செம்மொழியாம் தமிழ் மொழிSemmoḻiyām Tamiḻ MoḻiTamil — A Major Classical Language

Sanskrit is basically an old Indo-European language. The Indo-Europeans moved into South Asia gradually — they did not even reach the Indus Valley at first — coming in from the direction of the Indus perhaps around 1600 BCE. So, the language they spoke was not too different from Greek or Latin. And to this day there are languages like Russian, and a whole group of them, which are very closely related to Sanskrit. Even English is, in the end — if you just count to ten, you can see it.

I had learned a couple of Indo-European languages, and then I learned Sanskrit. But I kept reading about this other language, which is not Indo-European and is not related to Sanskrit or Greek or Latin or English, and which has its own literature. So I became interested, and I wanted to learn something different. That is how I started to study Tamiḻ.

And I was very lucky, because when I first went to study it, I worked with A. K. Ramanujan — a Kannada poet and a very brilliant man, who had just discovered Sangam literature himself. It was amazing: he could go in and talk to fifty undergraduates, and they would leave the lecture all wanting to learn Tamiḻ. He was so enthusiastic about it. I do not know how he did it, but it was remarkable how he brought the language across.

What is interesting is that his main language was Kannada. He knew Tamiḻ from speaking it at home, having grown up in Karnataka; he wrote his own poems in Kannada, but his translations from Tamiḻ are very beautiful and very important. I was fortunate that way. And I also met my wife, Kausalya, when I first studied Tamiḻ — I went to Wisconsin to study it because Harvard did not have it, so I had to go there in the summer. So that is how I got interested in Tamiḻ.

They think Tamiḻ is unimportant and being overtaken by other languages like English. None of this is true. I would like to say something about Tamiḻ as a major world language, because this is something people often do not realize. Tamiḻ is spoken by about as many people as live in France — actually probably a little more. Seventy-five or eighty million people. That makes it one of the most important languages in the world, just on the basis of how many people speak it.

But it also has an extremely dynamic modern literature. It is used for all sorts of things — we see plays and movies in Tamiḻ, television in Tamiḻ, everything. The fact is that Tamiḻ will not become less important. It may change; all languages change. But if anything, as time goes on, it will become more important. It is one of the major languages of the world, and that is something we all need to keep in mind when we consider Tamiḻ.

Why is Tamiḻ a classical language? The reason is very, very simple. It is because of what we call Sangam literature. Sangam literature is a compendium of works written roughly two thousand years ago — some of them a little more recent, some may even be older. And this literature is unlike anything in any other Indian language, including Sanskrit. It is also unlike anything in the entire world that I know of. Of course there are many things in the world, but I do not know of anything like Sangam literature.

When we look at Sanskrit — Sanskrit was used as a lingua franca over all of South Asia and much of Southeast Asia for a thousand years, and the amount of literature in it is enormous. Just enormous. When we look at Sangam literature, it is not so big. It is actually quite small compared to the enormity of Sanskrit: the Vedas, the Purāṇas, and so on. And I am talking here of Sangam literature, not later Tamiḻ.

But what makes Sangam literature so special? This is something I am trying to make people realize, because it is very important for what Tamiḻ is, and also for what Tamiḻ identity means. When we look at Sangam literature, the first thing that jumps out at us is that it uses almost no Sanskrit. There are a few borrowed words here and there. It has been said that the Vedas have as many Dravidian words as Sangam has Sanskrit words. There are very few Sanskrit words.

The second thing that is very important about Sangam is that it is not derivative. The other major languages of India — Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi and so forth — all came into being after Sanskrit had become a lingua franca, and they looked to Sanskrit for their ideas, their literary conventions, how they worked; and much of their vocabulary was borrowed from Sanskrit. This is not true of Tamiḻ, which is about a thousand years older than any of these other languages. Tamiḻ is not derivative from Sanskrit in any sense.

Each literature has its own trajectory. If we look at Greek literature, nowadays we have come to realize that the beginning of Greek — which is obviously the Homeric epics — came out of an oral bardic tradition. And the same thing is clearly true of Sangam literature: it comes out of this bardic tradition, in South India, probably all over South India. There was a very rich and very active oral literature going on, and there were groups — communities which were bards — who made their living by reciting these poems, probably actually extemporizing them, and playing in people's houses and things like that.

The poets are aware of some of the things in Sanskrit. North Indian ideas and other things were coming into the South — not only sort of Brahminical things, but also Jain and Ājīvika and Buddhist. All of those things were coming into the South. It may well be that with these changes, that is what really catalyzed the writing of this literature, or the setting down of it.

But it is not really like Roman literature. Roman literature is more like what happened in Telugu or Kannada, where a previous literature, Sanskrit, was simply imitated. If you have heard Telugu recited — some of the old Mahābhārata and things like that — it is incredibly rich and beautiful poetry, but it is not original in the same way that Tamiḻ is. And of course it is much later.

The other thing about Tamiḻ — and this is extremely important, and something Tamiḻs are aware of but not everybody else — is that people wrote Tamiḻ before Sanskrit became so important.

And when they wrote Tamiḻ, they used a writing system that seems to have come from the north — though people argue about that — called Brahmi; they adopted Brahmi, or adapted it, for Tamiḻ. Now, Tamiḻ is missing many of the sounds of Sanskrit, and it has other sounds that Sanskrit does not have. And the alphabet is exactly, perfectly suited to the Tamiḻ language. But when you write Sanskrit in it, it does not work as well.

And so, unlike Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and the other languages of India, which write Sanskrit words perfectly, just as you write them in Sanskrit, in Tamiḻ you cannot do that. And so, because it started being written so early, this adds to the Tamiḻ identity. And there are even political things that go on about whether you should use borrowed Sanskrit characters in Tamiḻ or whether you should get rid of them. One of them is ஜ. So this becomes an interesting subject — a subject for a different discussion!

Another thing that sets Tamiḻ apart: when we look at older Indian literature — not modern Indian, obviously — we see that most of the stories are about gods and mythological things. Some of them are very wonderful; Śakuntalā, for example, is a wonderful story. But these works tend not to treat human life as people live it. The sense of tragedy that we find in Greek and Latin, and some other classical languages, does not seem to be there so much in Sanskrit, and this tends to be true of the languages which imitated Sanskrit when they started to be written. But it is not true of Tamiḻ.

Tamiḻ treats every aspect of human life. And what is more important, it speaks of real people with names. Sanskrit very rarely does this, except in inscriptions — the praśastis that praise kings do it, but not most things in Sanskrit.

And in its scope, Sangam literature covers an enormous amount. U. Vē. Sāminātaiyar once said something to the effect that when you encounter all of Sangam literature, you have encountered a whole world.

Another thing about it — and this is something I realized as I translated the Akanāṉūṟu — is that the literature is so intense and so descriptive that it feels as if you are really living in Sangam times. Spending years translating the Akanāṉūṟu, I began to feel as though I were a villager in Tamiḻ Nadu of two thousand years ago. It really pulls you in, in a way which is hard to describe. There are not many things in literature I know of that do that — that in twenty lines can make you feel you are standing in a village two thousand years ago, watching a couple of people having a quarrel about something.

The emphasis of Sangam literature, then, is almost always on real life — not on the stories of gods, or of ancient kings. There are many kings, but they are not ancient kings.

Both the Akanāṉūṟu and the Puṟanāṉūṟu were anthologized much later, probably around 800 or 900 CE. As to when the poems themselves were written, there is a fair amount of evidence that they were written between about 100 BCE and maybe 200 CE — over two or three hundred years. The poems do describe generations of people, so we know they spanned multiple generations.

One interesting thing is that there is a beautiful poem in the Akanāṉūṟu that describes the town of Musiṟi. Musiṟi is in Kerala nowadays, but Kerala used to be Tamiḻ-speaking. The poem describes how Roman ships would come — well, they are called Yavaṉa ships. The ships were ultimately probably Roman, although we do not know where their crews came from. They would unload things — Roman things — and we know what they unloaded, because we have dug them up: things like pots. Then they would fill up with pepper and take the pepper back to Rome. We have Roman documents that describe the pepper trade, and that trade stopped around 200 CE. So that is one way we can find out something about when the poems were written.

When we look at the language, we do not find it changing much, which would seem to indicate that they were not written over a thousand years or anything like that. Probably two or three hundred years is the most that they would have been written over.

And another thing to point out is that these poems did not arise in a vacuum. They arose in a culture that was already quite developed. We are finding, as we dig up old sites in various places in the Tamiḻ area, that there was a great deal of trade going on, even at a very early period, between Tamiḻ Nadu and the north.

Tamiḻ Nadu was somewhat sheltered by the hills, so you had Tamiḻ culture. As you went north, you came into a country that the Tamiḻ south and Sanskritic north India each regarded as an uncultured borderland — and then you got into the north, which by its own account was civilized again. I am overstating it, and I should say the judgment is theirs and not mine, but something like that seems to have been the case.

The Tamiḻs are the only group in South Asia whose sense of themselves as speakers of a language, with their own culture and their own identity, goes back to the beginning. Remember one of the poems I read: the king says that if someone says Tamiḻ is owned in common — and by that he means the Tamiḻ-speaking area is owned in common with other kings — he will not tolerate that.

There are other poems that talk about a hero going off to try to make money. He goes north, through areas where Tamiḻ has ceased to be spoken, and the fact that Tamiḻ is not spoken there shows how totally alien those areas are. So there was a sense very early of Tamiḻ as its own identity, which is very interesting, because that is not something you find in other areas of South Asia in the same way.

The breadth of these Sangam poems is really amazing, and they are among the great legacies of literature in the world. They are not very well known outside, and even among Tamiḻs they are not well known, because some of them are difficult. Everybody, of course, knows Thirukkuṟaḷ, which is a good thing, because Thirukkuṟaḷ is masterful and a wonderful collection.

But these other poems people do not tend to know so well, because they are difficult. If you take the time to learn some of them, you will be amazed by how rich they are in so many ways.

And also, if you spend time learning and reading Sanskrit, which I have done — and Sanskrit also has a very great literature — you will be surprised by how different they are from anything in Sanskrit. They are unlike anything else I know of in the Indian tradition, and they are, in some profound way, the source of the identity of Tamiḻs: what makes Tamiḻs, Tamiḻs. If you want to see that, look at some of the Sangam poems, particularly Puṟanāṉūṟu and Akanāṉūṟu.

That is a critical question. What you see nowadays in India is that everyone wants to learn English. And what we find across South Asia — not only in the Tamiḻ area, but in all languages — is that people are not really fluent in reading and writing their own language, and they are not that good in English either. So they end up not really mastering any language. I think that is a terrible thing.

But your question is more about people in the diaspora — though it applies to Tamiḻs anywhere, and really to any language: how do you get children interested in their own? And here I will say just one thing. If you think about how children grow up, they imitate what their parents do. Ultimately, more important than school or anything else is what they see at home and what happens at home.

So the problem is not with the children; the problem is with the parents. How many parents have Sangam literature at home? How many have a copy of Kambaṉ? How many even have Thirukkuṟaḷ — which is at least a little more common? And of those, how many ever read it, or talk to their children about it, or say: this is beautiful? For that matter, it need not be Sangam poetry — you can have the great works of the Nāyaṉmār and the Āḻvār, whatever. But if the children do not see you interested in this, why should they be interested?

And nowadays it is worse than a missing bookshelf. The father sits scrolling his phone, and the child sits scrolling too — and then the parents wonder why nobody reads anything or talks to anybody.

One thing I used to suggest is that every Tamiḻ should get a copy of Sangam literature, keep it in the bookcase, and open it and read something occasionally. We have very easy commentaries on it all, and now there are English versions available, so you can see what a poem means easily if the Tamiḻ is too hard. But children will inevitably imitate what they see at home. And if what they see at home is that there is no Tamiḻ book, that no one ever talks about Tamiḻ, that no one ever reads it — why should they be interested in it?

It is not very exciting, really. I had heard my teacher, A. K. Ramanujan, talk about Tamiḻ as a classical language — that was not a new idea to me. And there was a great deal of effort going on in Tamiḻ Nadu to have Tamiḻ designated a classical language. Then Professor Maṟaimalai asked whether I would write something about Tamiḻ's position, and I did. That was in 2000.

Then I forgot all about it. I had no idea what became of it. Years later, in 2015, I got a call saying I was being given the Padma Shri — and I thought someone was pulling a prank on me.

And I think the only reason it had any effect is that Indians will listen to a foreigner who has no stake in the matter. I did not say anything new. People in Tamiḻ Nadu had been saying it for years. It simply came from someone outside, with nothing to gain by it.

A simple answer. Languages and politics do not mix — period. We see in India that there is so much politics going on over Tamiḻ and Sanskrit, and Hinduism, this religion and that religion — and frankly, that is toxic to everything.

You cannot look at a language in political terms. That is a very wrong thing to do. You have to look at a language in its own terms. What is its richness? What can I learn from it? How much can I enjoy reading this literature? — rather than the crazy politics that goes on.

"Tamiḻ is the oldest language in the world," and so on and so forth — that does not help Tamiḻ. It is actually very unfortunate to see language in those terms. What is important about a language is what is in it: the culture it conveys, the wisdom that is in it, the insight you can get from it into human life, into history, into various things like that. But who cares how old something is? We have lists of things that merchants sold from 4000 BCE in Sumeria — but so what? Nobody is going to buy that and get excited about it just because it is so old.

So I think what people need is this: if in their own lives they value Tamiḻ and its literature — and Tamiḻ is its literature — then their children will value it too.