CHAPTER 7
Tamil Hindu Literature
Norman Cutler
While the phrase “Tamil Hindu Literature” may appear to be simple and
straightforward, a few moments of reflection reveal that each of its three com-
ponents are actually rather slippery. What exactly do we mean by Tamil – the
relatively formal language associated primarily with writing and public oratory,
or the full gamut of regionally and socially based spoken dialects? And even if
we were concerned only with the former, we would still have to confront the evo-
lution of the literary language during its 2,000-year history. The slipperiness
of the terms “Hindu” and “Hinduism” are well documented in recent scholar-
ship on South Asian religion and culture; and the notion that these terms, as
commonly construed, are relatively recent constructions, heavily influenced by
India’s colonial history, is now widely accepted (Frykenberg 1989). And finally,
the term “literature” can be interpreted in various restricted and embracive
senses. Within the well established tradition of Tamil grammar and poetics,
ilakkiyam, commonly translated as “literature,” implies a special kind of lan-
guage usage that is governed by precisely defined rules of grammar and literary
convention as well as a particular milieu in which texts were composed and cir-
culated. But the corpus of texts delineated by this term is certainly too narrow
for the agenda of this volume.
In this essay the phrase “Tamil Hindu literature” will be interpreted liberally,
if not especially rigorously, to include texts conforming to a wide range of lin-
guistic registers and styles, composed at various points in time, and associated
with various religious milieux which in modern terms would usually be labelled
“Hindu.” Further, all of the specific textual types treated here would be viewed
as appropriate subjects of study in the curriculum of a Tamil Department in a
modern university in Tamilnadu, though they were engendered and originally
circulated in a number of different cultural milieux.