Vasu Renganathan
Lecturer
School of Arts and Sciences
University of Pennsylvania
W/
http://snipurl.com/17ztx
Tamil Nationalism and the Hegemony of Textual
Tradition
Friday, June 1st |
12:30 - 2:30 PM
Rituals, priesthood and liturgical and non-liturgical
texts form the integral
elements of Tamilhood and the Tamil way of life from the medieval period
onwards. A nationalist consciousness surfaced by reconstituting the past
based on both religious and non-religious literary texts. It is the
trajectory of literary and religious developments, more than the
charisma of the poets became instrumental to the shaping of such
discourses like Tamilism, Tamil nationalism, Tamilhood and Tamil bhakti.
The role of the sixty four Saiva Nayanmars and twelve Vaisnava Alvars of
the medieval period was in most part responsible for formulating a new
mono-theistic ritual basis for Tamil religious nationalism. The Sangam
and other didactic treatises on the other hand were responsible for
constructing a non-religious Tamil sentiments such as heroism, Tamil
way of love life and the like. Alvars and Nayanmar's texts are
passed on from generation to generation with much emphasis on music (icai)
and mime (avinayam) rather than on poetry. It is often believed
that their performance of singing with rhythm and melody is more
appealing and carrying the spirit of Tamilhood more than their meaning.
Further, it is evident that there lies an intrinsic relation between the
temple architectures of Tamil region and their representations in
religious texts. This leads one to believe that the Tamil hymnists
developed the perceptions and symbolisms, and the kings gave a form to
them. This paper, thus, examines the nature of Tamil nationalistic
sentiments the way they were developed throughout the history by the
production and
interpretation of religious and non-religious texts belonging to both
Sangam and medieval period. Special attention will be paid to
understanding the Tamil sentiments the way they are portrayed in the
texts of Saiva Nayanmars, with much focus on the work of
Tirumular's Tirumantiram.
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Dr. Renganathan's area of specialization includes Tamil language,
linguistics and literature. He is the principal investigator of the
multimedia enabled Tamil language pedagogical website hosted at the
University of Pennsylvania, and funded by the Department of Education
and South Asia Language Resource Center, University of Chicago.