Essays of U Ve Sa The Man who Revived Ancient Tamil Literature
Translated by Prabha Sridevan and Pradeep Chakravarthy
New Delhi: Niyogi Books 2022
Dr U V Swaminatha Iyer (1855-1942) is a personality who is in every sense a man of his times. He lived before the Pure Tamil Movement and the Dravidian Movement reshaped the cultural and political landscape of the Tamil region and therefore was able to make a remarkable contribution to the study of Tamil Literature. He was trained in Sanskrit and Tamil, a bilingual skill which is utterly absent in the "scholarly" tradition today. Like Hindi in the North which almost at around the same time, Tamil too was caught up in a battle that ultimately decided the shape structure and morphology of the language and some scholars call that identity battle the beginning of the Tamil Modernity.
The book begins with the line: "Tamil is a classical language spoken by more than 80 million people across the world." The bland statement hides an important claim :classical status for a living language which in itself is problematic. What deserves attention is the place of "classical" languages in the literary cultures of the world. If we take Latin as an example it is well known that almost all the major European languages inherited their grammar script and to a large extent their literary models from Latin and after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD these were adopted or refashioned and repurposed for writing vernacular languages, the vulgate tongue. Therefore the classical status of a language is not predicated merely on its "antiquity". In the case of Tamil and other languages as Sheldon Pollock in his now classic work, Language of the Gods in the World of Men, the literary forms and grammatical structures evolved within what he calls the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. The use of Sanskrit language and Grantha script by powerful dynasties like the Cholas and the Pandyas shows that ninetieth century and early twentieth century preoccupation with a politicized linguistic consciousness did not influence the literary and scribal culture of the early medieval age.
This book consists of 29 essays written by U V Swaminatha Iyer and were originally published in Tamil literary magazines that had wide circulation in Mylapore, Egmore, Mambalam and other parts of Madras city: Ananda Vikatan.Along with Pratapa Mudaliar who is remembered for writing his Autobiography and is a precocious venture into scriptal consciousness, Iyer also wrote his autobiography after he retired from Presidency College. The collection of essays in this book are largely autobiographical and detail his life as a scholar in search of a "lost heritage", the Lost Literature of Tamil. It is a pity Umberto Eco had not heard of Dr U V Swaminatha Iyer when he wrote the Name of the Rose. Iyer hunted, searched, copied, edited and published Tamil literary classics and today the claim of Tamil being a Classical Language is largely substantiated by the body of early texts that he discovered and published.
Swaminatha Iyer was the protege of Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai under whom he studied Tamil and who gave him the name Swaminatha. The Tiruvadurai Adheenam hada rich collection of Tamil Manuscripts, a Scriptorium rich in documents collected over several centuries. With the intervention of Tyagaraja Chettiyar, Iyer got the post of Tamil Pandit in Kumbakonam College and from this point onwards he began the task of collecting Tamil Manuscripts. Jiva Chintamani, a Jaina work was the first major work and it was followed by the discovery and publication of Purunanurru, Silapadikaram, Manimekkalai and other works. As the essays in this book describe in the imitable style adopted by this great savant his search took his to temples, houses of descendents of Tamil scholars, Saivite Mutts and culturally influential people. Access was not easy and there was competition. However the single minded devotion was crowned with success and with the advent of Print, Swaminatha Iyer was able to bring the literary past of Tamil Language to a wider audience. It must be said that in this task Damodaram Pillai (1832-1901) Armugha Navalar also helped in the endeavor of rediscovering the lost literary heritage.
Were the classics of Tamil literature which today are glossed under the rubric Sangam Literature really lost. Are there no mention of these works during the early medieval period. Did the transition from palm leaf as a medium of record keeping and manuscript preservation play any role in the disappearance of these works. David Shulam in his outstanding work Tamil A Biography has provided just the answer. Unfortunately given the deep and unseemly crust of identity politics in which Tamil Studies exists today books like the one by Sridevan and Chakrvarthy will remain rare. The authors have done a splendid job in providing lucid translations of the essays of this great savant.
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