Tamil Studies Conference 2006

Challenge of Spoken Language to the Creative Writers in Modern Tamil

2006-06-02T21:20:00.000-04:00

Challenge of Spoken Language to the Creative Writers in Modern Tamil
E. Annamalai, Yale University

If literature is an expression of experience and perception of life in an elegant and imaginative language, the problem of language in literature could be narrated from diffrent perspectives. One is the adequacy of language to express experience and perception as they are. This is a philosophical question. The experiential dimension of this question is the individual author’s struggle to get the right expression. C. Mani (1996) captures this struggle thus in his poem iTaiyiiTu ‘Interruption’

Everything I want to say
Does not shape into words.
So much
deviation;
So much
disappointment

of missing targets.
When you draw up a horse
You may not get a
horse;
What comes up might be an ass;
Or it could be a hybrid of
both.
-----------------------------------
-----------------------------------

This paper is not about this struggle in the creative process of converting an abstraction into concrete. The second perspective of the problem is about making the ordinary language into an elegant one, making the ephemera, common place language into a memorable and unique one. Debates about style belong here, but they are not the subject of this paper either. The third perspective of the problem of language discussed in the paper is one of authenticity of language.
Tamil fiction begins to show signs of a language of its own from Pudumaippittan (1906-1948) distinguishing it from the language of story telling in public discourses (kataakalaTceepam), whose features can be seen in many of the early novels in Tamil and from the language of story telling to children by endearing adult, who consider themselves to have responsibility for the children’s moral development (paaTTi katai), whose features can be seen even in some contemporary short stories. That it is not a small matter that Tamil fiction has come to have a language of its own will become clear when it is realized that science writing in Tamil has not developed its own language. The reasons are cultural-political, not linguistic.

When the Tamil language entered the public sphere of the modern period (in the sense of Habermas as defined by other scholars (Crosslay, Nick and Roberts, John M (eds.) 2004) peopled by new consumers of language in the 19th century, it faced the need for a language suitable for that sphere, be it public speech or public literature. The public intellectuals of the Tamil community chose, for reasons of history and cultural politics, to use a language that is prose in its texture and poetry in its language. This led to diglossia whereby differences in the nature of language were not tied to genres such as poetry versus newspapers, but to communicative situations such as one to many versus one to one. Poetry, fiction, platform speech, newspapers and such others, which have the communicative situation of distance between the producer of the language and its receiver and of being unidirectional, chose a variety of Tamil that was closer to earlier poetic compositions rather than to contemporary speech. The language of speech remained in the private sphere. This diglossia was perpetuated by schooling through the control of schools by those public intellectuals, who were a privy to the formal variety of Tamil used to write poetry and to the political and cultural reward this language through education offered in the pre-modern Tamil nation.

The language of fiction began to change towards the language of the private sphere with the help of the new public media like popular magazines, which had relatively more open access to the producers of language. The use of dialects, as in the classical Sanskrit dramatic tradition of using linguistic make-ups, like the dress and other make-ups, to indicate the low social standing of characters, could be found in the first novels themselves (Meenakshisundran 1972, Sethu Pillai 1976). They mark the upward mobility of characters from low social status and from illiteracy by their switching to the formal language (Muttiah 1980). The change to the use of spoken Tamil by the protagonists themselves in fiction was a later development. It was a concession given to the language of the private sphere to be used in the conversational part of the story, where the characters move the story, while keeping the formal variety of Tamil, which is written, to the narrative part of the fiction, where the author moves the story. Diglossia of the language was carried to make diglossic fiction. The space for the language of the private sphere in fiction slowly expands into special types of fiction like stream of consciousness novels and autobiographical novels, where the narration becomes reflexive conversation and the separation between them becomes porous (Shanmugam Pillai 1978, 1981, Shenbagam 1971). Finally, the language of the private sphere becomes the language of the narrative of the author who is not a character of the fiction. The functional differentiation between narration, the site of author’s voice and conversation, the site of characters’ voice is not, however, obliterated. Syntactic devices, common in a formal language, such as complex strings of subordinate clauses, less deletions to have meanings less context dependent etc are used in the language of narration written with the spelling of the language of speech (Annamalai 2004). This ultimate expansion of the domains of use of the language of private sphere in fiction is also triggered by the ideological shift in literature from author-centric fiction to character-centric fiction by the notion of withdrawal of the author from the story. A parallel to this shift in Tamil drama and movies is the co-occurring shift of the formal variety of Tamil to the informal with the change in choreography from addressing the audience to speaking with co-acting characters. The complex details of the story of shifting language in Tamil fiction deserve a separate treatment.

With the idea of the centrality of characters in fiction comes the idea of authenticity of the language they speak, that is, the language the author uses in the speech of the characters. The spoken language is the center piece of this authenticity. Linguistic authenticity has two sides: formal and cognitive. On the formal side is the use of words in phonological shape and morphological structure and of sentences combining words, as in speech. Most writers of fiction now use Tamil as it is spoken in informal situations when the characters converse with each other. The spoken language has contours reflecting the space, regional or social, the characters occupy in life. These contours at phonological, morphological, lexical levels in large measure and in syntactic and semantic levels in a small measure, which linguists call dialects, are used in fiction to identify characters, as a means of their characterization, with particular social groups (caste and class, but not gender) and / or particular geographical areas. The fictional works are labeled by these contours displayed with names like konku novel, dalit novel etc. They make isomorphic the life experience they describe and the language they use to describe it. It is rare to find now a fictional work that is embedded in a region or a social group or groups to use in conversation spoken forms that are unmarked for these variables and could be called standard spoken forms. This is natural, and so will be high in authenticity, because it is the language variety of a region or a social group that expresses its life experience pristinely. As an observer of the ecology of language Muhlhausler (1995) claims that ‘’life in a particular human environment is dependent on people’s ability to talk about it’’ (p.155) and that the living environment is registered in the language people speak as cultural ‘’memory’’ (p.156). The spatial and social environment is registered in the dialects.

The standard spoken forms in conversation are reserved for characters in situations that transcend specific regions and social groups, not to primary characters from any region or social group, as done in the earlier works. Though it is logically and linguistically possible to have exchanges between characters of a particular region and social group in standard spoken language, it is probably taken by writers to be less authentic, which probably accounts for its rarity in recent works. This has led to a situation in Tamil that using the spoken language in fiction means using the dialects (which includes the variety the urban educated class, which mixes Tamil speech with English words and phrases).

The effect that the writers intend to create by the use of dialects is a ‘feel’ about the ethos of their characters. A good ‘feel’ increases the authenticity of the fiction. To create such a feel or flavour, it is not necessary to be faithful to the speech of the characters in real life to the last detail, nor is it necessary to be consistent throughout. It is not possible to be totally faithful to speech because the Tamil alphabet is inadequate to code speech as it is, even if a writer wants to do it, and writing speech in Tamil script has not received cultural acceptance to produce a normative spelling for speech. Linguists take issue with inconsistency in the representation of speech in fiction (Deivasundaram 1981) and condemn the representation as unauthentic. This linguistic criticism stems from an erroneous assumption that creative writers, like linguists, transcribe speech. Writing speech in fiction is not transcribing speech. Its authenticity comes from the feeling it evokes, not the accuracy it adheres to. Writing speech in Tamil fiction abounds in instances like the same word being written differently (either different spellings of a spoken word or spelling it either as spoken or as written conventionally) in the same sentence or in different sentences in the speech of the same character. Failure to be consistent is not a failure to meet the challenge of the spoken language as long as the reader gets the feel of a speaking performance with all its associated flavours.

The other side of linguistic authenticity is cognitive. It is about the style or the manner of thinking. The question is if a specific style of thinking is reflected in the language used by the writer. The style of thinking, i.e. the manner of packaging thoughts, in writing (or in giving a formal speech) is different from speaking in a conversation. Writing allows deliberation of language while speaking is marked by its spontaneity in delivering the language. Writing is acquired through schooling, which nurtures a style of language with a different logic than in the style of speaking. For example, in the written language, explanation of connection between things may be through argumentation, and in the spoken language, it may through metaphors and proverbs. The written language is more impersonal and distant than the spoken; it may be more explicit than implicit. And so on (Annamalai 1991) Illich goes beyond grammatical, lexical and text-structural differences between the spoken and the written language to claim that the written language is divorced from the context of lived experience and it affects our perception of ourselves and the world. Further, the written or the standardized language disempowers dialects (or vernaculars as Illich calls them in the context of pre-colonial Europe) through the process of creating nation-states. (Illich and Sanders 1988, Web). All this means that the written language differs from the spoken language communicatively, cognitively and politically.

It follows that writing speech in its true idiom is not conversion of it into a written language with a new spelling.

Packaging the thought of the characters in their spoken mode of Tamil is a challenge to creative writers whose thinking style has been reshaped by their acculturation to the literate world. This problem is accentuated for the fiction writers in Tamil, which being diglossic, has lexical and grammatical differences also in the way the language is written and spoken. Let me illustrate this problem with some examples. The meaning ‘he does not want to marry his uncle’s daughter’ can be coded in writing style as avan tan maamaa peNNaik kayaaNam ceytukoLLa viumpavillai or avanukkut tan maamaa peNNaik kalyaaNam ceytukoLLap piTikkavillai / iSTam illai. Within this style, there would be differences when tirumaNam is chosen in place of kalyaaNam, paNNi or kaTTi is chosen in place of ceytu indicating a scale of variation from being elevated to colloquial. This variation in style reflects a language ideology, not thinking style or information packaging. The paired sentences with the nominative and dative subjects, on the other hand, differ in the pragmatics of encoding meaning: there is dilution of agency with the dative subject, which foregrounds the mental disposition of the speaker rather than his action. This sentence is common, and natural, in speech. When some one writes the sentence with the nominative subject as avan maamaa poNNe kalyaaNam cenjikkiDa virumbale using spoken spelling, the writer ignores the cognitive style preferred in speech. Take another pair of sentences. avan tan maamaa peNNaik kalyaaNam ceytukoLLa maRukkiRaan and avan tan maamaa makaLaik kalyaaNam ceytu koLLa maaTTeen enkiRaan, both of which mean ‘he refuses to marry his uncle’s daughter’. The first sentence of this pair, which uses the performative verb maRu ‘deny’ (in Austin’s (2005) sense), is not used in the spoken language. The speech codes this meaning as a communicative act of the speaker, as if quoting his mental disposition, as in the second sentence. If one writes the first sentence, as if it is spoken, as avan maamaa poNNe kalayaaNam cenjikkiDa marukkiraan, it is a hybrid non-existent in writing because of its spelling and non-existent in speaking because of its packaging. This hybrid sentence does not instantiate a thinking style transfer from writing to speaking, but it illustrates merely a sound transfer. This is not authentic spoken language. Another example is with passive syntax, which is not part of the grammar of the spoken language, but writers give it spoken spelling as in the second sentence below rather than the third sentence, which is natural in speech. Suppression of agency of action is different in the thinking styles of writing and speaking. avan kalyaaNam uuril ellooraalum peecappaTTatu (in written spelling), avan kalyaaNam uurle ellaaraalum peesappaTTuccu (in spoken spelling) ‘his marriage was talked about by every one in the town’. Its correlate without passive form of the verb is: avan kalyaaNatte patti uurule ellaarum peesunaanga / uuree peesuccu uurle oree peeccu ‘every one in the town / the whole town talked about his marriage / His marriage was the talk of the town’

Let me illustrate this phenomenon of linguistic hybridity with one example from actual writing. The protagonist of Bhooma’s Karukku (1992 ) thinks aloud her hope and anxiety thus: oDikkappaTTa ceRagugaL tirumbavum vaLandu valuppettu, naanum naalu peerappoola ennaikkup paRakka aarambippeenoo teriyale. The phonology of this sentence is spoken, but the style of thinking exhibited in word (e.g., ceRagu, valuppeRu), syntactic phrases (e.g. the passive oDikkappaTTa) and the metaphor (oDikkappaTTa ceRagugaL for ‘personal freedom’ is alien to the style of thinking in speech. This illustrates the writer’s literate style of thinking being transplanted into protagonist’s speech (thinking aloud, to be exact), as if it is her style of thinking in speech. In this autobiographical novel, the author is the protagonist younger in age and so the problem of hybridity and of author’s voice supplanting linguistically the character’s voice is especially poignant.

The above illustrative examples show a mismatch between packaging of thought in speaking by the characters and codifying that thought in the language employed by the writer. The result is hybridity in language and its writer. This hybridity is different from the hybridity Mani speaks about above, which is about inadequate or imprecise expression for an experience. This hybridity is about drawing from two sources that results in a unique entity non-encountered in ordinary language. Hybridity is an aspect of post-modern existence arising from living across borders- between nations by the diaspora, between rural and urban divide by the schooled, between languages by bilinguals. Homi Bhabha (1994: p.4) refers by cultural hybridity the “passage between fixed identifications … that entertains differences without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.” Linguistic hybridity is a passage between fixed identifications of language, but the linguistic difference in a particular expression, while is not felt hierarchical by the writer, is not felt to be authentic to either of the identifications by the reader. The linguistic hybridity illustrated here is different from code-alternation (mixing of and switching between codes) by balanced bilinguals , which are motivated by the communicative obligations of inclusion and exclusion of interlocutors and avoidance of taboo, social goals of shifting identity of self or concealing it, and the linguistic needs of filling lexical gaps.

Writing about real experience of the world in a learnt language (or taught tongue as Illich (1981, Web) contrasts it with mother tongue) is the source of the linguistic hybridity illustrated above. The writers of modern Tamil fiction live in two worlds linguistically. Most of them have lived through the language of their characters and acquired that language as part of their growing up in the world they fictionalize. They also have been schooled and have learnt the language of literate way of thinking and expressing. This learnt language of the school, which is reinforced by the urban life style many of them live in, is super-imposed on their acquired language of a life different from their current one. It traverses into the language representing the characters from this different life, which the writers try capture in their speech. This transvestism between thinking and speaking appears unnatural to the reader. The above kind of linguistic hybridity in the fiction of the post-modern times is not natural because the author and the character are two entities not to cross their borders in the world of literature. In fact, the author must be absent, but the hybrid language betrays his presence.

It is not that the learnt language is of no use in fiction. It is used in the narrative part of the fiction, as mentioned earlier. Writers use it creatively in the conversational part also for some literary purpose. This use is similar to code-alternation. This traversing between codes in similar to Homi Bhabha’s hybrid cultural behaviour exhibiting difference with no hierarchy.

The failure on the part of modern writers to linguistically match the organization of the thought of their characters with the expressive language of speaking has significance beyond literature. Modern Tamil, not in the trivial chronological sense of being spoken at the present time but in the sociological sense of representing the modern life, is shaped by various historical and ideological forces (Annamalai 2000). One such historical and ideological force is broadening of the social base of writers and readers and the increasing acceptance of dispersal of the control of language of the public sphere to those coming from the margins of the society. The impact of this force on Tamil is that it adds virility and versatility to the language of cultural, i.e fictional, production. The modernizing change in language cannot be unauthentic linguistically. The challenge of language to creative writers in modern Tamil is to make this Tamil authentic to the life of the marginal majority, who have come to contribute to the defining of modernity of the Tamil language. If their way of speaking is a part of modern Tamil in terms its rhythm, tone, diction, discourse structure and thinking style, it would be a challenge unmet by the creative writers to contribute to the shaping of modern Tamil, when their coding of these features is unauthentic.

References
Annamalai, E. 1991. On the dichotomy of spoken and written language. In Commemoaration
Volume to Professor R.N. Srivastava. New Delhi
Annamalai, E. 2000. Lectures on modern Tamil. Coimbatore: Bharathiyar University (Linguistics Department)
Annamalai, E. 2004. Post-Modern trends in Tamil. In Chevillard, Jean-Luc and Wilden, Eva (eds.) South-Indian Horizons: Felicitation volume for Francois Gros on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Ponidcherry: Institut Francais de Pondichery
Austin, J.L. 2005. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
(Second Edition: William James Lectures edited by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa)
Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge)
Crosslay, Nick and Roberts, John M (eds.). 2004. After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere. Oxford:Blackwell
Deivasundaram, N. 1981. Tamil Diglossia. Tirunelveli: Nainar Patippakam
Illich, Ivan. 1981. Introduction in D.P. Pattanayak. Multilingualism and mother-tongue education. Delhi: Oxford University Press
Illich, Ivan. Web. Taught mother tongue and nation state. Talk available at http://sunstie.queensu.ca/memorypalace/parlour/Illich02
Illich, Ivan and Barry Sanders. 1988. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. London: Mariam Boyars
Mani, C 1996. Ithuvarai. CreA:Chennai (Originally published in 1962 in Ezhuthu)
Meenakshisundran, T.P. 1972. Dialects in Kamalambal Carittiram. In Proceedings of the Second All India Conference of Dravidian Linguistics, Tirupati. Thiruvantapuram: Dravidian Linguistics Association. pp. 165-167
Muhlhasuler, Peter. 1995. The interdependence of linguistic and biological diversity. In Myers, David (ed.) The Politics of Multiculturalism in the Asia/Pacific. Darwin: Northern Territory University Press
Muttiah, E. 1980. tamiz naavalkalkaLil mozip payanpaaTu (Language use in Tamil novels). Madurai: Vayal (author publication of his Ph.D. thesis)
Sethu Pillai, S.P. 1976. tamiz naavalkaLil peeccumozi vazakku: VaTuvuuraarin cotanai muyaRci (Use of spoken language in Tamil novels: An experiment by Vaduvur). In ParalkaL 2. Madurai: Muttu Patippakam. pp. 25-36
Shanmugam Pillai, M. 1978, 1981. Collected papers. Madurai, Muttu Pathippagam [2v.]
Shenbagam, M. 1971. ilakkiyattil peeccumozi (The spoken language in literature). In Aayvuk koovai 3 (Proceedings of the Conference of University Tamil Teachers’ Association, Annamalainagar). pp. 209-214.

* Preliminary version. Not for distribution or citation.

P. Ragupathy on Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature: Poetics, Publishing, and Critical Practice

2006-05-26T12:08:00.000-04:00

Listen to P. Ragupathy's talk at the Sunday, May 14th session: Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature: Poetics, Publishing, and Critical Practice.

Click here to listen: http://mathy.kandasamy.net/musings/2006/05/22/396

V. Geetha on Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature: Poetics, Publishing, and Critical Practice

2006-05-26T12:02:00.000-04:00

Listen to V. Geetha's talk at the Sunday, May 14th session: Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature: Poetics, Publishing, and Critical Practice.

Click here to listen: http://mathy.kandasamy.net/musings/2006/05/24/398

M. Kannan on Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature: Poetics, Publishing, and Critical Practice

2006-05-26T11:56:00.000-04:00

Listen to M. Kannan's talk at the Sunday, May 14th session: Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature: Poetics, Publishing, and Critical Practice.

Click here to listen:
http://mathy.kandasamy.net/musings/page/2/

ஈழத்து இலக்கியம்: படைப்பின் கவித்துவம், திறனாய்வின் நெறிமுறைகள், வெளியீட்டின் தொழில்நுட்பம்

Culture, Cultivation, and Civility in the Tamil Country

2006-05-25T19:39:00.000-04:00

Culture, Cultivation, and Civility in the Tamil Country
Anand Pandian
University of British Columbia

In 1923, Maraimalai Adigal, founder of the Tamil Purist Movement in south India, published a text entitled Vellalar Nakarikam or “Vellalar Civilization,” concerning the history, customs and admirable qualities of the caste into which he was born. Maraimalai described the virtues of the Vellalas—their refinement of feeling, their generous giving, their sympathy for the suffering of all living creatures—as the fruit of their agrarian labor. Vellalas have of course long been identified as the paradigmatic caste of settled cultivators in the Tamil country of south India. In their struggle to till the land, Maraimalai had argued here, they had also succeeded in cultivating within themselves an exemplary heart.

Maraimalai Adigal and other elite Vellala scholars of the early 20th century have been rightly criticized for identifying Tamil cultural heritage with the imagined nature of a single dominant community (Pandian, Chalapathy, others).1 But these writers have nonetheless exercised a powerful influence on Tamil cultural nationalism in the twentieth century. Moreover, texts such as this one shed light on a unique feature of this political discourse—its representation of the agrarian environment as an essential site of cultural identity and national virtue. In this paper, I consider the genealogy of this nationalist geography. How did culture in the Tamil country of southern India come to be identified with the virtues and practices of its agrarian citizenry?

* * * * *

Consider the seventh chapter of a 10th grade Tamil language textbook issued by the Government of Tamil Nadu in the year 2000.2 The chapter, entitled “Anna, the Peak of Culture,” is an homage to C.N. Annadurai—playwright, poet, former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and leading figure in the development of a Dravidian politics in the state. The pages laud his virtuous deeds as illustrations of the ethics of selfhood extolled in early Tamil texts such as the Tirukkural and Purananuru. The chapter presents a single likeness in order to explicate the excellence of this way of life—

We say “cultivation” [panpaduththal] for a maturation effected in the same way that land is ploughed, leveled, watered and sown. If the heart-that-is-lan [manamaakiya nilam] of the people is cultivated, “culture” [panpaadu] grows. In English, ultivation was first, culture came after. As the impurities in the hearts of people vanish and as rarer qualities accumulate, in the cultivated state in which people live as people, “quality” [panpu] shines its light; culture takes shape.

If the culture of a nation can be found in the qualities of its people, author Mu. Pi. Balasubramanian argued, these qualities may be identified by a reformed or corrected state of heart, speech and deed. Here were the tracks of a movement between West and East, one which traced a course of improvement—the people as its subject, cultivation as its means, culture as its telos or endpoint, and tillage as its pedagogic sign.

Panpaadu is a neologism, coined by Tamil literary critic T. K. Chidambaranatha Mudaliar in the mid-twentieth century as a calque on the English “culture” (Barney). 3 Combining two terms—panpu as “quality” or “good quality” and paadu as a “condition” brought into being—the modern noun may be taken as a state of refinement, the achievement of a “condition of good quality.”4 It represents culture, in other words, as a state of being cultivated, or cultivatedness. The Tirukkural had identified panpu with virtues such as kindness, courtesy, and equanimity. In its contemporary usage, panpaadu is widely used to name the distinctive values and customs of various social groups, especially the Tamils, on behalf of whose collective merit it was first proposed.

On face, this coinage of a term such as panpaadu might appear to represent a clear debt to Anglo-German “culture” or Kultur. Even in English, Balasubramanian himself had argued, “cultivation” preceded “culture.” Both culture and cultivation, we may recall, stem from the Latin cultus, the past participial form of colere—to till, tend, care for.5 In the West, the work of cultivation has long held an important place in discourses and practices of moral pedagogy. The Roman orator Cicero famously described philosophy itself as the agrarian “culture” or cultivation of the soul.6 Christian theologians for centuries urged the heirs of Adam to restore a fallen world to perfection through the gardening of its soils. And by the late nineteenth century, European powers throughout the globe regularly sought to moralize the human beings they ruled by making rural environments into vehicles of pedagogy: be they agricultural colonies for urban paupers in France, nursery school gardens for young children in Germany, or plantations for the subjects of British colonialism in India.7 [my work on these legacies]

But is the transposition of this Western legacy solely what is at stake in the Tamil sense of panpaadu? Let us return to the Tamil terms at work in this south Indian schoolbook text. Panpaduththal—the verbal form used by Mu. Pi. Balasubramanian—is defined by the Tamil Lexicon as a transitive verb with the following meanings: 1. to refine, temper, or season, and 2. to prepare or make suitable for tillage, as land. What should we make of its striking resemblance to the English “cultivation”—its ability to sustain both social and agrarian senses? Have persons, soils and things alike always been subject to techniques of panpaduththal? When and how did refinement emerge as a possibility for individuals, collectives and the landscapes they inhabited in southern India? If there are other histories at stake in terms such as these, through what forces, vectors or relationships do they come into the present?

With some of these questions in mind, I sought out Dr. Balasubramaniam last summer at his small apartment in the neighborhood of Anna Nagar in the Tamil capital city of Chennai. A writer closely identified with Dravidian politics and especially the DMK, he for one argued that the Tamil term for culture was in no sense derivative of its English analogue. “It came first in Tamil only, and then afterward in English,” he insisted, making a familiar claim for the antiquity of the civilization on whose behalf he had spent most of his adult life writing. But when I probed into the precise means by which these legacies came to work in the present, his answers grew more interesting. The retired professor told me that he had come from an agricultural family himself, and had stood and watched while his father’s lands were being ploughed as a child. It was these experiences that suddenly became consequential in the midst of his training as a professor of Tamil literature. And most importantly, the means by which these experiences became consequential was through an accidental flash of memory. He told me the following:

When I was studying for my M.A., what we call Panpaadu or “Culture” was a subject. Our professor would give explanations, would he not? When he was explaining, as he was describing panpaadu as a cultivation of the heart, just like that, one day, in a flow, what he said was this—“It’s that only, if we cultivate the land we call it panpaduththal, just like that cultivating the heart is panpaadu.” When he said that, a flash came to me. He said it by chance. But when I was an M.A. student, when he linked these two together and spoke, I felt as though there was a relationship between that agriculture and our cultivation of our hearts. The reason for the flash was the class itself.

The English word or image to which Balasubramanian turned at several points as he spoke, and the one that I would like to consider more closely now, is that of the flash. Walter Benjamin offers the following suggestive account: “The perception of similarity is in every case bound to an instantaneous flash,” he has written.8 In his musings on what he describes as “The Mimetic Faculty,” Benjamin describes language as an archive of such similarities or correspondences between things. I quote: “the nexus of meaning of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears. For its production by man—like its perception by him—is in many cases, and particularly the most important, tied to its flashing up. It flits past.”

As always, Benjamin’s own language here is dense and demands an unpacking. Relations of similarity flash up in language, the literary critic had argued. If language is the bearer of similarity, then similarity therefore needs language in order to flash up in the present. If the flash is to be taken as that which “flits past,” then it may be understood as making a sudden or instantaneous relationship between the past and the present, between what is and what has been, between what is and what will have been. As Benjamin insists, the “time-moment” here is critical. Similarities archived in language therefore provide a supple and unpredictable means by which pasts come to matter in the present. Language works as a structure of both remembrance and resemblance.

Let us note that there is a haziness or indeterminacy to the object that Balasubramanian had named his “flash” of memory: was he referring to the sudden occurrence of a good comparison between culture and agriculture to his M.A. professor, the sudden recurrence of a childhood memory of watching ploughed fields to M.A. student Balasubramanian as he listened to this professor lecture, the sudden recurrence of this memory of a classroom experience to writer Balasubramanian as he composed his tract on the peak of culture, or the recollection of these Tamil meanings of cultivatedness in a contemporary pedagogic environment marked by the preeminence of English? If we accept that the present may be grasped as a structure of flashing resemblances, then each and all of these relations may be recognized as simultaneously at stake.

As anthropologists, we are accustomed to interpreting the invocations of “culture” multiplying worldwide as symptoms of a globalizing anthropological imagination, one infecting greater numbers of foreign places with the tainted legacies of Western cultural nationalism if not imperialism. What I seek to do in the remainder of this talk, however, is to excavate a different terrain of culture or cultivatedness in south India, one indebted to a different set of histories. In characterizing Tamil culture as a state of cultivatedness, texts such as that of M.P. Balasubramanian echo a longstanding elaboration of the agrarian environment as a place of virtue in Tamil cultural and literary production. Flashing into the present along with colonial and other modern histories, this structure of cascading resemblances makes possible an imagination of the cultivated landscape as an essential space of collective belonging in the Tamil country.

* * * * *

In order to propose his model of a cultivated culture in the schoolbook chapter, Balasubramanian relied largely on textual fragments drawn from Tamil moral and didactic works on the subject of aram or virtue. It is indeed the case that texts such as the sixth-century Tirukkural explicitly praised cultivators at times as a class of essentially good people. “Only those who live by eating what they plough do live—all others follow behind begging to eat,” one famous couplet proclaims. More often, however, agrarian practice appears in this literature as an allegory of virtuous conduct, and the cultivated landscape as an emblem of moral order. Agrarian idioms for virtue have circulated since early medieval times in the Tamil country as idioms of popular practice, moral pedagogy, and religious and philosophical discourse. Such discourses present the interior nature of the self as a landscape to be sown with the virtues of a settled life.

Take, for example, the Nalatiyar, one of the most prominent of the early medieval canon of Tamil works concerning virtue, and attributed by legend to the Jain monks of seventh-century Madurai. Among its four hundred verses are ones suggesting that the virtuous retain their character even in bad company, like the sweetness of a plaintain fruit ripening under bitter neem leaves; that those who live on nothing more than handouts will perish, like paddy watered by a meager irrigation tank; that the small win protection through their friendship with the great, like the grass that rings a tree trunk beyond the reach of a ploughblade; that the words of a poor man go unheeded, like a plough scratching the surface of dry soil; that the disposition of a son will follow that of his father, like the shoot of good paddy yielding the same grain with which it was planted.9 Claims such as these—clothed in the language of metaphor, metonym, simile, and allegory—present virtue in the form of an ecology, employing the agrarian environment as a didactic instrument of moral pedagogy.

Early Tamil works on virtue used such language in order to draw distinctions between higher and lower forms of personal conduct and social life—between the great and the small, the noble and ignoble, the learned and unlearned, and indeed, the civilized and savage.10 However, they did not identify incivility, vulgarity or baseness with rusticity itself, as with the distinction between graamya and naagarika in Sanskrit, for example (Daud). Rather, the crucial distinction at work here was one that opposed naatu to kaatu—the life of the settled lowland agrarian country counterpoised to the life of the forests, thickets, and other untilled tracts on its periphery, tended and inhabited by hunters, grazers and marginal cultivators who were assimilated only with great difficulty into the orbit of the lowland social and political order.11

The antagonism between naatu and kaatu presents a south Indian variation on the broader theme of country against city—a distinction pointing here toward an agrarian civilization with its own norms and forms of civility.12 This was a cultural formation that slowly consolidated in the Tamil country over the course of many centuries, beginning in the latter part of the first millennium C.E. Dominant peasant lineages of Vellalas and other communities directed the settlement, development and tillage of new lands on the periphery of cultivated tracts. They wielded authority over these regions by affiliating themselves to kings and chieftains. They sought legitimacy for such authority by patronizing religious mendicants, scholars, and temples. Agrarian idioms of moral development in texts such as the Nalatiyar gesture toward these historical processes, and point toward ways in which dominant cultivators—and the agrarian activity with which they were identified—attained a certain form of cultural hegemony in south India. Religious sects in early medieval India depended as much on the patronage and support of peasant cultivators as they did on kings, warriors and merchants. A language of agrarian virtue would have provided one powerful means of winning the allegiance of these cultivators, translating moral sentiment into the terms of daily life.

Nalatiyar was described by English missionary G.U. Pope at the close of the nineteenth century as the Vellalar Veedam—“The Bible of the Cultivators of the soil.”13 Agrarian similes for virtue appear in Tamil cultural tradition as nodes of intersection between literary form, pedagogic purpose and popular knowledge. They circulate in contemporary moral discourse as proverbs and maxims, “old sayings” and folk verities, stripped of their historical referents and carrying with them nothing more than the concrete scenes of agrarian livelihood they invoke. This reverberating archive of language, image, and experience betrays the traces of what I would describe as an agrarian civility: a way of imagining the refinement of self and conduct in relation to the historical experience and exemplary status of the cultivating citizenry. These idioms of moral development convey a sense that there is something intrinsically virtuous about the practice of agriculture, the tools by means of which it is exercised, and the people who wield these tools. They suggest that the space of the cultivated landscape be taken as an essential setting for the “civilizing process” in south India, to be credited with the same importance that Norbert Elias had lent the courts, towns, and monasteries of Europe.

What I propose under the rubric of agrarian civility is not an argument for Tamil “culture” in the conventional sense of a stable and coherent symbolic order. I gesture instead toward a language of power, an authoritative and persuasive means of representing civilization itself in agricultural terms, one that casts the refinement of conduct as an organic process aided by spade, plough, and sickle. At work here is an imagination of improvement arrayed along a developmental trajectory, reaching from the most savage inhabitant of savage tracts toward the civil cultivator of the most civilized terrain. Modern nationalist texts such as the one I have discussed deliberately recuperate these legacies in the service of cultural pedagogy. But images and idioms such as these also flash up unknowingly in the everyday moral discourse and ethical projects of contemporary Tamil people. I conclude this talk with the briefest of ethnographic vignettes in order to allude to the efficacy of such recollection.

* * * * *

One evening in the midst of my fieldwork in the Cumbum Valley in late 2000, I was assailed by a drunk young man who insisted on grabbing both my hands and making me slap him on the cheeks for some unknown indiscretion. My cultivator friend Virumandi Thevar looked on with a bemused smile, and later advised me with an analogy to speak only with those who spoke well: nalla nalla nilam paarthu naamum vithaikkanum. “Searching out the best of land, we too must sow some seeds.” He had drawn this line from a popular song in the 1967 Tamil hit film Vivasayi or “The Farmer.” The film starred beloved Tamil cinematic icon and future Chief Minister MG Ramachandran as a heroic and progressive young farmer. It was advertised from the outset as a didactic enterprise in the tradition of Tamil moral literature. “Only if the farmer stands straight will the nation stand straight,” its promotional chapbook proclaimed, citing the authority of the Tirukkural, Auvaiyar, and other Tamil texts.

Songs such as nalla nalla nilam echoed every now and then from the heart of the Kullappa Gounden Patti bazaar where Virumandi and I had had this exchange that night, blaring from the loudspeakers mounted to the thatched roof of a tea stall. With every broadcast, the song projected an agrarian subject of national virtue. “Searching out the best of land, we too must sow some seeds. In the hearts of the people of the nation, it is honesty that we must grow.” To imagine oneself as belonging to this imaginary “we,” as Virumandi did that evening, one had to identify both with these virtues and the rural environment to which they belonged. Moral traditions rely on the lessons of the past in order to critically engage with the demands of the present. Moralized landscapes such as these form compelling terrain for the cultivation of identity, civility, and even culture.

1. As M.S.S. Pandian notes, much historical scholarship on the Dravidian movement traces its genesis to this educated elite, neglecting the role that heterodox thinkers such as E.V. Ramaswamy played in garnering the movement a mass base in the 1920s and 1930s. See also A. R. Venkatachalapathy, “Dravidian Movement and Saivites: 1927-1944.”
2. M. P. Balasubramanian—a litterateur closely identified with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party and the head of the collective responsible for this texbook—contributed the chapter, which was originally published in the DMK magazine Murasoli on 16 September 1996. My thanks to the grandson of Muthu Karuppa Thevar in Madurai for drawing this lesson—which he had read in school—to my attention.
3. I am grateful to V. Arasu, A. R. Venkatachalapathy and Barney Bate for elucidating both the history and the usage of the term.
4. I draw these definitions from the Tamil Lexicon, which, as late as the printing of its fourth volume in 1931, did not include the word panpaadu among its entries.
5. These are the meanings atttributed by the Oxford English Dictionary; Raymond Williams, Keywords, writes that it meant additionally to inhabit, protect and honor with worship.
6. Gyorgy Markus, “Culture,” p7. See also Raymond Williams, “Culture,” who notes that both culture and cultivation stem from the Latin cultus, the past participial form of colere: to till, tend, care for.
7. Ceri Crossley, “Using and Transforming the French Countryside” and Susan Harrington, “The Garden in Frobel’s Kindergarten.”
8. “Doctrine of the Similar”.
9. Nos. 244; 191; 178; 115; and 367.
10. See Raj Gowthaman, Aram Atikaaram.
11. David Ludden, “Archaic Formations of Agricultural Knowledge in South India,” pp60-1.
12. I borrow the language of norm and form from Paul Rabinow, French Modern.
13. Translation of Nalatiyar.

Tamil Studies: What and Why by E. Annamalai

2006-05-22T10:12:00.000-04:00

Tamil Studies: What and Why

Tamil Studies, sometimes called Tamilology with a narrower meaning, is a not a discipline with its own theory and methodology. It is a collective field of study with Tamil as the focus and the pivot, where disciplines from Anthropology to Zoolatry may converge. This convergence is possible because Tamil is taken in its holistic sense to include Tamil language, literature, culture, society, arts and others. A recent addition to the others is Tamil diaspora. Tamil Studies is open ended.

Tamil studies is by definition multi-disciplinary. Researchers from many disciplines take Tamil in one or more of its aspects mentioned above to be their subject matter. It is also commonly inter-disciplinary, as an integrated approach from more than one discipline enriches the understanding of the Tamil question. Tamil Studies is not autonomous in the sense that it is located in time and space, and, more importantly, it is often in relation to other languages, literatures, cultures, societies, arts etc in which Tamil is enmeshed. Study of Tamil in India in the context of other Indian languages, in Sri Lanka in relation to Sinhalese, in Canada in comparison with other minorities etc are some examples of such an approach, which will throw a better light to the understanding of Tamil.. Tamil Studies is often historical because of the simple fact that the history of Tamil runs over two millennia.

In the recent past, the traditional departments of Tamil language and literature in India and Sri Lanka have expanded their scope beyond the study of grammatical and literary texts to include studies of media, gender, caste etc relating them to Tamil. Nevertheless, this is inadequate methodologically and theoretically and in expertise to represent the full expanse of Tamil Studies, which has to come from different disciplines. To promote Tamil Studies so conceived, it is essential, in order to promote interaction between researchers from different disciplines and cross-fertilize the soil of Tamil with different disciplines, it is essential to have periodical conferences. To have a journal, printed or web based, devoted to Tamil Studies will be an additional source of nourishment. There are, of course, conferences and journals devoted to particular disciplines, in which the research on Tamil is discussed. But to have a conference (and a journal) on Tamil Studies itself would be indicative of its maturity and of a critical mass of researchers working on it.

It is in this context the international conference of Tamil Studies held at the University of Toronto, Canada from May 12- 14, 2006 assumes significance. It is not that it is the first conference of this kind, as there were International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies of the International Association for Tamil Studies and others (and there were / are journals devoted specifically to Tamil Studies or having sections to Tamil Studies in the broader studies of South Asia or Asia). The significance of the Toronto conference lies in the fact that it has come at a time when Tamil Studies has been becoming less attractive to the students of the younger generation and when Tamil, as mentioned above, has come to expand its meaning to include a new kind of diasporic Tamil in all its aspects, which is different from its diasporic meaning of colonial times in dealing with Tamil and Tamils in Indian Ocean and Caribbean islands.

The disciplinary breadth and historical depth of Tamil Studies was visible in the Toronto conference. A thread running through the papers can be said to be continuity and change –adaptations of Tamil to new situations with its agility. The papers dealt with such adaptability and agility of Tamil exemplified by the changing functions and status of paRai and its players, women of veeLam in inscriptions and of low castes in contemporary literature, transformation of temple-located catir of a low caste into sabha- located naaTTiyam of upper castes, akam themes echoing in polyphonic kuRavanci, extension of the maTal of akam to bhakti, accommodating aRRuppaTai into Saivite canon, adopting a folk epic to the new medium of animation, emergence of new literary productions like public oration and dalit literature, changing language of modern fiction; they also dealt with the new aspect of diaspora with regard to its theoretical and experiential issues.

The ‘why’ of Tamil Studies is explained by the following. First, it helps Tamil speakers understand their heritage and the challenges facing them in the present including the disuse of their very language. Second, being one of the old civilizations still living, the heights Tamil reached and its survival traits in changing circumstances will help to understand other civilizations and their fortunes. Third, the study of its contemporary political, social and cultural conflicts will throw light on such conflicts all over the world in these post-modern times.

Why should the students of the current generation be interested in Tamil Studies at a personal level. It is not necessary for them to choose Tamil Studies as their career path. Whatever be the discipline they choose to be their career path, choosing Tamil as the focus of specialization within that discipline will put them a unique position. Even in fields of career not directly connected with Tamil Studies like medicine, business management, journalism, community service etc, exposure to Tamil Studies, especially learning the Tamil language, will given them an advantage making them special.

E. Annamalai
Yale University
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~tamils/programme/eannamalai.html

Thank you for attending!

2006-05-15T20:47:00.000-04:00

The conference organizers would like to thank all those of you who attended "Tropes,
Territories and Competing Realities," the first annual Tamil Studies conference at the University of Toronto. We wish to thank the scholars who presented their work at the conference. They eagerly welcomed the idea of a conference in Toronto when it was first broached to them and we are delighted that they were able to come and present their work ranging from medieval era Tamil literature and history to the challenges of contemporary diaspora communities. We also wish to thank all those who participated throughout the three days of the conference. In particular, we were delighted to see other scholars and graduate students, members of the Tamil community, and young students engaging in the debates and questions over the three days.

We owe a special thank you to all our sponsors whose generosity made the conference possible. It is the support of academic institutions and community members that make such conferences possible and we are grateful for their commitment to bringing Tamil Studies scholars to Toronto. Lastly, we are deeply indebted to the numerous volunteers who gave freely of their time and energy to make this possible. They worked so that others could showcase their work and their good humour, high spirits and drive made this conference not only possible but a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Thank you all very much and we look forward to seeing you in Toronto next year.

Sincerely,

Chelva Kanaganayakam
R. Cheran
Darshan Ambalavanar

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We invite attendees to share with us their experiences at the conference. Kindly email your comments to tamils@chass.utoronto.ca or post them in this thread. The organizing committee reserves the right to edit your comments and/or reject them at its discretion. Comments will be published on this blog as we receive them.

Conference Chairs

2006-05-05T13:51:00.000-04:00

Darshan Ambalavanar
Mr. Ambalavanar is a doctoral candidate in the Study of Religion at Harvard University. His dissertation is on Arumuga Navalar and the formation of the public sphere.
Session: Panel Session / Saturday, May 13th / 11:30 - 13:00 EST

E. Balasundaram
Dr. Balasundaram was Head of the Department of Tamil at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Between 1969-1994, he taught at the University of Peradeniya, University of Colombo, University of Kelaniya, and the University of Jaffna. He is the currently the President of the Swami Vipulanada Art Society - Canada. His publications include Naattar Ilakkiya Ayvum Mathippedum Mattakkalappu Mavattam (2005); Mattakalappu Mavatta Thirumana Marapukal (2003); Eelathu Idap Peyar Aayvu (2002); Oppanaik Kali (1990); Ilakkiyathil Maruthuvam (1989); Kaathavarayan Naadakam (1986).
Session: Historical Literature / Friday, May 12th / 9:00 - 11:00 EST

R. Cheran
Dr. Cheran's research and teaching interests include transnationalism, forced migration and diasporic identities as well as Tamil Studies. Prior to his current position, Dr. Cheran was a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow associated with York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies and continues to serve as a faculty associate of the Centre and has been guest faculty in the Centre’s Summer Course on Refugee Issues for the past seven years. From 1984 to 1992, Dr. Cheran was a working journalist in Sri Lanka where he was the editor and regular columnist for a biweekly newspaper that focused on human rights reporting in the context of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Since 1990, Dr. Cheran has been a senior research consultant with the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo. Cheran has published seven anthologies of poetry in Tamil. His poems have been translated into English, German, Sinhala, Kannada and Malayalam. He is the co-editor of Thamil ini (Kalachuvadu: 2000), selected papers from the international Tamil studies and Tamil literary conference held in Chennai, India in 2000.
Session: Visual Arts and Media / Friday, May 12th / 17:00 - 18:20 EST

Chelva Kanaganayakam
Dr. Kanaganayakam's research interests are in Southeast Asian literature, contemporary Indian and Sri Lankan writing, literature of exile and postcolonial theory. His major publications include Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature (2005); Counterrealism and Ingo Anglian Fiction (2002); Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka (2001); Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz (1997); Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World (1995), and Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose (1993).
Session: Tamil Studies - Standards, Methodologies, and Research Practices / Sunday, May 14th / 10:00 - 12:00 EST

Kalanithy Kulamohan
Mrs. Kulamohan studied Tamil and Tamil Studies at the University of Jaffna. She has been teaching Tamil and Tamil studies at the Tamil Academy of Culture and Technology since 1996. She is a well known Tamil poet.
Session: Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature - Poetics, Publishing and Critical Practice / Sunday, May 14th / 13:00 - 15:00 EST

Bhavani Raman
Ms. Raman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation is entitled, " Document Raj: Scribes, writing and colonial transformation in early nineteenth century South India."
Session: Colonial and Postcolonial History / Saturday, May 13th / 14:00 - 16:00 EST

Raman Seylon
Dr. Seylon read towards his MA and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and presently teaches World history, Indian history, and African History at Bridgewater State College.
Session: Anthropology / Saturday, May 13th / 16:30 - 18:30 EST

Maithili Thayanithy
Ms. Thayanithy is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is on asceticism in the Mahabharata.
Session: Precolonial History / Saturday, May 13th / 9:00 - 11:00 EST

Vappu Tyyskä
Dr. Tyyskä's present research deals with intergenerational and gender relations among immigrant and minority groups. In the last five years, she has conducted research projects on youth-parent relations in the Iranian and Sri Lankan Tamil communities in Toronto. Additionally, she participated in two large team research projects, on the needs of newcomer immigrant children. She is currently starting a research project on family violence in selected immigrant communities. Her most recent publications include “Teen Perspectives on Family Relations in the Toronto Tamil Community” in CERIS Working Paper Series No. 45 (2006); Action and Analysis: Readings in Sociology of Gender (2006); “Immigrant Adjustment and Parenting of Teens: A Study of Newcomer Groups in Toronto, Canada”, in Jatta Herranen, Vesa Puuronen, and Jarna Soilevuo-Grønnerød, eds. Youth - Similarities, Differences, Inequalities. Proceedings of the 4th International Youth Conference (2005); and “Conceptualizing and Theorizing Youth: Global Perspectives”, in Helena Helve and Gunilla Holm, eds. Contemporary Youth Research: Local Expressions and Global Connections (2005).
Session: Diaspora Studies / Friday, May 12th / 14:30 - 16:30 EST

Parthiban Vadivelu
Mr. Vadivelu read English at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka and obtained his MA from Carleton University, Canada. He has been teaching English and Translation Studies at the Tamil Academy of Culture and Technology since 2000. He is a critic and translator. His interests include postcolonial literature, literary and cultural theory, and Tamil Studies. His chief specialty is modern diasporas.
Session: Contemporary Literature / Friday, May 12th / 11:20 - 13:20 EST

Featured Presenter: Karuna (Eugene Vincent)

2006-05-05T13:50:00.000-04:00

Karuna (Eugene Vincent)
E/ digimedia@bellnet.ca

Karuna is a student of the legendary Jaffna painter A. Mark. Karuna is widely regarded as a pioneer in Tamil digital art in Toronto. He has designed over 500 book covers and contributed illustrations to more than a dozen Tamil literary magazines in Canada, Sri Lanka, Paris, and India. Karuna's paintings and digital art have been exhibited in Jaffna, Colombo and Toronto. He is also an accomplished photographer and light and stage designer for theatre. His studio, Digi Media Creations, is located in Toronto where he works as full time graphic designer.

Visual Arts and Media: Territory, Identity and Liminality in Contemporary Painting
சமகால ஓவியங்களில் நிலப்பரப்பும் அடையாளமும் அந்தரநிலையும்
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 17:00 - 18:20 EST

ஓவியர்களின் ஓவியங்கள் கண்காட்சிக்கு வைக்கப்படுவதுடன் ஓவியங்கள் பற்றிக் கருத்துரைகளும் வழங்கப்படும்.

Featured Presenter: Stanley J. Tambiah | Dept. of Anthropology | Harvard University

2006-05-02T09:03:00.000-04:00

Stanley J. Tambiah
Professor Emeritus
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University
E/ tambiah@wjh.harvard.edu
W/ http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~anthro/social_pages_tambiah.html

Although Dr. Tambiah retired from active teaching in 2001, he continues his research and writing on monastic complexes and temples in Bangkok; political violence in South Asia, especially the Bombay riots of 1991-92; and transnational movements of people and diaspora communities in an age of “globalization." He also continues with his comparative study of the charisma of saints and the cults of relics, amulets and tomb shrines in some Christian, Buddhist, and Sufi Islamic traditions. Since 2002, he has begun a field study of Sri Lankan immigrants in Toronto, Canada. His major publications include Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life (2002); Transnational Movements, Diaspora, and Multiple Modernities (2000); Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (1997); Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka (1992); Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (1992); Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (1990); Culture, Thought and Social Action (1985); The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets (1985); World Conqueror and World Renouncer (1977); Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in Northeast Thailand (1975), and Bridewealth and Dowry (1974).

Negotiating Cultures: Tamil Youth in Toronto
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 14:30 - 16:30 EST

டொராண்டோ தமிழ் இளையர்களும் பண்பாட்டுப் பரிமாற்றங்களும்
டொராண்டோவின் இலங்கைத் தமிழ் இளையர்கள் பற்றிய மூன்று ஆண்டுகால கள ஆய்வின் முடிவுகள் இக்கட்டுரையில் உள்ளன.

Featured Presenter: Joseph Chandrakanthan | Centre for the Study of Religion | University of Toronto

2006-05-02T08:59:00.000-04:00

Joseph Chandrakanthan
Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto
Clinical Ethicist, Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto
E/ joseph.chandrakanthan@utoronto.ca

Dr. Chandrakanthan has held major academic appointments including, Head of the Department of Christian and Islamic Civilizations, University of Jaffna (1980 -1986); Professor of Biblical Studies and Ethics, Concordia University (1996-1999). He has presented papers at a number of national and international conferences and published ten books and over 50 articles in issues related Christian Theology, Ethics, Human Rights and inter-religious spirituality.

When Two Cultures Collide at Bed-Side: Religio-cultural Perspectives on Tamil Ethic of Care
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 14:30 - 16:30 EST

As a country of immigrants, Canada and more specifically the city of Toronto has one of the world’s largest ethnic and culturally diverse populations. State repressions, drought, famine, and crippling forms of economic deprivations coupled with war and violence have forced large numbers of people as immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers to many western and North American capitals to look for safety, security, and economic prosperity.

The principles and norms applied in clinical ethics consultations in North America are largely drawn from the Judeo-Christian and western ethical practices and religious values. From a juridical perspective these are centered on the exercise of autonomy of the patient as an individual whose rights and duties are also guaranteed by the State. While the universalism enshrined in these principles are of global ethical importance, in their application and illustration they manifest a particular western worldview of socio-political evolution.

Based on case examples this presentation will analyze the challenges of cross-cultural trans-cultural and meta-cultural care particularly in relation to the process of decision-making in designing care plans especially in the context of terminal illnesses, palliative sedation and withdrawing and withholding of treatment and other complex-care decisions that impinge on one’s religious, ethical and cultural predicaments. The importance of integrating pluri-religious ethical insights in the larger context of care and of incorporating the cultural modes of care in the delivery of care will be explored against the backdrop of the dilemmas and issues faced by they many religious and cultural groups. The meaning and significance of illness as a corporate or familial experience and the process of ailing and especially of dying as a social ritual will be further elucidated to deepen the importance of understanding the ethical implications of cure and care in a multi-cultural, pluri-religious milieu. The limitations implied in the process of interpretation/ explanation in the context of Doctor-patient relationship will also be explored.

A serious and particularly terminal illness is also an emotionally charged context for the patient as well as for the members of the family and friends of the one who is facing the end of his/her life. Interpersonal bonds their depth and degree, the suddenness of the illness, the age of the patient, the intensity of relationships with their cultural ramifications should therefore be approached with deep sensitivity and compassion from, the part of the care-giver. This presentation will emphasize these issues of care.

Featured Presenter: Ravindiran Vaitheespara | Dept. of History | University of Manitoba

2006-04-28T10:27:00.000-04:00

Ravindiran Vaitheespara
Assistant Professor
Department of History
University of Manitoba
E/ vaithees@ms.umanitoba.ca
W/ http://www.umanitoba.ca/history/faculty/ravi.html

Dr. Vaitheespara's research interests include colonial and postcolonial South Asia with a special interest in the formation and articulation of Tamil identity, nationalism and popular culture in both India and Sri Lanka; Left movements and Tamil ethnic politics and postcolonial studies. His recent publications include "Marxism, Nationalism and Tigerism: Interrogating the Historiography of Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism" in Trans/Formations: Perspectives on Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism (forthcoming); "Christianity and the Origins of Tamil Modernity" in The Beginning of Protestant Churches in India: The Danish-English-Halle Mission in South-India (1706-1845) (forthcoming); "Poverty of South Asian Vernacular Modernity’s?" Economic and Political Weekly 38:32 (2003). and "Discourses of Empowerment: Missionary Orientalism in the Development of Dravidian Nationalism" in Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities (1999).

Revisiting the Sri Lankan Left in relation to the Tamil National Question
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 14:00 - 16:00 EST

Despite the existence of some preliminary survey's outlining the failure of the Sri Lankan Left with respect to the National Question in Sri Lanka, what is clearly increasingly obvious is the need for more substantial scholarly work on this important and much neglected subject. It is with this broader objective of eliciting interest in this area of research that the present paper seeks to revisit this important subject and map out some areas and personalities within the Sri Lankan Left movement that have not yet received any substantial attention in relation to this subject. The paper also seeks to chart some of the recent developments within the Left with respect to the Tamil national question.

தமிழ்த் தேசிய இனப் பிரச்சினையும் இலங்கையின் இடதுசாரி இயக்கமும்
தமிழ்த் தேசிய இனப் பிரச்சினை தொடர்பாக இலங்கை இடதுசாரிகள் விட்ட தவறுகள் பற்றி ஒருசில கட்டுரைகள் ஆங்காங்கே வெளிவந்துள்ளன. எனினும் ஆழமான புலமைசார்ந்த ஆய்வுகளின் போதாமை நிலவுகிறது. இந்தப் போதாமையைத் தீர்க்கும் ஒரு முயற்சிதான் இந்த ஆய்வுக் கட்டுரை. இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் அண்மைக் காலங்களில் தமிழ்த் தேசிய இனப் பிரச்சினை தொடர்பாக இடதுசாரி இயக்கத்தில் ஏற்பட்டுள்ள மாற்றங்களும் கவனத்தில் எடுத்துக்கொள்ளப்படும்.

Featured Presenter: Brenda Beck | Sophia Hilton Foundation of Canada

2006-04-28T10:25:00.000-04:00

Brenda Beck
President
Sophia Hilton Foundation of Canada
E/ softsci@eagle.ca

Dr. Beck's relevant publications include Annanmar Katai: Vols. I & II, (a folk epic of Tamilnadu in Tamil and in English, on facing pages) collected, translated and edited by B. Beck (1992); "Core Triangles in the Folk Epics of India," in Oral Epics of India (1989); The Three Twins: The Telling of a South Indian Folk Epic (1982); Peasant Society in Konku: A Study of Right and Left Subcastes in South India (1972).

Visual Arts and Media: The Animation of a South Indian Folk Epic
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 18:20 - 19:00 EST

The paper briefly summarizes the content and historical setting that occasioned the creation of the Annanmar Katai (Story of the Brothers). It also describes this epic's ritual and social context today. In particular the paper suggests a framework for examining the "oppositional aesthetic" that drives the Annanmar story's main plot line. Following this the author outlines her current initiative: retelling the epic using 52 x 12 minute digitally animated episodes. Brief excepts will be screened for the audience so that the 2D "puppet like" movements and traditional South Indian folk art imagery being used can be appreciated and discussed.

உயிர் பெறும் காவியம் ஒன்று: அண்ணன்மார் கதை
இந்த ஆய்வுக் கட்டுரை நாட்டார் இலக்கியப் படைப்பான அண்ணன்மார் கதை எழுதப்பட்ட வரலாற்றுச் சூழலை ஆய்வு செய்கிறது. அக்காவியத்தின் சுருக்கமும் தரப்படுகிறது. அண்ணன்மார் கதைக்குரிய சடங்குகளும் இந்தக் கதையில் இன்றைய சமூகப் பின்புலமும் கட்டுரையில் விவரிக்கப்படுகின்றன. குறிப்பாக அண்ணன்மார் கதையின் கருப்பொருளை ஆய்வு செய்வதன் மூலம் எதிர்ப்பு/ எதிர் அழகியல் (oppositional aesthetic) எனும் கருத்தாக்கத்தைக் காட்டுவதாக முன்வைக்கிறார். இந்த அமர்வில் பிரெண்டா பெக் தயாரித்த அண்ணன்மார் கதை திரைப்படத்தின் சில காட்சிகளும் திரையிடப்படும்.

Featured Presenter: Anand Pandian | Dept. of Anthropology& Sociology | University of British Columbia

2006-04-27T11:54:00.000-04:00

Anand Pandian
Johal Chair of Indian Studies, Institute of Asian Research
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology & Sociology
University of British Columbia
E/ pandian@interchange.ubc.ca
W/ https://www.directory.ubc.ca/index.cfm?page=personDetail&row=1000009360

Dr. Pandian's research concerns the cultural politics of development, nature, and identity in Tamil Nadu. He is currently completing a book manuscript regarding the social reform of a caste of putative thieves in the Madurai countryside, and beginning work on a second project concerning representations of rural life and landscape in Tamil cinema. Dr. Pandian is a co-editor of Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (2003). Other publications include "Securing the Rural Citizen: The Anti-Kallar Movement of 1896" in the Indian Economic and Social History Review (2005); "An Ode to an Engineer" in Waterlines: The Penguin Anthology of River Writing in India (2003); "Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India" in the Journal of Historical Sociology (2001); and "Land Alienation in Tirunelveli District" in the Economic and Political Weekly (1996).

Culture, Cultivation, and Civility in the Tamil Country
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 16:30 - 18:30 EST

This paper concerns the emergence of the agrarian landscape as a paradigmatic space of collective virtue in the political discourse and popular legacies of twentieth-century Tamil Nadu. Prominent ideologues of the early Dravidian movement sought to identify civility or "nakarikam" in southern India with the imagined nature of its dominant peasant communities. By the mid-twentieth century, Tamil literary critics had coined "panpadu" as a Tamil neologism for "culture," identifying the term with a cultivated state of heart, speech, and deed. In the official school textbooks and print media through which the term began to circulate, such cultivatedness was often identified with the conduct and character of the agrarian citizenry. Numerous popular Tamil films from the 1960s onwards have promoted peasant heroes as icons of virtuous conduct, culminating perhaps in the "nativity" genre of contemporary Tamil film that roots Tamil culture in the quotidian trials of rural existence. This paper tracks reverberations of these representations in the ethical life of agrarian cultivators in the Cumbum Valley of southern Tamil Nadu, exploring agricultural practice as a terrain of moral distinction. Tracking discourses of virtue between tea stalls and tilled fields, I seek to account for the conditions under which the cultivator may be taken as a sign of cultivated being in contemporary south India.

Featured Presenter: Martha Selby | Dept. of Asian Studies | University of Texas at Austin

2006-04-27T11:40:00.000-04:00

Martha Selby
Associate Professor
Department of Asian Studies
University of Texas at Austin
E/ ms@uts.cc.utexas.edu
W/ http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/asianstudies/faculty/profiles/Selby/Martha/

Dr. Selby's research interests include Tamil and Prakrit poetry and poetics and early medical literature in Sanskrit. She is the author of The Circle of Six Seasons: Poems from Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Old Tamil (2003) and Grow Long, Blessed Night: Love Poems from Classical India (2000). She has held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Style and Substance in a Late Old Tamil Anthology
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 9:00 - 11:00 EST

Ainkurunuru, literally “The Short Five Hundred” or “Five Hundred Short Poems,” is an anthology of akam or “love” poems from the fourth century C.E. The text consists of five sections, each with one hundred poems composed by a single author. The poems themselves range in length from three to six lines. Each section is devoted to one of the five tinais, or “landscapes,” of reciprocal love, a genre first described by the Tolkappiyam, the earliest extant work on Tamil phonology, grammar, and poetics. Because of the wide samples of the work of individual authors that this text provides, we are presented with a wonderful opportunity to explore issues of authorial “style” in a comprehensive way. For the purposes of this presentation, I will be analyzing the poems of Ammuvanar, the author of the second section of the text, who specialized in compositions in the tinai termed neytal (“blue water lily”), the landscape of the seashore, where poems of tortured separation and lamentation are popularly set. I will address issues of word choice, image, and repetition, and will use them to illustrate how Ammuvanar's poems carry a unique signature that is also evident in twenty-six verses found in other anthologies.

ஐங்குறுநுìறு: பொருளும் நடையியலும்
சங்க இலக்கியங்களுள் ஒன்றான ஐங்குறுநுìறு அகம் என்ற பிரிவில் வருகிறது. ஐங்குறுநுìறு ஐந்து பிரிவுகளால் ஆனது. ஒவ்வொரு பிரிவும் ஒவ்வொரு திணைக்கென ஒதுக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது. சங்கப் புலவர்கள் பலரால் பாடப்பட்டுள்ள ஐங்குறுநுìறு பல்வேறு புலவர்களின் நடையியல், பொருள் என்பன குறித்து ஆழமான ஆய்வுக்குரிய வாய்ப்புகளைத் தருகிறது. இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் அம்மூவனார் என்னும் புலவரின் படைப்புகளை மார்த்தா செல்பி ஆய்வு செய்கிறார். அம்மூவனார் நெய்தல் திணைக்குரிய பாடல்களைப் புனைந்தவர். சொல் தெரிவு, படிமங்கள், கூறியதுகூறல் என்ற உத்தியின் பயன்பாடு போன்றவற்றால் அம்மூவனார் பாடல்கள் எவ்வாறு தனித்துவமாகத் துலங்குகின்றன என்பதை இனங்காட்டுவதே இந்த ஆய்வின் மையமாகும்.

Panel Discussion: Pursuing Tamil Studies in North America
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 11:30 - 13:00 EST

Featured Presenter: Geevan (Nanda Kandasamy)

2006-04-22T08:36:00.000-04:00

Geevan (Nanda Kandasamy)
E/ nandakandasamy@gmail.com
W/ www.nandakandasamy.com

Geevan is a self-taught artist whose deep desire to paint was fuelled by strong emotions and impressions associated with the violence he witnessed in a Jaffna beset by war. Expression through art was, in itself, his form of protest in a climate of silence and fear. Not only have his various exhibits in Sri Lanka and Canada met with success, he also continues to be one of the most sought-after artists in the community. While his artwork, in general, communicates with many refugees and immigrants who share images of suffering, pain, violence and oppression, his most recent body of work has been influenced by the cultural confusion of Tamil children in North America and by the violence of youth culture in general.

Visual Arts and Media: Territory, Identity and Liminality in Contemporary Painting
சமகால ஓவியங்களில் நிலப்பரப்பும் அடையாளமும் அந்தரநிலையும்
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 17:00 - 18:20 EST

ஓவியர்களின் ஓவியங்கள் கண்காட்சிக்கு வைக்கப்படுவதுடன் ஓவியங்கள் பற்றிக் கருத்துரைகளும் வழங்கப்படும்.

Featured Presenter: Rudramoorthy Cheran | Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology | University of Windsor

2006-04-22T08:31:00.000-04:00

R. Cheran
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
University of Windsor
E/ cheran@uwindsor.ca

Dr. Cheran's research and teaching interests include transnationalism, forced migration and diasporic identities as well as Tamil Studies. Prior to his current position, Dr. Cheran was a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow associated with York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies and continues to serve as a faculty associate of the Centre and has been guest faculty in the Centre’s Summer Course on Refugee Issues for the past seven years. From 1984 to 1992, Dr. Cheran was a working journalist in Sri Lanka where he was the editor and regular columnist for a biweekly newspaper that focused on human rights reporting in the context of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Since 1990, Dr. Cheran has been a senior research consultant with the International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) in Colombo. Cheran has published seven anthologies of poetry in Tamil. His poems have been translated into English, German, Sinhala, Kannada and Malayalam. He is the co-editor of Thamil ini (Kalachuvadu: 2000), selected papers from the international Tamil studies and Tamil literary conference held in Chennai, India in 2000.

Theorizing Tamil "DiasporiCity"
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 14:30 - 16:30 EST

Transnational and diaspora are contested categories in contemporary social sciences and humanities. Not only are they useful in challenging the rigidities and bounded-ness of identities (religious, ethnic, national etc.), they also offer new possibilities and new points of becoming. Building upon my earlier work, this paper is an attempt to map historical, cultural and political coordinates that affect Tami identities in the diaspora. Two major questions will be pursued: how do representations of space both reflect and affect diasporic situations? What have been the effects of dislocation upon conceptions of Tamil identity?

Employing the notion of DiasporiCity, I propose to show that in the diaspora context, identity becomes the embattled rhetoric of culture, “home” and “authenticity”, being deployed as strategic locations. The notion of DiasporiCity does not necessarily signify the origins of the community; nor does it refer to the existential conditions of living. Rather, I use the term to capture an “enunciation” and an entanglement of ethnicity, cityscape and subalternity in a transnational context that is replete with undercurrents- some complementary and others contradictory.

அலைந்துழல்வின் கோட்பாட்டியல்
அழைந்துழல்வு(diaspora) என்னும் கருத்தாக்கம் சமூக விஞ்ஞானம், மனிதப் பண்பியல் போன்ற துறைகளில் பல வடிவங்களில் பயன்படுத்தப்பட்டு வருகிற விவாதத்திற்குரிய ஒரு கருத்தாக்கமாகும். தேசம், தேசியம் போன்ற இறுக்கமான கருத்துநிலைகளை கேள்விக்குட்படுத்தும் அதேவேளையில் புதிய அடையாளங்கள், புதிய வாழ்நிலைகளின் சாத்தியப்பாடுகளை அலைந்துழல்வு உருவாக்குகிறது. இந்தக் கட்டுரை தமிழர்களுடைய அலைந்துழல்வு பற்றிய வரலாற்று, பண்பாட்டு, அரசியல் சித்திரம் ஒன்றைத் தருகிறது. இரண்டு முக்கியமான கேள்விகள் இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் முன்வைக்கப்படுகின்றன.

முதலாவது, இடம்பெயர்வு, இடம் அழிவு என்பன தமிழ் அடையாளத்தின்மீது எத்தகைய பாதிப்பைச் செலுத்துகின்றன? இரண்டாவது, அலைந்துழல்விலும் புகலிடத்திலும் நமக்கான வெளி என்பதை நாம் எப்படி உருவாக்கிக் கொள்கின்றோம்?

Featured Presenter: Susan Schomburg | Dept. of Religion | Swarthmore College

2006-04-21T19:39:00.000-04:00

Susan Schomburg
Visiting Professor
Department of Religion
Swarthmore College
E/ sschomb1@swarthmore.edu

Dr. Schomburg's research interests include Islamic Tamil history, culture and literature - historical, anthropological and literary study, including translation projects. Major future project will examine lives, thought, and literary works of the Tamil Muslim cittars including Kunankudi Mastan Sahib.

Lovely, Recalcitrant Women: Tay Tamil, Cultural Agency, and Islamic Histories
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 14:00 - 16:00 EST

How does Islamic Tamil literature illumine Islamic Tamil history, and how does it relate to deep-seated controversy and energetic reformist movements in Islamic Tamil communities today? A survey of extant literature produced by Qadiri savants of Tamil Nadu (learned Islamic Tamil litterateurs affiliated with the Qadiri Sufi order), indicates both creative Islamic adaptation of traditional Tamil gendered literary themes as well as specific reformist agendas concerning Tamil Muslim women. This paper presents evidence from a variety of historical records and literary works to argue that marriage patterns in the Indian Ocean Islamic littoral communities and maraikkayar (Arab-settled) port towns, as well as more widespread Islamic norms of gender segregation, have contributed, historically, to gender- and Tamil culture-specific forms of Islamic practice in the Tamil region. These unique forms of Islamic practice have, in turn, decisively influenced contemporary local reformist discourse and activities.

Featured Presenter: Parvathy Kandasamy | Tamil Academy of Arts and Technology

2006-04-21T19:37:00.000-04:00

Parvathy Kanthasamy
Instructor, South Asia Studies Program, University of Toronto
Lecturer, Tamil Academy of Arts and Technology
E/ pkanthasamy@hotmail.com

Dr. Kanthasamy has held various academic appointments including, Senior Fulbright Fellow, Stanford University (1989); Research Associate, Centre for Refugee Studies, York University (1994); Lecturer, Vidyalankara and University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. A community activist, she has extensively worked with at-risk groups in Toronto, particularly abused women, and is currently active on the advisory committees of the Tamil Mental Health Project and National Project on Refugee Children at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Her research interests include teaching Tamil in the diaspora; comparative study of Tamil and English; gender and class construction in the Sri Lankan community in Canada; identity, ethnicity, nationalism and its relationship to gender, sexuality and masculinity; family, gender relations and sexuality in South Asia.

Panel Discussion: Pursuing Tamil Studies in North America
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 11:30 - 13:00 EST

Featured Presenter: Davesh Soneji | Faculty of Religious Studies | McGill University

2006-04-19T09:41:00.000-04:00

Davesh Soneji
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Religious Studies
McGill University
E/ davesh.soneji@mcgill.ca
W/ http://www.academic.mcgill.ca/newfac/profiles/2004/by-name/soneji.htm

Dr. Soneji's research interests include the history of the performing arts in modern South India and Maratha-period Tanjavur. He is currently co-editing a volume with Indira Viswanathan Peterson entitled Performing Pasts: The Invention of the Arts in Modern South India, and is also completing a major work focused on devadasis in Tamil and Telugu-speaking South India from 1860 to the present.

“No More Nautches in Poodoocottah”: Colonial Modernity, Memory and the Devadasi Dance Tradition of the Viralimalai Murukan Temple
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 14:00 - 16:00 EST

Muttukkannammal, the last dedicated devadasi of the Murukan temple at Viralimalai in Pudukkottai district, remembers dancing to English marching-band songs when the Maharaja of Pudukkottai would come to her temple. Integrated into the catir kacceri or formal concert repertoire in the nineteenth century, these compositions were meant to be part of the courtly “rituals of display” of the Tanjavur and Pudukkottai Maharajas, and devadasi dance was a central visual marker of these spectacles. But by the 1930s, devadasi performances in both the temples and courts of Tamilnadu had become merely perfunctory as far as temple administrators, priests, zamindars, and audiences were concerned. In Viralimalai, the “ritual-dance repertory” of the temple had disappeared by this time, and instead, only the catir kacceri was performed in the temple on festival days by Muttukkannammal. Transmogrified by colonial modernity and the discursive contours of “social reform,” the performance culture and lifestyles of devadasis in the Pudukkottai and Tanjavur districts had become irrevocably divested of function or meaning.

In this paper I examine how shifts in the sites of devadasi performance can be read as indexes for the process of the community’s disenfranchisement in Tamilnadu from c. 1920-1955. I suggest that the impact of social reform movements is felt very early in the devadasi communities of Tamil-speaking South India, accounting for the disappearance of “ritual dance” on the one hand, and the disappearance of patronage of courtly dance on the other. Using ethnographic data and analyses of specific genres within the dance repertoire, this paper illustrates the innovative ways in which the devadasis of Viralimalai transformed and negotiated their identities in relation to the temple and court before, during, and after the implementation of the Anti-Devadasi Act of 1947.

விராலி மலை முருகன் ஆலயத்தின் தேவதாசி ஆடல் மரபு
புதுக்கோட்டை மாவட்டத்தில் உள்ள விராலி மலை என்னும் இடத்தில் அமைந்திருக்கும் முருகன் ஆலயத்தில் கடைசித் தேவதாசியாக இருந்தவர் முத்துக்கண்ணம்மாள். புதுக்கோட்டை மகாராஜா விராலி மலை கோயிலுக்கு வருகிறபோதெல்லாம் ஆங்கில அணிநடை இசைக்கு நடனமாடியவர் முத்துக்கண்ணம்மாள். பிற்பாடு இவ்வகையான நவீன நடனமும் சதிர்க்கச்சேரியின் ஓர் அங்கமாக இணைக்கப்பட்டு விட்டது. தஞ்சாவூர் புதுக்கோட்டை மகாராஜாக்களின் அரசவை நடனத்திலும் இவை இடம்பெறலாயின. 1930 அளவில் தேவதாசி நடனங்கள் சடங்கு சார்ந்த ஆடல் மரபிலிருந்து மெல்ல மெல்ல விலகிப்போக, சதிர்க் கச்சேரி மட்டுமே எஞ்சியிருந்தது. இந்த ஆய்வுக் கட்டுரை தேவதாசி நடனமரபில் ஏற்பட்ட மாற்றங்கள் (1920-1955) எவ்வாறு அந்த சமூகத்தினர் ஒடுக்கப்பட்ட நிலைக்கு ஆளாக வழிவகுத்தது என்பதை விளக்குகிறது. தமிழ் நாட்டு தேவதாசி சமூகங்களிடமே சமூக சீர்திருத்த இயக்கங்களின் தாக்கம் முதலில் தென்பட்டது. 1947ம் ஆண்டு தேவதாசி ஒழிப்புச் சட்டத்திற்கு முன்பாகவும் பின்பாகவும் எவ்வாறு தமது ஆடல் மரபுகளை, தமது அடையாளத்தை தக்க வைத்துக்கொள்ள அவர்கள் முயன்றனர் என்பதை இந்தக் கட்டுரை பதிவு செய்கிறது.

Related Link: inDANCE's Purnima/FullMoon

Featured Presenter: Archana Venkatesan | Dept. of Religious Studies | St. Lawrence University

2006-04-17T19:50:00.000-04:00

Archana Venkatesan
Assistant Professor
Department of Religious Studies
St. Lawrence University
E/ avenkatesan@stlawu.edu
W/ http://web.stlawu.edu/asian/docs/venkatesan.html

Dr. Venkatesan earned her doctorate in South Asian Studies (Tamil) from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, currently being revised as a book, was on the ninth century Tamil Srivaisnava poet, Kotai (Antal). Her research interests are in the literary and performative cultures of the Tamil Srivaisnavas.

“Why abandon a lovely rabbit to chase after a crow?”The talaivi in the Matal poems of Tirumankaiyalvar
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 9:00 - 11:00 EST

Tirumankaiyalvar stands out among the Alvar poets not only for his prodigious output, but also for the variety of literary forms, rhythms and genres in which he chooses to express his dedication to Visnu. In the gem-like Ciriya Tirumatal and Periya Tirumatal he imagines himself as a talaivi (heroine) threatening to undertake the matal, a ride on a palmyra horse to win the heart of the heartless beloved, here Visnu. Tirumankai’s poem is based on a literary trope that appears in the Cankam corpus, where men declare their unrequited love publicly while riding a palmyra horse. Though we have no clear evidence that the literary matal reflected reality, Tamil grammars and the poems alike assert that riding the palmyra horse was the sole preserve of men. However, in Tirumankai’s poem, it is a bold, angry heroine who threatens to engage in this radical un-talaivi like behavior. In this paper I explore how Tirumankai uses the Cankam motif of the matal, calibrating it to express and explain a woman’s frustrated love for a distant immortal beloved. Using the Ciriya and Periya Tirumatals as case studies, I argue against the concept of a generic talaivi in the Vaisnava Tamil bhakti tradition, and instead posit that not only is there difference between talaivis of two poets, but there is considerable variation within a single poet’s (here Tirumankai) repertoire.

திருமங்கை ஆழ்வாரின் மடல் பாடல்களில் தலைவியின் நிலை
ஆழ்வார் பாடல்களில் திருமங்கை ஆழ்வாரின் பாடல்கள் சிறப்புமிக்கன. பல்வகைப்பட்ட பா வடிவங்கள், ஒத்திசை, வண்ணங்கள் மூலம் திருமாலைப் பாடியவர் திருமங்கை ஆழ்வார். சிறிய திருமடல், பெரிய திருமடல் என்னும் இரண்டு படைப்புகளிலும் தன்னைத் தலைவியாக உருவகித்த நிலையில் அவர் பாடல்களைப் புனைந்துள்ளார். திருமாலின் இதயத்தை வெல்வதற்காக மடல் ஏறவும் தயாராக இருக்கிறார் திருமங்கை ஆழ்வார். மடல் ஏறுவது என்னும் வழக்கு சங்க காலத்தில் நடைமுறையில் இருந்ததாகத் தெரிய வருகிறது. பனைமரத்தின் கங்கு மட்டைகளால் செய்யப்பட்ட குதிரையில் ஏறி தமது ஒருதலைக் காதலை ஊரறிய வெளிப்படுத்துவதே இந்த வழக்கம். ஆண்களுக்கு மட்டுமேயுரிய வழக்காகவே இருந்து வந்தது. எனினும் திருமங்கை ஆழ்வார் பாடலில் வருகிற தலைவி மடல் ஏற முற்படுகிறார். தலைவியின் பாத்திரவார்ப்பு சிறிய திருமடலிலும் பெரிய திருமடலிலும் எவ்வாறு மாறுபடுகிறது என்பதை விளக்குகிறது அர்ச்சனா வெங்கடேசனின் கட்டுரை. அதனுìடாக திருமங்கை ஆழ்வார் படைத்த தலைவி ஒருத்தி அல்லள்; பல்வேறு முகங்கொண்டவள் என்பதையும் வைணவப் பக்தி இலக்கியத்தினுìடாக ஒரு பொதுப் படையான தலைவி படிமத்தை எதிர்பார்க்க முடியாது என்பதையும் இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் அவர் நிறுவுகிறார்.

Featured Presenter: Sascha Ebeling | Dept. of South Asian Languages & Civilizations | University of Chicago

2006-04-17T19:47:00.000-04:00

Sascha Ebeling
Assistant Professor
Dept. of South Asian Languages & Civilizations
University of Chicago
E/ ebeling@uchicago.edu
W/ http://salc.uchicago.edu/facultybios/ebeling.html

Dr. Ebeling holds a PhD in Tamil Literature from the University of Cologne, Germany, where he also previously taught Tamil. His research interests include both modern and classical Tamil literature, but especially nineteenth-century literature on which a monograph entitled The Transformation of Tamil Literature During the Nineteenth Century is forthcoming.

Pulavars and Potentates in Nineteenth-century South India: Structures of Literary Patronage at the Zamindars' Courts
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 9:00 - 11:00 EST

The present paper addresses the systems of literary production of nineteenth-century Tamil pulavars under the patronage at the courts of zamindars and native ‘kings’. The discussion focuses on the nature of the texts produced in a late pre-modern ‘courtly’ environment, the patrons and their motives, the audiences. I examine the specific function of literature in such an environment and, in particular, the role that texts played in the zamindars’ ritualized remembrance of former glory.

19ம் நுìற்றாண்டுத் தென்னிந்தியாவில் புலவரும் புரவலரும்
ஜமீன்தார்கள், மன்னர்கள் அரவணைப்பில் இலக்கியம் படைக்கப்பட்ட முறைமை பற்றிய ஆய்வு இது. இத்தகைய படைப்புகளின் இயல்பு என்ன, புரவலர்களின் நோக்கம், உந்து சக்திகள் யாவை, இந்தப் படைப்புகளின் வாசகர்கள்/கேட்போர் எத்தகையவர்கள் போன்ற கேள்விகளுக்கு விடை தேடுகிறது கட்டுரை. புரவலர்களின் அரவணைப்பில் இலக்கியத்தின் பங்கு என்ன என்பதும் ஜமீன்தார்கள், மன்னர்கள் தமது முன்னைப் பழம் பெருமையை நினைவு கொள்வதில் இந்த இலக்கியங்கள் எத்தகைய பங்காற்றின என்பதையும் குறிப்பான ஆய்வுக்குட்படுத்துகிறார் சாஷா ஈபிலிங்.

Sunday, May 14, 2006 | Royal Palace Banquet Hall

2006-04-17T19:42:00.000-04:00

Sunday, May 14, 2006
Royal Palace Banquet Hall
3150 Eglinton Avenue East
Scarborough, Ontario M1J 2H2

* Please note that these two sessions will be conducted in Tamil.
** Please also note that there will be a $15 charge to be paid at the door for this session. All monies collected will be used for meeting conference costs.

10:00 - 12:00 EST: Tamil Studies: Standards, Methodologies, and Research Practices

Moderator: Chelva Kanaganayakam
Panelists: E. Balasundaram, E. Annamalai, M. Trawick, R. Mahalingam, S. Canagarajah, and B. Bates

The panel will consist of several short presentations by scholars from different disciplines who will discuss the problems, issues, and methodological concerns that shape their research. Strangely enough, there is no consensus about how research is undertaken or what scholars hope to accomplish through their research. In some instances, research tends to shift its focus from the object to the problems of methodology. It is thus important for scholars involved in Tamil studies to make some observations about how their research is constituted. The significance of sustained research in Tamil studies can only be understood through a critical appraisal of objectives, approaches, and accomplishments. Some of the questions they are likely to address are as follows: what does it mean to undertake research in a particular discipline? How do different disciplines diverge and intersect in their goals? What are the strengths and weaknesses of particular methodologies? What kinds of issues dominate current research? What are major research centres? What is the peer review process, and where should one publish in order to gain recognition? What, if any, are impediments to meaningful research?

13:00 - 15:00 EST: Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature: Poetics, Publishing, and Critical Practice

Moderator: Kalanithy Kulamohan
Panelists: N. Subramaniam, V. Geetha, M. Kannan, and Devakanthan

The objective of the panel is to explore the ways in which the idea of a reading public and the idea of a book culture (nool pazhakkam) have evolved in relation to recent Sri Lankan Tamil literature. The formation of Tamil diaspora in the last twenty years, the emergence of Dalit and women’s literature and the dominant presence of “resistant literature” have transformed Tamil literary practices. Consequently, Tamil literary practice has evolved in remarkably interesting ways, with writers experimenting with new forms, publishing in different countries and in a wide range of journals and magazines, and reaching out to a transnational audience. The authors themselves play a very different role by projecting themselves in multiple ways. While the overall effect of these changes has been very positive, there is very little understanding about the framework within which literature is being produced or received. As a community of writers and readers who now enjoy a transnational reach, it is important that we think carefully about standards, about form, genre and poetics, about editing, publishing, and critical practice. In the absence of clearly formulated and understood standards, it is all too easy for major works to be eclipsed by those that are inferior, and for inferior works to shape the reputation of an entire body of writing. This panel, therefore, looks at various aspects of literary production and reception, focusing largely on the poetics of writing, the mechanics of publication, and the standards of reception.

காலை அமர்வு பகல் 10.00 மணி - தமிழியல்: அனுகுமுறைகள், ஆய்வுநெறிகள், அளவுகோல்கள்

தலைமை: பேராசிரியர் செல்வா கனகநாயகம்
பங்கேற்பு: பேராசிரியர் இ.அண்ணாமலை, பேராசிரியர் ராம்.மகாலிங்கம், பேராசிரியர் மார்கெரெட் ட்ரேலிக், பேராசிரியர் பார்னி பேக்ஸ், கலாநிதி இ.பாலசுந்தரம், பேராசிரியர் சுரேஷ் கனகராஜா

பல்வேறு துறைகள் சார்ந்த புலமையாளர்கள் தமிழியல் ஆய்வு தொடர்பாக தமிழ்த் துறை சார்ந்த கருத்துகளைச் சுருக்கமாக இந்த அரங்கில் முன்வைப்பார்கள். எµவகையில் தமிழியல் ஆய்வுகள் முன்னெடுக்கப்பட வேண்டும் என்பதில் புலமையாளர்களுக்கிடையில் கருத்தொற்றுமை கிடையாது. எனினும் தமது துறை சார்ந்த ஆய்வுகள் எµவாறு முன்னெடுக்கப்படுகின்றன என்பதை புலமையாளர்கள் முன்வைப்பார்கள். துறை சார்ந்த அணுகுமுறைகள் யாவை, பல்வேறு துறைகள், ஒன்றிணைந்தும் கிளை பிரிந்தும் எµவாறு தமிழியல் ஆய்வுகளுக்கு உதவ முடியும், பயன்படுத்தப்படும் ஆய்வு நெறிகளின் வலு என்ன, வழுக்கள் யாவை, இப்போதைய ஆய்வுகளில் மேலோங்கியிருக்கும் கூறுகள் என்ன, சிறப்பான தமிழியல் ஆய்வு மையங்கள் எவை போன்ற கேள்விகளுக்கு மறுமொழி தேடும் ஒரு முயற்சியாகவும் இந்த அமர்வு அமையும்.

பிற்பகல் அமர்வு 1.00 மணி - ஈழத்து இலக்கியம்: படைப்பின் கவித்துவம், திறனாய்வின் நெறிமுறைகள், வெளியீட்டின் தொழில்நுட்பம்

தலைமை: கலாநிதி குலமோகன்
பங்கேற்பு: பேராசிரியர் நா.சுப்ரமணியன், என்.கண்ணன், வ.கீதா, தேவகாந்தன்

வாசிப்பின் பரவலாக்கம், இணையவெளி மற்றும் நுìற்பழக்கம் ஆகிய கருத்தாக்கங்களின் பின்னணியில் ஈழத்து இலக்கியம் பற்றி புதிய கேள்விகளை எழுப்புவதே இந்த அமர்வின் நோக்கமாக அமைகிறது. புகலிட வாழ்வு, அலைந்துழல்வு, போரியல்/எதிர்ப்பு இலக்கியங்களின் எழுச்சி, தலித் இலக்கியம், பெண்ணிய எழுத்துக்களின் ஆழம் என்பன ஈழத்து இலக்கியத்தின் வடிவங்களையும் படிமங்களையும் பெருமளவுக்கு மாற்றியமைத்துள்ளன. இதன் தொடர்ச்சியாக படைப்பாளிகளும் புதிய அணுகுமுறைகள், புதிய வெளியீட்டு வடிவங்கள், பல்வேறு நாடுகளில் வெளியீடு செய்வதன் மூலம் தேசம் கடந்த வாசிப்பு/வெளியீடு போன்ற புதிய நிலைகளுக்குச் செல்கிறார்கள். இப்புதிய நிலைகளின் வளமும் செழிப்பும் உணரப்பட்டாலும் இவை குறித்த துறை சார்ந்த முறையான அணுகு முறைகள் போதுமான அளவு எம்மிடையே இல்லை. எனவே சமகால இலக்கியப் படைப்புகளின் பல்வேறு பரிமாணங்கள், தரச்சிறப்பு, வெளியீட்டுத் தொழில்நுட்பம், வாசகர் ஏற்பு நிலை, நியமங்கள் போன்றன குறித்து பல்வேறு கேள்விகளை இந்த அமர்வு ஆய்வுக்கு உட்படுத்தும்.

Registration Deadline Extended: April 30, 2006

2006-04-16T10:17:00.000-04:00

Please note that due to the change in conference venue to the William Doo Auditorium, the registration deadline has been extended to April 30, 2006. However, the organizers retain the right to refuse registration if and when the capacity of the venue is exceeded within the new deadline.

Register now: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~tamils/reg

Featured Presenter: Leslie Orr | Dept. of Religion | Concordia University

2006-04-16T09:58:00.000-04:00

Leslie Orr
Associate Professor
Department of Religion
Concordia University
E/ orr@vax2.concordia.ca

Dr. Orr's research interests include religious and social history of medieval South India, especially Tamil Nadu of the Chola period (9th to 13th centuries); women in pre-colonial South Asia; Hindu temples; devadasis; interaction of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism; Brahmins (Brahmans); food and feeding; asceticism. She is the author of the book, Donors, Devotees and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu (2000) and numerous articles, including, most recently, "Identity and Divinity: Boundary-Crossing Goddesses in Medieval Tamilnadu," in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73:1 (2005) and "Processions in the medieval South Indian temple: Sociology, sovereignty and soteriology," in South Indian Horizons: Felicitation Volume for François Gros (2004).

Marching to a Different Beat:The Changing Fortunes of the Drummer in Medieval Tamilnadu
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 9:00 - 11:00 EST

The drummer (uvaccan) looms large in the life of the temple in the Chola period (9th to 13th centuries). Judging from the frequency with which Tamil inscriptions mention drummers, their services were regarded as requisites of temple ritual almost to the same degree as were those of priests, or those who supplied flowers for worship. Drumming was an essential feature of movement within the temple compound, and is particularly mentioned in the context of the sribali offerings that were carried out three times daily for the temple’s main deity, when groups of five or seven men (but sometimes twenty or more) would accompany the procession around the precincts of the temple. Yet, despite the ritual importance of the uvaccar, there are indications that another community of drummers, the paraiyar, did not enjoy such standing. Although the paraiyar of medieval times had not yet acquired the degraded and serf-like status of the community in later times -- so that their anglicized name “pariah” became synonymous with “outcaste” -- they are referred to in Chola period inscriptions in a way that indicates a declining position. If the paraiyar had ceased playing the ritual and professional roles they had had in an earlier age -- perhaps having been displaced by the uvaccar -- the uvaccar in their turn seem to have suffered social dislocation over time. References to uvaccar, as key ritual specialists, are particularly abundant in the early Chola period, but by the early twentieth century, members of this community -- who became known as Occhar -- had become marginalized, as a class of priests and drummers serving village goddesses.

My effort in this paper will be to trace the situation and activities of the various categories of drummers of Tamilnadu from the ninth century into later medieval times. Basing myself primarily on the evidence of the temple inscriptions, I hope to illuminate the processes of downward mobility that seem to characterize the changing social status of these communities -- and the religious, political, and cultural framework within which these developments took place.

மத்தியகாலத் தமிழ்நாட்டில் பறையடிப்போரின் சமூகநிலை
சோழர் காலத்தில் (9லிருந்து 13ம் நுìற்றாண்டு) கோவில்களோடு பிரிக்கமுடியாத பிணைப்புடன் இருந்தவர்கள் உவச்சர் என அழைக்கப்படும் பறையடிப்போர். தமிழ்க் கல்வெட்டுகளில் பறையடிப்போர் பற்றிக் கிடைக்கும் விரிவான தகவல்களைப் பார்க்கும்போது, அர்ச்சகர்களுக்கு இணையான தேவை, பறையடிப்போருக்கும் இருந்திருப்பது தெரிகிறது. நாள்தோறும் மூன்று முறை கோவிலைச் சுற்றி சுவாமி உலா வரும் வழமை ({பலி) உள்ளது. பறை இதனுடைய முக்கியமான அங்கமாகும். உவச்சர்களுக்கு சடங்கு முக்கியத்துவம் இருந்தபோதும் மற்றொரு தொகுதி பறையடிப்போராகிய பறையருக்கு இத்தகைய முக்கியத்துவம் இருக்கவில்லை. மத்திய காலகட்டங்களில் பறையரின் நிலை, தாழ்த்தப்பட்டதாக இருக்கவில்லை எனினும் சோழர் கால கல்வெட்டுக்களில் அவர்களுடைய சமூகத் தரம் தாழ்ந்துகொண்டே செல்வதற்கான ஆதாரங்கள் கிடைக்கின்றன. உவச்சர் பற்றிய பல தகவல்கள் சங்கப் பாடல்களில் கிடைக்கின்றன. 20ம் நுìற்றாண்டின் ஆரம்பத்தில் உவச்சர்கள் என்ற பெயர் ஓச்சர்கள் எனத் திரிபு பெற்று சமூகத் தரத்திலும் தாழ்த்தப்பட்டு விட்டார்கள். இந்த ஆய்வுக் கட்டுரை பறையர்களின் இவ்வாறான நிலை மாற்றத்துக்கான சமூக, சமய, பண்பாட்டு, அரசியல் காரணங்களை ஆய்வு செய்கிறது.

Featured Presenter: Suresh Canagarajah | Dept. of English | Baruch College, City University of New York

2006-04-16T00:09:00.000-04:00

Suresh Canagarajah
Professor
Department of English
Baruch College, City University of New York
Graduate Centre, City University of New York
E/ Athelstan_Canagarajah@baruch.cuny.edu
W/ http://urlsnip.com/302897

Dr. Canagarajah teaches postcolonial literature, Great Works in Literature, ESL, and composition. His research interests span bilingualism, discourse analysis, academic writing, and critical pedagogy. His Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (1999) won MLA's Mina Shaghnessy Award for the best book in literature and rhetoric. His subsequent book, A Geopolitics of Academic Writing (2002) won the Gary Olson Award for best book in social and rhetorical theory. Another book, Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students (2002), critiques dominant practices in academic literacy and argues for a place for alternative discourses. He has most recently edited a collection of articles by international scholars on responses to globalization in Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice (2005). He has also published widely in journals such as TESOL Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, Language in Society, Written Communication, World Englishes, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and Multilingua. He is currently finishing the transcriptions of interviews on diaspora life with Tamils in East London, Toronto, and California.

Constructing a Diaspora Identity in English
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 14:30 - 16:30 EST

Using data from a series of sociolinguistic studies in Tamil communities in East London, Toronto, and Los Angeles, I discuss the way English functions to construct new identities among Sri Lankan Tamils as they primarily use English for their communication. It emerges that women use more tokens of English in public life for intra-community interactions compared to men. Also, there is greater preference for English among the previously less educated class of people. Since the latter have learnt English after their arrival in the West, their dialect resembles those that are prestigious in the host communities. From this perspective, the Sri Lankan English of the professional classes (which has prestige in Sri Lanka) provides them relatively less prestige here. These can be explained as new forms of empowerment through English for previously disadvantaged groups. However, the traditional elite lay claim for greater prestige because they have proficiency in a wider range of registers and discourses because of their education. Similarly, the dialectal differences among British, Canadian, and US based speakers (especially among the youth who have learnt the language after migration) provide subtle forms of identity differentiation.

With the home language becoming preponderantly English, and the younger generation of speakers becoming monolingual in English, there is the fear among many that the identity of the community will be lost in the West in a few more years. It is the case that even the other “essences” that previously served to characterize this community (i.e., food, dress, religious faith, values) are hard to find anymore. The community is, however, discovering new forms of maintaining in-group solidarity. Members use newer constructs to describe Tamil identity and community. For many young people it is the family oriented activities that Tamils of different English dialects perform (in weddings, places of worship, birthday parties, picnics, and cultural events) that serve to define them as a separate group. In other words, it is not language or culture but practices that make them a community (in line with notions such as “communities of practice”). As English becomes the language in which these activities are performed, it is serving to construct variant discourses and “structures of feeling” that also serve to develop a transnational imagined community.

ஆங்கிலமொழிக்கூடாக அலைந்துழல்வின் அடையாளத்தை உருவாக்குதல்
லண்டன், டொராண்டோ, லாஸ்ஏஞ்சல்ஸ் ஆகிய பெருநகரங்களில் வாழும் புலம்பெயர்ந்த தமிழ்ச் சமூகங்களில் நடத்தப்பட்ட சமூக மொழியியல் ஆய்வுகளை அடிப்படையாக வைத்து எவ்வாறு இலங்கைத் தமிழர்களிடையே ஆங்கிலமொழியூடாக ஒரு புலம்பெயர் அடையாளம் உருவாகிறது என்பதை இந்தக் கட்டுரை பதிவு செய்கிறது. பெண்கள், ஆண்கள், உயர் பதவியில் இருப்போர், போன்ற பல தரத்தினருக்கிடையே ஆங்கிலமொழிப் பாவனை எவ்வாறு வேறுபடுகிறது என்பதையும் இந்தக் கட்டுரை ஆராய்கிறது. வீட்டுமொழியாக ஆங்கிலத்தைப் பயன்படுத்துவோரின் எண்ணிக்கை கூடிக்கொண்டே போகிறது. புதிய தலைமுறையினர் பெருமளவுக்கு ஆங்கிலத்தை மட்டுமே பேசுபவர்களாக வளர்கிறார்கள். இந்த நிலை தமிழ் அடையாளத்தை மேற்குலகில் இல்லாமல் செய்துவிடலாம் என்ற பயத்தை பலரிடம் தோற்றுவிக்கிறது. எனினும் தமிழ்ச் சமூகம் தன்னை அடையாளப்படுத்துவதற்குப் புதிய புதிய வடிவங்களை உருவாக்கிக் கொள்கிறது. வித்தியாசமான ஆங்கிலமொழிக்கூடான உறவாடலும் உரையாடலும் தமிழ் நிலைப்பட்ட ஓர் அடையாளத்தைத் தோற்றுவிக்கின்றன என்பதை கட்டுரையாளர் வலியுறுத்துகிறார்.

Featured Presenter: Peter Schalk | Department of History of Religions | Uppsala University

2006-04-14T08:34:00.000-04:00

Peter Schalk
Professor
Department of History of Religions
Uppsala University
E/ peter.schalk@relhist.uu.se
W/ http://web.telia.com/~u18211204

Dr. Schalk's main fields of research are ritual transmission of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, the religions of Fu Nan as state ideologies, the history of Buddhism among Tamils in Tamilakam and Ilam, Hinduism in western exile, and the religious expressions of social-economical conflicts in present South Asia. His recent publications include "Robert Caldwell’s Derivation īlamSouth-Indian Horizons: Felicitation Volume for Fracois Gros (2004); "īlamHistoria Religionum 25 (2004); "God as Remover of Obstacles: A Study of Caiva Soteriology among Ilam Tamil Refugees" in Historia Religionum 23 (2004).

A Contested Past: Historiography in the Civil War in Sri Lanka
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 9:00 - 11:00 EST

The civil war has affected historical writing on both the Īlavar and Lankan side. The same events from the past are remembered in epigraphy, in social, political, economic, art and religious history in incompatibles ways, but in accordance with own stipulated and contradicting political aims. Linguistics and especially etymology are also seriously affected. I shall demonstrate this by selecting one significant and important example for the past and present political discourse, the interpretations of the word īlam among intellectuals in the group of Īlavar and Lankans. Īlavar interpret it by following traditional Tamil lexicography as a Tamil word in the formula sīhala<īlam. Lankans interpret it the other way round in accordance with Robert Caldwell as a derived Indo-Aryan word in the formula īlam.

வரலாற்றியலும் இலங்கை யுத்தமும்
ஈழவரும் இலங்கைத் தரப்பினரும் வரலாறு எழுதும் முறைமையை போர் பெருமளவுக்கு பாதித்துள்ளது. ஒரே நிகழ்வை கல்வெட்டியலுìடாகவும் சமூக, பொருளாதாரா, அரசியல் காரணிகள் ஊடாகவும் இருதரப்பினரும் பார்க்கும் முறையும் புரிந்துகொள்ளும் முறையும் மிகவும் வேறுபடுவதாக இருக்கிறது. ஈழம் என்ற சொல்லை உதாரணமாக எடுத்து, ஈழவரும் இலங்கையர்களும் எப்படி முரண்பட்ட நிலைகளில் இதனைப் புரிந்துகொள்கிறார்கள் என்பதை இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் பீட்டர் ஷால்க் ஆய்வு செய்கிறார்.

The Animation of a South Indian Folk Epic

2006-04-13T10:34:00.000-04:00

Featured Presenter: Patricia Lawrence | Dept. of Anthropology | University of Colorado

2006-04-12T06:46:00.000-04:00

Patricia Lawrence
Lecturer, Peace and Conflict Studies
Department of Anthropology
University of Colorado
E/ patricia.lawrence@colorado.edu

Dr. Lawrence's ethnographic research has continued in eastern Sri Lanka from 1991 to present. Her research has focused on how people creatively draw from cultural resources to survive, heal war's injury, and to redeem life. A MacArthur, Fulbright, and Rockefeller scholar, she teaches anthropology and peace and conflict studies at the University of Colorado, and works as a consultant for grass roots civil society endeavors in eastern Sri Lanka. She is the author of The Ocean of Stories (2003), and a number of scholarly articles. She served as the consultant for documentary films about everyday people caught in the 1990's violence in Batticaloa.

Batticaloa's Shadows: Violence and Recovery
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 16:30 - 18:30 EST

This paper brings an ethnographic perspective to bear on the intersection of violence and social recovery in Batticaloa district. Fine-grained, local level anthropological research in villages devastated by the tsunami and the unrelenting shadows of war forms the basis of case studies and analysis in this presentation. The perspectives offered in the paper are drawn from recent and on-going research.

[Update 2006/04/27 : Presenter has withdrawn paper.]

Featured Presenter: Chelva Kanaganayakam | Dept. of English | University of Toronto

2006-04-12T06:40:00.000-04:00

Chelva Kanaganayakam
Director, Centre for South Asian Studies
Professor, Department of English
University of Toronto
E/ ckanagan@chass.utoronto.ca
W/ http://www.utoronto.ca/english/faculty/bios/kanaganayakam.htm

Dr. Kanaganayakam's research interests are in Southeast Asian literature, contemporary Indian and Sri Lankan writing, literature of exile and postcolonial theory. His major publications include Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature (2005); Counterrealism and Ingo Anglian Fiction (2002); Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka (2001); Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz (1997); Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World (1995), and Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose (1993).

Genre, Space and Typology in Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 11:20 - 13:20 EST

While there has been a general agreement about the burgeoning of creative writing in Tamil during the last two decades, very little has been done towards establishing a typology that would identify the ways in which this body of literature marks a point of departure from the literature that preceded it. Political conflict, cultural transformation and diaspora have often been identified as salient factors that contributed towards a change of sensibility among Sri Lankan Tamil writers. The precise manner in which these socio-cultural and political changes affected literary representation is yet to be charted in a comprehensive manner. This paper argues that nationalism and political struggle alone do not suffice as frames for understanding this body of writing. We need to look at the role of space, including land and landscape, genre, language, and a host of related issues in order to fully understand the multiple ways in which contemporary Sri Lankan writing in Tamil preserves a sense of continuity with previous writing while giving expression to new and often paradoxical realities.

தற்கால ஈழத்து இலக்கியத்தில் திணை/வெளி/வகைப்பாடுகள்
கடந்த இருபது ஆண்டுகளாக ஈழத்து இலக்கியம் பெரும் வளர்ச்சி பெற்றுள்ளது என்பது பொதுவாக ஏற்றுக்கொள்ளப்பட்டாலும் இந்த வளர்ச்சி, அதற்கு முந்திய காலகட்டத்தைவிட எவ்வாறு தனித்தும் சிறப்பாகவும் கிளைவிரிந்து சென்றிருக்கிறது என்பதுபற்றி, அறிந்துகொள்வதற்கான வகைப்பாடுகள் (typologies) எம்மிடையே இல்லை. அரசியல் எழுச்சி, சமூகப் பண்பாட்டு மாற்றங்கள், புகலிட/அலைந்துழல்வின் இலக்கியம் என்பன இந்த மாற்றத்துக்கு காரணம். இலக்கியப் பதிவை இவை எவ்வாறு துல்லியமாக மாற்றியமைத்துள்ளன என்பதை இனித்தான் நாம் தெளிவாகவும் இறுக்கமாகவும் ஆய்வு செய்ய வேண்டியிருக்கிறது. சமகால ஈழத்து இலக்கியத்தை மதிப்பிட தேசியவாதமும் அரசியல் போராட்டங்களும் மட்டுமே போதுமானவையன்று என்பதே இந்தக் கட்டுரை முன்வைக்கும் வாதமாகும். வெளி, நிலக்காட்சி, திணை, மொழி போன்ற பல கூறுகளை நாம் கவனத்தில் எடுக்க வேண்டும் என்று இந்தக் கட்டுரை வலியுறுத்துகிறது.

Change in Venue: William Doo Auditorium

2006-04-10T11:37:00.000-04:00

Please note that the venue for the conference has been changed from the Combination Room in Trinity College to the new William Doo Auditorium, located in the Willcocks Residence of New College. The conference will be held in its entirety at this new venue.

William Doo Auditorium
New College, University of Toronto
45 Willcocks Street (Willcocks & Spadina)
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1C7

* The closest subway station is Spadina. From that station, walk south for 10 minutes on Spadina Avenue or take the Spadina southbound streetcar and get off at the Willcocks stop.

Featured Presenter: Margaret Trawick | Dept. of Social Anthropology | Massey University

2006-04-10T11:26:00.000-04:00

Margaret Trawick
Professor
Department of Social Anthropology
Massey University
E/ M.Trawick@massey.ac.nz
W/ http://anthropology.massey.ac.nz/staff/Trawick

Dr. Trawick has carried out four extensive fieldwork projects in southern India, one extensive fieldwork project in Sri Lanka, and one fieldwork project at her former home in New York State. Her publications address the status of women in India, literate Chinese and Indian medical systems, South Indian poetry and poetics, spirit mediumship and possession, the anthropology of emotion, family and kinship, life histories, and the experience of untouchability in India. Since 1995, she has conducted research on the conflict in Sri Lanka. Some of her major and relevant publications include Enemy Lines: Childhood, Warfare, and Play in Batticaloa (forthcoming); “Interviews with High School Students in Eastern Sri Lanka” In Everyday Life in South Asia (2002); “Killing and Healing Revisited: On Sacrifice, Warfare, and Cultural Difference” in Medical Anthropology for the New Millenium Essays in Honor of Charles Leslie (2002); "On the Status of Child Combatants." in the Journal of Social Sciences 4:2 (2000); "Lessons from Kokkaddichcholai" at International Conference on Tamil Nationhood and the Search for Peace in Sri Lanka (1999); "Reasons for Violence: A Preliminary Ethnographic Account of the LTTE" in South Asia Vol. XX (1997), and Notes on Love in a Tamil Family (1990).

Duttugamani and Senguttuvan
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 16:30 - 18:30 EST

The late D.S. Sivaram has asserted that Senguttuvan of the Silappathigaram became, at the turn of the twentieth century, “one of the most persistent and characterising narratives of militant Tamil nationalism” (Sivaram: Collected Writings Part 10). Meanwhile, Duttugamani of the Mahavamsa is a well-known culture hero for militant Sinhala nationalists. Both Duttugamani and Senguttuvan are highly developed characters in the respective texts that introduce them. The Silappathigaram and the Mahavamsa were composed at approximately the same time in history, between the third and sixth centuries A.D., and in the same region, a circle with a three-hundred mile radius whose center is the middle of Adam’s Bridge. The two kings as portrayed in the texts have a number of attributes in common, most notably their angry natures and their driving ambitions for conquest, although the texts in which their stories are embedded are radically different from each other. The stories of these two kings offer some insight into the ideals and dilemmas of kingship in the respective societies of the day, as understood or constructed by the authors of the texts that tell their stories. The central dilemma for both is the same: How does a king or military leader make war and shed blood in the name of a religion or a people for whom bloodshed is sinful and deeply polluting? It will be argued in this paper that the LTTE and Tamil people in general have rejected Senguttuvan as a model for action in the present day, while Sinhala militants continue to look to the image of Duttugamani for inspiration and motivation in their current war against Tamils. The causes and consequences of these different decisions will be explored in this essay.

துட்டகாமினியும் செங்குட்டுவனும்
தீவிரவாதத் தமிழ்த் தேசியத்தின் முக்கியமான கதையாடலாக செங்குட்டுவன் அமைகிறார் என்பது காலஞ்சென்ற சிவராமின் கருத்தாகும். அதேவேளை தீவிரவாத சிங்கள தேசியத்துக்கு மகாவம்சம் குறிப்பிடும் துட்டகாமினி ஒரு முக்கியமான நாயகன் ஆவார். சிலப்பதிகாரமும் மகாவம்சமும் ஏறத்தாழ ஒரே காலகட்டத்திலேயே எழுதப்பட்டதாகக்கொள்ள முடியும். இந்த இரண்டு மன்னர்களும் தமக்கிடையே பொதுவான பல இயல்புகளை கொண்டிருந்தனர். உதாரணமாக கோபம், வெற்றிவேட்கை இரண்டையும் குறிப்பிடலாம். இந்த மன்னர்களுடைய வாழ்க்கையை ஆய்வு செய்வது அந்தக் காலகட்டத்துச் சமூகங்களின் இலட்சியங்கள் பற்றியும் நெருக்கடிகள் பற்றியும் தகவல்களைத் தருகிறது. இந்த இரண்டு மன்னர்களுக்கும் பொதுவாக இருந்தது ஒரே ஒரு சங்கடம்தான்: போரையும் குருதி சிந்துவதையும் வெறுக்கிற ஒரு சமூகத்தினர் அல்லது ஒரு மதத்தினரை பிரதிநிதித்துவப் படுத்துகிற போதும் எவ்வாறு போரை முன்னெடுப்பது என்பதே அதுவாகும். இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் விடுதலைப் புலிகளும் தமிழ் மக்களும் பொதுவாகவே செங்குட்டுவனை நிராகரித்து விட்டார்கள் என்ற வாதம் முன்வைக்கப்படுகிறது. அதேநேரம் சிங்களத் தீவிரவாதிகள் தொடர்ந்தும் துட்டகாமினியை ஆதர்ச நாயகனாகக் கொண்டிருக்கிறார்கள் என்பது வலியுறுத்தப்படுகிறது.

Featured Presenter: E. Annamalai | Dept. of Linguistics | Yale University

2006-04-09T12:20:00.000-04:00

E. Annamalai
Visiting Professor
Department of Linguistics
Department of Anthropology
Yale University
E/ annamalai38@yahoo.com

Dr. Annamalai is a Visiting Professor at Yale University since September 2004, where he teaches Tamil language courses as well as courses on political and public-cultural dimensions of language in India and on the structure of the Tamil language. As the Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore he was involved in developing language policy and in implementing programs for the development of Indian languages, primarily their use in education. His interest in language diversity and in the consequences of language contact has extended to documentation and revitalization of endangered languages. His recent publications on Tamil language include the papers, "The Constituent Structure of Tamil and Case and the Argument Structure of Tamil" in The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (2003 and 2004); "NP Gaps in Tamil: Syntactic versus Pragmatic" in Polymorphous Linguistics: Jim McCawley’s Legacy (2005) and the books Adjectival Clauses in Tamil (1997), Lectures on Modern Tamil (1999) and Colloquial Tamil (2002). Under his guidance were produced: A Dictionary of Contemporary Tamil (1992), Dictionary of Idioms and Phrases of Contemporary Tamil (1997) and Tamil Style Manual (2001).

Challenges of Language to Modern Tamil Creative Writing
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 11:20 - 13:20 EST

There are two kinds of language problem to creative writing. One is the problem of converting experiences into words and sentences and it is a problem of the creative process. The other problem is of providing linguistic authenticity to experiences and it is a problem of the communicative process. The second problem relates to the hiatus between the conventions of literary composition and actual language use in real life. Though both problems relate at some point, this paper is about the second problem. This paper discusses questions that relate to the social dynamics of modern Tamil, its diglossic differentiation, literate linguistic influence on the writer, consistency in representing speech in Tamil script and loss of the reader.

நவீன தமிழ் இலக்கியம் எதிர்கொள்ளும் மொழியின் சவால்கள்
நவீன தமிழ் இலக்கியத்துக்கு மொழி சார்ந்து இரு சிக்கல்கள் இருக்கின்றன. முதலாவது சிக்கல், அனுபவங்களை எவ்வாறு வார்த்தைகளிலும் வசனங்களிலும் கொண்டுவருவது என்பது பற்றியது. இது படைப்பாக்க நெறிமுறை சார்ந்தது. மற்றது அனுபவங்களுக்கு மொழியியல் தனித்துவத்தைத் தருவது. இது தொடர்பாடல் நெறிமுறையைச் சார்ந்த சிக்கலாகும். இரண்டாவது சிக்கல் இலக்கிய மரபுக்கும் அன்றாட வாழ்க்கையில் மொழியின் பயன்பாட்டுக்கும் இடையிலான உறவு பற்றியது. இந்த இரண்டு சிக்கல்களும் ஓரளவுக்கு உறவு கொண்டவை எனினும் அண்ணாமலையின் ஆய்வுக் கட்டுரை இரண்டாவது சிக்கல் பற்றியே பேசுகிறது. இக்கட்டுரையில் நவீன தமிழின் சமூக இயங்கியல், அதனுடைய இரட்டை வழக்கு நிலைமை (diglossia), மொழியியல் சிறப்பு எழுத்தாளர் மீது செலுத்துகின்ற தாக்கம், பேச்சு வழக்கை சீரான முறையில் எழுத்தில் கொண்டு வருவது போன்றவை பற்றி விவாதிக்கிறது.

Featured Presenter: Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan | Dept. of Fine Arts | University of Jaffna

2006-04-08T02:56:00.000-04:00

Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan
Lecturer, Art History
Department of Fine Arts
University of Jaffna
E/ tshanaathanan@yahoo.co.in
W/ http://shanaathanan.blogspot.com

Shanaathanan read towards his BFA and MFA in Painting at the University of Delhi and passed with First Class Honours. His work has been exhibited in several countries including the United Kingdom, France and India. In 2004, he was an Artist-in-Residence at Vasl in Karachi, Pakistan and the Usher Gallery in Lincoln, United Kingdom. His major publications include "Making the Impermanent Permanent: The Configurations of Mugamandhapa Architecture of Jaffna Temple" in Cintanai 15:1 (2005); "Painting the Artist’s Self: Location, Relocation and the Metamorphosis" at Tamil Nationalism – Trans/Formation (2004); "Interaction Between Visual Art and Tamil Literature in 20th Century" at Tamilini (2000), and "Contemporary Temple Painting of Jaffna" in Cintanai 12:2 (2000).

Visual Arts and Media: Territory, Identity and Liminality in Contemporary Painting
சமகால ஓவியங்களில் நிலப்பரப்பும் அடையாளமும் அந்தரநிலையும்
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 17:00 - 18:20 EST

ஓவியர்களின் ஓவியங்கள் கண்காட்சிக்கு வைக்கப்படுவதுடன் ஓவியங்கள் பற்றிக் கருத்துரைகளும் வழங்கப்படும்.

Featured Presenter: Daud Ali | Dept. of History | School of Oriental and African Studies

2006-04-07T16:38:00.000-04:00

Daud Ali
Senior Lecturer in Early Indian History
Department of History
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
E/ da7@soas.ac.uk
W/ http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staffinfo.cfm?contactid=141

Dr. Ali's main areas of research are Cultural and Social History of Ancient and Medieval India; including history of political structures and religious ideas, courtly manners. He is currently interested in general historical topics relating to ancient and medieval Indian history until 1600. His major publications include Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (2004); "Recognizing Europe in India: Colonial master narratives and the writing of Indian History," in Stromquist Contesting the Master Narrative (1998); "Royal Eulogy as World History: Rethinking Copper-Plate Inscriptions in Cola India," Querying the Medieval: The History of Practice in South Asia (2000); "Technologies of the self: Courtly Artifice and Monastic Discipline in Early India," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41:2 (1998); "Violence, Gastronomy and the Meaning of War in Medieval South India," Medieval History Journal 3:2 (2000); "Anxieties of Attachment: The Dynamics of Courtship in Medieval India," Modern Asian Studies, 36:1 (2002); "'Gardens in Early Indian Court Life," Studies in History 19:2 (2003).

Palace Establishments in the Chola Empire: A Study of the Term Velam in Chola Epigraphy
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 9:00 - 11:00 EST

This paper, using the large corpus of Chola period Tamil inscriptions, will attempt to clarify and understand an apparently obscure and neglected term in Tamil epigraphy, known as velam. The paper will argue that the term in Chola period sources should best be understood as a ‘palace establishment’ composed mostly of women (and sometimes men) of servile status. A relatively comprehensive review of the term in inscriptions and literature sheds significant light on the organisation of the lower echelons of labour in the Chola imperial household and the conditions under which men and women of this status were incorporated into such service. The paper will analyse the function and evolution of these palace establishments throughout the history of the empire.

சோழர் காலக் கல்வெட்டுக்களில் வேழம் என்னும் சொல் பற்றிய ஆய்வு
சோழர் காலக் கல்வெட்டுகளில் இடம்பெறும் வேழம் என்ற சொல்லுக்கு முரணான, தெளிவற்ற விளக்கங்கள் தரப்படுகின்றன. அந்தச் சொல்லுக்குரிய பொருத்தமான பொருள் மாளிகை நிறுவனம் (Palace Establishments) என்பதை இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் நிறுவுகிறார் தாவுத் அலி. இந்த மாளிகை பெண்களையும் ஒரு சில அடிமை ஆண்களையும் மட்டுமே கொண்டிருந்தது. வேழம் பற்றிய ஆய்வு சோழர் காலத்தில் அடித்தள மக்கள் மற்றும் அவர்களுக்கு விதிக்கப்பட்ட ஊதியம்/ஊழியம் எவை என்பது பற்றி விரிவான தகவல்களைத் தருகிறது. சோழர் காலம் முழுவதுமே இத்தகைய மாளிகை நிறுவனங்கள் எµவாறு உருவாகிப் பணியாற்றின என்பதை இக்கட்டுரை விளக்குகிறது.

Featured Presenter: Yamuna Sangarasivam | Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology | Nazareth College

2006-04-06T02:10:00.000-04:00

Yamuna Sangarasivam
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Nazareth College
E/ ysangar7@naz.edu
W/ http://www.naz.edu/directories/emp.cfm?email=ysangar7@naz.edu

Dr. Sangarasivam's research interests include nationalism and terrorism; race relations intersecting with constructions of class, gender, sexuality and national identity; transnational/border identities; peace-witnessing and social justice. Some of her relevant publications include " Militarizing the Feminine Body: Women's Participation in the Tamil Nationalist Struggle" in Violence and the Body: Race, Gender and the State (2003) and "Researcher as Informant: Methodological Pleasures of the Native Other," Geographical Review 91: 1&2 (2001).

Racism and Terrorism: Old Fears as New Anxieties
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 16:30 - 18:30 EST

This paper examines the construction of “terrorism” and racism in the context of war. I will be analyzing narrative strategies that deploy the rhetoric of “terrorism” in everyday speech to normalize and solidify the binary opposition of self and Other in the context of Sri Lanka and North America. How is the language of “terrorism” deployed to mobilize, manipulate and define everyday relationships of power? How does an unconscious acceptance of the “terrorist” discourse work to discipline and control social behaviors and social relations, which are influenced by racist attitudes? How do the categories of “terrorist” and “terrorism” impact folks within Tamil communities – how they construct their identities and how they participate in racism as a means of somehow preserving the self in relation to a “terrorist” Other within and beyond Tamil diasporic home spaces? In examining these questions, my intent is to facilitate conversations about the transformative potentials of re-thinking the terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” in the process of non-violent social change.

இனவாதமும் “பயங்கரவாதமும்”
போர்ச்சூழலில் “பயங்கரவாதமும்” இனவாதமும் எவ்வாறு கட்டமைக்கப்படுகின்றன என்பதை இந்தக் கட்டுரை ஆய்வு செய்கிறது. இலங்கையிலும் அமெரிக்காவிலும் நாளாந்த கதையாடல்கள் எவ்வாறு பயங்கரவாதம் என்பதை ஒரு சாதாரணமான “நாம்”, “பிறர்” என்ற வகைப்பாட்டுக்குள் கொண்டுவருகிறது என்பதை இந்தக் கட்டுரை விளக்குகிறது. பயங்கரவாதம் என்ற கோட்பாடு எவ்வாறு அதிகாரத்துக்குத் துணை போகிறது? சமூக நடைமுறைகளையும் சமூக உறவுகளையும் எவ்வாறு இந்தப் பயங்கரவாதக் கதையாடல் கட்டுப்படுத்துகிறது? பயங்கரவாதம், பயங்கரவாதி என்ற பதங்கள் எவ்வாறு தமிழ்ச் சமூகங்களைப் பாதிக்கின்றன? ஆகிய கேள்விகளை கட்டுரையாளர் ஆய்வுக்கு எடுத்துக்கொள்கிறார்.

Featured Presenter: Mark Whitaker | Dept. of Anthropology | University of South Carolina

2006-04-05T05:00:00.000-04:00

Mark Whitaker
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of South Carolina
E/ MarkW@usca.edu

Dr. Whitaker's current research interests center on Tamil, Sri Lanka, politics, media, diaspora, and nationalism. His recent publications include "TamilNet.com: Some reflections on Popular Anthropology, Nationalism, and the Internet" in Anthropological Quarterly 77:3 (2004) and Amiable Incoherence: Manipulating Histories and Modernities in a Batticaloa Hindu Temple (1999).

A Death and the Tamil Diaspora: Some Reflections on the Multiple Audiences of Sivaram Dharmeratnam
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 14:30 - 16:30 EST

On April 28, 2005, Sivaram Dharmeratnam, or ‘Taraki’, the journalist, military analyst and TamilNet.com editor was murdered as part, apparently, of the continuing ‘shadow war’ being fought out quietly in Sri Lanka despite the current cease-fire. A tragedy for his family, and roundly condemned in Sri Lanka as a great loss to journalism even by many who disagreed with his politics, Sivaram’s death provoked a wave of public mourning in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. The LTTE declared Sivaram ‘Mamaniththar’, and memorials were held in Paris, London, Sidney, Washington, D.C., Newark, New Jersey, and, of course, in Toronto. As an attendee and co-mourner at several of these events – for Sivaram was also an old friend – I grew amazed at how the different identities Sivaram had (quite consciously) crafted as part of his work in various media still circulated in the Diaspora, and how people at the memorials were trying to mingle and fuse them. Was I witnessing, perhaps, the birth of a new Diasporic discourse – a discourse of death in which something not quite Sivaram would live again? And did this reveal something illuminating about how media influences diasporic memory? The purpose of this paper is to begin trying to answer both of these questions.

சிவராமின் மரணமும் புகலிடத் தமிழரும்
ஏப்ரல் 28, 2005 அன்று தராக்கி என்று அறியபட்ட சிவராம் தர்மரட்னம் கொலை செய்யப்பட்டார். தமிழ்நெட் இணையத்தளத்தின் ஆசிரியராகவும் இதழியலாளராகவும் படைத்துறை ஆய்வாளராகவும் விளங்கியவர் சிவராம். அவருடைய மரணம் இலங்கையிலும் புகலிடத் தமிழர்கள் மத்தியிலும் பெரும் அனுதாப அலைகளை ஏற்படுத்தியது. அவருக்கான நினைவு அஞ்சலிக் கூட்டங்கள், பாரிஸ், லண்டன், சிட்னி, வாஷிங்டன், நியூëஜர்சி, டொராண்டோ ஆகிய இடங்களில் நடைபெற்றன. விடுதலைப் புலிகள் சிவராமுக்கு மாமனிதர் விருது வழங்கினார்கள். சிவராம் என் நீண்டகால நண்பர் என்ற முறையில் ஒரு சில அஞ்சலிக்கூட்டங்களில் நானும் கலந்துகொண்டேன். அப்போதுதான் புலம்பெயர்ந்த தமிழர்கள் மத்தியில் சிவராமின் பல்வேறு அடையாளங்கள் எµவாறு தொகுத்தும் இணைத்தும் ஒன்றாகவும் வேறுவேறாகவும் அலசப்பட்டன என்பது எனக்கு வியப்பைத் தருவதாக இருந்தது. ஒரு புதுமையான புகலிடக் கதையாடல் (diaspora discourse) ஒன்று உருவாகிறதோ என்ற ஐயம் எனக்கு ஏற்பட்டது. கூடவே இன்னொரு கேள்வியும் எழுந்தது: ஊடகங்கள் எµவாறு அலைந்துழல்வின் நினைவெழுதலை ஆதிக்கம் செலுத்துகின்றன? இந்தக் கட்டுரையின் நோக்கம் இµவிரு கேள்விகளுக்கும் பதில் தேடுவதாகும்.

Featured Presenter: V. Geetha | Tara Publishing

2006-04-04T00:02:00.000-04:00

V. Geetha
Tara Publishing
E/ v_geetha@vsnl.com
W/ http://www.tarabooks.com

V. Geetha is a writer, translator, social historian, activist, and a freelance editor with a number of small research journals. A leading intellectual from Tamil Nadu, she has been active in the Indian women's movement since 1988, organising workshops and conferences. She has written widely, both in Tamil and English, on gender, popular culture, caste, and politics of Tamil Nadu. Among the publications she has co-authored are "Patriarchy" in Theorizing Feminism Series (forthcoming); Soul Force: Gandhi’s Writings on Peace (2004); Seasons of the Palm (2004); Current Show (2004); An Ideal Boy: Charts from India (2001); "Gender" in Theorizing Feminism Series (2001); Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium: From Iyothee Thass to Periyar (1998). Her Tamil books include Self-respect and Samadharma: Life and Thought of Antonio Gramsci, Frankfurt Marxism, and An Introduction to Althusser.

Caste, Gender and the Tamil Realist Novel Today
Friday, May 12, 2006 /11:20 - 13:20 EST

This paper will look at the continuing attractions of realism for those who write of lives that were not considered worthy of literature until recently. I will look at a select body of writings on dalits and poor, marginalized women. The authors I consider include Perumal Murugan, Tamizhselvi Baama, Kanmani Gunasekharan and Vizhi.Paa. Idayavendan.

தமிழ் யதார்த்த நாவலும் சாதியமும் பாலினமும் (Gender)
பெருமாள் முருகன், தமிழ்ச் செல்வி, பாமா, கண்மணி குணசேகரன், விழி பா.இதயவேந்தன் ஆகியோரின் படைப்புகளை முன்வைத்து யதார்த்தவாதம் எவ்வாறு அடிநிலை மக்களின் வாழ்க்கையை இலக்கியத்தில் கொண்டுவருவதற்கு பயன்படுகிறது என்பதை இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் விளக்குகிறார். தலித்துகள், வறிய மக்கள், பெண்கள் போன்றோருடைய வாழ்க்கையைச் சித்திரிக்கும் எழுத்தாளர்கள் தொடர்ந்தும் யதார்த்தவாதத்தை நோக்கி ஈர்க்கப்படுவது பற்றிய ஆய்வே இந்தக் கட்டுரையாகும்.

Featured Presenter: Katherine Young | Faculty of Religious Studies | McGill University

2006-04-03T00:03:00.000-04:00

Katherine Young
Professor
Faculty of Religious Studies
McGill University
W/ http://people.mcgill.ca/katherine.young

Dr. Young's research interests are Hinduism, religions of Tamil Nadu, Hindu ethics, and gender and religion. Her major publications include "The Image- incarnation: Religion, Philosophy, and Sectarian Politics in the Evolution of Srivaisnavism" Studies in Hinduism, vol. 4 (forthcoming); "Om, the Vedas, and the Status of Women with Special Reference to Srivaisnavism" in Jewels of Authority: Women and Textual Tradition in Hindu India (2002); "The Spirit and the Bride say Come: Continuing a Hindu-Christian Dialogue," Journal of Vaisnava Studies 6:5 (1998); "Theology Does Help Women's Liberation: Srivaisnavism, a Case Study," Journal of Vaisnava Studies 3 (1995); "The Meeting of Two Great Traditions: Migration into Tamil Nadu (500-900 C.E.)," in Ethnicity, Identity, Migration: The South Asian Context (1993).

Panel Discussion: Pursuing Tamil Studies in North America
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 11:30 - 13:00 EST

Drummers and Changing Images of Tamil Identity: From Cankam to Bhakti Poetry
Saturday, May 13, 2006 9:00 - 11:00 EST

In this paper, I will trace representations of drummers in Tamil literature from about the first century CE to the tenth. What do works such as the Purananuru, Ahananuru, Cilappatikaram, Manimekalai, Paripatal, and the bhakti poems of the alvars and nayanmars tell us about the image, function, and status of drummers? Do they help us to understand how Tamil identity is presented or generated? And do they provide clues about how this identity changes over the millennium?

Cankam poems represent specialized classes of drummers defined by type of drum: mulavu, tannumai, and patalai drums played by Panar, courtesans, and Virali; kinai, parai, and muracu drums played by Kinaiyar, Paraiyar, and Akavunar; and tuti drums played by Tutiyar. These specialists were also associated with specific contexts: the Panar with the court and entertainment but also the call to battle, the battlefield, and the harvest; the Paraiyar and Kinaiyar with the king, his court. and battle; the Akavunar with fortune telling, and the Tutiyar with battle but also with death -- protecting the wounded from death on the battlefield, honouring the dead warrior’s memorial (natukal), and heralding caravan attacks or other wild, dangerous activities. Poems associated these types of drummers, too, with particular types of singing and dancing. Some cankam understandings of drums likely had archaic religious meanings associated with shamanism or Murukan worship and concepts of kingship (the king’s royal drum, which was deified and worshipped, for instance, was made of an enemy’s tutelary tree, which had shamanic axis mundi symbolism and contained the power of its former owner).

My preliminary research shows that this rich field of concrete, specialized meaning and emotion evoked by drums in cankam poetry changed to a more abstract image of song and dance as a kind of cultural icon of Tamil identity in the bhakti poetry. The drummers themselves disappear largely from view in the bhakti poems. I will ask the following questions to explore this change and search for an explanation. Was this a question of the bhakti genre (which simply had no interest in drummers), lack of patronage, no role in temple ritual, or the inferior status of drummers (because ritual impurity was associated with the leather of drum heads - the word “pariah,” for instance, which meant drummer came to mean paraiah as outcaste)? Were technical terms for drumming displaced onto the deities, and if so, why? Were there differences in Vaisnava and Saiva representations of drummers, and, if so, why? How does the history of literary images of drummers compare to that of other types of performers, such as the panar who also had ambiguous status? Does this tell us anything about the fault lines among various types of performers?

பறையடிப்போரும் மாறி வரும் தமிழ் அடையாளமும்: சங்கக் கவிதைகளில் இருந்து பக்தி இலக்கியம் வரை
சங்க காலத்தில் இருந்து 10ம் நுìற்றாண்டு வரை பறையடிப்போர்/ அவர்களது நிலை பற்றிய பதிவுகள் எµவாறு மாறி வந்துள்ளன என்பதை இந்தக் கட்டுரை ஆராய்கிறது. புறநானுìறு, அகநானுìறு, சிலப்பதிகாரம், மணிமேகலை, பரிபாடல், ஆழ்வார், நாயன்மார் பாடல்கள் எல்லாம் பறையடிப்போர் பற்றிய எத்தகைய படிமங்களைத் தருகின்றன? பறையடிப்போர் சமூகத்தில் எந்த நிலையில் வைக்கப்பட்டிருந்தனர்? அவர்களுடைய பணி என்ன? தமிழ் அடையாளத்தை பிரதிநிதித்துவப்படுத்துவதில் பறையடிப்போரின் சிறப்பு என்ன? இது எµவாறு கடந்த 10 நுìற்றாண்டுகளாக மாறி வந்துள்ளது? இந்தக் கேள்விகளுக்கான பதிலைத் தேடுகிறார் கத்தரின் யங். சங்கக் கவிதைகளில் பறையடிப்போர் பற்றிய பல குறிப்புகள் வருகின்றன. பல வகையான பறைகள் பற்றியும் தகவல்கள் கிடைக்கின்றன. முழவு, தண்ணுமை, படலை ஆகிய வகைப் பறைகள் பாணர்களாலும் விறலியர்களாலும் ஆடல்மகளிராலும் பயன்படுத்தப்பட்டன. கிணை, முரசு, பறை ஆகியன முறையே கிணையராலும் பறையராலும் அகவுணராலும் பயன்படுத்தப்பட்டன. துடி எனப்படும் பறையை துடியர் பயன்படுத்தினர். இத்தகைய பல்வேறுபட்ட பறைகளும் பல்வேறுபட்ட சந்தர்ப்பங்களிலும் பயன்படுத்தப்பட்டன. பாணர் முழங்கிய பறைகள் அரசவையிலும் ஆடல் பாடல்களிலும் பயன்பட்டன. போர் முனையிலும் அறுவடை காலங்களிலும்கூட அவை ஒலி எழுப்பின. பறையும் கிணையும் அரசவைக்குரியதாகவும் போர்முனைக்குரியதாகவும் அமைந்தன. அகவுணர் பறையொலி குறிசொல்லுதலுடன் தொடர்புடையது. துடியருடைய பறை போருடனும் இறப்புடனும் தொடர்பானது. துடிப்பறை போரில் காயமுற்றோரைக் காப்பதற்கும் பயன்பட்டது. வீரர்களின் நடுகல் வழிபாட்டிலும் துடிப்பறை பயன்பட்டது. அரசவைப் பறைகள் தெய்வீகமாகக் கருதப்பட்டன. கால ஓட்டத்தில் பறை, பறையடிப்போருக்கு இருந்த சிறப்பு அழிந்து போகலாயிற்று. பக்தி இலக்கியங்களில் பறை பற்றிய செய்தியே கிடையாது. ஏன் இந்த மாறுதல் நிகழ்ந்தது, எµவாறு இந்த மாறுதல் நிகழ்ந்தது, ஏன் பறையும் பறையர்களும் ஒடுக்கப்பட்ட சாதியினராக மாற்றம் பெற்றனர், வரலாற்றில் பாணர்களுடைய நிலை என்ன, போன்ற கேள்விகளுக்கு விடை தேடுகிறது இக்கட்டுரை.

Featured Presenter: E. Valentine Daniel | Dept. of Anthropology | Columbia University

2006-04-02T03:30:00.000-04:00

E. Valentine Daniel
Professor
Department of Anthropology
Columbia University
E/ evd7@columbia.edu
W/ http://www.columbia.edu/cu/anthropology/fac-bios/daniel/faculty.html

Dr. Daniel is Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the Southern Asian Institute at Columbia University. His major publications are Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (1996) and Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (1987) . Other publications include "The Limits of Culture" in Near Ruins (1998); "Crushed Glass" in Culture/Contexture: Essays in Anthropology and Literary Study (1996); "Formations, Forms and Transformations of Tamil Refugees" in Mistrusting Refugees (1995), and "Suffering Nation and Alienation" in Questioning Otherness (1995). He is currently working on a book on the philosophy of the founder of American Pragmatism, Charles S. Pierce, and its relevance for the human sciences.

Coping with Displacement: Ethics of Recognition or the Will to Power
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 16:30 - 18:30 EST

Sri Lankan Plantation Tamil youth have employed two modes of coping with displacement and the encounter with new "agents" of domination. The first may be described as the "ethics of recognition," with obvious allusions to Hegel's dialectic of recognition; and the second, with equally obvious allusion to Nietzsche's "will to power." The analysis of these two ways of coping with difference will be the subject of this paper.

இடம்பெயர்வை எதிர்கொள்ளல்: அங்கீகாரத்திற்கான அறவியலா அல்லது அதிகாரத்திற்கான வேட்கையா?
இலங்கையின் மலையகத் தமிழ் இளைஞர்கள் இடம்பெயர்வையும் புதிய ஆதிக்க சக்திகளையும் இரண்டு வகையாக எதிர்கொள்கிறார்கள். முதலாவது வகையை நாங்கள் அங்கீகாரத்தின் அறவியல் என்று அழைக்கலாம். இது ஹெகலை நினைவுபடுத்தக்கூடும். இரண்டாவது அதிகாரத்திற்கான வேட்கை. இது நீட்ஷேயை நினைவுபடுத்தக்கூடும். இடம்பெயர்வை எதிர்கொள்ளக் கையாளும் இந்த இரண்டு வழிமுறைகளின் வேறுபாடுகளைப் பற்றியதே இந்தக் கட்டுரை.

Featured Presenter: Indira V. Peterson | Dept. of Asian Studies | Mount Holyoke College

2006-04-01T01:28:00.000-05:00

Indira V. Peterson
Professor
Department of Asian Studies
Mount Holyoke College
E/ ipeterso@mtholyoke.edu
W/ http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/asian/profiles/peterson.shtml

Dr. Peterson's fields of specialization are Indian and comparative literature (classical and modern); Sanskrit and Tamil language; Hinduism; South Indian performing arts (music, dance, and drama) and cultural history; women and gender in South Asia. Her major publications include Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints (1989); Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi (2003). She is also the editor for Indian Literature in the Norton Anthology of World Literature (2001). She is currently working on Imagining the World in Eighteenth-Century India, a book on the innovative eighteenth-century Tamil dance-drama genre called the "Kuravanci" or "fortune-teller" drama.

The Kuravanji Fortune-teller Dramas of Tamilnadu: Local and Global discourses in an Early Modern Tamil Literary Genre
Friday, May 12, 2006 / 9:00 - 11:00 EST

This paper is about the Kuravanji, the drama of the wandering fortune-teller, a Tamil courtly literary genre of the 18th and 19th centuries. Focusing on a wandering tribal fortune-teller (Kuratti, Kuravanji) and her birdcatcher husband, who come from the hills to ply their trades in a prosperous temple-town, Kuravanji dramas offer imaginative perspectives on social interactions and political change in early modern Tamilnadu. These dramas shape ancient Tamil literary themes in a popular mould; they also portray folk figures and material drawn from contemporary Tamil society in an elite context. The genius of the Kuravanji genre lies in its innovative transformations of enduring Tamil discourses about persons in relation to emotional and physical landscapes and sacred places. At the same time, the plot and characters of the drama evoke comparison with European comic operas with parallel plots and contrasting elite and marginal characters, while commenting on social relations in 18th century Tamilnadu. Moreover, the fortune-teller's travels in regions far beyond the Tamil country dramatizes the expanding eighteenth-century world, a world growing larger as a result of intercultural encounters engendered by travel and migrations of various kinds. In this paper I discuss the plot and themes of the Kuravanji drama, using my translations of the Kurralak Kuravanji (1715) and other celebrated dramas, to illuminate the genre’s dialogic discourses on class and on the local and the global.

தமிழ் நாட்டில் குறவஞ்சி நாடகங்கள்: நவீன தமிழ் இலக்கியப் பரப்பில் உள்ளூர் மற்றும் உலகக் கதையாடல்கள்
18ம், 19ம் நுìற்றாண்டின் குறவஞ்சிப் பாடல்களை ஆய்வு செய்கிறார் இந்திரா பீட்டர்சன். 1715ல் வெளியிடப்பட்ட குற்றாலக் குறவஞ்சியை மூலமாகக்கொண்டு அக்காலத் தமிழ் நாட்டின் சமூக ஊடாட்டங்களையும் அரசியல் மாற்றங்களையும் இந்த ஆய்வுக் கட்டுரை பதிவு செய்கிறது. மேட்டுக்குடியினரையும் சாதாரண பொதுமக்களையும் பற்றிய சித்திரங்களைத் தருவதால் குறவஞ்சி நாடகங்கள் அங்கதச் சுவை சார்ந்த ஐரோப்பியப் பாடல் நாடகங்களுடன்(opera) ஒப்பிடத்தக்கதாக அமைகின்றன. குறவஞ்சி நாடகங்களின் மையப் பாத்திரங்கள் நாடோடிகளாகவும் அலைவோராகவும் இருந்தமையால் அவர்களுடைய உலகம் எவ்வாறு தமிழ்நாட்டுக்கு அப்பாலும் விரிவடைகிறது என்பதையும் அதனுìடாகக் கிடைக்கின்ற பண்பாட்டு இடைத் தாக்கங்கள், கலாசார பரிமாற்றங்கள் பற்றியும் பயன்தரும் ஆய்வாக இது அமைகிறது. வர்க்கம், உள்ளூர்த் தளம் மற்றும் உலகத் தளம் என்பன எவ்வாறு தமக்குள்ளேயும் சமாந்தரமானதும் முரணானதுமான கதையாடல்களை எழுப்புகின்றன என்பதை இந்தக் கட்டுரை விளக்குகிறது.

University of Toronto: Sessional Lecturer Position (x2)

2006-03-31T11:12:00.000-05:00

The South Asian Studies Program at the University of Toronto currently seeks two sessional lecturers from May 1 – June 30, 2006 to teach the following New College courses in Tamil Studies:

NEW213Y1F – Introduction to Tamil
Intended for students with little or no knowledge of written Tamil. Intensive introduction to phonology and grammar; syntax of the modern Tamil language; emphasis on basic writing and reading. More information is available at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~tamils/SAS-NEW213Y1F.pdf.

NEW217H1F – Tamil Studies in South Asian and the Diaspora
An interdisciplinary approach that explains the complexity and multiplicity of Tamil culture. Anhistorical approach to the evolution of Tamil culture over the last twenty centuries. Issues of region, space, politics, and religion will aid in an understanding of contemporary Tamil culture, both in South Asia and the diaspora. More information is available at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~tamils/SAS-NEW217H1F.pdf.

Application deadline is April 19, 2006.

Featured Presenter: Bernard Bate | Dept. of Anthropology | Yale University

2006-03-31T02:40:00.000-05:00

Bernard Bate
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Yale University
E/ bernard.bate@yale.edu
W/ http://www.yale.edu/anthro/people/bbate.html

Dr. Bate's research focuses on Tamil, South Asia, language, politics, gender and the historical ethnography of language. Previous research examined political and literary oratory in the contexts of its production in late twentieth-century Tamil Nadu. He is currently exploring the history of Tamil oratory and textuality in order to document the emergence of political oratory in the early twentieth century. His recent publications include "Arumuga Navlar, Saivite sermons, and the delimitation of religion, c. 1850" in Language, Genre, and the Historical Imagination in South India, a special issue of the Indian Economic and Social History Review (2005); "Shifting subjects: elocutionary revolution in 18th Century America and 20th Century India" in Language and Communication 24:4 (2004); "Political Praise in Tamil Newspapers: The Poetry and Iconography of Democratic Power" in Everyday Life in South Asia (2002).

Panel Discussion: Pursuing Tamil Studies in North America
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 11:30 - 13:00 EST

Textuality and Social Transformation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Jaffna
Saturday, May 13, 2006 / 14:00 - 16:00 EST

This paper will discuss the relationship between changing models of communicative action and transformations in social organization in mid nineteenth-century Jaffna. I will examine how new understandings of textuality introduced by protestant missionaries fundamentally transformed the nature of Jaffna society and how those transformations played fateful roles in the production of a Tamil communicative modernity in general. Following K. Sivathamby's understanding of textuality (paadam), I will stress the social roles and outcomes associated with specific phenomenologies of language practice. Taking the Kandapuranam and the protestant Bible as exemplary texts within two different understandings of textual practice, I will discuss how the social roles associated with protestant textuality, as embodied in protestant sermons (piracangam), provided new models of and for social and political action.

நுìற்றாண்டு யாழ்ப்பாணத்தின் சமூக மாற்றங்கள்
மாறி வருகின்ற பொதுசனத் தொடர்பாடல் வழிமுறைகள், 19ம் நுìற்றாண்டு யாழ்ப்பாணச் சமூக அமைப்புகளுடன் எத்தகைய உறவு கொண்டிருந்தன என்பதை பெர்னாட் பேட்ஸ் இந்தக் கட்டுரையில் விளக்குகிறார். புரெட்டெஸ்டாண்டு மிஷனரிமார் அறிமுகப்படுத்திய “பாடங்கள்” (textuality) எவ்வாறு யாழ்ப்பாணத்தின் தொடர்பாடல் நவீனமயமாக்கத்துக்கு துணை செய்தது என்பது கட்டுரையின் மையமாகும். கந்தபுராணத்தையும் புரெட்டெஸ்டாண்டு மதத்தினரின் பைபிளையும் எடுத்துக்காட்டாகக்கொண்டு எவ்வாறு இத்தகைய பாடங்கள் பிரசங்கங்கள் என்ற வடிவத்தின் ஊடாக புதிய தொடர்பாடல் முறைகளை உருவாக்கின என்பதையும் கட்டுரை ஆய்வு செய்கிறது.

Registration Deadline: April 15, 2006

2006-03-27T14:41:00.000-05:00

Please note that the conference registration deadline is April 15, 2006. Please inform colleagues and friends who are interested in participating that they must register by this date if they intend to attend. They can register electronically using our online form at http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~tamils/reg.

தமிழியல்: திணையும் தளமும் நிலையும்

2006-02-09T15:21:00.000-05:00

வடஅமெரிக்கா, ஐரோப்பா, தெற்காசியா, ஆஸ்திரேலியாவைச் சேர்ந்த 30க்கும் மேற்பட்ட கல்வியாளர்கள் ஒன்று கூடும் தமிழியல் மாநாடு, மே மாதம் 11ம் தேதி முதல் 14ம் தேதி வரை டொராண்டோ பல்கலைக்கழக டிரினிடி கல்லுìரியில் நடைபெறுகிறது. பங்குபெற விரும்புவோர் அனைவரும் இந்த இணையத் தளத்தில் முன்பதிவு செய்வது அவசியம்.

டொராண்டோ பல்கலைக்கழகத்தின் தெற்கு ஆசிய கல்விக் கழகமும் வின்சர் பல்கலைக்கழகத்தின் சமூகவியல் மற்றும் மானுடவியல் துறையும் இணைந்து “திணையும் தளமும் நிலையும்” தமிழியல் மாநாட்டை ஏற்பாடு செய்துள்ளன. 2006ம் ஆண்டு மே மாதம் 11ம் தேதி முதல் 14ம் தேதி வரை நான்கு நாட்கள் மாநாடு நடைபெறும். ஆண்டுதோறும் நிகழவுள்ள தமிழியல் மாநாட்டுத் தொடரின் முதல் நிகழ்வாக இம்மாநாடு அரங்கேறுகிறது.

மேற்குலகின் ஆகப்பெரிய புலம்பெயர் தமிழ்ச் சமூகத்தைக் கொண்டிருக்கும் டொராண்டோவில் தமிழ்க் கல்வி வளர்ச்சிக்கான நீண்ட காலத் திட்டத்தின் ஓர் அங்கமாக இந்த மாநாடுகள் அமைகின்றன. வடஅமெரிக்காவின் தமிழ்க் கல்வி மையமாக டொராண்டோவை உருவாக்கும் முயற்சியின் முதல் கட்டமாக டொராண்டோ பல்கலைக்கழகத்தில் நடைபெறும் இம்மாநாடும் கோடைக்கால தமிழ் மொழி வகுப்பும் இடம்பெறுகின்றன.

டொராண்டோ பல்கலைக்கழகத்துடனும் வடஅமெரிக்காவின் தமிழ்க் கல்வியாளர்களுடனும் டொராண்டோ தமிழ்ச் சமூகத்தைப் புத்தாக்க வழியில் மாநாட்டின் வழி இணைப்பது ஏற்பாட்டாளர்களின் நோக்கம். மேலும் டொராண்டோ மாணவர்களுக்கும் வடஅமெரிக்காவின் தமிழியல் கல்வியாளர்களுக்கும் தமிழ்க் கல்வியின் விரிந்த தளத்தையும் இம்மாநாடு அறிமுகப்படுத்தும்.

வடஅமெரிக்காவின் தமிழியல் கல்வியாளர்கள் தங்களது படைப்புகளை சக கல்வியாளர்கள் மற்றும் டொராண்டோ தமிழ்ச் சமூகத்தின் முன்னிலையில் படைக்க ஒரு வாய்ப்பையும் இந்த டொராண்டோ மாநாடு தருகிறது. அதனுடன் தமிழ்நாடு, இலங்கை தொடர்பான கல்விகளில் ஈடுபட்டிருக்கும் கல்வியாளர்கள் தங்களது ஆய்வுகளைப் பரிமாறிக்கொள்ளவும், இந்தத் தமிழ் வட்டாரங்கள் குறித்த கல்வியை பரந்த ஒப்பீட்டு முறையில் அணுகவும் மாநாடு வகைசெய்கிறது. அனைத்துலக கல்வி மையத்துக்கான மங் சென்டர் அல்லது பல்கலைக்கழக அச்சகம் மூலம் மாநாட்டில் படைக்கப்படும் கட்டுரைகளை நுìலாக வெளியிடுவது மாநாட்டின் நோக்கங்களில் ஒன்று.

அறிமுகம்

டொராண்டோ பல்கலைக்கழகத்தின் தெற்கு ஆசிய கல்விக் கழகமும் வின்சர் பல்கலைக்கழகத்தின் சமூகவியல் மற்றும் மானுடவியல் துறையும் இணைந்து “திணையும் தளமும் நிலையும்” தமிழியல் மாநாட்டை 2006ம் ஆண்டு மே மாதம் 11ம் தேதி முதல் 14ம் தேதி நடத்துகின்றன. தென்அமெரிக்கா, ஐரோப்பா, தெற்காசியா, ஆஸ்திரேலியா நாடுகளைச் சேர்ந்த கல்வியாளர்களை இம்மாநாடு ஒன்றிணைக்கிறது. வரலாறு, இலக்கியம், மானுடவியல், சமயம், கலாசாரா மனோவியல், மொழியியல், புலம்பெயர் கல்வி போன்ற துறைகளில் ஆய்வுக் கட்டுரைகள் மாநாட்டில் இடம்பெறுகின்றன. லண்டன் பல்கலைக்கழகத்தின் கீழ்த்தேச நாடுகள் மற்றும் ஆப்ரிக்கக் கல்விக் கழகம், ஹார்வர்ட் பல்கலைக்கழகம், யேல் பல்கலைக்கழகம், உப்சாலா பல்கலைக்கழகம், மாசேய் பல்கலைக்கழகம், பாண்டிச்சேரி பிரஞ்சு கல்வி நிலையம், மாக்கில் பல்கலைக்கழகம், கொலம்பியா பல்கலைக்கழகம், டொராண்டோ பல்கலைக்கழகம், யாழ்ப்பாணப் பல்கலைக்கழகம் என்று விரிந்த கல்வித் தளங்களைச் சேர்ந்த 30க்கும் மேற்பட்ட கல்வியாளர்கள் இந்த முக்கிய மாநாட்டில் பங்கேற்கின்றனர்.

சக கல்வியாளர்கள் முன்பு தங்களது படைப்புகளை பன்முகத் தளத்தில் படைக்கும் ஓர் தனித்தன்மையான வாய்ப்பை வடஅமெரிக்காவின் தமிழியல் கல்வியாளர்களுக்கு இம்மாநாடு வழங்குகிறது. வடஅமெரிக்காவின் தமிழியல் கல்வி பெருமளவில் தமிழ் நாடு சார்ந்த ஆய்வுகளை முன்னிலைப்படுத்தியுள்ளது. இந்த மாநாடு, தமிழியல் மற்றும் தமிழியல் சார்ந்த துறைகளில் ஆய்வு செய்யும் கல்வியாளர்களை ஒன்றுகூட்டி, பன்முக ஆய்வை மேற்கொள்ள ஒரு தளத்தை அமைக்கிறது.

கருப்பொருள்

பண்டைக்கால தமிழ்க் கவிதை முதல் தற்கால இலக்கியம் வரை காணப்படும் படைப்பிலக்கியம், நிகழ்கலை மரபுகளின் வளர்ச்சியும் தொடர்ச்சியும்.
இடைக்காலம், தற்காலத்தின் தேசியக் கற்பனைகளின் மறுஉருவாக்கம்.
மேற்கத்திய நகரங்களில் தமிழ் புலம்பெயர் சமூகங்களில் உருவாக்கம்.
இலங்கை இனப் பிரச்சினை தொடர்பான கலாசார, பண்பாட்டு ஆய்வுகள்.
தற்காலத் தமிழ்நாட்டில் பால், சாதி, சமயம் தொடர்பான சமூக, கலாசார, இலக்கிய மறுஉருவாக்கங்கள்.

மாணவர்களுக்கு குறிப்பாக டோராண்டோவின் புலம்பெயர் சமூகத்தைச் சேர்ந்தவர்களுக்கு தமிழியலின் விரிந்த துறைகளை இந்த மாநாடு அறிமுகப்படுத்தும். இதற்காக மாணவர்களுக்கான ஓர் அரங்கம் ஒதுக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது. இவ்வரங்கில் வடஅமெரிக்கப் பல்கலைக்கழகங்களில் தமிழியல் கல்விக்கான வாய்ப்புகள் பற்றி வெவ்வேறு துறைகளைச் சேர்ந்த கல்வியாளர்கள் பேசுவார்கள். மேலும் இத்திட்டங்களில் சேர்வதற்குத் தேவையான கல்வி, பயிற்சித் தகுதிகள் பற்றியும் விளக்குவார்கள்.

மேலதிக விவரங்களுக்கு: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~tamils/main.html.

Conference Site Launched

2006-01-23T18:15:00.000-05:00

The official site of the Tamil Studies Conference 2006: Tropes, Territories and Competing Realities was launched on January 21, 2006. The conference's registration request form can be found on http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~tamils/reg.

Conference Programme: May 11 - 14, 2006

2006-01-05T14:38:00.000-05:00

Thursday, May 11, 2006: Combination Room, Trinity College - U o/ T

19:00 - 20:00 EST: Reception (for scholars only)

Friday, May 12, 2006: William Doo Auditorium, New College - U o/ T

8:00 EST: Registration

8:30 - 9:00 EST: Opening Remarks

9:00 - 11:00 EST: Historical Literature / Chair: E. Balasundaram

Style and Substance in a Late Old Tamil Anthology / Martha Selby
"Why abandon a lovely rabbit to chase after a crow?"... / Archana Venkatesan
The Kuravanji Fortune-teller Dramas of Tamilnadu... / Indira Peterson
Pulavars and Potentates in Nineteenth-century South India... / Sascha Ebeling

11:00 - 11:20 EST: Refreshments

11:20 -13:20 EST: Contemporary Literature / Chair: Parthiban Vadivelu

Challenges of Language to Modern Tamil Creative Writing / E. Annamalai
Contemporary Dalit Literature / M. Kannan
Caste, Gender and the Tamil Realist Novel Today / V. Geetha
Genre, Space and Typology in Contemporary Sri Lankan... / Chelva Kanaganayakam

13:20 - 14:30 EST: Lunch

14:30 - 16:30 EST: Diaspora Studies / Chair: Vappu Tyyskä

Constructing a Diaspora Identity in English / Suresh Canagarajah
Negotiating Cultures: Tamil Youth in Toronto / Stanley J. Tambiah
A Death and the Tamil Diaspora... / Mark Whitaker
When Two Cultures Collide at the Bed-Side... / Joseph Chandrakanthan
Theorizing Tamil "DiasporiCity" / Rudramoorthy Cheran

16:30 - 17:00 EST: Refreshments

17:00 - 18:30 EST: Visual Arts and Media / Chair: R. Cheran

Territory, Identity and Liminality in Contemporary Painting / T. Sanathanan, Geevan and Karuna

18:20 - 19:00 EST: The Animation of a South Indian Folk Epic / Brenda Beck

Saturday, May 13, 2006: William Doo Auditorium, New College - U o/ T

9:00 - 11:00 EST: Precolonial History / Chair: Maithili Thayanithy

A Contested Past: Historiography in the Civil War in Sri Lanka / Peter Schalk
Writing Tamil History: Post National Perspectives / Pon Ragupathy
Palace Establishments in the Chola Empire... / Daud Ali
Drummers and Changing Images of Tamil Identity... / Katherine Young
Marching to a Different Beat... / Leslie Orr

11:00 - 11:30 EST: Refreshments

11:30 - 13:00 EST: Panel Discussion - Pursuing Tamil Studies in North America

Bernard Bate, Yale University
Daud Ali, School of Oriental and African Studies
Martha Selby, University of Texas at Austin
Katherine Young, McGill University
Parvathy Kanthasamy, Toronto
Shantela Easwarakumar, Toronto

14:00 - 16:00 EST: Colonial and Postcolonial History / Chair: Bhavani Raman

Textuality and Social Transformation in Mid-nineteenth-century Jaffna / Bernard Bate
Lovely, Recalcitrant Women... / Susan Schomburg
Revisiting the Sri Lankan Left in relation to the Tamil National.... / Ravindran Vaithespara
"No More Nautches in Poodoocottah"... / Davesh Soneji

16:00 - 16:30 EST: Refreshments

16:30 - 18:30 EST: Anthropology / Chair: Raman Seylon

Coping with Displacement... / E. Valentine Daniel
Batticaloa's Shadows: Violence and Recovery / Patricia Lawrence
Culture, Idealized Beliefs about Gender and Psychological Well Being... / Ram Mahalingam
Duttugamani and Senguttuvan / Margaret Trawick
Racism and Terrorism: Old Fears as New Anxieties... / Yamuna Sangarasivam

Sunday, May 14, 2006: Royal Palace Banquet Hall

* Please note that these two sessions will be conducted in Tamil.

10:00 - 12:00 EST: Tamil Studies: Standards, Methodologies, and Research Practices

Moderator: Chelva Kanaganayakam
Panelists: E. Balasundaram, E. Annamalai, M. Trawick, S. Canagarajah, and B. Bates

The panel will consist of several short presentations by scholars from different disciplines who will discuss the problems, issues, and methodological concerns that shape their research. Strangely enough, there is no consensus about how research is undertaken or what scholars hope to accomplish through their research. In some instances, research tends to shift its focus from the object to the problems of methodology. It is thus important for scholars involved in Tamil studies to make some observations about how their research is constituted. The significance of sustained research in Tamil studies can only be understood through a critical appraisal of objectives, approaches, and accomplishments. Some of the questions they are likely to address are as follows: what does it mean to undertake research in a particular discipline? How do different disciplines diverge and intersect in their goals? What are the strengths and weaknesses of particular methodologies? What kinds of issues dominate current research? What are major research centres? What is the peer review process, and where should one publish in order to gain recognition? What, if any, are impediments to meaningful research?

பல்வேறு துறைகள் சார்ந்த புலமையாளர்கள் தமிழியல் ஆய்வு தொடர்பாக தமிழ்த் துறை சார்ந்த கருத்துகளைச் சுருக்கமாக இந்த அரங்கில் முன்வைப்பார்கள். எµவகையில் தமிழியல் ஆய்வுகள் முன்னெடுக்கப்பட வேண்டும் என்பதில் புலமையாளர்களுக்கிடையில் கருத்தொற்றுமை கிடையாது. எனினும் தமது துறை சார்ந்த ஆய்வுகள் எµவாறு முன்னெடுக்கப்படுகின்றன என்பதை புலமையாளர்கள் முன்வைப்பார்கள். துறை சார்ந்த அணுகுமுறைகள் யாவை, பல்வேறு துறைகள், ஒன்றிணைந்தும் கிளை பிரிந்தும் எµவாறு தமிழியல் ஆய்வுகளுக்கு உதவ முடியும், பயன்படுத்தப்படும் ஆய்வு நெறிகளின் வலு என்ன, வழுக்கள் யாவை, இப்போதைய ஆய்வுகளில் மேலோங்கியிருக்கும் கூறுகள் என்ன, சிறப்பான தமிழியல் ஆய்வு மையங்கள் எவை போன்ற கேள்விகளுக்கு மறுமொழி தேடும் ஒரு முயற்சியாகவும் இந்த அமர்வு அமையும்.

13:00 - 15:00 EST: Contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil Literature: Poetics, Publishing, and Critical Practice

Moderator: Kalanithy Kulamohan
Panelists: N. Subramanian, V. Geetha, M Kannan, and Devakanthan

The objective of the panel is to explore the ways in which the idea of a reading public and the idea of a book culture (nool pazhakkam) have evolved in relation to recent Sri Lankan Tamil literature. The formation of Tamil diaspora in the last twenty years, the emergence of Dalit and women’s literature and the dominant presence of “resistant literature” have transformed Tamil literary practices. Consequently, Tamil literary practice has evolved in remarkably interesting ways, with writers experimenting with new forms, publishing in different countries and in a wide range of journals and magazines, and reaching out to a transnational audience. The authors themselves play a very different role by projecting themselves in multiple ways. While the overall effect of these changes has been very positive, there is very little understanding about the framework within which literature is being produced or received. As a community of writers and readers who now enjoy a transnational reach, it is important that we think carefully about standards, about form, genre and poetics, about editing, publishing, and critical practice. In the absence of clearly formulated and understood standards, it is all too easy for major works to be eclipsed by those that are inferior, and for inferior works to shape the reputation of an entire body of writing. This panel, therefore, looks at various aspects of literary production and reception, focusing largely on the poetics of writing, the mechanics of publication, and the standards of reception.

வாசிப்பின் பரவலாக்கம், இணையவெளி மற்றும் நுìற்பழக்கம் ஆகிய கருத்தாக்கங்களின் பின்னணியில் ஈழத்து இலக்கியம் பற்றி புதிய கேள்விகளை எழுப்புவதே இந்த அமர்வின் நோக்கமாக அமைகிறது. புகலிட வாழ்வு, அலைந்துழல்வு, போரியல்/எதிர்ப்பு இலக்கியங்களின் எழுச்சி, தலித் இலக்கியம், பெண்ணிய எழுத்துக்களின் ஆழம் என்பன ஈழத்து இலக்கியத்தின் வடிவங்களையும் படிமங்களையும் பெருமளவுக்கு மாற்றியமைத்துள்ளன. இதன் தொடர்ச்சியாக படைப்பாளிகளும் புதிய அணுகுமுறைகள், புதிய வெளியீட்டு வடிவங்கள், பல்வேறு நாடுகளில் வெளியீடு செய்வதன் மூலம் தேசம் கடந்த வாசிப்பு/வெளியீடு போன்ற புதிய நிலைகளுக்குச் செல்கிறார்கள். இப்புதிய நிலைகளின் வளமும் செழிப்பும் உணரப்பட்டாலும் இவை குறித்த துறை சார்ந்த முறையான அணுகு முறைகள் போதுமான அளவு எம்மிடையே இல்லை. எனவே சமகால இலக்கியப் படைப்புகளின் பல்வேறு பரிமாணங்கள், தரச்சிறப்பு, வெளியீட்டுத் தொழில்நுட்பம், வாசகர் ஏற்பு நிலை, நியமங்கள் போன்றன குறித்து பல்வேறு கேள்விகளை இந்த அமர்வு ஆய்வுக்கு உட்படுத்தும்.

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Important Notices

All participants must register for admission.
Conference registration is free and open to all.
Registration deadline is April 30, 2006.

Last Updated: May 5, 2006

Participating Scholars and Artists

2006-01-05T14:09:00.000-05:00

Scholars

Daud Ali, School of Oriental and African Studies
E. Annamalai, Yale University
Bernard Bate, Yale University
Brenda Beck, Trent University
Suresh Canagarajah, Baruch College, City University of New York
Joseph Chandrakanthan, University of Toronto
R. Cheran, University of Windsor
E. Valentine Daniel, Columbia University
Sascha Ebeling, University of Chicago
V. Geetha, Tara Publishing
Chelva Kanaganayakam, University of Toronto
M. Kannan, French Institute of Pondicherry
Parvathy Kanthasamy, Tamil Academy of Arts & Technology
Patricia Lawrence, University of Colorado
Ram Mahalingam, University of Michigan
Leslie Orr, Concordia University
Indira Peterson, Mount Holyoke College
Pon Ragupathy, University of Jaffna
Yamuna Sangarasivam, Nazareth College
Peter Schalk, Uppsala University
Susan Schomburg, Swarthmore College
Martha Selby, University of Texas at Austin
Davesh Soneji, McGill University
Stanley J. Tambiah, Harvard University
Margaret Trawick, Massey University
Ravindiran Vaitheespara, University of Manitoba
Archana Venkatesan, St. Lawrence University
Mark Whittaker, University of South Carolina
Katherine Young, McGill University

Artists

Conference Sponsors

2006-01-03T17:46:00.000-05:00

Institutional Sponsors

Business and Individual Sponsors

JetSpeed Travels
Yarlmetal Fabrications Inc.
Mohan Subramaniyam, Property Max Realty Inc.
Canadian Tamil Taxi Operators' Association
Millennium Leisure Travels
RajaRam Caterers

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* The organizers cannot be held responsible for contents of external sites.

About Toronto

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Toronto is Canada's largest city and the provincial capital of Ontario. Toronto's population is 2,518,772 (Statistics Canada, 2004). The population of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) is 5,203,686 (Statistics Canada, 2004). Residents of Toronto are called Torontonians (in French: Torontois). The city is part of the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario, a densely populated region of around 7 million people. Approximately one-quarter of the Canadian population lives within the Golden Horseshoe, and about one-sixth of all Canadian jobs lie within the city limits. Toronto is a global city, exerting significant regional, national, and international influence, and is one of the world's most multicultural cities. Toronto is Canada's financial centre and 'economic engine,' as well as one of the country's most important cultural, art, and health sciences centres. In January 2005, it was designated by the federal government as one of Canada's cultural capitals. It is one of the safest cities to live in North America; its violent crime rate is lower than that of any major US metropolitan area and is one of the lowest in Canada.

Discover Toronto: http://www.torontotourism.com/visitor.

About Tamil Studies Conference 2006

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The Centre for South Asian Studies of the University of Toronto and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Windsor will host an interdisciplinary Tamil Studies conference in Toronto on May 11-14, 2006. This conference will give Tamil Studies scholars in North America a unique opportunity to present their work before peers from their own specific disciplines and across the broad range of disciplines involved in Tamil Studies. Tamil Studies in North America has also overwhelmingly concentrated on studies of Tamil Nadu, India, whereas this conference will bring together scholars working on Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka and provide a forum for a more comparative examination of these regions. Over 30 scholars from universities as diverse as the School of Oriental and African Studies, Harvard University, Yale University, Uppsala University, Massey University, French Institute of Pondicherry, McGill University, Columbia University, University of Toronto, and the University of Jaffna will participate in this important conference.

The conference papers will cover a range of subjects with a particular focus on the following themes:

The development of literary and performance traditions from the earliest genres of Tamil poetry to contemporary literature;
The transformation of nationalists imaginaries in the medieval and modern period;
The impact of war on Tamil literary, social and cultural practices in contemporary Sri Lanka;
The transformation of Tamil society and western metropolitan centers through the formation of Tamil diasporic communities.

The ethnic conflict on Sri Lanka has become an area of research that engages fields from Political Science to Medical Anthropology. This conference will have papers presented on this conflict that will creatively demonstrate how scholars of medieval history, contemporary literature, diaspora studies and anthropology can articulate the multi-layered history and cultural impact of such nationalist conflicts. The papers will also engage with similarly dynamic social, cultural, and literary transformations in modern Tamil Nadu particularly in relation to gender, caste and religion. The conference will enable scholars of these two distinct Tamil regions to pursue their scholarship in a new and comparative light.

The conference organizers intend that this will be the first of a series of Tamil Studies conferences held at the University of Toronto, the plan is to make this an annual or biannual event and to increase the participation of the University of Toronto in Tamil Studies. Toronto is now the home of the largest Tamil diasporic community in the west and one of the important goals of this conference is to provide Tamil students in Canada with an introduction to the fields of Tamil Studies in North America and given them an opportunity to hear the work of Tamil Studies scholars. The conference goals also include the publication of the papers presented by the Munk Centre for International Studies or a University Press.

>> Conference e-Registration <<

What is Tamil?

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Tamil is a classical language and one of the major languages belonging to the Dravidian language family. Spoken predominanty by Tamilians in South India and Sri Lanka, it has smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. As of 1996, it was the 18th most spoken language in the world with over 74 million speakers worldwide. As one of the few living classical languages, Tamil has an unbroken literary tradition of over two millennia. The written language has changed little during this period, with the result that classical literature is as much a part of everyday Tamil as modern literature. Tamil schoolchildren, for example, are still taught the alphabet using the átticúdi, an alphabet rhyme written around the first century CE. The name 'Tamil' is an anglicised form of the native name தமிழ். The final letter of the name, usually transcribed as the lowercase l or zh, is a retroflex r. In phonetic transcriptions, it is usually represented by the retroflex approximant.

Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_language