Deep Rivers (Selected Writing on Tamil Literature)

Details : 

Author : Francois Gros
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Institut Francais De Pondichery 
Publication date :1 January 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 519 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8184701721
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 9788184701722
Weight :1000 g 
Dimension : 25 x 17 x 3 cm

About the Book

This book brings together for the first time in English all the major essays written by Francois Gros on Tamil literature. An impressive range of topics is covered here from studies of Cankam literature and devotional texts of the Tamil Bhakti traditions to contemporary Tamil novels and short stories. Many of the essays include an overview of French Indological work over past three centuries made available to the English speaking scholarly world for the first time here. While the author urges European and American scholars of Tamil history and culture to take the intellectual discourses of Tamil scholarship seriously, he insists at the same time that Tamil not be ghettoized but should rather be read alongside texts in other South Indian languages, with reference to the evidence to the evidence of epigraphy, numismatic, archaeology and art history.

These articles bring a multiplicity of
opposing sides into face to face confrontation; arguments flow in from all sides while additional references at the same time destabilizing the apparently stronger positions. By bearing witness to Tamil in all its forms and by addressing Tamil culture through the medium of Tamil literature, these articles repeatedly remind us of the diverse, composite and tolerant depths in which we live.
“The power of that literature derives from the marvelous alliance between the unreality of its conventions and the realism of its images which reveals to us its unreality of its conventions and the realism of its conventions and the realism of its images which reveals too us its public in context and enchants us as well. For almost a millennium this pendulum movement allowed the literary current to remain alive, guarding within a civilization, which was becoming more and more Hindu in the shade of its palaces and sanctuaries from the beginning of this era, an original humanistic flavor, close to popular indigenous traditions but certainly capable of magnifying them, of mythologizing them and certainly of mystifying us too.”
“….prefiguring what was soon to become the pride of Tamil literature, the songs of the Alvar, they are something more than simple precursors. It must be recognized that Paripatal, after having give us the first hymns to Murukan, offers us as accompaniment the first Tamil litanies of the Bhakti of Vishnu; it is usually acceted that Bhakti was born in Dravida, most especially beside the Tamiraparani, but it is at Maturai, on the banks of the Vaiyai, that we hear its first song.”
“…..it is the humble satisfaction of the philologist, who might be imagined busy minutely weaving shrouds for dead gods, to make contact through these songs with the beliefs, the joys and the sorrows of a living people.”