Dr.Kamil Zvelebil
Dr. Kamil Zvelebil
Dr. Zvelebil studied at the Charles University in Prague from 1946 to 1952 where majored in Indology, English language, literature and philosophy. After obtaining his Ph.D in 1952 between then and 1970 he was a senior research fellow in Tamil and Dravidian linguistics and literature at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He held the role of associate professor of Tamil and Dravidian at Charles University in Prague until 1968 when he and his family were forced to leave Czechoslovakia after the Soviet-led invasion of the country. During the late 1960s he made many field trips included those to South India and from 1965-66 he was a was a temporary professor in Dravidian studies at the University of Chicago in the United States and visited the University of Heidelberg between 1967 and 1968.
In 1970 after some more time at the University of Chicago he was a visiting professor at the College de France in Paris. After more travel through European universities he became the professor of Dravidian linguistics and South Indian literature and culture at the University of Utrecht until his retirement in 1992. Kamil Zvelebil died on 17 January 2009.
Books written by Dr. Zvelebil:
1. The Smile of Murugan
2. Tamil Traditions on Subrahmanya Murugan
3. Comparitive Dravidian Phonology
4. Lexicon of Tamil Literature
5. Introducing Tamil Literature
6. Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature
7. Introduction to the Historical Grammar of the Tamil Language
8. Dravidian Linguistics – an Introduction
9. Literary Conventions in Akam Poetry
10, A Sketch of Comparitive Dravidian Morphology
11. The Irula Language
13. Tamil Literature
14. The Irulas of the Blue Mountains
15. Ananda-tandava of Siva Sadanrttamurthi: The development of the concept of Atavallan-Kuttaperumanatikal in the South Indian textual and iconographic tradition
16 The Poets of the Powers – Magic, Freedom and Renewal
17. Sidda Quest for Immortalit
18. Niligiri Area Studies
THE SMILE OF MURUGAN (Excerpts from this book)
Chapters
1. Introductory
2. Distinctive Features of Tamil Literature
3. Problems of Dating, Relative and Absolute Chronology
4. The Cankam legend. The Texts
5. Analysing Classical Poetry
6. The Theory of “Interior Landscape”
7. Themes, Motives, Formulae
8. Late Classical Poetry
9. Tolkappiyam
10. The Book of Lofty Wisdom
11. The Lay of the Anklet
12. Saiva Bhakti – Two approaches
13. The Imperial Poet
14. The Cittar: An enigma
15. Arunakiri, the Great Magician
16. The Prose of the Commentators
17. Origins of Modern Tamil Prose. The Historical and the
Theoretical Problem
18. Tamil Renaissance
19. The Prose of Today
20. The “New Poetry”
Tamil and other Dravidian Languages: There are no Dravidian literatures per se. It is, however, an entirely different matter if we consider carefully just one of the greatest literatures of the South: the Tamil literature. There, and only there, we are able to point out a whole complex set of features – so to say a bundle of diagnostic isoglosses - separating this Dravidian literature not only from other other Indian literatures but from other Dravidian literatures as well. It is of course only the earliest period of the Tamil literature which shows these unique features. But the early Tamil poetry was rather unique not only by virture of the fact that some of its features were so unlike everything else in India, but by virture of its literary excellence; those 26,350 lines of poetry promote Tamil to the rank of one of the greatest classical languages of the world – though the world at large only just about begins to realise it.
All other Dravidian literatures – with the exception of Tamil – begin by adopting a model – in subject matter, themes, forms, in prosody, poetics, metaphors etc. – only the language is different; in spite of the attempts of some Indian scholars to prove that there were – that there must have been – indigenous, “Dravidian”, Pre-Aryan traditions, literary traditions, in the great languages of the South, it is extremely hard to find traces of these traditions, and such attempts are more speculative than strictly scientific. It is of course quite natural that in all these great languages oral literature preceded written literature, and there is an immense wealth of folk literature in all Dravidian literary as well as non-literary languages.
But in Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, the beginnings of written literatures are beyond any dispute so intimately connected with Sanskrit models that the first literary output in these languages is, strictly speaking, imitative and derived, the first literary works in these languages being no doubt adaptations and/or straight translations of Sanskrit models. The process of Sanskritization, with all its implications, must have begun in these communities before any attempt was made among the Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam peoples to produce written literature, and probably even before great oral literature was composed.
The beginnings of Kannada literature were almost totally inspired by Jainism. The first extant work of narrative literature is Sivakoti’s Vaddaradhane (900 A.D) on the lives of the Jaina saints. The fundamental work on rhetoric in Kannada, and the first theoritical treatise of Kannada culture, is based on Dandin’s Kāvyadarsa. Pampa, the first great poet of Kannada literature – and one who is traditionally considered the most eminent among Kannada classical poets – is again, indebted entirely to Sanskrit and Prakrit sources in his two compositions, in his version of the Mahabharatha story, and in his Adipurana, dealing with the life of the first Jaina Tirthankara. Quite is the same of Telugu literature. Telugu literature as we know begins with Nannaya’s translation of the Mahabharatha (11th century A.D). The vocabulary of Nannaya is completely dominated by Sanskrit. In Malayalam too, the beginnings of literature are essentially and intrinsically connected with high Sanskrit literature: the Unnunili Sandesam, an anonymous poem of the 14th century, is based on the models of the sandesa or duta poems (the best known representative of which is Kalidāsa’s Meghaduta); it’s very language is a true manipravalam which is defined, in the earliest Malayalam grammar.
Tamil culture has produced - uniqely so in India – an independent, indigenous literary theory of a very high standard, including metrics and prosody, poetics and rhetoric.
Distinctive Features of Tamil Literature: It is clear that the Tamil literature did not develop in a cultural vacuum, and the evolution of the Tamil culture was not achieved either in isolation, or by simple cultural mutation. The very beginnings of Tamil literature manifest clear traces of Aryan influence – just as the very beginnings of the Indo-Aryan literature, the Rgvedic hymns, show traces of Dravidian influence. This, too, is today an undisputed fact.
On the other hand, there are some sharply contrasting features which are typical for Tamil classical culture alone, for the Tamil cultural and literary tradition as opposed to the non-Tamil tradition – and in this respect, the Tamil cultural tradition is independent, not derived, not imitative, it is pre-Sanskritic, and from this point of view Tamil alone stands apart when compared with all other major languages and literatures of India.
Historically speaking, from the point of development of Indian literature as a single complex, Tamil literature possesses at least two unique features. First, as has been pointed out, it is the only Indian literature which is, at least in its beginnings and in its first and most vigorous bloom, almost entirely independent of Aryan and specifically Sanskrit influences. Second: though being sometimes qualified as a neo-Indian literature, Tamil literature is the only Indian literature which is both classical and modern; while it shares antiquity with much of Sanskrit literature and is as classical, in the best sense of the word, as eg. ancient Greek poetry, it continues to be vigorously living in modern writing of our days.
Tamil is probaly the one ancient language of India that bears the reflection of the life of an entire people; that is, its heroes are idealized types derived from what we might even call ‘common folk’. Classical Tamil literature is not the literature of the barons; neither is it the literature of a monastic order; nor the literature of an elite, of a nagarika; it is not the literature of a particular social class. The poets, of both sexes, had no priestly function to perform. There are more than twenty women minstrels, responsible for about 140 poems of the earliest strata of Tamil poetry. The true diagnostic feature of these poets is the fact that they were a professional, vocational group, held generally in high esteem. They belonged by birth, to all classes of society; quie a number of them were born as princes and chieftains; a great number were peasants or merchant origin; the list of ancient poets includes potters, blacksmiths and carpenters - by birth, that is.
The genre of Akam poetry, i.e., poetry of the ‘inner world’, speaks of private life. This is the tender, intimate love-poetry, anonymous, stereotyped, including some of the greatest love poems ever composed in world literature: a poetry based on the concept definitely broader and deeper than the Sanskrit kāma. The second genre Puram, of the ‘outer world’, poetry concerning individual heroes; about war, greatness, fame and duty; about public and political life; the result – magnificent bardic poetry, panegyrics and war lyrics. There is brevity and conciseness, a striving after powerful abbreviation, clarity and transparence, which is the result of much effort to exploit to the utmost the technique of suggestion, of inference and word-play, of a compelled and telling use of imagery, of mutiple overtones.
Tolkāppiyam: represents much more than just the most ancient Tamil grammar extant. It is not only one of the finest monuments of human intelligence and intellect preserved in the Indian tradition; it is also the first literary expression of the indigenous, pre-Aryan Indian civilization; it represents the essence and the summary of classical Tamil culture.
The Tolkāppiyam, as we have it today, consists of three books (atikāram). Each book has nine chapters (iyal), and the whole has 1612 sutras of unequal length in 27 chapters. Roughly speaking, the grammar deals with orthography and phonology, etymology and morphology, semantics, sentence structure, prosody, and with the subject-matter of literature.
In the nine chapters of the first section, Tolkappiyam deals with the sounds of the language and their production, with combination of sounds (punarcci, “joining, copulation”), with orthography, and with some questions which we would today designate as graphemic and phonological problems. One may say that the first book is on “eluttu” (this term may mean, in various contexts, “sound”, “phoneme” or “letter”) is dedicated to phonetics, phonology and graphemics of old Literary Tamil. The treatment of the arrangements of consonants, and the description of the production of sounds is interesting.
The second section is called Collatikāram, “The book about words”, and deals with etymology, morphology, semantics and syntax. Among the exciting problems emerging from the study of this book are questions of word-classes, of compounds, semantic problems, and rich lexical data. The author (or authors) had also some linguistic geography of the Tamil land: standard Tamil was spoken in the centamilland, and adjoining this area were twelve dialectal regions.
Porulatikāram, or the book dealing with “subject-matter” is, in short, the prosody and rhetoric of classical Tamil. In addition, it contains a wealth of sociological and cultural material. The first two chapters of this atikāram (the akattinai iyal and thepurattinai iyal) contain a detailed treatment of literary conventions of both basic genres of classical literature, akam and puram. The next two iyals deal with the two kinds of love, pre-marital (kalavu) and marital (karpu) and with extramarital relations, and in the subsequent parts, prosody (yāppu) and rhetoric (ani) are treated in detail. The whole book on poetics is planned as follows:
1. Treating of mutual love
2. Treating of war and non-love themes
3. Treating of secret or premarital love
4. Dealing with open wedded love
5. Treating of further aspects of love situations
6. Dealing with dramaturgy
7. Dealing with simile
8. Dealing with prosody and the art of composition
9. Treating of tradition and literary usage
In traditional terms, Tolkappiyam deals with the total subject-matter of grammar (ilakkanam), with eluttu (basic “signs” of language; sounds and letters), col(“words”), porul (subject-matter of poetry), yappu (“prosody”), and ani (“rhetoric”).
The earliest, original version of the Tolkāppiyam belongs to the “pre-Cankam” period; the oldest layer of the grammar is somewhat earlier in time than the majority of extant classical Tamil poems. The nuclear portions of Tolkāppiyam were probably born sometime in the 2nd of 1st century B.C., but hardly before 150 B.C. Later generations of grammarians and prosodists added to this core and developed its ideas from time to time, and it is not ruled out that the third part of the grammar, the one which deals with the subject-matter of poetry, is in toto (or in greater part) than the first two parts. The final redaction of the Tolkāppiyam as we know it today did not probably take place before the 5th century A.D., so that the ultimate shape of the sutras as we have them before us is probably not earlier than the middle of the first millenium of our era.