Tevaram: Ayvuttunai (Tevaram: Etudes et glossaire tamouls).

• Author: Shulman, David

This (third) volume of indices, glossary, and other supplementary materials complete the scientific edition of the Tamil Tevaram by Francois Gros and T. V. Gopal Iyer, handsomely published by the French Indological Institute in Pondichery. For Tamil Saivas, the Tevaram poems, attributed to Tirunanacampantar, Tirunavukk'aracu cuvamikal (Appar), and Cuntaramurtti (seventh-ninth centuries) and sung by otuvar in Saiva temples throughout Tamil Nadu, are a fundamental canon, often equated with the Veda. Although the editors modestly refrain from claiming to have produced a final critical edition of these poems, their work is a model of judicious editing - and as close as we are likely to get to a critical text. The edition is based on fifty-four manuscript sources and fourteen earlier printed volumes, described in the first volume of this set. The apparatus listing all attested variants, printed in the volume under review, reveals a remarkably stable textual tradition (especially when compared, e.g., to Kampan's Tamil Ramayana).

The present volume, entirely in Tamil, offers a series of useful aids to scholarly study of the Tevaram and of Tamil Saivism generally. An elaborate introduction complements Gros' penetrating historical essay in volume I. Here Gopal Iyer ranges, with the pandit's encyclopedic command of the entire literature, through the medieval sources in relation to the Tevaram. One wishes, at times, for precise citations, for example, in the lists of names for the Tevaram poets as they are mentioned in later works (pp. 31-37): alas, not everyone knows the medieval Tamil puranas by heart! The discussion (p. 38) of the number of patikams (the standard poetic form for this corpus) composed by Campantar and Cuntarar - a well-known problem, derived from the statements of the Tirumurai kanta puranam and from Cekkilar - remains, again, inconclusive, perhaps because of an overly objectified notion of the "author" as an empirical subject. The patikam recovered from an inscription at Tiruvitaivay shows how generative and inconclusive the genre was. In any case, this introductory essay is illuminating in many respects, including discussions of metre and the vexed question of the musical system attached to Tevaram - which, as the tradition has itself recognized, has been lost and later refashioned (in line with the current melakarta system of Carnatic music).

Although the Tevaram is unusual, among Tamil texts...