The Beauty of Tamil Literature
The history of Tamil literature spans over some two thousand years. During this protracted period, plenty of anthologies, epics and works according to every known form of Tamil genres were written and formed. Significantly enough, the Tamil literature has manifested itself in different forms in religion, dance, drama, music, virtues and so on. The blog post delves into the fascinating journey of Tamil literature in all these years thereby making few observations on its current status.
Stages of Tamil Literature
The most primary era of Tamil literature are termed as the Sangam age. The Sangam literature consists of the oldest Tamil wealth of literature, and chiefly deals with love, war, trade, etc. The travesty here is that most of the literary works of this period have not been preserved and therefore, could not be documented.
The available literature of this period has been broadly divided into three categories based on chronology, namely, the Major Eighteen Anthology Series comprising the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Idylls and the Five Great Epics. This was the period when the Tamil state was reigned by the three 'crowned kings' the Cheras, Pandyas and the Cholas and thus, is known as the Golden Era.
The post Sangam period is marked by the characteristic feature of increased interaction between Tamil and Sanskrit. This is the reason why Tamil is alleged to be originated from Sanskrit because of its close association with Sanskrit.The famous works of this period are Kalavali, Nalatiyar, Inna Narpathu and Iniyavai Narpathu.
Moving on to the texts, the first regular newspaper having the highest circulation in Tamil was Swadesamitran, started by G.Subramaniya Iyer in 1882, editor of The Hindu and founding member of the Indian National Congress. The newspaper voiced the strong public opinion of the educated peoples of almost the entire Tamil community. Further, the freedom movement and the advent of Gandhi also had an impetus on Tamil journalism. C. Rajagopalachari kick-started Vimochanam, a Tamil journal devoted to advocating prohibition at the Gandhi Ashram in Salem district in Tamil Nadu.
Many magazines were launched in Tamil Nadu during the 1920s and 1930s. The humour magazine Ananda Vikatan by S.S. Vasan in the year 1929 went a long way in creating some of the greatest Tamil novelists of the era. Subsequently, Dina Thanthi became one of the largest Tamil language dailies by circulation within a few years.
Tamil Literature’s influence on Tamil Cinema.
The Tamil literature’s wedlock with Tamil Cinema needs special emphasis and needs to be uncovered here. The example of the novel Parthiban Kanavu, which was made into a movie during 1960s was acclaimed by the critics. Additionally, there have been artists, writers working with Cinema who were authors in the Tamil literature. Kalaignar Karunanidhi stands as an example of the past. The new set of literary writers such as Nanjil Nadan, S Ramakrishnan and Jeyamohan are entering the Tamil Film Industry now. The dialogues written at times carry on the message for the promotion of public good and interest. Hence, the roles of writers have been ever changing and ever evolving. However, in this respect, the responsibilities of the writers have been overtaken by the directors of the Tamil Cinema today as they have started exercising more of autonomy in cases of direction, narration, screenplay and other aspects of movie making.
Cataloguing the work of various Tamilian authors is one of the biggest challenges that the literature is grappling with. Not only this, there are other problems of integrity, authenticity, and attribution. Another relevant concern for Tamil literature’s readers and followers is that most of the literatures have not taken a form of the book. The manuscripts are mostly hand written out of the ones which remained unpublished. There are attempts being made in this regard to revive the long lost ancient wisdom in the form of literature by way of creating blogs and portals on social and political issues. Moresoever, Tamil literature is being made available as mobile and electronic books. Amidst all this, equally noteworthy is the fact that the erstwhile wide popularity of the Tamil literature has been degrading and the sales of Tamil literary pulp fiction has declined in view of the ongoing internet age. Accessibility to many other Tamil literary resources is one area which needs extensive research. For instance, Tamil Heritage Foundation is a global initiative to archive electronically under the three major categories viz. Text, Sound and Visual. This is a commendable step in the direction of protection of endangered manuscripts by way of digitization. In view of all this, it must be kept in mind that Tamil literature needs preservation and popularization among not only the Tamil native speakers but also among other communities.