(Download) "Kavya in South India: Old Tamil Cankam Poetry (Book Review)" by The Journal of the American Oriental Society # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Kavya in South India: Old Tamil Cankam Poetry (Book Review)
- Author : The Journal of the American Oriental Society
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 188 KB
Description
Kavya in South India: Old Tamil Cankam Poetry. By HERMAN TIEKEN. Groningen: EGBERT FORSTEN, 2001. Pp. 270. One of the most difficult issues in dealing with much of premodern Indian literature is chronology. Unless we are lucky enough to have epigraphic confirmation, dating often involves considerable detective work, putting together different types of circumstantial evidence and reaching a generally accepted conclusion. We do not have firm dates even for such seminal figures as Asvaghosa, Kalidasa, and Kampan. With regard to the old Sangam literature in Tamil, we are similarly lacking in firm dates--though there has been a great deal of evidence adduced to suggest strongly that the poems were composed between the first and third centuries A.D. In Kavya in South India: Old Tamil Cankam Poetry, Herman Tieken argues that these dates are incorrect, and that the corpus of Sangam literature rather belongs to the ninth or tenth century A.D., when it was written by a poet (or poets) in the Pandyan kingdom who wished to create a classical Tamil tradition to rival that of Sanskrit. The writer(s) of this literature, he argues, used old names and old history to accomplish their deception, which was extraordinarily successful. He further argues that the poems have Prakrit counterparts, and that they can actually belong to genres of Prakrit literature. In this way, he suggests that almost everything that has been written about this literature is mistaken. It is not original, he claims, but a derivative of northern literatures. And it is quite late, so that it cannot be used to make generalizations about early history, culture, or even language. He also spends some time discussing the esthetic implications of the akam (interior or love) poems, and claims they constitute a condescending and often sarcastic urban and sophisticated take on village life.
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