A tradition lost and found ...

Searching and Research have become synonymous these days. Google and the search engines give a false notion of a knowledge cap on all of us. Research is defined as an activity of browing through the thousands of web pages, and finding out the one sentence that we want. But, there was a time when information was not available at all and people were actually searching. And, how they did !

Bala gave a book by A.K.Ramanujan on the old Tamil literature. The most interesting part of the book for me was the preface. A brilliant introduction on the efforts put by people in collecting the old Tamil manuscripts. Thought of sharing it with everyone here.

Swaminatha Aiyar (1855-1942), a man of vast learning, was entirely unaware even of the existence of the breathtaking epics and anthologies of early Tamil, until he met a liberal-minded munsif (civil judge) named Ramaswami Mudaliar, in a small temple town, Kumbakonam. Aiyar records the date of this fateful meeting, for it was no less, as October 21, 1880, a Thursday.

To him, as to all students of Tamil literature, this date is “etched in red letters”. The munsif had just been transferred to that small town. When Aiyar met him, the judge asked him what he had studied and under whom. Aiyar named his well-known mentor and listed all the grammars, religious texts, and commentaries he had labored over. The judge, unimpressed, asked him, “That's all ? What use is that ? Have you studied the old texts ?”. He named some. Aiyar, one of the most erudite and thoroughgoing of Tamil scholars, was aghast that he had not even heard of them.

The judge then gave him a handwritten manuscript to take home and read. In his autobiography (the chapter is called “What is the use ?”), Aiyar says the good fortune of his past lives took him there that Thursday and opened a new life for him. Swaminatha Aiyar, who was 44 then, devoted the rest of his long life to roaming the villages, rummaging in private attics and the store-rooms of monasteries, to unearthing, editing and printing classical Tamil texts.


It is to him and to his peers, such as Ci.Vay. Damodaram Pillai (1832-1901), that we owe our knowledge of this major tradition. They rescued manuscripts from oblivion and put them into print and circulation. Pillai described the situation in the late nineteenth century in a preface he wrote to the first edition (1877) of one of the eight Anthologies :

Only what has escaped fire and water (and religious taboo) remains; even of that, termites and the bug named Rama's Arrow take a toll, the third element, earth, has its share ... When you untie a knot, the leaf cracks. When you turn a leaf, it breaks in half ... Old manuscripts are crumbling and there is no one to make new copies.

Even when they were available, the manuscripts had many errors and interpolations. Texts differed greatly from copy to copy. Only some scholars and some sectarian monasteries protected the texts they liked and revered. Each community studied its own texts. If, for some reason, a Saivite scribe copied a Jain text, important emendations were likely to be made. A few kings and rich men arranged for copies to be made when the old manuscripts fell apart. The scribes had to be well chosen and well paid. If someone wished to read a book, he had to go in search of it.



Manuscript owners did not lend them out, for good reason. They were guarded like treasures and passed from generation to generation in the family like heirlooms until some ignoramus threw one as a peace offering to angry floods or lighted the kitchen fires with it.

One reason for the complete absence of Buddhist manuscripts in the Tamil area (with one famous exception, Manimekalai), is that no one preserved them or copied them after the Hindu Saivites and Vaisnavites triumphed over Buddhism.

Jain manuscripts survived very well, because of a ritual practice called Sastradanam observed by the rich : the ritual called for giving new copies of old religious manuscripts to scholars on occasions like weddings. Regarding the expenses, the Christian scholar Rev.P.Percival said that he bought a palm leaf manuscript for ten pounds before 1835; when it was printed later, he could get it for two and a half shillings.



Written texts, and among them the very classics that are the pride of Tamils today, were thus precariously, expensively, often only accidentally, transmitted. The story of Swaminatha Aiyar dramatizes the transition from palm leaf to print, from a period of private sectarian ownership of texts to a period of free access to them.

We have read about this Swaminatha Aiyar in school. The only thing I knew was that he was called the Grandfather of Tamil - தமிழ் தாத்தா . But, I did not know this was the tremendous work he had done.