Some remarks on Dr. Tieken's book by prof. Hart

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The dating of classical Tamil texts in a recent book by

Dr. H. Tieken attempts to place them in the 10th century or so.

Some Remarks by George Hart on this new dates for CT texts.

Indologists may find it useful.

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan

 

----

 

Some Remarks by George Hart on

Herman Tieken's Kavya in South India

 

 

 

Recently, a book by Herman Tieken has appeared entitled Kavya in South

India: Old Tamil Cankam Poetry, published by Egbert Forsten in

Groningen, The Netherlands, 2001. The book is part of the prestigious

Gonda Indological Studies, and so must be taken extremely seriously. I

am currently reviewing the book for the Journal of the American

Oriental Society, but I feel it is necessary to give some information

about it here, as the book claims to overturn virtually all of our

ideas about premodern Tamil literature.

 

Here is some information on the book, taken from the Indology forum:

 

Did Tamil Cankam poetry describe a contemporary society, or an

idealized pure Tamil society of the past, as it was imagined in a time

already greatly influenced by North-Indian Sanskrit culture ... ?

 

The following recent publication is perhaps of interest to

readers of this list because of the challenging thesis on the relative

chronology of early Tamil poetry and Sanskrit Kaavya defended in it.

Title: Kaavya in South India: Old Tamil Cankam Poetry. Author: Herman

Tieken Publ.: Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2001

 

From the back cover: "Old Tamil Cankam poetry consists of eight

anthologies of short poems on love and war, and a treatise on grammar

and poetics. The main part of this corpus has generally been dated to

the first centuries AD and is believed to be the product of a native

Tamil culture.

 

The present study argues that the poems do not describe a

contemporary society but a society from the past or one not yet

affected by North-Indian Sanskrit culture. Consequently the main

argument for the current early dating of Cankam poetry is no longer

valid. Furthermore, on the basis of a study of the historical setting

of the heroic poems and of the role of Tamil as a literary language in

the Cankam corpus, it is argued that the poetic tradition was

developed by the PaaNTiyas in the ninth or tenth century. ... ... the

identification of the various genres of Cankam poetry with literary

types from the Sanskrit Kaavya tradition ... indicates that in Cankam

poetry Tamil has been specifically assigned the role of a Praakrit.

.... "

 

My edition has a slightly different blurb on the back, but it is not

significantly different. Here is what I replied to this notice before

I had seen the book:

 

I notice the message reproduced at the end of these comments in

Indology in July. While I have not yet seen Prof. Tieken's book, I can

certainly respond to the ideas on the back cover. There is

overwhelming and indisputable evidence that the anthologies were not

written as late as the ninth or tenth century. It is, moreover, quite

certain that the Sangam anthologies were not patterned after Prakrit

or Sanskrit. Let me make a few brief points.

1. Language. This is absolutely indisputable. The Sangam texts

use very different (and demonstrably much more archaic) forms and

vocabulary than later texts of the sixth century onward. Many verb

forms that disappeared by the sixth century can be shown to be part of

an older Dravidian verb system that is quite consistent with an age of

the second or third century. The vocabulary is also quite different

from that of later works -- it has much less Sanskrit, and uses words

that are not attested later. A good source for these older forms is V.

S. Rajam's A Reference Grammar of Classical Tamil Poetry : 150

B.C.-pre-fifth/sixth Century A.D. Philadelphia, Pa., American

Philosophical Society, 1992.

2. Content. While the akam (love) poems share some themes with

Prakrit and even Sanskrit (as I have shown), they are still radically

unlike the poems in those languages. Prakrit has nothing like the five

tiNais, and it is not nearly as carefully worked out, with stock

speakers, stock images for each landscape, ragas (called paNs) for

each, and the like. There is absolutely nothing like the PuRam

(heroic) poems of the PuRananuru and the Patirruppattu in Prakrit or

Sanskrit. That is because the Puram poems are mostly written as

imitations of the productions of low-caste bards and drummers.

3. Culture. The poems show a coherent culture that is utterly

different from the 9th or 10th century. It is clear, if one reads the

Purananuru, that the poems are directly about events the authors have

heard of. Many of the poems concern marginal people at the borders of

society. This is not the case of the Sanskrit or Prakrit traditions.

Where is there anything like the famous Kalittokai poem of the lame

man pursuing the hunchback woman?

4. History. The poems name hundreds of poets and kings -- and

string them together in a narrative that is chronologically coherent.

The names are quite unlike the names of the 9th and 10th century.

There are many historical facts that have been confirmed by

archeological and other evidence -- some kings who appear on coins, or

in datable contemporary inscriptions (1st-3rd century), Roman coins,

description of trade also found in outside sources, and the like.

5. Literary theory and usage. The Tolkappiyam describes theories

and systems that are mostly quite foreign to Sanskrit and Prakrit, but

which fit Sangam literature quite well. Its grammar describes some

forms that are quite old (as shown by the earliest inscriptions), and

even the writing system it describes, with the puLLi, has now been

shown to be as early as the second century or even earlier. The Sangam

poems do not use anything related to Sanskrit meter, unlike the poems

of later times. By the ninth and tenth centuries, almost all

literature in Tamil divided its stanzas into four parts, like Sanskrit

and Prakrit (though they never actually borrowed Sanskrit meters).

6. Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina elements. In the Sangam poems,

Murugan has not yet been identified with Kartikeya -- he is a folk

spirit that possesses people and must be propitiated. There is not

much mention of Visnu or Siva, while it is clear that Jainism and

Buddhism are both present in Tamil Nadu. Many of the gods are local

and do not appear in later literature. All of this accords perfectly

with what we know of that period, and does not fit at all the later

period. This is only a cursory response -- it seems almost a waste of

time to go on, as the evidence is so abundant and convincing. The fact

is, the poems are quite unaware of Prakrit or Sanskrit literature --

though they do know of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (which fits

with their accepted date of 1st-3rd century AD). They do not resemble

Prakrit or Sanskrit literature enough to be modeled upon them -- I

have argued that both Tamil and Prakrit/Sanskrit use the same body of

conventions, which they got through southern (Tamil and Maharastri)

folk traditions. But the poems themselves are quite different and work

in very different ways. Finally, there is a convincing -- and enormous

-- body of coherent and mutually reinforcing historical, linguistic,

cultural, religious and literary evidence that shows clearly the poems

are much earlier than the 9th or 10th century. Yes, some 9th or 10th

century poets might have decided to write some "old" literature based

on Prakrit and Sanskrit. But would they have invented hundreds of

archaic forms and words that fit the development of Dravidian? Would

they have eschewed Prakrit/Sanskrit ideas and metrical patterns? Would

they have carefully gotten rid of almost all their Sanskrit words and

invented hundreds of words that are not found in the other 9th century

literature? Would they have made up the names of hundreds of poems

and kings and woven them into a huge corpus that is chronologically

consistent (and fits with inscriptional and numismatic evidence)?

Tieken's argument (if it is correctly reflected in the blurb on the

back cover) just does not make sense. It is as if one were to claim

the Vedas were written in the 10th century AD by a group of people who

wanted to reflect an idealized past. Indeed, the Sangam works contain

much more historical information than the Vedas -- it would be much

easier to 'prove' that the Vedas were written in the 10th century than

that the Sangam poems were. What is it about some European

Sanskritists that makes them unwilling to accept that a non

Indo-European people could create a great literature on their own in

South Asia? The evidence of the non-derivative nature of Sangam

literature is absolutely convincing. I hope that some will read the

translation of the Purananuru that Heifetz and I recently published.

How these poems could be derived from the Sanskrit/Prakrit tradition

utterly mystifies me -- and I have read most of the kavya literature

(Kalidasa, Magha, Bharavi) in the original. And I have read the

Prakrit poems with the chaayaa anuvaada. By the way, the Purananuru is

one of the seminal texts of premodern India -- it is quite as

important as the epics and the Vedas for understanding the development

of South Asian culture.

From George Hart, Prof. of Tamil and Chair of Tamil Studies,

Univ. of California, Berkeley, USA

 

 

Here are some further comments after looking over his book. One of

Tieken's arguments -- in fact, his most important argument -- is

statistical: he claims that the arrangement of the poems is not random

(as they presumably would be if anthologized), but rather contains

repeated words and phrases between contiguous poems (9 poems forward

or backward), and that means the poems must have been all composed in

order by one person who unconsciously -- or consciously -- reused

phrases from what he had just composed. As evidence for this, he lists

repeated words/phrases that recur between neighboring poems.

 

He writes, "Apart from the difficulties in finding a poem meeting

these requirements all at the same time, we should consider the size

of the corpus which the compiler was supposed to have had at his

disposal. If we set the frequency of a word, rather arbitrarily, at

once every tenth poem, the compiler would in theory have required

ten poems to hit upon another occurrence of aNNal, ten times ten poems

in order to find one which in addition contained eeRu, a thousand

poems to find one which also contained punkaNmaalai, ten times

thousand (sic) poems to find one which also contained peyar, and so

on. It is hardly unreasonable to doubt if the compiler was ever

interested in memorizing such a vast corpus of poems...... " The fact

is, this is an elementary error in statistics.

 

Here is the proper statistical calculation: Suppose the anthologies

contain a total of 8000 different words and 80 words per poem. The

likelihood of word 1 in poem 1 being word 1 in poem 2 is 1/8000. The

likelihood of its being any word in poem 2 is 80/8000=1/100.

Likelihood of 1.2 being any word in poem 2 is also 1/100.

Thus the chance of any word in poem 1 being any word in poem 2 is

80/100=80%. If you include 2 poems, chance of a word in poem 1 being

any word in poem 2 or 3 is 80/100+80/100=160%. If you include 8 poems

forward and backwards, chance is 80*16=1280%. That is to say, you

would have to go through 13 poems before you found one that did not

have any words in common. The chance of 2 words occurring are 1280/2,

of 3 words are 1280/4. In fact, it is most likely that 13

words will be found to exist within the preceding and following 8

poems. (In fact, we might expect even more repetition, as the poems

are based on oral models and use conventional phrases and themes).

 

In his work, Tieken gives a 10 page appendix in which he shows that

words repeat between contiguous poems (including 9 forward and 9

backward). However, he does not do what any standard scientific study

would do: he does not compare his results with the results of poems

chosen at random. I did so, choosing poems from the Kuruntokai at

random. Let me first give Tieken's correspondences for poems 140-149:

 

 

140 cel, koLa, maakkaL, azintu, aRintu, puu

141 celku kooL kiLi kaTiiiyar kaT naaL kai naaTa paTu

142 puu kiLi kaTiyum kaT paanaaT aRintanaLoo

143 uTaiyan uriyatu malai icai ankaluz naaTan paaTTaaLan

144 cenranaL uriyatu malai nanree veNTalai pirivil naaTTee paTutalum

145 uTaittee tuyiR maakkaL kaN paanaaL aanaa ciRu

146 pirintoorppuNarpoor maakkaL nanRu veNTalai uTai taNTu

147 pirintooree tuyil kanavee anna ankaluz mayir

148 kanavoo anna

149 oonku aLitoo niiTu tara kai ciRu puun nillaavee

 

Note that this actually should give more correspondences than mine, as

it is based on using the next ten poems as well and some of the

correspondences (e.g. oonku in 149) refer to later poems. Here is the

result I obtained by using ten random KuRuntokai poems (referring only

to one another):

 

5 kaN kol toozi tirai kaama nooy utai tirai tivalai niir pulampan

ena pal uNkaN paatu mellam

186 kaN kollai toozi koTi mullai talai ena aar talai mel punatta

mullai koti naataRku

240 koTi tirai mullai talai nooy tirai pal talai toozi mullai

koti pani kiLi verukku vantatan pora toonRi maalai avar maNi netu oLi

253 toozi nivanta keeLaar aayinum |puu ceer| peru kavin nin tuyar

|oli kazai| malai pukaa kal cel iRantoor ooíku

308 talai kaama utai naatan tuyar malai iru piti izi cilampin kaN

|maa malai| kai

367 koTiyoor toozi kotiyoor vanticin toonRum avar maNiyin aayinum

puucal kavin nin malai pukanRu kal iRaiya izi |maa malai| toti

peRiiiyar |uva kaaN|

naattu |taN naRu| ooíkiya nalkaar

390 ena paatu vantu netu keeLaay cellaatiim piti taNNumai ciRu

peyarum munai

133 pulampinan uNta (see uN in uN kaN) toozi punavan kiLi peru

olittu iruvi ciRu peyal olittu nalam

7 kol mel pora olikkum cilampee totiyooL olikkum kaalana nalloor

munniyoor

398 tivalai ena uNkaN toozi pani vantena maalai tuyar kaN kai

peRal uvakaiyin taNNena peytu kaalai aaka

107 niir verukiRku toonRi netu iruL oL aaki

 

As you can see,I actually found many more correspondences in

non-contiguous poems than Tieken found in contiguous ones. The central

argument of his book—that there are more repetitions between

contiguous poems than non-contiguous ones—is thus shown not to be

valid. There is much more to be said about this book. Suffice it to

say at present that I have found nothing whatsoever that would lead me

to accept any of its premises.

 

From George Hart, Prof. of Tamil and Chair of Tamil Studies,

Univ. of California, Berkeley, USA