Tamil Language and Literature
Tamil is the language of more than 3 million people in Sri Lanka, including Brahmanists, Muslims and Christians, who attach importance to it as the language of their particular community. The intellectual elite among these communities, however, is almost always trilingual (English, Sinhalese and Tamil).

Tamil is one of the four Dravidian languages recognised in India as national languages, and is the language of the state of Madras (which has been known since 1965 as Tamil Nadu). The language is spoken by some 50 million people in India, Sri Lana and Malaysia. It is a very rich tongue which represents the culmination of a long cultural development, and its vocabulary, syntax and grammatical refinement make it one of the great instruments forged by the human mind to express all the subtleties of thought. There is an International Association of Tamil Studies which brings together linguists of many nationalities interested in one of the oldest of living languages, rivalling Pali and Sinhalese in this respect.

In spite of the legends which attribute the origins of Tamil to a mythical past, the Sangams, the earliest. Tamil literary academies do not appear to date back earlier than the 1st century A.D. though this in itself is a very respectable antiquity.

Over these many centuries countless poets have enriched the language. One of the most famous works is a 5th century poem which is a kind of Bible for the Tamils: the Kural or Thiru Kural (Holy Kural) of Thiruvalluvar, who is believed to have lived in the area of present-day Madras. This contains 1330 distichs, which are admired for their perfection of form, concision of style and high moral value. It was translated into English in 1870 by G U. Pope, a Canadian missionary.

The spread of Hinduism through the medium of texts written in Sanskrit influenced the religious and scientific language and enriched the Tamil alphabet with five new letters not required for the Dravidian languages. In its present form the alphabet consists of 34 basic characters, but nine letters can be modified by the associated vowel so that altogether 65 characters are required.

The main literary works of the 9th century were religious commentaries and Shaivite hymns. About 830 a Tamil translation of the Ramayana was produced at the court of a Chola king by a poet named Kambar, and this is considered by scholars to be superior to the Sanskrit original both in liveliness of imagination and in literary form. During this period, too, a group of Vaishnavite sages, the Alvars, compiled a collection of religious hymns, the Prabandham and in a later century this inspired the Tamil philosopher Ramanuja (1050-1137), one of the world’s profoundest religious thinkers, to produce his theological works, which were written in Sanskrit.

Present day Tamils think poorly of the period between the 14th and 17th centuries, when the language was contaminated by Sanskrit influences. A reaction began after 1660, and from this period we have a polemical work, the Siva-Vakyam, which advocates a monotheist and rationalist faith and rejects the idols and ceremonies of Brahmanism: a trend which can still be observed in present day Tamil Nadu.

In the 17th century, thanks to the work of the missionaries, the influence of Tamil was extended. In the following century an Italian Catholic priest known under the Tamil name of Viramamunivar won a leading place in modern Tamil literature: this was Father Beschi (1680-1747), a Jesuit, who became a linguist, grammarian and lexicographer as well as a noted Tamil writer.

The publication of newspapers and numerous religious works helped to create a modern prose style in an ancient language which had tended to become set in over-elaborate literary forms. A series of dictionaries published from 1742 onwards revealed the Tamil language to the Western world a Tamil-Latin dictionary in 1742, followed by a Tamil-French dictionary in 1744 and a Portuguese-Latin-Tamil dictionary in 1745.

Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka was a centre of Tamil studies of only slightly lesser importance than Madurai and Madras in India. Although the first Tamil-English dictionary appeared at Madras in 1779 the second, published at Jaffna between 1833 and1842, was much superior, containing no fewer than 58,500 words.

The British presence and the foundation of universities of modern type reinforced the work of the missionaries in stimulating the revival of Tamil and the literary enthusiasm of the educated classes of a people with an innate interest in the things of the mind. In India the Tamils vied with the Bengalis in a prolific output of works in every field of knowledge history, linguistics, archaeology, philosophy and mathematics as well as in poetry.

Literary Tamil has long been a difficult language which has meant little to the mass of the population, who speak a variety of local and social dialects, according to their origin and caste. In the last thirty years the press, radio and cinema have helped to promote the development of a simpler language better suited to the needs of modern life and closer to the spoken languages. These mass media play an important part in fostering the unification of spoken Tamil.

The influence of the Tamil cinema is considerable since one-fifth of India’s total output of films is produced in Tamil Nadu. Another important factor has been the awakening of national feeling in Tamil Nadu under the leadership of the Dravidian Progress Party or Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which came to power in 1969. The Tamil spoken in Sri Lanka, though it has an independent life of its own, also benefits from this revival and from the continuing exchange intellectual, literary and scientific between Tamil Nadu and the Tamil minority in the country.

For many years the Tamils in Sri Lanka have been calling for the establishment of a Tamil-language university. A considerable step in this direction has been taken with the setting up of a Tamil faculty in Jaffna College, now a university.