Paper short abstract:

Tiricirapuram Minatcicuntaram Pillai, the doyen of 19th-century Tamil poets, is usually seen as a pure traditionalist writing in the medieval genres. I will show that the forms he has chosen mask a rather ironic, modern sensibility.

Paper long abstract:

We tend to regard the Tamil literary production of the 19th century as a story of decay on the one hand-- the fading away and dessication of the medieval cirrilakkiyam genres-- and of rapid innovation, on the basis of the newly introduced European models, on the other. Thus there is the ongoing search, barren for the most part, for the "first Tamil novel" and for "short stories" in the Western mode. This narrative (similar to that told for other South Asian languages) distorts a reality of much deeper creative engagement with the new realities of the 19th century, including the work of poets of genius who transformed the medieval genres-- far from worn out in expressive terms-- into subtle statements of a modern, skeptical and ironic awareness. I will show how Tiricirapuram Minatcicuntaram Pillai, the most prominent of the 19th-century Tamil poets, used traditional forms to articulate a complex vision of the modern world.