Mapping Historical Periodization in Tamil Literary Histories

This paper investigates the relationship between historical periodization and political sovereignty in Tamil literary histories. Literary texts have served as abiding sources for conceptualizing the autonomy of Tamil pasts. From the early nineteenth century, scholars anchored Tamil literary history in the temporal framework provided by comparative historical linguistics. Following the missionary Robert Caldwell’s, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856), literary historians inventively engaged with historical periodization in Tamil. Since then, these literary histories and their temporal frameworks have provided the paradigm for asserting a modern political sovereignty in Tamil, as a claim through and over time itself and as a point of entry into world history. Intellectuals and publicists drew on these frameworks to fashion new and utopian political futures. My paper maps the varied engagements with historical time embedded in these ventures. Rather than debate the utility or rejection of historical periodization, I draw on K. Sivathamby’s essay on literary history in Tamil to consider periodization as a contested field. Attending to periodization as a political technique, I suggest, reveals the fissures in the discourses of political sovereignty in Tamil and nationalist occlusions of more radical possibilities. A critical approach to cultural nationalist discourse also requires the critique of the temporal frameworks that anchor it in universal, world history.