Organizer and Chair: Indira Peterson, Mount Holyoke College
Discussants: Martha Selby, Southern Methodist University; Alf Hiltebeitel, George
Washington University
In two characteristically thoughtful articles (see ref.) the late A.K. Ramanujan has suggested that reflexivity and contextuality of various kinds are the generative bases for cultural forms and literary texts in Indian civilization. In Ramanujan's words, in each Indian text and context we respond to an entire "system of presences and absences." This panel is about some of the ways in which language and genre have been deployed to create such reflexive systems in the South Indian literary texts that the presenters have studied. Working with medieval and pre-modern texts produced in the Tamilnadu region in several different genres, and in Tamil, Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Marathi, we have discovered that language and genre differentiate and affiliate these texts and their diverse contexts in fluid configurations, generating discourses of plurality, rather than of any kind of unitary "identity."
The works of the 14th century Srivaisnava Acarya ("teacher") Vedantadesika present a particularly complex picture of the linguistic pluralism of the South Indian Srivaisnava sect, in which both the Vedas and the Tamil hymns of the Alvars are given equal value as canonical texts. In addition to philosophical treatises and commentaries in Sanskrit, and theological commentarial works in Manipravala (a hybrid mixture of Sanskrit and Tamil), Desika also wrote original devotional (bhakti) poetry in Tamil, Sanskrit, and Prakrit. Focusing on Desika's poetry, Steven Hopkins argues that, while the saint-poet's linguistic shifts allow him to deploy three very different cultural and poetic discourses in his poems, he uses these discourses in a way that underscores their interconnectedness, and his own irreducibly plural vision of devotion and its expression.
In the pillaittamil ("Tamil [poetry] about a child"), a highly productive genre in medieval and pre-modern Tamil literature, the poet adopts a maternal persona to praise an extraordinary child according to a stylized set of conventions. Comparing pillaittamil poems by a Hindu, a Christian, and a Muslim author, written in praise of a Hindu deity, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Baby Jesus, respectively, Paula Richman shows that the genre functions as a common discourse through which poets from diverse religious communities express their shared cultural identity as Tamils. The pillaittamil says Richman, encompasses religious plurality within its poetic system. Indira Peterson's paper is about the kuravanci ("The Play of the Kuratti Fortuneteller"), a dance-drama genre nurtured at the courts of the Tamil region in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Marathi-speaking Maratha rulers of Thanjavur commissioned kuravancis in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and in a mixture of several languages, including Sanskrit. The nomadic Kuratti fortuneteller, the principal character in these plays, is herself adept at speaking several languages. In the polyglossia of kuravanci plays, and their complex treatment of the Kuratti fortuneteller in relation to her aristrocratic clients, Peterson discerns pluralistic discourses of identity, themselves refractions of the multilingual and multi ethnic environment of the Tamil region in the 18th century. All three papers suggest that, although at one level, language and genre serve as codes of definition and differentiation in South Indian literary texts, they are, at the same time, fluid signs illuminating the permeable and plural nature of these texts and their cultural contexts.
Alf Hiltebeitel has worked extensively on Mahabharata traditions in Tamil and Sanskrit, and Martha Selby specializes in classical Tamil and Sanskrit poetry. As discussants, they will bring to the panel insights from their own work on language, genre, and discourses of plurality in South Indian literature.
(Ref.) A. K. Ramanujan, "Where Mirrors are Windows: Toward an Anthology of Reflections," History of Religions, Vol. 28, no. 3, Feb. 1989, pp. 187-216; and "Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation," in Paula Richman, ed., Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 22-49.
Steven P. Hopkins, Swarthmore College
For the past several years, scholars for the most part have emphasized the vernacular languages in their studies of South Indian Hindu bhakti literature. Even more, the field of south Indian bhakti literatures has mainly privileged Tamil, one of the oldest southern "mother tongues," and so-called "Tamil bhakti," in the ideological, literary, and historical study of devotion in South India. Scholars of Vaisnava traditions have identified the poetry of the Alvars, saint-poets who flourished from the 6th through the 9th centuries, as normative for defining South Indian bhakti; scholars of Saivism have claimed as equally normative the Tamil songs of the Nayanmar ("Masters"), who flourished about the same time in what is now known as Tamil Nadu. Fine work in Telugu and Kannada has served to temper somewhat a certain Tamil-centrism in bhakti studies, though focus is still placed on the primacy of the vernacular in definitions of bhakti in the South.
Such a focus, to use the influential vocabulary of A.K. Ramanujan, places "bhakti" firmly in the concrete, "emotional" household realm of the "mother tongue," in implied contradistinction to the public, intellectual "father worlds" of Sanskrit poetics and discourse. Bhakti, in this view, is part of the "first language," the "natural" language of one's birth, continuous with one's folk and folklore; Sanskrit is a "second" language, a learned language of culture. Such distinctions are reminiscent of those traditionally claimed between the "Great" and "little" traditions. These distinctions are doubtlessly important in any study of Indian devotional literature; they risk, however, creating an artificially monolithic (and monoglossic) tradition in place of what has been and what remains a complex, multi-lingual reality. Such an emphasis on Tamil and other vernaculars obscures not only the contributions of trans-local, trans-regional Sanskrit to the development of South Indian bhakti, but even more importantly, that of multi-lingual saint-poets like the 14th century South Indian polyglot Venkatanatha (popularly known as "Vedantadesika"-"Teacher of the Vedanta").
Vedantadesika wrote not only independent philosophical treatises and commentaries in Sanskrit, and theological commentarial works in "manipravala," a hybrid mixture of Sanskrit and Tamil, but also wrote original poetry in Sanskrit, Tamil, and one long poem in Prakrit. For Desika, whose formative years were spent in the multi religious, cosmopolitan atmosphere of Kancipuram in northern Tamil Nadu, devotion was not only a matter of the mother tongue; for him devotion had many tongues, many genres and audiences, both local and pan Indian.
Desika's Sanskrit poetry is marked by influences from the Tamil Alvars and elements from what might be termed "Tamil bhakti." In the same way, his Tamil and Prakrit poems reflect lines of influence from Sanskrit poetry and poetics. Currents of influence run in both directions: he privileges no one discourse over another. All three tongues, in Desika's discourse are plural in texture; they reflect and respond to each other in dynamic ways. This paper will explore, in as much analytic detail as possible, the various voices that make up Desika's polyphonic writing and its implications for the history of South Indian bhakti.
Paula Richman, Oberlin College
In the pillaittamil genre, a poet adopts a maternal persona to praise an extraordinary child according to a highly stylized system of literary conventions. Each pillaittamil (literally "Tamil [poetry] for/about a child") includes ten sections, each of which focuses on a different stage or activity in the child's life. In the first section, the poet asks various powerful beings (usually deities) to protect the child. In other sections, the Mother asks the baby to give her a kiss, come to her, or clap its hands. This genre began within the Hindu tradition, with poems addressed to Murukan or a Saivite goddess. With the coming of Islam to Tamilnadu, Islamic poets began to compose pillaittamils to the Prophet Muhammad. Later, Tamil Christians adopted the genre, particularly to compose verses to Baby Jesus.
The number of sections in a pillaittamil, the content of the sections, and their refrains are all specified by tradition, and cannot be changed. And yet, even though the genre began among Hindus, other religious traditions adopted it as their own. It became "an entire system of presences" across religious boundaries.
But the absences are just as telling as the presences. For example, the prescriptions say that the first section must invoke protection for the child. In Hindu poetry, elaborate traditions determined who should be asked to protect the divine baby. It was considered prudent to ask Visnu for protection first, since he preserves the universe. Siva comes next, but nothing about his destructive nature can be mentioned. Many other deities are then invoked, and the last verse in the section requests the protection of the 33 crores of deities. How do Muslim poets deal with this section? They ask Allah for protection; they ask for the protection of the poet's patron; they recall other times when God protected his prophets; they write about protection among the other attributes of God. A Christian poet found the idea of asking God to protect peculiar, since Father and Son are one. He too used the existing poetic structure to compose something theologically appropriate.
Rather than affirming unitary and exclusive religious identities, pillaittamils demonstrate the multiple nature of the identities of pillaittamil poets. Although the pillaittamil tradition was well established among Hindu poets previous to Muslim and Christian appropriation of the genre, when Islamic and Christian poets employed it, they did so as a Tamil enterprise, not a Hindu one. That is, they adopted the pillaittamil genre as a system of poetic presences and absences. The pillaittamil thus generated religious plurality within its poetic system.
Indira V. Peterson, Mount Holyoke College
In the 18th century, and in the first years of the 19th, the Maratha rulers of Thanjavur and the Telugu and Tamil Poligar rulers of the "little kingdoms" in southern Tamilnadu patronized a number of new dramatic and musical literary genres with a popular slant, which were enacted at court and at temple festivals. Focusing on the Thanjavur court, in this paper I have examined what I consider to be pluralistic discourses of identity in the kuravanci, "The play of the Kuravanci fortuneteller" the most productive of the new genres.
The stereotyped plot of kuravanci plays begins with a sequence in which the Kuravanci (or Kuratti), a fortuneteller of the nomadic Kuravar tribe and the eponymous principal character in the play, predicts the happy union of an aristocratic heroine with her royal or divine lover, and is rewarded for her prediction. Meanwhile, the Kuratti's own lover, the birdcatcher Cinkan, misses her while he is setting traps for birds, and sets out to search for her. The play ends when a distraught Cinkan is finally reunited with his beloved Kuratti.
The bulk of the kuravanci's songs and dances are devoted to the description of the ways of life of the Kuravar people, who are described as nomadic hunter gatherers living in the hills, and following customs that are very different from those of the settled populations of the city and countryside. Great stress is laid on the Kuratti's wit and occult wisdom, on the strangeness of the Kuravar way of life, and the wilderness couple's free and potent sexuality. All this might appear to be simplistic exoticism, an unambiguous discourse of "othering." I have argued, however, that the comedic, yet fundamentally positive portrayal of the Kuratti and Cinkan, places them in a complex relationship of resemblance and identity as well as difference with the aristocratic characters in the play, and implicitly with the play's patron.
Patronized by the Marathi speaking Maratha kings from Shahji (1685-1712) onwards, Thanjavur court poets wrote kuravanci plays in Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi, as well as in a mixture of several languages, including Sanskrit. In a major Thanjavur kuravanci play the fortuneteller tells fortunes in the various languages she has picked up during her travels (these include English). In the polyglossia of the genre and its principal character, as in the multiple subject positions implied in the play's treatment of its theme, I discern pluralistic discourses of identity. I suggest that these discourses are themselves refractions of the shifting contours of personal and communal identity in the increasingly multi-lingual and multi ethnic social world of the Tamil region in the 18th century.
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