ABSTRACT
This South Dravidian language is spoken by about 50 million people in Tamilnadu, where it has had official language status since 1956. There are also up to 3 million speakers in Sri Lanka, and at least another million scattered through South-East Asia, Indonesia, Polynesia (Fiji), South Africa, and Guyana. Tamil has a long history, with an epigraphical record dating from more than 2 ,0 0 0 years ago. Ancient Tamil literature dates from about the same period, the main m onum ents being (a) the Tolkappiyam , a grammar of the language and also a socio-linguistic docum ent of great interest and importance; (b) the Tirukkural, the Tam il Veda’, a kind of handbook of secular wisdom by the fifth-century poet Tiruvalluvar; and (c) two vast collections of short poems, the Pattupattu (T en Songs’) and the Ettuttokai (T h e Eight A nthologies’), which provide a psycho logically detailed mapping of human life in terms of its key twin facets: love and war. Many of the war poems are quasi-historical and take up themes concerning wise governance, in the m anner of the Sanskrit classics; the love poems are set in five existential landscapes’, each with its specific tensions and solutions. With such a classical past, Tamil is not surprisingly one of the leading literary languages in the sub-continent today.
