Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that
stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world
languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a
mother tongue for so many speakers. David Shulman presents a
comprehensive cultural history of Tamil-language, literature, and
civilization-emphasizing how Tamil speakers and poets have
understood the unique features of their language over its long
history. Impetuous, musical, whimsical, in constant flux, Tamil is
a living entity, and this is its biography. Two stories animate
Shulman's narrative. The first concerns the evolution of Tamil's
distinctive modes of speaking, thinking, and singing. The second
describes Tamil's major expressive themes, the stunning poems of
love and war known as Sangam poetry, and Tamil's influence as a
shaping force within Hinduism. Shulman tracks Tamil from its
earliest traces at the end of the first millennium BCE through the
classical period, 850 to 1200 CE, when Tamil-speaking rulers held
sway over southern India, and into late-medieval and modern times,
including the deeply contentious politics that overshadow Tamil
today. Tamil is more than a language, Shulman says. It is a body of
knowledge, much of it intrinsic to an ancient culture and
sensibility. "Tamil" can mean both "knowing how to love"-in the
manner of classical love poetry-and "being a civilized person." It
is thus a kind of grammar, not merely of the language in its spoken
and written forms but of the creative potential of its speakers.
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