Paper short abstract:

The paper seeks to explain the use of the genre marker purāṇam in Tamil literature on Islamic themes, arguing that the term purāṇam served as a signifier for a narrative originating in Arabic or Persian discourse, thereby highlighting the narrative’s origins outside South India.

Paper long abstract:

Beginning in the late sixteenth century, poets and religious scholars created a sizeable and diverse corpus of texts that rendered Islamic narratives and scholarly discourse in Tamil language. The most important works in this corpus are a set of more than a dozen long, narrative poems, consisting of several thousand stanzas each, that tell events from the lives of Muslim prophets and saints. Strikingly, a sizeable share of these poems are designated as purāṇas, a term more commonly associated with Hindu and Jain texts than with Muslim discourse. It is therefore hardly surprising that scholars have generally perceived in the use of the term purāṇam a movement towards localization and rooting of 'foreign' subject material in a Tamil-Hindu environment, an explanation that fits squarely with a wider academic propensity to stress the local character and supposed vernacular embeddedness of Islamic Tamil literature. However, I aim to demonstrate in this paper that the use of the term purāṇam by Tamil Muslims was not meant to make Islamic themes somehow less 'foreign', but on the contrary signaled the translated-ness of a text, thereby emphasizing the Tamil text's origin in Arabic or, rarely, Persian discourse.