Blaming the Brahmins: Texts Lost and Found in Tamil Literary History

Tamil literary history abounds in legends about texts lost and found. The theme resurfaces in modern literary history in descriptions of the rediscovery of classical Cankam poetry at the end of the nineteenth century. If this poetic corpus has never been literally lost but has merely been invisible, circulating in the small circle of scholars, it is said to have been kept away by brahmins from its rightful owner, the Tamil people. Instead, the brahmins forced their own Sanskrit texts upon the Tamils. Curiously, this scenario, which is clearly indebted to the political idiom of the Dravidian movement, finds its most explicit expression in the works of two scholars, A.K. Ramanujan and K.V. Zvelebil, who, contary to their colleagues, past and present, working in Tamil Nadu itself, could easily have ignored any form of pressure from the political side. At the same time, both were men with strong literary ambitions, who as such have been carried away by literary fancy itself.