The Oldest Living Language in the World

A review of Tamil: A Biography, David Shulman, Harvard University Press, 2016.

The central character in Tamil: A Biography is not a person but a language, spoken today by more than eighty million people in south India, Sri Lanka, and dispersed communities in Oceania, South-East Asia, the Indian Ocean, South Africa, the Caribbean islands, North America, and Western Europe. Tamil is classified by linguists as a Dravidian language, distinct from the Indo-European family and closely related to other south Indian languages such as Malayalam (the language of Kerala), Telugu (spoken in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), and Kannada (the language of Karnataka). It is one of the most ancient living languages in the world: its existence can be traced back to the third century BCE, though its roots go back much farther into antiquity.

One of the first things students learn about Tamil is that it is a diglossic language: the written form is different from what is pronounced orally. David Shulman prefers the term polyglossia, or even hyperglossia, to highlight the complexity of the forms taken by written and oral language, its openness to neighboring languages—Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada should rather be seen historically as forming a continuum of spoken dialects—, and its entanglement with Sanskrit in literary expressions or religious discourse. For poets, Sanskrit and Tamil are like “a fine necklace strung with coral and pearls”—they cannot be disentangled.

A second feature of the Tamil language is its ancienty. Tamil claims to be the oldest language in the world and the only one to be still in existence. Here the reader should pause and think: are we speaking of the same language? For David Shulman, “the language, which we continue to call ‘Tamil,’ has enriched itself so thoroughly with new resources that it bears little resemblance to the language of say, Kamban [the great Indian poet from the Chola period] or Cekkilār [a Chola saint from the 12th century CE]” (p. 264). And yet some Sangam poems read like they were written only yesterday. Their freshness and accessibility are thoroughly modern. For Shulman, “Tamil is both the oldest of languages and eternally young” (p.296).

A third characteristic of Tamil is its musicality. Tamil: A Biography is not a language textbook; it won’t teach you how to speak Tamil. But the author wants to give his readers “at least some sense of what it feels like to live inside this language” (p.14). Tamil language has twelve vowel sounds and multiple consonants that are hard for an untrained ear to distinguish. Its phonology is characterized by multiple R-like sounds and consonants made by curling the tongue backward against the palate. It is among the most rapidly spoken of human languages. This musicality works like magic: for Shulman, “Tamil has never lost, at least to this day, the innate mantic potency of the spoken syllable” (p. 90).

Tamil is the fount of a literary tradition that finds its origin in Sangam poetry, named after the three mythic Sangam academies of high antiquity in which much of this early literary activity originated. These antique poems, a corpus consisting of eight anthologies and ten larger poetic narratives—to which a later set of Eighteen Minor Works including the Tirukkuṟaḷ is often added—, were collected at the time of the Pallava dynasty ruling from Kancipuram (not far from today’s Chennai) and the Pandya dynasty centered on Madurai in the far south, the later seeing themselves as the font of Tamil classical civilization. This tradition was further developed during the Chola imperial period, from the latter half of the 9th century till the beginning of the 13th century, during which Tamil became a transregional language spoken as far afield as Burma, Thailand, Sumatra, and even southern China.

Another high point for Tamil literature is bhakti poetry, the devotional poems written in relation to specific creeds and temples. These poems are still familiar to modern religious believers: “Anyone who visits a Tamil temple is likely to hear a pilgrim gently singing these very poems as he or she comes within sight of the image of a god or goddess” (p. 120). Buddhists, Jains, and later on, Muslims, developed their own poetic traditions alongside worshipers of Shiva, Vishnu, and Murugan.

Later periods were no less rich in literary productions: the creative experimentations from the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century; the courtly and popular cultures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the expressive power and stylistic range of nineteenth-century Tamil prose; and the birth of modernity, which owes as much to endogenous developments as to British colonialism.

Here are some common themes that run through this book.

1/ Tamil is more than a language. It is “an extraordinarily long-lived, heterogeneous, and richly elaborated culture or series of cultures” (p.3). It is a way of life. It is also a deity or a goddess. “God… prefers to speak in Tamil” (p.313). “I think of Tamil as a living being—impetuous, sensitive, passionate” (p.3). “Every time a Tamil speaker opens her mouth, it is the honeyed Goddess who emerges in audible presence” (p. 241).

2/ There is more to classic Tamil literature than Sangam poetry. Editing, translating, and commenting Sangam poems has become a cottage industry in academia. But Shulman’s own preference goes to Tamil bhakti poems, “arguably the single most powerful contribution of Tamil south India to pan-Indian civilization” (p. 115). And although his book barely covers the past two centuries, Tamil literature is very much alive today, with authors as talented as S.Ramakrishnan, Perumal Murugan, Rajathi Salma, and Charu Nivedita.

3/ Tamil grammar is the continuation of poetics by other means. We think of grammarians as obscure scholars writing boring books. For Tamils, Agastya, the first grammarian and the seventh of the great Vedic sages, is a cultural hero and his book, the grammar known as Akattiyam (now lost except for a few stray verses), is a foundational text. The oldest surviving grammar, the Tolkāppiyam, is as much about poetry and life as it is about language and rules.

4/ The themes that define Tamil literature also define Tamil identity. Classical poetry is divided between love poetry (akam) and war poems (puṟam), the first dealing with the inner world of the individual, while the second deals with the outer world of society. “Both domains, the outer and the inner, continually resonate with each other” (p. 49). Tamil characters are a mix of akam and puṟam.

5/ There is so much that we don’t know. There is so much that I don’t know. Many Tamil texts have been lost forever, and some palm-leaf manuscripts have not yet been edited. David Shulman makes great efforts to give dates or periods for the most ancient texts, and yet the internal chronology of this literature is still far from settled. He doesn’t prioritize one type of literature over the other, and gives equal standing to the main periods of classic Tamil texts. And yet he had to make choices, and prefers in-depth analysis of particular works over an extensive survey.

Reading Tamil: A Biography strengthened my resolve, if not to learn Tamil (when would I find the time?), then at least to get acquainted with translations of the main works of the literary canon.