V. Rajesh
Graduate Student
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology - Madras
E/ rajesh.v@iitm.ac.in
The Making of Sangam Literary Canon and Tamil
Identity
Friday, June 1st |
12:30 - 2:30 PM
If language and literature are said to represent the
collective consciousness of a community then the literary canon may
constitute the collective memory and identity of the community in
question. However in a multi-cultural and pluralist society like India
when literary production is associated with power, the notion of a
literary canon is historically contingent. Although literary canons like
any other human artifact are a product of history, attempts to
understand the Tamil literary canon of any period focus mostly on short
time frame and are concerned more with the politicization of the
literary canon rather than with the long-term processes that prepare the
ground for it. The privileging of a particular literary text of a
particular period does not necessarily mean that the literary text in
question attains an absolute status without any contestation. What is
important for a literary historian is to map these oscillations – the
privileging and contestation that is more pronounced and obvious for a
language, which has deep literary history.
I shall argue that the Sangam literary canon that we have in its present
form is the outcome of a process intimately tied to the politics of
kingship legitimacy, scholarly debates in commentarial tradition and
identity assertion of various sorts. If the making of a literary canon
is intimately tied to the politics of identity assertion of various
sorts, then is there a way to study the literary history in its own
terms? Does such an exercise require essentially reconfiguring the
relations between history and literature? I shall attempt to search for
an answer to these questions by taking recourse to the complex history
of the making of the Sangam literary canon and Tamil identity.
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Mr. Rajesh's current research interest is mapping the responses to the
re-discovery of Sangam classics in late 19th and early 20th century
Tamilnadu and its relation to the politics of Tamil identity. His
article titled “Text and Time in Early Tamilakam” is published in
Negotiations with the Past: Classical Tamil in Contemporary Tamil
(eds.) M. Kannan and Carlos Mena.