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'terrorists' .... " It is unlikely that many, hearing these familiar
characterizations, will recall the United Nations' declaration on the
rights of indigenous peoples, published in Geneva in 1985 , from
which Mr. Nietschmann quotes: "Indigenous nations and peoples
may engage in self-defense against State actions in conflict with their
right to self-determination."
This is not a political resume of the current appalling Tamil-Sri
Lanka conflict, and neither in his introduction to
Poems oj Love and
War
nor in his earlier volume of classical Tamil translations ,
The In–
terior Landscape
(University of Indiana Press), does A . K. Ramanu–
jan refer to the situation of the Tamils and Tamil culture in contem–
porary Sri Lanka. On the other hand, most of the media accounts
give little indication of the antiquity and coherence of Tamil culture,
though the conflict in Sri Lanka has resulted in part from the fact
that enough of the Tamil traditions, and with them the Tamil sense
of identity, have survived to matter intensely to the present Tamil
inhabitants of Sri Lanka.
Even so, much of the Tamil tradition, like so many others, has
been lost, and one of the most precious and perhaps most portable
parts of it, the classical poetry, nearly vanished without a trace. Mr.
Ramanujan's introduction to
Poems oj Love and War
provides a brief
account of the salvaging of the venerable texts of the originals, which
are part of a body of writing that is reputed to include some of the
greatest of Indian poetry . The classical period , when the poems were
composed, dates from about 100 B.C. to about 250 A.D.
The poems, which in their first life were part of an oral tradi–
tion, were eventually written down, and were preserved, com–
mented on, and taught, for most of two thousand years. But they ,
and the Tamil tradition itself, did not meet with the approval of a
purist Hinduism that marked Indian academic studies in the eigh–
teenth century, and the Tamil classics, as well as Jain and Buddhist
works, were banished.
Here and there, devoted and independent spirits kept such of
the ancient writings as they had been able to obtain, and treasured
and studied them, hoping for followers. A few rare successions of
this kind are the basis for the survival of the tradition of classical
Tamil poetry as it is now known. Mr. Ramanujan's digest of the way
it came about is tantalizingly sparse .
In the latter part of the nineteenth century - so part of the story
goes - a "liberal-minded" civil judge named Ramacuvami M utaliyar
was transferred to the small town of Kumpak5nam. There , in 1880 ,
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