Classical Tamil

Classical Tamil is the literary register of one of the world's oldest continuously spoken languages, a Dravidian tongue whose classical corpus stands apart from the Sanskrit tradition of northern India. The oldest stratum, the Sangam literature, comprises several hundred poems gathered in anthologies, conventionally dated to roughly the early centuries CE with roots possibly earlier, together with the ancient grammar Tolkappiyam, which codifies not only the language but the poetics of interior landscape, in which love and war are mapped onto five landscapes of hill, forest, field, shore and wasteland.

Inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi push the written record back further still. From this base the tradition ran unbroken through the didactic classics, above all the Tirukkural, whose 1330 couplets on virtue, wealth and love are revered across religious lines, through medieval epic, court poetry and grammar, into the modern language. The Government of India formally recognized Tamil as a classical language in 2004, the first so designated. Because the spoken language never died, Classical Tamil is not a foreign tongue to Tamils but the deep register of their own, taught in schools and quoted in ordinary speech.

Between roughly the sixth and ninth centuries Tamil country produced the bhakti movement, devotional religion sung in the mother tongue, and its hymns remain in daily liturgical use. The Shaiva saints, the Nayanars, sang the Tevaram, whose core is the work of Sambandar, Appar and Sundarar, and Manikkavasagar added the Tiruvasagam, of which Tamil tradition says that whoever is not melted by it must have a heart of stone.

The Vaishnava saints, the twelve Alvars, produced the four thousand verses gathered as the Divya Prabandham, including Andal's Tiruppavai, sung across Tamil homes each Margali month. These corpora acquired canonical standing. The Divya Prabandham is called the Tamil Veda, and in Srivaishnava temples it is recited liturgically alongside the Sanskrit Veda, a dual canon formalized by Ramanuja's tradition. Shaiva temples maintain hereditary and trained singers, the otuvars, whose office is precisely the singing of the Tamil hymns before the deity. The bhakti corpus also carries the pann system of ancient Tamil music, ancestor of ragas still used. Pilgrims sing these hymns at the shrines the saints themselves sang of, the padal petra sthalams, so that a verse composed thirteen centuries ago is still performed at the very temple it names.