The Lives of Poets: New Models of Literary Innovation in Early Modern Tamil Literature

This article looks at early modern literary genres in Tamil to better understand the relationship between Tamil literature and other South Indian prabandha traditions. What this article shows is that between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, new ways of thinking about innovation and authorship entered Tamil literature, new modes that shared key features with the larger South Indian category of prabandha, despite the divergent history of the term prabandha itself in Tamil. These new modes, which emerged in a range of literary genres in which the term prabandha (Tam. pirapantam) is notably absent, introduced the poet as a human subject whose complex personal relationships—both to people as well as to other texts—were inseparable from the story of the text’s creation. This privileging of the lived experience of individual poets became a marker of a new type of multi-stanzaic narrative verse, distinguished both from its antecedents as well as from other contemporary genres that retained older models of literary innovation. By thinking about new models of authorship and innovation as features shared across early modern literary genres in South India, this article enters into conversation with the other articles in this volume and reveals a shared intellectual and cultural history with the larger South Indian prabandha tradition