Interrogating ‘Rediscovery’ and an Enquiry into the Transmission of Sangam Literature during the Pre-modern Period

Abstract

It has been argued that nineteenth-century Tamil literary history witnessed the displacement of the pre-nineteenth-century notions of ‘literary canon’ which are supposed to have constituted largely of religious and didactic literature with the printing of classical Tamil literary works. Under colonial modernity the displacement of the pre-nineteenth-century notions of Tamil literary canon was supposed to have been accompanied by a new mode of appraising time and a secularisation of Tamil society. Revolving largely around the selective individual narratives of pre-modern literary and hagiographical works and also of middle-class men in colonial Tamil Nadu, this view rarely takes into consideration for enquiry the literary works that were in circulation in Jain Mutts of the early modern period, missionary documents and the early colonial records like Mackenzie's collections, Board's collections of the College of Fort St George and the quantitative history of book production in British India. An enquiry into the latter sources will offer the possibility of an alternative understanding of Tamil literary history of the nineteenth century. There is another baggage that weighs heavy in historical writings on the nineteenth-century Tamil society that requires interrogation. It is about ‘Tamil renaissance’ and ‘rediscovery’ of classical Tamil literature under colonialism.