Passages: relationships between tamil and sanskrit.

• Author: Ann selby, Martha
• Position: Book review

Passages: Relationships between Tamil and Sanskrit. Edited by--lc ANNAN M. and JENNIFER CLARE. Institut Francais de Pondichery, Publications Hors Serie, vol. 11. Pondichery: INSTITUT FRAKAIS DE PONDICHERY and TAMIL CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY, 2009. Pp. xxxvi + 380.

This volume is another result of the productive collaboration between Kannan M. and Jennifer Clare, and presents the proceedings of a 2007 conference held at the French Institute of Pondicherry. Each contribution to this book explores the relationship between Tamil and Sanskrit, and, as is the case with most edited volumes of this sort, some of the articles are excellent and thought-provoking, while others are less so, and probably should not have been included. In his introduction, Kannan M. explains the three-part organization of the book, while Jennifer Clare's foreword is a very useful distillation of how various Tamil grammarians understood the relationship between the Tamil and Sanskrit languages over time, and what the term vata col ("northern language") meant to them within shifting intellectual contexts across the centuries. Clare also examines just what the implications are in these shifts for our understanding of literary production and history.

Titled "Stepping Stones," the first part of the book contains four previously published articles by the first Euro-American scholars in the field to examine the dynamics between Tamil and Sanskrit in a rigorous way. The first article, Jean Filliozat's 1955 "Tamil and Sanskrit in South India," sets out the reasons for the "relative neglect" of Tamil studies as being those of accident and prejudice. Filliozat reminds us that the philological method in India was first practiced in the South, but with the shift of the "main centre of activity of the Europeans in India ... from South India to Calcutta" (p. 1), by the eighteenth century Sanskrit had become the "fundamental medium for the understanding of Indian civilization," and this, combined with new theories about race, led to a "depreciation" of the South (p. 2). Filliozat concludes that "Sanskrit came into great vogue in Tamilnad after the full development of Tamil literature" (p. 10), but, as succeeding articles in this book certainly demonstrate, Sanskrit was more of an enriching force than a supplanting one, at least from a literary perspective.

Siegfried Lienhard's 1973 "Akapportll and Sanskrit Muktaka Poetry" offers a reading of Prakrit poetry in light of catikam literary conventions (see his examples on p. 15). Lienhard debunks the notion that Prakrit poetry is "folksy," claiming that it is "of very elaborate design and an extremely refined taste and thus is far from being unconventional and simple" (pp. 15-16). He draws our attention to the striking similarities between the conversational contexts provided by the commentators' headnotes for the Prakrit poems and the headnotes and comments of Tamil editors and commentators, with the female companions nearly always serving as "reconcilers." Lienhard also adds that "the Tollaippiyam proves to be a valuable source of information not only with reference to Tamil rhetoric, but also to Sanskrit love poetry of the nzuktaka type" (p. 17).

It was at this point in my reading that I began to wonder just how these four initial articles further the work of the volume as a whole. Filliozat's article is polemical, and Lienhard's, while innovative for its time, now tells us nothing new and fails to offer any nuanced analyses, but as we move on to George Hart's benchmark 1976 article, "The Relation between Tamil and Classical Sanskrit Literature," I concluded that, even though all of the ideas expressed in these four pieces are now overly familiar, perhaps the act of reading...