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Margherita Trento et al., "For the Love of Tamil: Essays in Honor of E. Annamalai" (UnionPress, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Hello and welcome back to the New Books and in your religions podcast, a podcast channel here on the New Books Network. I am your host, Dr. Raj Balkaran. But more importantly, I have the pleasure of welcoming to the podcast today Margarita Trento and Costas Nakasis. They are two of the four editors. The other two in absentia are N. Govindarajan and Sasha Ed Ling. All four of these editors participated in a labor of love called for the Love of Tamil Essays in honor of E and the Malang. So welcome both to the podcast.
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A
Thanks for having us, Raj.
- [00:44]
C
Thank you for having us. And hello, everyone.
- [00:48]
B
Yes, yes, yes. So this book happens to be available open access at the click of a button in the podcast notes, but let's learn a little bit about its genesis and sort of its purposes as a fetch shift. And, you know, how did this come into being, this book?
- [01:05]
C
From what I know, after Professor Anomaly retired from the University of Chicago, which was only the last one of his many retirements, because he was previously at Yale University and he was previously in Mysore, there had been some talks of actually preparing a book in his honor. And perhaps Costas knows a little bit better about those initial phases. But I think this specific project somehow was really initiated towards the end of 2023 by Ngovinderajan, who wrote to me and said, professor Anamalai is soon to harvest. Well, first we were talking about his 87th, afterwards, his 88th birthday. But anyway, the idea was actually to celebrate him at some point as time was running. So that's how it all started for me. And then from then on, we were actually working quite intensely and running. But perhaps Costas remembers some previous.
- [02:19]
A
Yeah, I would just add to that. In Namalai was teaching as a Tamil professor and a linguist at the University of Chicago, which is also where he had gotten his PhD many years before and actually started there when he was doing his PhD also as a language teacher and has had a quite amazing career across many institutions, like Margarita was saying. And, and, and so we thought it would be completely fitting to kind of celebrate that and bring together many of his colleagues, but also students especially, who all were very enthusiastic about showing their affection and respect for him and his career and the amount of time that he's put into the scholarship and the teaching and the advising surrounding all things related to the Tamil language. I think the first concrete form that it took, though, was also a conference that you put together in Naples, right. Which was kind of one of the iterations, also the kind of the Stepping stones that led to the volume.
- [03:31]
C
Indeed, I add to the many activities of Professor Anamalai. I should also add that he has been active in reading groups even after retiring and during his years in Chicago and elsewhere, on top of his regular working hours, on top of regular advising, he has also been reading with people all over the world, all sorts of things, all sorts of texts in Tamil. So there was a quite larger community. And yes, in Naples last year, in May, we actually held the two weeks workshop during which we were reading several different texts connected to the tradition of Tamil Shaivism. And Annamalai came mostly to participate and give his advice and actually read with us. And as a surprise, at the end of this week, we actually hosted a little conference in which mostly his students actually talked about their experience about studying with him. And we presented some of the papers then were part of the book.
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B
Fascinating. I feel like there should be some article or blog post somewhere called the Many Lives of E Anomaly or something like that.
- [04:50]
C
Probably somewhere.
- [04:52]
B
Yeah. So a number of directions we could take this in. There are so many really rich and varied and interesting contributions, but I'd like to stay a little bit at the high level and talk about sort of what unites the volume with respect to Tamil, or maybe for our listeners, you know, there are, you know, there are many. Tamil holds a unique place among Indic languages. I mean, I think they all do in their own way. And I don't mean necessarily the grammar, but there are some interests and intrigues in terms of Tamil and the Tamil landscape. I'm sure that you have. You have learned both in plowing the field, so to speak, and also in putting together this volume. Could you comment a little bit about sort of Tamil, the love of Tamil in general and scholarly sense?
- [05:39]
C
My first reaction to this would be that Tamil is quite unique in being both a classical language and the spoken language. So it actually allows. I mean, there is a huge variety of ways in which we can approach Tamil, study Tamil, work with Tamil. There are researchers of classical literature, philologists, people who study early Tamil, Brahmin inscriptions, a few letters carved on rocks, and Buddhist beds in the mountains surrounding Madurai. And then there is the contemporary language. There are the dialects, the literature, the cinema, and everything and everything in between. So first of all, compared to other Indian languages, it has this vastness. I would say it is just one of the ways in which Tamil is special. Then much of it's also been said there is also a very emotional attachment to the language which perhaps has parallels in other Indian languages. But I I would say that the history of the love for Tamil is. Is itself something it. There is this, the beautiful book by Sumathi Ramaswamy that kind of talked about its 19th century sort of incarnation, the moment in which reformers, politicians, activists were thinking about Tamil, what is Tamil? And perhaps also this self reflexivity is something that is very much part of the language. I don't know what you think about that, Costas.
- [07:28]
A
Yeah, just building on that. And it also reflects interesting things about Anomaly Serzot's own career. I mean, like Margaret was saying, because it's a spoken language that. Where the speakers, certainly since the 20th century, but much before, have maintained an active engagement with the very long history of the language. And so in that way it's not unique. But one special thing is that it's not just that there's a kind of a continuity that the linguist can draw between what's spoken today and what was spoken thousands of years ago, but that Tamil speakers themselves understand that their language has that kind of historical depth. And you know, you see that in the way in which Sangam literature informs contemporary song lyrics, how political oratory draws on tropes from medieval Tamil. And so that depth is palpably close to its own speakers. And that has to do with the political history of the language, like Margarita was saying, in which that cultural depth became a kind of an emblem and also something to politically organize around. And that linked. And so one of the things that that I think did was to make it apparent to Tamil speakers that not only was the. Is the language have a kind of a cultural and historical depth, but also to the intelligentsia that there were also indigenous ways of understanding the language internal to its own history. And I think that that's something that gets replicated in fact in the scholarship as well, for various reasons. But I also think it has to do with the political history of wow, this idea, that kind of the specialness of the Tamil language community, where there's long been an attempt to actually think about the history of Tamil through its own categories. And those categories are not the same as some of the kind of the Western categories that have been drawn to think about the language. And it's an expansive understanding of the language that's not just about grammar or semantics, but it's also about poetics. It's also about other forms of art. And so between the kind of the political wedding of the language to other kinds of media, like theater and Cinema in the 1950s, but also to the attempt to use indigenous categories to understand the language that Tamil is something that doesn't just signify a language in the narrow sense, but has kind of far reaching tendrils into all sorts of aspects of life that we don't necessarily think of narrowly in terms of language. And so I think that's also reflected in Anomaly's own career as a linguist trained in the generative tradition and kind of the Western Chomsky tradition of the time. But as someone who also had a deep background in literature and also in the Tamil, the Tamil grammatical tradition, which again includes things like poetics and all sorts of things, and in his own teaching and in the literature that I mean, and in the scholarship that he helped promote. You know, and this is the reason I say this is because it's reflected in the volume, is that it's quite wide ranging. I mean, you look at the table of contents, it starts from literature and then moves into grammar, but then also includes sociolinguistic studies of various sorts, historical studies into theater, into cinema. And so in that sense Tamil is also special. And as we tried to capture this volume by encompassing not just the language but also the culture, the society, the history, the arts. And again, it's not unique to Tamil, but there's something special about how it's configured.
- [11:20]
C
I would say if I can add something to this, as I was listening to you speaking, there is something about, as you said, this depth and this long history of the language. There is something also about which is I find quite, perhaps not unique, but quite striking about Tamil and writing and the presence of the very form of the language in the space. As you perhaps know, more than half of the 70,000 and plus inscriptions that are found in India are in Tamil or are in South India. That means that the space is really at least the archaeological space, the historical space, mostly temples, but also other sort of structures are covered with Tamil Alphabet. And it's also one of the places, one place with an extremely rich manuscript culture. There are thousands and thousands of manuscripts on palm leaf, on paper that still emerge. Every family has, many families have Stillmans manuscripts. They keep being donated to libraries and archives. So there is also something about how the language visually occupies such a huge role. Maybe also. I'm saying it because of where I'm located. I'm talking from Pondicherry and I am actually working in an institute where we have a big archive where we work with epigraphy as well. There is an article on epigraphy in our volume two. But as of late, I think very often from Inter Milenado we hear Tamil and we see it all the time. It is quite a strong experience, I feel.
- [13:17]
B
Yeah. Thank you both for the rich response on the. You know, we're not short selling any of the fine, ancient, rich, diverse languages of South Asia, but there is a certain unique gravitas with Tamil that I think that's legible whether or not one is within Tamil studies by virtue of its dual citizenship as a classical language and a fiercely contemporary language by virtue of its vast geographic sweep. And so know, languages are all mindsets and they're all cultures in and of their own. But it seems so acutely the case that Tamil is a world, it is a cultural world, you know, above and beyond access to such a wide array of texts. Its tendrils reach into so many crevices of culture as evinced by the very, very wide range of. Of topics and the volume. But there really is no. I mean the wide range of the volume is a brilliant reflection of the wide ranging applications and iterations and usages of Tamil. So I think that's an extraordinary feature that's certainly worth mentioning right off the top. I sort of had a question, more of a comparative question, but it may not land insofar as I suppose you'd have to have training in other Indic literary cultures. But one question that comes to mind is what's transmissible, methodologically or otherwise, what do you feel that you've learned or is being learned in Tamil studies that may well be very useful for other sort of Indic literary scholarship. Now that presupposes perhaps some knowledge that you may or may not possess. And maybe we have to pivot this question, but I thought I'd ask what do you think might be applicable to other South Asianists?
- [15:26]
C
Well, one answer that as a student of Tamil literature who has read a lot of it with Anavalayi himself, and I think as it emerges also from the volume, it is interesting to think about Tamil in relationships with other languages precisely because of its long history. The language really changed, adapted, absorbed elements from the rich constellation of other languages with which it interacted. Sanskrit and that is a long story. But Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Urdu and all the languages which were spoken at different times and in different context in the region that is the Tamil South. There are a few articles actually in the volume that speak directly to this. Taliyah Ariaf works on this Mohini Mohini Villasa Kuravanji, which is a genre which was particularly important at the Maratha court in tanjavur in the 18th century. And it is a genre which even Though it is drawn from the Tamil tradition, these are ballads about fortune tellers. It's at this point becomes actually multilingual. So it is in Sanskrit, it is in Tamil, and then with a little bit of Telugu, a little bit of Marathi. So we see here in one literary piece precisely these relationships in play. And we see things like Sanskrit verses following Tamil mitre and Tamil poetry adopting Sanskrit figures of speech and so on and so forth. And in fact, this question of the interaction of Tamil with other languages, which I think is also. I mean, it's also a factor of this, of this long history, emerges throughout the volume. We have Sanskrit and Tamil, we have Tamil and Sanskrit, we have Tamil and Sinhala. And this is also something that I like about the book, that it actually has several articles on Tamil in Sri Lanka or Sri Lankan Tamil, Sri Lankan authors of Tamil. And it really shows how, in fact, this space and these authors were integrating what we are in this universe of Tamil, being it a language, a culture, sort of a region with blood boundaries, complex history, but nevertheless, I would say a region. And there also the tension and relationship between Sanskrit and Sinhala, for instance, is in the article by Justin Henry, is another very, very interesting avenue for thinking about the language. So thinking the language in relationship with other languages is something that I think we are all more and more trying to do.
- [18:46]
A
Yeah. Just to add to that, I mean, it's a good question that this question of where about specificity and generality. And, you know, one thing I. I've noticed other people have pointed out as well is that it's not always that different kinds of language communities are radically different from others, but there are ways in which the scholarship around different kinds of language communities, by amplifying certain kinds of differences or things that are predominant in one place or another, give rise to different kinds of points of view on the general or on the universal. So I'm just thinking I'm trained as an anthropologist, and if you look at Africanist anthropology, the kinds of questions that were concerned that body of scholarship in general are slightly different from those that have concerned South Asianists and Melanesianists, for example. And I think that there's something about that, that the study of different kinds of languages and cultures can produce a kind of scholarship that itself has its own interesting insights. And I think the one that Margarita is pointing at, which is a really important one, is multilingualism. And trying to think about how Tamil provides a perspective on multilingualism that is different from the other perspectives that we often see in scholarship. And it's not because the way in which multilingualism works in Tamil Nadu over however long is necessarily different from other places, but that somehow the history of the scholarship, but looking at it, have brought out different things. And I think in the South Asian context, it's as Margarita was saying, the unique position of Tamil vis a vis Sanskrit as being slightly different than perhaps other places, and also its relationship to English as well, and, and later how that gets ramified in its relationship to Hindi and the like. So it's not that Tamil is exceptional in that there's a preference for speaking Tamil versus other languages or its relationship to English as a language of mobility, but at the same time, the way in which that appears in Tamil Nadu has a kind of a Clari that has made the scholarship a little bit different and that I think that other people can learn from. But that's, you know, if you take a longer view or not longer view, take a kind of a broader view of other domains in which Tamil studies has contributed. I mean, it's striking, for example, that Louis Dumont's work first is situated in South India and it's thinking about Dravidian kinship as a different way of thinking about kinship. Now, Dravidian kinship is not what so called Dravidian kinship systems are not unique to South India. And yet at the same time a certain kind of scholarship think about alliance comes out of this region. And similarly think about language politics. I mean, Tamil Nadu is not the only place that's had language politics. I mean, certainly in Andhra Pradesh, as Lisa Mitchell's written about. But somehow the intensity of language politics made it an interesting set of interventions by people like Sumatra Ramaswamy, Bernard Bait, Ershik and a number of scholars where there's a kind of a. It puts it on the table, this connection between devotion and language that I think is unique. And similarly, the question around cinema and politics is another one. I mean, the relationship between cinema and politics is not unique to Tamil nad and yet there's something about that historical configuration that produced a form of scholarship that now we can learn about. I'm thinking about cinema and politics in other places. And so there's something, you know, there are these different modes, aspects of Tamil language and culture that I think are generalizable, but they're generalizable from the specificities of the Tamil case. And you know, there are more things that I think we could probably point to that are like this. But, you know, I mean, one that pops into my mind, you know, the study of caste is another place where the unique conflict configurations of caste in this region afford interesting insights that are maybe generalizable. So, I mean, those were just some kind of beginning thoughts on that. But I think every region has this and the strength of a scholarship is that it's able to draw on its particularities to then speak to questions of much wider significance. And Tom was given a lot in that one.
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D
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- [23:31]
C
if I can add to that and tie it up with what we were saying before about reflexivity is that I think this long, long history we're talking about also actually means that there has been reflections within the Tamil traditions about some of these issues that we have just mentioned. So, I mean, Tamil scholars have thought about in the 16, in the 17, in the 18th century, they have thought about the relationship of their language with Sanskrit. They have written grammars about it, trying making sense of how it is. How are these two languages related? How do their respective grammars work? They have struggled with question of social hierarchy and caste at different points, again trying to make sense of it, writing treatises in reaction with what was written in Sanskrit, dharma, literature and so on and so forth. So I feel like maybe this is just a more general reflection of what is, I mean, about being steeped in some tradition and in some language and in this case is Tamil, to think through some of these issues. There is a conversation with what's going on today in the sense of the scholarship, but that also allows us actually to have a little bit of a deeper conversation with all the moments in history when these questions were asked.
- [25:09]
B
Yeah, thank you. Thank you both for so seriously engaging that sweet spot between the contours of the specific, whatever specific data we're looking at and that which might be generalizable, if not more on the universalizable end of the spectrum. I think that was brilliant the way you did that. Just a couple, you know, a couple naive questions. One is, you know, you touched in passing on sort of some political self consciousness in Tamil nest. Tamil dumb, you know, then would you. Can you comment on acts of translation, acts of editing, acts of standardization? Are these political acts?
- [26:04]
C
Oh, well, indeed, as you probably noticed, the volume is in transliteration and that is Also, somehow was a choice, and it is a choice that we all make. And it is political in as much as it is. It has a long history. So why should we transliterate, how should we transliterate and for whom? What are the rules we follow and what is the public we're aiming for? Because in transliterating long Tamil passages, as we do sometimes in the book, we are making them legible for an international audience that will be able to follow them more or less, but not forcibly intelligible for a Tamil audience, even not for an English speaking Tamil audience, because it is after all, quite a strange experience to read our own language in another Alphabet. I have this experience all the time when I'm trying to read novels and Tamils and the words on which I stumble all the time are actually transliterations of English words that it takes me ages. I'm like, okay, this is going to be English, let me pronounce it and see what it is. So, yes, there is a number of little choices like that. Transliteration is one that I often think about because it has wide implication. And beyond editing a book, it's also actually a key question in editing in general. I, I wouldn't call myself a pure philologist, but because of my work, I do happen to edit a lot of text. I do critical edition, I do diplomatic editions, and very often because these days we do them online. The English Alphabet, of course, with diacritics to represent all the sounds of Tamil is the easiest way to go for actually digital editing. But again, that comes with its own set of questions. But I guess there is also the whole question of discipline. And on this, I mean, as an historian and a philologist, we are very concerned with transliteration and with systems, but the systems we use are very often quite different from how, for instance, anthropologists have transliterated or transcribed Tamil historically. So that is also some of an ongoing conversation that sometimes borders on incommunicability.
- [29:01]
A
Yeah, I mean, they're definitely political questions, partly because we have no choice but to transliterate in one way or another or translate or not translate. I think one interesting thing is, you know, the, the perception of the language of Tamil politics is that there's a kind of a chauvinism around the language, you know, is famous for its purism. I'm, I'm just thinking about the other side of it, just the larger politics of, of translation. At the same time, though, I always felt, and I don't know if this reflects your experience too, Margarita, that despite a certain kind of rhetoric around the language there. I find actually that Tamil language politics is quite open and quite in a certain sense kind of radically open and interested to be, you know, writers are interested to be read on an international stage. And they're also, if you look, there's all sorts of things constantly being translated into Tamil. And you know, the attitude towards multilingualism has never been in the region that people should only be speaking Tamil. And so the politics is quite, it's interestingly, it's different than I think that it maybe it looks like from the outside the call for purism was as much a call for recognition at a kind of a global and national stage. And you know, so there's a vibrant literature in the Tamil language and there's a vibrant literature about Tamil in the English language that's written both by Tamils and non Tamils. And works that have written in other languages are constantly being translated into Tamil and vice versa. And so I think what's interesting is thinking about translation as a process of openness reveals that Tamil language politics, despite being kind of characterized as provincial in a certain way, is actually from another perspective a certain kind of embodiment of a kind of a cosmopolitanism. And that's reflected again I think, in this volume. It's also reflected in the career of someone like Anomaly who has taught and traveled from India to the United States, to Germany to Japan to Singapore, all for the love of the language, but not in any kind of insular way, but as a way to try to broaden the conversation as widely as possible. And I actually find that to be. It's peculiar to him I think as a person in the sense that he's a quite cosmopolitan thinker and a quite open minded person. But I actually think it reflects a broader cultural milieu of the state and of the region.
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C
I had a discussion along these lines with a friend last week. We went to the Chennai Book Fair and he's, he's a Sanskrit who came to Pondicherry to study Sanskrit for a few months. I brought him along and he was, I mean he can let's say, read the titles in Tamil. And what actually struck him at the Chennai Book Fair was the amount of titles translated. So actually there was in Tamil but a rich, say global literature which was presented to, to the people, to the people attending the fair, but actually also a very, very rich literature in Tamil itself. Contemporary literature, let's say the, the of the 20th century but also many, many reprints of classical literature. So actually on the table of the same publisher, Tiru Kural a novel from the 20th century and a translation from German or English would actually sit one next to another. And I think that is somehow a nice image for what you were just saying.
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B
Beautiful. So for the love of Tamil. Whose love?
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C
Well, Animalized Love first of all, I think this title came quite naturally and I think there is really. Having worked with, lived a non animal life for many years, there is really a deep respect and admiration for the way he. For his relationship with the language which is his own language and something which is very dear to him and very close to him. But he also has been able throughout his career to observe as an object of study, as an object of curiosity. And so yeah, first of all, I would say that is Animalized Love which is really an example of how to. How to respect, how to study, how to be true to something we love. Because there is, there is some, some the critical mind that Anomaly has applied to the study of, of the language like this is. Has been perhaps like the utmost expression of this love. But then there is, I guess all of his students love for him and for the language. For the language through him. That certainly happened to me. I arrived in Chicago. I mean I met Anamala at the University of Chicago. I was his student for many, many years. And I think I arrived and I thought that I wanted to study Tamil because I needed it to do some research project that I was very much excited at the point, at that point and after a few years with Anomaly, well, my research project still was very interesting to me but actually the center of gravity of what excited me, what I was curious about somehow moved towards this galaxy which is Tamil.
- [35:23]
B
That's beautiful. So maybe we'll close shortly. Let's see. I have three questions, three naive questions on my list here. But maybe I'll end with something a little more traditional. So who's the book for? Who might most benefit from looking at this book?
- [35:43]
A
Good question. I think the book has a different number of different audiences. I think primarily for scholars of Tamils is the most obvious of them. But because of the diversity I think of topics, there are aspects of the book that would be of interest to many different kinds of. First of all, many different kinds of scholars and many different kinds of scholars of Tamil from those who are thinking about literature to those who are thinking about linguistics, to those who are thinking about media and also to those things about language politics. And I think in any one of those areas there'll be, you know, I think people who are not working on Tamil will also also be interested in what's in the book? One thing to say too is that not all of the essays are about Tamil. You know, there's an essay by Prabhal Dasgupta that's about Bangla and elements of Bangla grammar that actually show interesting resonances with Tamil. There's also an article about the so called tribal Panias and the Nilgiris who are Dravidian speaking language group. But it's not about Tamil per se. And so I think they're both kind of for the scholars, they're those kinds of scholars of Tamil scholars of topics that are touched on by the volume. And then I would also say that for people who are interested in literature and maybe are not scholars, there be interesting insights to texts that are widely read in Tamil Nadu today by many different kinds of people, like the Tirukural for example, as well as articles that have brought out different kinds of elements of the, of the, of, of literature that haven't been as much focused on. So for example, Govinda Rajan has a, has a piece on poems by a Tamil Dalit woman. So I think that people with wide varieties, both who are scholars but also non scholars, may find things of interest to them. It's not a page turning pulp fiction either though. So I think the reader should be prepared to push up their sleeves and get ready for hard thinking.
- [38:10]
B
Reading with a pencil?
- [38:11]
A
Yes, with a pencil. Bring your pencil or your virtual pencil to the PDF lead, you're able to download Open Access and then just the last thing to say is, you know, especially the stuff on linguistics will be of general interest to linguists, even if they're not Tamils, you know, working on Tamil insofar as, you know, it's a, you know, there are many of the disciplines that are touched on are comparative disciplines like history, linguistics and the like.
- [38:38]
B
Fantastic. So thank you very much both for appearing on the podcast tonight.
- [38:44]
A
Thank you, Raj, thank you.
- [38:45]
C
It was a pleasure.
- [38:47]
B
Yes, for those listening, we have been speaking with two of the four editors of this brand new open access volume, Margaret of Trento and Costa Nacas, who have helped prepare this labor of love for the love of Tamil essays in the honor of a fascinating, far reaching, productive, fairly passionate figure who spent some six decades bridging everything from grammatical description to sociolinguistic policy. You know, so have a look at the link in your podcast notes. The book is available open access and skim through some of the titles. There's an excellent chance there's something in here that will relate to what you're working on. Or what you're currently thinking about until next time. Well, keep listening. Keep safe thinking. Keep contemplating the richness of Tamil and all that it holds. Take care.
- [40:00]
A
Of.