"Indian literature:Dravidian literature." (by A. K. Ramanujan)
Of the four literary Dravidian languages, Tamil has been recorded earliest, followed by Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. Tamil literature has a classical tradition of its own, while the literatures of the other languages have been influenced by Sanskrit models. Early classical Tamil literature is represented by eight anthologies of lyrics, 10 long poems, and a grammar called the Tolkappiyam (“Old Composition”). ... it is generally ascribed to the first three centuries of the Christian Era and represents the oldest non-Sanskrit literature to be found on the South Asian subcontinent.
The article then spends four long pages on describing the Tamil literature of the first millennium: 1st to 3rd centuries; 4th to 6th; and 6th to 9th (Tolkappiyam, Epics, Bhakti, etc.) (In Period of the Tamil Cola Empire, Britannica then devotes 2 paragraphs each to Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam)
The next period, the time of the Tamil Cola Empire (10th–13th centuries), saw an awakening of neighbouring literatures: Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. The first extant Kannada work is the 9th-century Kavirajamarga (“The Royal Road of Poets”), a work of rhetoric rather indebted to Sanskrit rhetoricians, ...
Article on "Indian Literature"Archived 2009-01-24 at the Wayback Machine written by: Indira Viswanathan Peterson, B.A., A.M., Ph.D., Professor of Asian Studies, Mount Holyoke College. Author of Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints. Editor of Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces—Indian Literature, Expanded 6th Edition
.
“
Encarta Encyclopedia, "Indian Literature"
III Classical Literature:
The dominant classical literary tradition in India developed in the Sanskrit language in the first few centuries AD. This literature had its great flowering in the era of the Gupta dynasty of north India, from 320 to 550. ... Kavya was the major form of classical literature in Sanskrit. The term kavya denoted works that were composed primarily for pleasure and that employed complex literary conventions and elaborate metrical schemes. ... In southern India, beginning in the 1st century ad, a magnificent body of nonreligious poetry was written in the Tamil language. The Tamil poets—both men and women—treat sexual love and the heroic ideals of the Tamil people through symbolic landscape images, powerful language, and delicate psychological touches. The early Tamil poems became the foundation of literary traditions in other languages of south India. They later influenced medieval poetry of religious devotion in all the Indian languages. ...
IV:Medieval Literature: The Rise of the Regional Languages:
By the 10th century the older Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages and dialects had grown into full-blown languages. Each region also began to develop its own distinctive culture. As a result, regional literatures developed in each of the new regional languages, under the patronage of local rulers.
IV A Bhakti: Devotional Literature: ... (many paragraphs, no mention of Kannada or Telugu)
IV B Other Literary Forms: ... (many paragraphs, no mention of Kannada or Telugu)
IV C Regional differences: (One paragraph out of 21 paragraphs on page 2)
In southern India, beginning with the Hindu Vijayanagar Empire (1336-1565), writers used both Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages related to Tamil. Speakers of Tamil continued to build upon the rich classical and devotional traditions in that language. In its early period, works in Kannada, another Dravidian language, were dominated by Jain religious themes. An example is the Adipurana (History of the First One), the 10th-century author Pampa’s biography of the Jain holy figure Rishabha. Writers in the Telugu language in particular excelled in kavya-style poetry. These works, though influenced by Sanskrit models, had features unique to Telugu language and culture. An outstanding example is the Shringaranaishadhamu (The Love of King Nala), in which the 14th-century poet Srinatha retells the well-known Sanskrit epic tale of the travails of King Nala and Queen Damayanti. Kerala, in the western part of south India, developed a rich literature in a language called Manipravalam (meaning “gem and coral”), which was a mixture of Malayalam and Sanskrit.
"(From introduction) Tamil (tamiz), the best known of the Dravidian languages, belongs to the South Dravidian (SDr) subgroup. It is first recorded in a lithic inscription in a form of the Ashokan Brahmi script which is dated to c. 254 BCE. It is therefore one of India's two classical languages, alongside the more widely known Indo-Aryan language Sanskrit. However, Tamil is the only one of the two with a palpable continuity between its classical and modern forms.
Of all the Dravidian languages Tamil has the longest literary tradition, covering more than two thousand years. ... the earliest extant literary text is the grammar Tolkappiyam (100 BCE), which describes the grammar and poetics of Tamil during that period. During its two-thousand-year uninterrupted history, Tamil distinguishes three different stages:Old Tamil (c. 300 BCE to 700 CE), Middle Tamil (700 to 1600 CE) and Modern Tamil (1600 CE to the present), each with distinct grammatical characteristics.
Kannada (kannada) belongs to the southern branch of the Dravidian languages. First attested in an inscription found near Halmidi village in Hassan District dating to c. 450 CE, Kannada has a continuous literary tradition from the ninth century CE to the present. It is one of the four literary Dravidian languages; only Tamil has a longer literary tradition. ... Kannada varies along several dimensions: historical, geographic, social and register. The language shows three historically distinct stages: Old Kannada dates from 450 CE to 1200 CE, Middle Kannada from 1200 to 1700 and Modern Kannada from 1700 to the present.
1. Tamil (true native name Tamiz; other names Malabari, Dravidi, Tamul, Aravam). Pop. 53,006,368; 3.35 million in Sri Lanka and over 2 million in South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, Fiji and Burma. Cave inscriptions (some seventy-six) in Tamil Brahmi script were found in Madurai and Tirunalveli districts c. second century BC (Mahadevan 1971: 83–4). The first known work, Tolkappiyam, is a treatise on grammar and poetics ascribed to the early pre-Christian era, presupposing a large body of literature before it, available in the form of anthologies. Although the influence of early Sanskrit grammars (fifth century BC) is obvious in certain grammatical concepts like Tamil kalam "tense, time" (Sanskrit kala- "time, tense"), Tamil peyar "name" for the noun (Sanskrit naman- "name, noun"), Tamil verrumai "separation, division" for "case" (Sanskrit vibhakti- "case marker", literally "division"), there is much that is original in Tolkappiyam.
As in the case of Pre-Modern Greek and Arabic, Tamil has "diglossia" (Ferguson 1964), which means that the standard written and spoken variety of Tamil, called centamiz "beautiful Tamil", is based on the classical language of an earlier era and not on any of the contemporary regional dialects. ...
2. Malayalam (Malayazma). Pop. 30,377,166; west-coast dialect of Tamil till about the ninth century AD; official language of Kerala stage. The Vazappalli inscription of Rajasekhara of the ninth century AD is considered the earliest document (Gopalakrishnan 1985: 31). The first literary work is Ramacaritam (c. twelfth century) and the first grammar, Lilatilakam (fourteenth century), written in Sanskrit. More than Kannada and Telegu, and unlike Tamil, Malayalam has borrowed liberally from Sanskrit, not only words but even inflected words and phrases. ...
3. Kannada (Kanarese, Canarese, Karanataka). Pop. 32,753,676; the official language of Karnataka state; the first inscription is dated 450 AD by Kadamba Kakutstha Varma from Halmidi, Belur Taluq, Mysore district; the first literary work Kavirajamarga, a treatise on poetics, belongs to the ninth century;S'abdamanidarpana is the first comprehensive grammar written in Kannada (thirteenth century). ...
4. Telugu (Telugu, Tneugu, Andhram, Gentoo, Wadugu, Warugi). Pop. 66,017,615; official language of Andhra Pradesh. Telugu place names occur in Prakrit inscriptions from the second century AD onwards. The first Telugu inscription is dated 575 AD from Erragudipadu of the Kadapa district by a prince of the Coda dynasty; the first literary work, a poetic translation of a part of the Mahabharata, belongs to the eleventh century AD.
From: Zvelebil, Kamil (1997), The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South India, BRILL Academic Publishers. Pp. 378., ISBN9004035915.
“
... Early Tamil poetry was rather unique not only by virtue of the fact that some of its features were so unlike everything else in India, but by virtue of its literary excellence; those 26,350 lines of poetry promote Tamil to the rank of one of the great classical languages of the world ...
All other Dravidian literatures—with the exception of Tamil—begin by adopting a model—in subject-matter, themes, forms, in prosody, poetics, metaphors, etc.—only the language is different; in spite of the attempts of some Indian scholars to prove that there were—that there must have been—indigenous, "Dravidian," pre-Aryan traditions, literary traditions, in the great languages of the South, it is extremely hard to find traces of these traditions, and such attempts are more speculative that strictly scientific. ...
But in Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, the beginnings of written literatures are beyond any doubt so intimately connected with the Sanskrit models that the first literary output in these languages is, strictly speaking, imitative and derived, the first literary works in these languages being no doubt adaptations an/or straight translations of Sanskrit models. The process of Sanskritization, with all its implications, must have begun in these communities before any attempt was made among Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam peoples to produce written literature, and probably even before great oral literature was composed. ... Whoever has written so far on the history of Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam literatures take refuge in a formulation which is characteristic for speculative conclusions; cf. "the beginnings of Kannada literature are not clearly traceable, but a considerable volume of prose and poetry must have come into existence before the date of Nrpatunga's Kavirajamarga (850 AD), the earliest extant work on rhetoric in Kannada;" or "beyond doubt there must have existed much unwritten literature (in Telugu) of popular character ...." etc. The facts are different.
The beginnings of Kannada literature were almost totally inspired by Jainism. The first extant work of narrative literature is Sivakoti's Vaddaraghane (cca 900 AD) on the lives of the Jaina saints. The fundamental work on rhetoric in Kannada, and the first theoretical treatise on Kannada culture, is based on Dandin's Kavyadarsa—that is Nrpatunga's Kavirajamarga. Pampa, the first great poet of Kannada literature—and one who is traditionally considered the most eminent among Kannada classical poets—is again, indebted entirely to Sanskrit and Prakrit sources, and in his two compositions, in his version of the Mahabharata story, and in his Adipurana, dealing with the life of the first Jaina Tirthankara. The beginnings of Kannada literature are, thus, anchored firmly in traditions which were originally alien to non-Aryan South India. Quite the same is true of Telugu literature. Telugu literature as we know it begins with Nannaya's translation of the Mahabharata (11th Cent.). The vocabulary of Nannaya is completely dominated by Sanskrit. ... In Malayalam, too, the beginnings of literature are essentially and intrinsically connected with high Sanskrit literature ...
An entirely different situation prevails in Tamil literature. The earliest literature in Tamil is a model unto itself—it is absolutely unique in the sense that, in subject-matter, thought-content, language and form, it is entirely and fully indigenous, that is, Tamil, or, if we want, ..., Dravidian. And not only that: it is only the Tamil culture that has produced—uniquely so in India—an independent, indigenous literary theory of a very high standard, including metrics and prosody, poetics and rhetoric.
There is yet another important difference between Tamil and other Dravidian literary languages: the metalanguage of Tamil has always been Tamil, never Sanskrit. As A. K. Ramanujan says (in Language and Modernization, p. 31): "In most Indian languages, the technical gobbledygook is Sanskrit; in Tamil, the gobbledygook is ultra-Tamil."
Tamil, one of the two classical languages of India, is a Dravidian language spoken today by 50 million Indians, mainly in Tamilnadu State (formerly Madras) in the southeast region of peninsular India. Tamil is also spoken in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and the Fiji Islands.
In this book, Poems of Love and War, I attempt translations of old Tamil poems selected from anthologies compiled about two millennia ago. Today we have access to over two thousand of these poems composed by 300 poets. These poems are 'classical,' i.e. early, ancient; they are also 'classics,' i.e. works that have stood the test of time, the founding works of a whole tradition. Not to know them is not to know a unique and major poetic achievement of Indian civilization. Early classical Tamil literature (c. 100 BC–AD 250) consists of the Eight Anthologies (Eţţuttokai), the Ten Long Poems (Pattuppāţţu), and a grammar called the Tolkāppiyam or the 'Old Composition.' ... The literature of classical Tamil later came to be known as Cankam (pronounced Sangam) literature. (pp. ix-x)
The Purananuru is an anthology of 400 poems written between the first and third centuries CE by more than 150 poets, including at least 10 poetesses. The language is old Tamil, the precursor of modern Tamil and Malayalam. Comprising one of the eight "Sangam" anthologies, the Purananuru is among the earliest works in Tamil that we possess. It was written before the Aryan influence had penetrated the south as thoroughly as it did later and is a testament of pre-Aryan South India and, to a significant extent, of pre-Aryan India. Consequently, the Purananuru is extremely important to the study of South Asia's history, culture, religion, and linguistics. But beyond this, the Purananuru is a great work of literature, accurately and profoundly reflecting the life of Tamilnad 2,000 years ago. Its appeal is universal: it has much to say about living and dying, despair, poverty, love, and the changing nature of existence. The Purananuru is one of the few works of classical India that confront life without the insulation of a philosophical facade; it makes no basic assumptions about karma and the other world; it faces existence as a great and unsolved mystery."
Tamil is one of the great classical literatures and traditions of the world.
The reasons for this are many; let me consider them one by one.
First, Tamil is of considerable antiquity. It predates the literatures of other modern Indian languages by more than a thousand years. Its oldest work, the Tolkappiyam,, contains parts that, judging from the earliest Tamil inscriptions, date back to about 200 BCE. The greatest works of ancient Tamil, the Sangam anthologies and the Pattuppattu, date to the first two centuries of the current era. They are the first great secular body of poetry written in India, predating Kalidasa's works by two hundred years.
Second, Tamil constitutes the only literary tradition indigenous to India that is not derived from Sanskrit. Indeed, its literature arose before the influence of Sanskrit in the South became strong and so is qualitatively different from anything we have in Sanskrit or other Indian languages. It has its own poetic theory, its own grammatical tradition, its own esthetics, and, above all, a large body of literature that is quite unique. It shows a sort of Indian sensibility that is quite different from anything in Sanskrit or other Indian languages, and it contains its own extremely rich and vast intellectual tradition.
Third, the quality of classical Tamil literature is such that it is fit to stand beside the great literatures of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Persian and Arabic. The subtlety and profundity of its works, their varied scope ... and their universality qualify Tamil to stand as one of the great classical traditions and literatures of the world. Everyone knows the Tirukkural, one of the world's greatest works on ethics; but this is merely one of a myriad of major and extremely varied works that comprise the Tamil classical tradition. There is not a facet of human existence that is not explored and illuminated by this great literature.
Finally, Tamil is one of the primary independent sources of modern Indian culture and tradition. I have written extensively on the influence of a Southern tradition on the Sanskrit poetic tradition. But equally important, the great sacred works of Tamil Hinduism, beginning with the Sangam Anthologies, have undergirded the development of modern Hinduism. Their ideas were taken into the Bhagavata Purana and other texts (in Telugu and Kannada as well as Sanskrit), whence they spread all over India. Tamil has its own works that are considered to be as sacred as the Vedas and that are recited alongside Vedic mantras in the great Vaisnava temples of South India (such as Tirupati). And just as Sanskrit is the source of the modern Indo-Aryan languages, classical Tamil is the source language of modern Tamil and Malayalam. As Sanskrit is the most conservative and least changed of the Indo-Aryan languages, Tamil is the most conservative of the Dravidian languages, the touchstone that linguists must consult to understand the nature and development of Dravidian.
In trying to discern why Tamil has not been recognized as a classical language, I can see only a political reason: there is a fear that if Tamil is selected as a classical language, other Indian languages may claim similar status. This is an unnecessary worry. I am well aware of the richness of the modern Indian languages -- I know that they are among the most fecund and productive languages on earth, each having begotten a modern (and often medieval) literature that can stand with any of the major literatures of the world. Yet none of them is a classical language. Like English and the other modern languages of Europe (with the exception of Greek), they rose on preexisting traditions rather late and developed in the second millennium. The fact that Greek is universally recognized as a classical language in Europe does not lead the French or the English to claim classical status for their languages.
To qualify as a classical tradition, a language must fit several criteria: it should be ancient, it should be an independent tradition that arose mostly on its own not as an offshoot of another tradition, and it must have a large and extremely rich body of ancient literature. Unlike the other modern languages of India, Tamil meets each of these requirements. It is extremely old (as old as Latin and older than Arabic); it arose as an entirely independent tradition, with almost no influence from Sanskrit or other languages; and its ancient literature is indescribably vast and rich.
”
Sahitya Akademi (2005), A History of Indian Literature, 500-1399
The medieval period of Indian literary history stretches over a very long time beginning from the seventh century to the close of the eighteenth century. Like all periodizations, it is undoubtedly imprecise, but not altogether arbitrary. The rationale for choosing the seventh century as the take-off point is that a group of devotional poets, known as Alwars and Nayanmars, emerged around this time in South India. They created a new literature which is distinct from the classical traditions, whether of Sanskrit or of Tamil. This is a breakthrough in Indian literary history. ...
The time around 9th and 10th century is significant in the history of Indian languages, it being the time when most of the modern Indian languages, the Indo-Aryan as well as the Dravidian (excluding Tamil which has had a continuous literary history since the beginnings of the Christian era) emerged as distinct speeches, though some of them had their beginnings, at least in embryonic forms several centuries earlier. The origin of Kannada, for example, had been traced back to the Halmidi inscription of the fifth century. Earliest specimens of Telugu in its primitive form have been found in the inscriptions datable to 575 AD.
Tamil: Another Classical Language
The other language operating in the country as a powerful vehicle of literary expression, of course, was Tamil. Like Greek, Tamil has an uninterrupted history; the relation between the modern and ancient Tamil is more or less similar to that of the Attic Greek and modern Greek. Tamil of the sixth century recognized as the middle Tamil by linguists, had undergone significant changes from the ancient or Sangam Tamil in its sound system and grammar and vocabulary.
”
Sahitya Akademi (1992), Modern Indian Literature, an Anthology
Sanskrit has a unique and unmatched place in the Indian linguistic and cultural set-up. It is not only one of the oldest literatures of the world but also the greatest repository of our traditional culture, and the main key to India's heritage. It has been acknowledged as the "symbol of our seniority among the nations of the world." ...
Tamil
The literary languages of India belong to two large families, the Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian. The basic structural difference between them is that the Indo-Aryan languages are inflectional and the Dravidian languages are agglutinative. Scholars like Suniti Kumar Chatterji and Mu. Varadarajan hold that in the histori past proto-Dravidian was spoken throughout India. Even now in North India about a dozen Dravidian languages, like Kolami, Parji, Gondi, and Brahui, are spoken in isolated areas. 'However, the more developed Dravidian languages are four: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam, and they are located in the south. Among them Tamil has a very special place. It has the longest literary tradition, extending to over two thousand years, next only to Sanskrit. While Sanskrit is a classical language of the past, Tamil is both classical and modern, with a continuous, unbroken literary history. The other three languages of the Dravidian group, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, have been considerably influenced by Sanskrit both in phonology and vocabulary, but the influence on Tamil has been much less.'
”
Siegfried Lienhard, History of Classical Poetry (1984)
In the very south of the subcontinent, poetry went its own way. Tamil, one of the still living Dravidian languages, is India's second classical language and the bearer of a great poetic tradition. It has its own norms and is at least as ancient as kavya.
SANSKRIT: Sanskrit is the classical language of India.
TAMIL : Oldest of the Dravidian languages, and one of the earliest spoken languages in the world (500 BC). The Tolkappiyam, meaning "Old Composition," is a work from the Sangam period (1-4 century AD) codifying Tamil grammar, ... A classical language, Tamil is less influenced by Sanskrit than other Dravidian languages. It is widely spoken in Sri Lanka, Fiji, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Kannada (p. 177): A member of the Dravidian family of languages, spoken by c.34 million people as the first language in south-west India, chiefly in the state of Karnataka (where it is the official state language), and by a further 10 million as a second language; also called Kanarese. It is written in the Kannada alphabet, with inscriptions dating from the late 6th century AD, and a literary tradition from the ninth century.
Tamil (p. 333): A member of the Dravidian family of languages, spoken by c. 65 million people, chiefly in India (where c.59 million use it as the official state language of Tamil Nadu), Sri Lanka (c. 3 million), Malaysia, and many parts of the Far East, eastern and southern Africa, and the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is written in the Tamil alphabet, found in inscriptions dating from the 3rd century BD, with a literature tradition from the 1st century AD, thus (apart from Sanskrit) providing the oldest literature in India.
