The Function of Poets in the Purananuru (original) (raw)
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The Purananuru and the Tamil Concept of Valour
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Lucifer, 1891
THE advent of Sanskrit on the field of European linguistic studies marks an era of great importance in the history of the world. Although the accounts I have been able to lay before you are few and necessarily very meagre, I hope nevertheless to have established that the Purānas, when read by the light of the Upanishads, become a clear commentary of the Vedas, which, in their turn, cease at once to be the first thoughts of an imaginary primitive humanity. Philology must give way to symbology in order that this result may be appreciated in its true light. It ought, in fact, to be the sole or at least principal instrument of ancient research. Symbology is the language of humanity, nay it is the language of nature. It is pre-eminently the universal language known to antiquity—the language whose alphabets are indelibly fixed on the tablet of the human mind, and whose eternal volume is the ever unalterable book of nature. Nothing but a clear, careful, and patient study of the alphabets of this language can lead us nearer that day in the history of the world, when all the different creeds will melt into one universal basis of belief and love.
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Unfettered by the tinais and turais by which the Purananuru is organized, this paper looks at the issues and subjectivities of the ancient Tamil society which determined its attitudes towards war. It includes in its narration not just the members of the royalty alone but every other stakeholder whose life was altered by war: the mother, the wife and the man himself. What the paper hopes to present is, by eschewing a theoretical framework, a world closer to the realities embodied and embedded in the poems of the Purananuru. Besides mapping the discourse of the society concerning war and heroism, it analyses the causes which frequently produced wars keeping the society in a state of perpetual volatility. Interestingly, it finds the glamorised world of the warrior co-existing with the gritty and often gruesome realities of the battlefield, with all its blood and gore.
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This article examines a subset of the vocabulary which has been used over the centuries for referring to “language professionals” in the treatises and the thesauri which constitute Ancient Tamil technical literature. It concentrates on two important terms, pulavaṉ “scholar, grammarian, poet” and kavi “poet”. The first one, pulavaṉ, is used (in the plural form pulavar) 80 times inside the Tolkāppiyam for referring to the scholars who were the creators of the “grammar” of Poetical Tamil, during the Sangam [Caṅkam] period. It is also used in other works for referring to creative poets (who could also be performers too). The second term, kavi, appears in Tamil at a later period, and medieval treatises (and kōśa-s) subdivide it into four subcategories, the “fast poet” (ācu kavi), the “sweet poet” (matura kavi), the “extreme poet” (cittira kavi) and the “vast poet” (vittāra kavi), whose qualifications are expounded for instance in treatises belonging to the “grammatical” genre called pāṭṭiyal. Those developments take place against a religious background which is influential for the development and the sustained existence of the scholarly community whose multi-faceted expertise with words is a “raison d’être” in the eyes of Tamil society.
Kṙṡṅa's relationships with the Gopīs of Vraja, described in texts such as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa were controversial in the precolonial period. This paper first summarizes the teachings of Caitanya (1486-1534), the inaugurator of Gauḋīya Vaiṡṅavism who promoted the Purāṇa. The paper then discusses Rūpa's Ujjvalanīlamaṇi (sixteenth century) where he promotes Kṙṡṅa's paramourship in relation to the Gopīs. This is followed by an analysis of both Jīva's (sixteenth century) view on Kṙṡṅa's matrimony with the Gopīs and the refutation of Jīva's view in the Svakīyātvanirāsavicāra written by Viśvanātha Cakravartī (seventeenth century). By tracing the process of "transcreation" concerning Kṙṡṅa narratives, the paper demonstrates the complexity of this controversy, which continues even to the present day. In addition, the paper argues that the production of commentaries provided an intellectual outlet for Hindu theologians in early modern South Asia to express their own perspectives on controversial topics while remaining faithful within their tradition.
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This paper deals with three women characters from three puranic texts in Odia and it provides an understanding of them which is different from what is available the relevant literature. The texts are: Sarala Mahabharata, composed by the fifteenth century poet Sarala Das, who is regarded as the adi kavi of Odia literature, Lakshmi Purana by the sixteenth century poet, Balarama Das, and Kartika Mahatmya by the eighteenth-century poet, Mahadeva Das. The characters chosen for study are Draupadi in Sarala Mahabharata, goddess Lakshmi in Lakshmi Purana and the goddess Alakshmi in Kartika Mahatmya. In passing, reference will be made to Shriya, the lower caste woman in Lashmi Purana. They are all marginalized women. This might sound odd, considering that Draupadi is the wife of the mighty Pandavas, Lakshmi, of the Supreme god Vishnu (Jagannath in the relevant text) and Alakshmi, the elder daughter of god Varuna, whose younger daughter is goddess Lakshmi herself. But in these celebrated works we find them in situations which shows their vulnerability. We find them extremely insecure; they are humiliated and insulted like any ordinary woman living in the margins of the society. But they do not give up; they resist, struggle and succeed in their own way. Now, as far as purana scholarship is concerned, Balarama Das's Lakshmi has received some attention, Sarala's Draupadi, only inadequate attention, whereas Alakshmi has suffered near complete neglect. The last may be due, in part at least, to the fact that minor puranic texts as a whole have not been considered worthy of careful and detailed study. In the category of minor puranic texts in Odia, we can include all puranic texts barring Sarala Mahabharata, Jagamohana Ramayana, also called Dandi Ramayana by Balarama Das and Srimad Bhagavata by Jagannath Das, composed in the sixteenth century.