Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Tamil: A Biographyby David Shulman
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. no reviews | add a review
This book explores two millennia of south Indian Tamil civilization, with a special emphasis on the way Tamil speakers and literati understood the unique features of their language and the major cultural themes articulated in Tamil over this long time span. Tamil is one of the great world languages, with its 80 million speakers, its ancient, classical past, and the profound richness of its cultural traditions, which spread throughout South Asia and beyond to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and, today, to a large Tamil Diaspora scattered around the globe. Presented in the format of a south Indian musical composition, the chapters take the reader through the whole of Tamil cultural history, from its beginnings at the end of the first millennium B.C. through the stunning poems of love and war known as "Sangam Poetry", the burst of intense religious movements in the mid-first-millennium A.D., the Chola period of imperial expansion, and into late-medieval and modern times, including present-day Tamil politics and the vast cultural production of Chennai, Madurai, and Tanjavur. The treasures of the Tamil language deserve a wide audience--thus the book is aimed at readers with no special knowledge of India no less than at speakers and connoisseurs of Tamil. Translated verses and spicy stories of poets, lovers, musicians, warriors and kings fill the pages of this book, which paints a wide-angle, panoramic canvas of one of the most creative civilizations in the history of South Asia as it evolved and transformed itself from the distant past up to our own generation.-- No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)305.894Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people Ethnic and national groups ; racism, multiculturalism Other Groups European OriginLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
The audience of this is for other scholars.
The title of the book needs to be renamed, "Scholarly work on Tamil Linguistic History"
Because, Tamil, a biography does not fit accurately.
What can you quote from this work?
Tamiḻ, means something like “knowing how to love."
"Do you know proper Tamil?”
He means by this: “Do you know how to behave properly as a male lover should"
Knowing Tamil, means to be civilized.
My Suggestions:
The Author constantly inundated with poetry. I understand, they are part of important literary works of Tamil.
I could not follow. I am not interested in archaic, turgid poetry, with exhaustive insights.
Maybe you can enlightenment me -- how I can benefit from them? I am not a Tamil Scholar.
I understand the book is scholarly, many academic works are clear, well-structure.
One can refer this work for scholarly sources of Tamil works
For layman interested in History of Tamil; History of Tamil Nadu, this would not be recommended.
Deus Vult,
Gottfried ( )