albeit mobilized for different interpretive projects, the next two chapters focus on the competing poetic system of the pāṭṭiyals, which theorize the capacity of Tamil language and literature to praise a royal patron, and explore the implications of this new understanding of the function of literary language. Finally, the dissertation ends with a seventeenth-century text, the Ilakkaṇa Viḷakkam, which attempts an integrated theory of Tamil literature, in which the most influential “new” developments in Tamil aesthetics, including the praise poetics of the pāṭṭiyals, are rendered compatible with the Sangam tradition. By providing a comparative look at approaches to interpreting the Tamil literary tradition, this dissertation hopes to bring attention to the important role played by comparative literary theory in our approach both to the study of South Asian literature and to the study of world literature more generally. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii A Note on Transliteration iii Introduction 1 Reading a (Premodern South Asian) Literary Tradition Chapter 1 12 Looking Back at the Interior Landscape: Debates over the Classical Past in the Tamil Commentarial Tradition Chapter 2 32 Outside the Caṅkam Canon: Innovation in Akam Poetics in the Yāpparuṅkala Virutti Commentary Chapter 3 59 Theorizing the Power of Poetry: Pāṭṭiyal Grammars and Literature of Praise Chapter 4 84 Praising God in the Court: Theorizing (Devotional) Praise Poetry in the Tolkāppiyam Commentaries Chapter 5 115 Consolidation of the Tamil Tradition: Intertextuality and Integration in the Seventeenth-Century Ilakkaṇa Viḷakkam Conclusion 133 Bibliography 138 i Acknowledgments This dissertation has been a collaboration of many heads, hearts and hands. Many thanks to all who have been part of this process over the years. I would especially like to express my gratitude: to the members of my Committee, including George Hart for introducing me to the joys of reading and translating Tamil literature, Anne Monius for her indefatigable support and sense of humor, Alex Rospatt for his support and encouragement, and Gene Irschick for constantly asking questions and being patient with my answers; to my Tamil teachers past and present, especially Kausalya Hart, whose knowledge of Tamil literature and grammar is unsurpassed, Dr. Bharathy, Tamil teacher and friend, Pandit V. Gopal Iyar of Pondicherry, Dr. Vijayalakshmy Rangarajan of Chennai, Professor A. Manavalan of Chennai and Dr. Ku. Sundaramoorthy of Mayilāṭutuṟai; to Lee Amazonas for keeping everything under control; to Professor Meera Viswanathan for first introducing me to the complexity of translating Tamil syntax; to the friends who shared the bizarre journey of PhD life, especially Srini Reddy, Kiran Keshavamurthy, Carlos Mena, Matt Baxter, Sujatha Meegama, Preetha Mani, Elizabeth Segran and Ian Lowman; to the friends who reminded me of life outside the PhD, especially Natasha Miley, Kim Nicholas, Ming-en Cho, Elisa Rassen, Zea Malawa and Nova Szoka; to Tamil scholar and dear friend M. Kannan and his family; to Meera Pathmarajah for helping make my first stay in Tamil Nadu so magical; and to my sisters for their love, especially Cynthia Clare and Morgen Warner. Finally, I thank Team Leo, especially my mother, Anne Steele, my father, Peter Clare and my mother-in-law, Devi MacKay, whose support allowed me to have it all, to my husband Kevin MacKay, for his love, sense of humor, and time management skills, and to our son Leo, who shared his first seven months with this project, and who kept me smiling. ii Note on Transliteration and Translation In the transliteration of Tamil words and Sanskrit words I have followed the convention of the Tamil Lexicon (University of Madras, 6 vols., 1924-36) with several exceptions. For the sake of readability, I have left more commonly used words untransliterated, such as Shiva for Śiva, Vishnu for Viṣṇu, Chola for Cōḻa, and the languages of Tamil, Sanskrit and Prakrit. In the case of Sanskrit words that have been transformed into the Tamil orthographic system, I have chosen to use the more familiar Sanskrit transliteration (as found in the Monier- Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary) such as prabandham instead of pirapantam and śleṣa instead of cilēṭai. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. iii for my family, old and new iv Introduction Reading a (Premodern South Asian) Literary Tradition While recent scholarship on world literature has focused on the political, linguistic and/or aesthetic relationships between Euro-American literary traditions and literature of the non-West, this dissertation addresses the methodological question of how to understand texts produced outside of contact with the West, texts that often demand alternative modes of reading and aesthetic appreciation.1 In the case of South Asia, where theoretical texts on language and literature have reflected and shaped both reading and compositional strategies for almost two thousand years, comparative poetics provides one particularly productive way to understand the ways in which interpretive processes are themselves embedded in complex cultural and historical contexts. My dissertation contributes to this discussion by looking at how the Tamil literary tradition was defined in texts on language and poetics produced in South India between the eighth and the seventeenth centuries. In particular, I focus on the shifting role of the classical past in the construction of this tradition in order to reveal the complex matrix of interpretive traditions competing for authority in the Tamil literary world. Literary criticism of the last fifty years has centered around a basic mistrust of a text’s statements and assumptions about itself. This position has led to the diverse schools of thought we now call “theory,” united in their task of “provok(ing) a text into unpremeditated articulation, into the utterance of what it somehow contains or knows but neither intends nor is able to say.”2 This relationship of “strategic disrespect” is justified by its objective position vis a vis the text, its ability to offer “a standpoint of appraisal grounded somewhere outside the range of possibilities afforded by the text’s internal or authorized commentary.”3 Although few scholars of literature would advocate returning to a mode of criticism based on decoding a text’s singular “original” meaning, determining the standpoint from which to productively understand the multiplicity of any text’s meaning has overwhelmingly favored a vantage point embedded in the 1 While the desire for a theory of world literature has defined Western literary scholarship since Goethe’s well-known attempt at a definition, in the last ten years the discipline of Comparative Literature has more seriously addressed the “problem” of adopting a more inclusive methodology without abandoning the rigorous linguistic competency that is still the foundation of the discipline. Scholars ranging from Damrosch to Bhabha to Apter have proposed ways to theorize “world

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