What defines Tamil identity? In trying to provide a satisfactory answer, Nirmala Lakshman takes a deep dive into two and a half millennia of Tamil history and culture. This ‘portrait of a community’ is a bird’s eye view of the historical evolution of the geographical space we identify today as Tamil Nadu. The Pandyas, the Pallavas and the magnificent Cholas almost inevitably dominate the first half of the book. The impact they left on temple architecture, iconography, congregational religion and the crystallisation of a caste hierarchy are essential ingredients of the Tamil personality in the centuries that follow.
Thereafter, the Sultans of Madurai, the Vijayanagar empire and its governors who morph into virtually independent rulers, up to a Maratha dynasty in Thanjavur from the late 17th century make up the next chunk of this story before ceding ground to the Europeans. Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity each play a significant role in this trajectory but any linear narrative needs constant qualification, given the later atheism of some principal non-Brahman ideologues and politicians. Kanchi, Madurai and Tanjore are the cities that dominate this historical landscape till Madras or Chennai came to occupy the foreground from the late 18th century onwards and provided a platform for modern political and social movements.
Compressing this story from the Sangam age to the 19th and 20th centuries while keeping some focus on the contemporary aspects of this history is not easy, but Lakshman ably manages with narrative force interspersed with journalistic first-person observations on encountering remnants of the past. A light touch stops the book from becoming a history tutorial.
Tamil as a language and a literary culture will obviously top any list of factors that define a Tamil identity. Language, evidently, provides essential continuity from the beginning of the historical period, but other factors have cemented and historically grounded it. Different dynasties, through empire building and political expansion, have mobilised support and consolidated themselves through a widespread patronage of temples, perhaps more consistently and to a far greater extent than elsewhere in South Asia. Through this entire period, caste hierarchies, including the Brahman-non-Brahman divide, also crystallised and later became an indistinguishable part of Tamil politics from the early 20th century.
The great merit of Lakshman’s wide-ranging essay is that it remains conscious that “adherence to a fixed notion of essentialism in Tamil identity may become problematic”, for it may end up ignoring essential changes that political and economic evolution cause.
The last part of the book brings out the complex changes initiated by colonialism and how each acquired a life of its own. Language devotion played a vital role in the consolidation of the Tamil identity from the late 19th century. Soon thereafter a strong non-Brahman movement also emerged. Lakshman perceptively notes that “the Tamils are inheritors of a disaggregated culture of caste and community. But they unite broadly in the bandwidth of a language and particular sentiments”. Music, cinema and literature each are a vital ingredient in this process. Each of these streams flowed into the national movement and a pan-Indian nationalism also emerged alongside the consolidation of a Tamil political and cultural personality.
There is in this evolution all the complexity of a consolidated Tamil identity in linguistic terms but which is simultaneously vertically divided in caste terms. How these trends reflected themselves in the politics of Tamil Nadu since the 1950s as the Congress declined and Dravidian parties occupied centrestage is part of the story the book tells. What completes the circle is the sense of a Tamil international identity through an identification with Tamil language speakers and the Tamil diaspora.
The trajectory of some of these multiple narratives is certainly towards some kind of “Tamil exceptionalism”. But similar trends from the late 19th century can be found in other states, too, as regional identities have consolidated alongside an all-India identity. What makes the Tamil case stand out? There are no easy answers but those interested would do well to read this book.
The reviewer is a diplomat-turned historian.
The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community
By Nirmala Lakshman
Published by Aleph Book Company
pages 464; price Rs999