South-Indian Horizons.

• Author: Monius, Anne E.

South-Indian Horizons: Felicitation Volume for Francois Gros on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday. Edited by JEAN-LUC CHEVILLARD and EVA with the collaboration of A. Murugaiyan and a preface by R. E. Asher. Publications du department d'indologie, vol. 94. Pondicherry: INSTITUT FRANCAIS DE PONDICHERY and ECOLE FRANCAISE D'EXTREME-ORIENT, 2004. Pp. xlv + 651.

This massive volume, produced in honor of the seventieth birthday of Francois Gros, the great French scholar of Tamil language, literature, and history, also serves as a "celebration of the field of Tamil studies" (p. ix), a "rich feast" (p. xiv) of articles covering topics from Brahmi inscriptions and Cankam literature to bhakti poetry and the history of tobacco use in southern India. With forty-one contributions in English, French, Italian, and Tamil, no review can treat them all, even superficially; as with all such edited volumes, the quality, approach, and subject matter of the essays cover a considerable range. Taking seriously one editor's contention that the volume as a whole "is an attempt to come to terms with what has been done already [in Tamil studies] and what remains to be done" (p. xxxiv), this review will assess the "state of the field" as represented by these collected works, highlighting some of the more engaging essays along the way.

The first sixteen essays, grouped under the heading "Studies in Devotional, Contemporary, Classical and Folk Literatures," reveal both the strengths and lacunae in the study of Tamil literature to date. Three of the essays--Judit Torzsok's "Siva le fou et ses devots tamouls dans le Tevaram," George L. Hart's "Syntax and Perspective in Tamil and Classical Sanskrit Poetry," and Alexander Dubyanski's "The Tamil Literary Background of the Sakuntala Natakam"--explore in careful detail the relationship of Sanskrit and Tamil literary forms and images, a discussion that has, in other circles, often been unfortunately tinged by Dravidian political aspirations. The study of the modern Tamil novel emerges with a certain robustness from this volume, with four excellent essays examining either particular novels and authors or thematically ranging over a number of narratives: Indira Viswanathan Peterson's "Saiva Religion and the Performing Arts in a Tamil Novel: Kalaimani's Tillana Mokanampal," R. E. Asher's "Vaikom Muhammed Basheer: Freedom Fighting into Fiction," Chantal Delamourd's "La Poesie des 'Vies Miniscules; dans Kanivu, Recueil de Nouvelles...