Ebeling 2021 From Diasporic Tamil Literature to Global Tamil Literature

21 From Diasporic Tamil Literature to Global Tamil Literature sascha ebeling This chapter examines the unique case of the emergence of a new world literature (in the sense of a literary system operating on a global scale), a case that has so far been absent from the recent project of rethinking world literature in the Anglo-American academy and beyond. This new world literature is what I will call “global Tamil literature.” The Tamil language, the oldest member of the Dravidian family of languages historically located primarily in the South of India, is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world whose literary tradition reaches back over two millennia.1 Until about the last decade of the twentieth century, “Tamil literature” was generally used to refer to literature produced by the Tamil people of India and Sri Lanka, as well as Tamil speakers in Singapore and Malaysia. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Tamil literature has transcended this earlier geography. When we consider the different places where Tamil literature is produced and circulated today, it becomes clear that we are no longer dealing with a South Indian or even Asian phenomenon. Tamil authors and readers today live in Paris, Berlin, Uppsala, London, Toronto, Melbourne, and no longer only in South India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. Publishing houses and literary magazines have sprouted in France, Great Britain, Germany, Canada, and many other places. Books, newspapers, and magazines produced in India can be bought in Tamil bookstores in Canada, France, or Britain. Furthermore, we must consider the numerous websites, online magazines, and blogs dedicated to Tamil literature, and the fact that Tamil authors and readers follow other literatures from around the world and actively I would like to thank the Tamil writers who have discussed their work with me, in particular Shobasakthi and Cheran. I am also grateful for the comments that earlier versions of this chapter have received from audiences in Singapore, Paris, Toronto, and Chicago, and to my colleague Whitney M. Cox for his careful reading of an earlier draft. 1 For a brief overview of Tamil’s long literary history, see Ebeling 2012; for an extensive treatment of primarily premodern Tamil literature, see Shulman 2016. 393 sascha ebeling participate in larger intellectual debates and aesthetic movements.2 The resulting picture is one of a truly global flow of words, texts, and ideas. This shift toward what one might call a “global Tamil literature” has only occurred very recently, during approximately the last three decades. The purpose of the present chapter is to examine this new “globality” of Tamil, or the emergence of Tamil literature as a new world literature. In what follows, I will trace in a few broad brushstrokes the history of how Tamil has become “global Tamil” (ulakattamiḻ ). We must begin with at least some minimal terminological clarifications. In my use, the term global in “global Tamil literature” refers to Tamil literary works that are produced and circulated in different places around the world, that are aware of global political and cultural developments and perspectives, and that are in conversation with other languages outside of South Asia, such as English, Malay, French, or German.3 What do we mean when we say “Tamil diaspora”? And what do we mean when we speak about its literature? Some understand the term Tamil diaspora to refer to all Tamil-speaking people who live outside Tamil’s historic cultural homeland in South India. The expression tāyakam katanta tamiḻ ilakkiyam, literally “Tamil literature ˙ that has gone beyond [its] homeland” – which was the title for an international conference in Singapore in 2011 – is based on such a broad vision. Others prefer to use the term Tamil diaspora in a more restricted sense to refer to Sri Lankan Tamils living in exile. Their literature has been called ı̄ḻ attup pulampeyar ilakkiyam (“literature of the Srilankan Tamil diaspora”) or pulampeyarntōr ilakkiyam (“literature of the displaced”). At any rate, no matter how inclusive or exclusive one would like the term to be, it is important to note that the group of people one might refer to as the “Tamil diaspora” remains internally diverse. Diasporas are always multiple; there is never one single diaspora, if only because people who live away from their real or imagined homelands perceive that situation differently.4 Moreover, one has 2 The history of the increasing interest of Tamil literature in other literatures, which is one of the characteristics of modern Tamil literature, still remains to be written. I have attempted to chart the beginning of this curiosity and intensified polylogical cultural contact in Colonizing the Realm of Words (2010). 3 I disagree with Gayatri Spivak’s claim that globalization necessarily means “the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere” and do not find that using the term planetary presents much of an improvement (2003: 72). 4 Mishra (2006) provides a useful overview of the historical development of diaspora studies and the vicissitudes of the theorizations of the term diaspora. My insistence here on using the term diaspora not as a transhistorical and trans-local coverall concept, but rather as always marked by historical and local specificity is based on my own research with diasporic Tamil communities in Germany, France, Canada, and the United States. 394 From Diasporic to Global: Tamil Literature to take into account differences of age (e.g., when different generations have differing attitudes to the value of maintaining Tamil culture in a diasporic environment), gender (e.g., when women experience life in exile differently from men),5 caste, and class, as well as the specificity of the particular historical moments when the migration occurred. Furthermore, it is important to note that diasporic communities also change over time. Changes can occur rapidly, from one generation to the next, and they can lead to an integration and acculturation of the immigrant community in the host land and its cultural universe to such a degree that it no longer makes sense to speak of a “diaspora.” Consequently, diasporic communities, and thus their cultures, must be considered volatile and unstable, so that an analysis of diasporic cultural activity can present only a snapshot of a particular more or less fleeting moment. Finally, there is the question of what role the original homeland plays for those who left it. For some diaspora theorists, the continued relationship with the homeland is crucial to the definition of a diasporic community (see Safran 1991 and 1999). This relationship can take various forms, such as the memorialization of former life in the homeland, imagining a return home, or active interference in the culture and politics of the homeland from the position of exile. All these factors are important to consider when we speak about something we would like to call a “Tamil diaspora” and its literary practices. Here, I proceed from an exploration of the diachronic dimension of the term, i.e., with a consideration of the two primary waves of migration leading to the emergence of different Tamil diasporas at different times as reflected in literary texts. The First Wave of Migration Until about the middle of the nineteenth century, Tamil literature was localized in South India and, on a smaller scale, in Sri Lanka. It has existed in these locales for about two thousand years, but we have no good evidence of any significant circulation of Tamil literary texts outside of the Tamil-speaking parts of South India and Sri Lanka during that long period.6 During the nineteenth century, Tamil migration in the wake of British colonial expansion led to the first large-scale Tamil diasporas. Tamils who sought new occupations in Singapore, Malaysia, 5 On how Sri Lankan Tamil women authors write about the specific problems Tamil women face in exile, see Thiruchandran (2006). 6 There certainly are texts, such as inscriptions, but there is no literature in the sense of belles lettres. 395 sascha ebeling Burma, South Africa, Mauritius, Fiji, Guyana, and Trinidad created their own communities and also established their own cultural institutions, such as libraries, printing presses, newspapers, magazines, drama clubs, and literary societies.7 It is clear that in these newly formed diasporic communities literature served as an instrument for exploring life, since some of the earliest literary works created in these new environments thematize the issue of migration and transcultural negotiation. In Singapore, for instance, the first Tamil newspaper, Singai Varthamani, was founded in 1875. When this first venture folded, the same editor, C. K. Makhdoom Sahib, founded the weekly Singai Nesan in 1887. For this newspaper, Makhdoom Sahib wrote a series of humorous dialogues in which fictional characters discuss various aspects of Singapore Tamil culture. One of these was titled “Humorous Dialogue between a Singaporean and an Indian” (“viṉ ōta campāsanai, itu ciṅ kappūrāṉ ukkum intiyaṉ ukkum itaiyē ˙ ˙ ˙ natantatu”) and published in Singai Nesan in two installments on September 24 ˙ and October 1, 1888. In this conversation, a Singaporean Tamil explains to a newly arrived South Indian Tamil the peculiar usage of the Tamil language in Singapore. Eager to do business in Singapore, the Indian is curious about the language of commerce. The Singaporean explains that the languages spoken in Singapore are Malay, Javanese, Chinese, Tamil, Hindustani, Arabic, and many others, and he also clarifies some of the Chinese and Malay words that have become common in Singapore Tamil. In this short piece, Singapore is depicted as a linguistic and cultural “contact zone” (Pratt 1992: 4), a melting pot where a new “Singapore Tamil” has developed that is different from South Indian or Sri Lankan Tamil. Makhdoom Sahib’s prose compositions, which, together with the poems of Sadasiva Panditar,8 belong to the earliest known specimens of Singapore Tamil belles lettres, thus present reflections of and about diasporic life through the medium of literature. Another early reflection of Tamil diasporic life is a novel written by Puloli K. Subrahmanyam, who migrated from Jaffna to British Malaya to work for the Krian Licensing Board in Perak. Subrahmanyam’s novel titled Balasundaram or The Victory of Virtue (Pālacuntaram allatu Caṉ mārkka jeyam) was published in Penang in 1918. While traveling on a ship from his native Jaffna to British Malaya to seek employment, the teenager Balasundaram falls in love with 7 It has to be noted that among these only the literary cultures of Singapore and Malaysia have been relatively well documented. See Amrith (2013) and also Rai (2014) for the wider historical context of that migration. 8 Sadasiva Panditar was the author of two devotional poems on the deity of the Singapore Thandayudhapani temple, Ciṅ kai nakar antāti and Cittirak kavikal, published in ˙ Singapore in (1887); see Tinnappaṉ (1998). ˙˙ 396 From Diasporic to Global: Tamil Literature beautiful Neelatchi. Upon arrival in Malaya, they each go their separate ways, but Balasundaram cannot forget the woman of his dreams. When he accidentally meets her again, she is married to a man who has been imprisoned under allegation of murder. Neelatchi is attracted to Balasundaram, who is handsome and educated and at any rate preferable to a husband in prison. So she tries to seduce him. But while Balasundaram remains steadfast, her husband commits suicide when he learns about his wife’s loose morals. Virtuous Balasundaram helps Neelatchi reform her ways and eventually returns to Sri Lanka, marries a local girl, and leads a happy life ever after. Like numerous Tamil novels written in South India during the first decades of the twentieth century, Balasundaram or The Victory of Virtue is a didactic book addressing various issues of social reform, such as the importance of morality and education. But the novel also touches on various aspects of diasporic life. It contains descriptions of the coffee estates and the celebration of the great Hindu temple festival of Thaipusam, a major event in Malaysia and Singapore to this day. Most importantly, the novel deals with the challenges and dangers of a modernizing society where people try to negotiate and refashion morality and cultural standards within a multicultural contact zone. The question of what constitutes a caṉ mārkkam, a path of virtue or proper behavior, in a changing and multicultural society is the overall theme of the novel.9 That such explorations of how to live a new, modern life in a changing society constituted an important topic for diasporic novelists is further betokened by the fact that Subrahmanyam’s novel was followed by another novel that resembled it very closely. Sampasivam–Gnanamirtham or The Treasure of Virtue (Cāmpacivam–Ñāṉ āmirtam allatu Naṉ ṉ eṟ ik kalañciyam) by ˙ Arunachalam Nagalingam (1901–79), who migrated to British Malaya at the age of nineteen from his native Karainakar, Jaffna (Sri Lanka), to work as a clerk at the Treasury of Malaya, was published in Kuala Lumpur in 1927. In an attempt to escape from a life of poverty in Jaffna, twelve-year-old Sambasivam, the novel’s protagonist, travels to British Malaya by himself. Despite many adversities, Sambasivam manages to become a teacher of Tamil and English and a social activist. He marries Gnanamirtham, the daughter of his mentor in Malaya, and finally returns to Jaffna to serve his native country. Like Subrahmanyam’s novel Sampasivam–Gnanamirtham also addresses issues of social reform, such as child marriage, women’s education, dowry disputes, or the deleterious effects of alcoholism. The work also 9 See also the technical discussions of the novel’s theme, plot, characterization, and style in Venugopal (1999). 397 sascha ebeling explores aspects of diasporic life, such as the role of family relations among exiles or the importance for the younger generations of engaging with Tamil culture and learning the Tamil language. While novels such as Balasundaram and Sampasivam–Gnanamirtham are certainly full of romance, melodrama, and predictable twists and turns to a degree that many readers of the twenty-first century may find unpalatable, one should not dismiss them too quickly. If we look beyond their often sensationalist plots, these novels turn out to be rich documents of the particular historical situation of social change during the height of colonial modernity which entailed the formation of the first Tamil diasporas. These novels portray people and cultures in motion. They show the varied attempts of diasporic Tamils to fathom the reality of their new life through the imaginary lifeworlds and possible universes of fictional characters. While themes centered round migration, cultural contact, and colonial modernity were important to the early Tamil writers in Singapore and Malaysia, other issues rose to prominence over time as Tamils became firmly rooted in their new social environments. As the literary cultures of Singapore and Malaysia continued to flourish and dozens of writers produced poems, short stories, novels, plays, and essays, writers became increasingly independent from the literary culture of the South Indian and Sri Lankan homelands. This autonomy of the diasporic literary field consisted in the fact that (a) authors no longer depended on South India’s literary infrastructures, such as magazines, libraries, booksellers, and publishing houses, in order to reach their readers, and (b) their work dealt with issues that were largely unrelated to life in the homeland. In other words, their writing became firmly rooted in the social and cultural realities of Singapore and Malaysia, which it engaged in manifold ways. Furthermore, in any diaspora the sense of living in displacement and the wish to return to one’s ancestral land may decrease over time or disappear altogether. Thus, today’s Tamil writing in Singapore and Malaysia is not primarily defined by its relationship with South India or driven by the authors’ desire to return to India as the Tamil homeland. It is true that out of the diasporas created during the colonial period Singapore and Malaysia became the only places where literary practices flourished to such a degree that they were noticed in South India and Sri Lanka. But it must be said that not many Tamil readers in South India regularly read Tamil writers from Southeast Asian countries. Given this relatively high degree of autonomy of the Tamil literary cultures in Singapore and Malaysia, it seems that they are no longer adequately described by the term “diasporic Tamil literature.” 398 From Diasporic to Global: Tamil Literature The Second Wave of Migration From the 1980s onwards, Sri Lanka’s civil war led to another large-scale migration of Tamils. A large number of Sri Lankan Tamils left the island, perhaps about 1 million people, and settled in many different places around the globe – places like Switzerland or Denmark which had never included a Tamil population before. Tamil now spread to all corners of the globe, with larger populations in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Australia. In all these new places, Tamils started to publish books, newspapers, and magazines, so new publishing houses and media were established. Some of the literary magazines only appeared for a number of years and then folded, such as Eksil (“Exile,” France), A Ā I (“ABC,” Netherlands), or Tūntil (“Fishing Hook,” Germany), while others continue ˙ ˙ such as Kālam (“Time”), which has been published to be successful today, from Canada since July 1990. The horrors of the war drove many to write about their lives, their experiences, and their political views. Thus, many new authors were born, authors who found an interested reading public in those who shared with them their life in exile. These new authors soon organized literary meetings (ilakkiyac cantippu), in Germany, England, or in France, where they met fellow authors and discussed not only each other’s works but also Tamil literature written by authors living in South Asia. In the late nineties, the Internet began to make things easier. Literature could be read on websites or emailed. Tamils from Norway to Switzerland and France to the Czech Republic could now be in touch not only with their friends and family in India and Sri Lanka, but also with each other. Words like “asylum” (tañcam), “exile” (pukalitam), and “dias˙ pora” (pulampeyarvu, pulampeyarntōr) gained currency at that point to refer to what came to be perceived as a shared experience amongst people who lived thousands of miles apart. As in the case of the pioneering diasporic Tamil writers in Singapore and Malaysia, numerous diasporic Sri Lankan Tamil authors have chosen to write about their experiences, their life in exile. The psychological negotiation is different from author to author, but it can be located somewhere between the two different ends of the spectrum we find in the reflections of Theodor W. Adorno and Edward Said. For Adorno, who was forced to leave his native Germany during the Nazi regime, life in exile was always a damaged life. He famously encapsulated his view that any attempt to deny this damage, this loss, only makes life more difficult with the sentence “There can be no right 399 sascha ebeling life in the wrong one” (Adorno 2005: 39).10 In contrast, Edward Said emphasized that out of the ruins of the self, the tears, the hate, and the fear, something new, enriching, and positive can be born. Said pointed out that “[w]hat has been left behind may either be mourned, or it can be used to provide a different set of lenses. Since almost by definition exile and memory go together, it is what one remembers of the past and how one remembers that determine how one sees the future” (Said 2000: xxxv). The future, according to Said, can hold renewal and hope, but, in any case, the present for the exile is a richer, deeper life. As Said argued: “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal . . . Thus, both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally” (86). The contrapuntal awareness of an author in exile can be used as a major source of inspiration. A life lived simultaneously in the interstices of two cultures entails the challenge of constant comparison, constant philosophical inquiry and epistemic adjustments – in short, a richer, deeper life. The novels written by Ratnam Thiagalingam (b. 1967), who sought asylum in Norway, are reminiscent of Adorno’s perspective of the “wrong life.” His first novel, Inviting Ruin (Aḻ iviṉ aḻ aippitaḻ , 1994), deals with how Tamil immigrants to Norway cope with European modes of sexuality and the threat of HIV/AIDS. In his second novel, Tomorrow (Nālai, 1999), he writes about the ˙ clash of Sri Lankan immigrants with Neo-Nazis in Norway and the racist violence against Tamil immigrants that erupted in the 1990s all over Europe. Nālai tells the story of Devaguru and his wife, Nithyayini, who have come as ˙ immigrants to seek asylum in Norway. When Devaguru and his family are confronted with racism and Neo-Nazi violence, he tries to remain committed to his Gandhian ideals of nonviolence. The novel begins with a first incident when Nithyayini and her coworker Jeevitha walk home late one night from their job in a fish processing factory, where they work long hours under inhuman conditions, and run into four Norwegian boys who accost them. One of the boys empties a bottle of beer over Nithyayini’s head, but then they let the two women go. When Nithyayini gets home, she breaks down and cries, but her husband does not quite know how to console her or what to make of the racist violence his wife has encountered. The situation escalates 10 The original reads, “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.” I have modified the English translation. 400 From Diasporic to Global: Tamil Literature when their daughter Malathi, a primary school child, is attacked and burned alive by a Neo-Nazi gang. Another striking example of diasporic writing describing a life in-between multiple selves, where a traumatic past mingles with a traumatic present, is found in the work of Anthonythasan Jesuthasan (b. 1967), writing under the nom de plume Shobasakthi (Sōpācakti), who was in his teens a soldier of the ˙ LTTE (Tamil Tigers), but later left them for ideological reasons. He has been living in Paris since 1993, making a living by odd jobs, such as stocking shelves in supermarkets or washing dishes, but also starring as the protagonist of Jacques Audiard’s movie Dheepan (2015), winner of the 2015 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.11 Shobasakthi’s first novel, titled Gorilla (Korillā), was published in 2001. Examining this novel at greater length will illustrate some of the complexities of the writing by Sri Lankan Tamils in exile. Gorilla opens with a letter in which a Sri Lankan Tamil man named Anthony Thasan petitions the French government for political asylum in France. In the petition, Anthony tells the story of his life, the various instances of torture he and his family have suffered at the hands of the Sri Lankan army, the Indian Peacekeeping Forces, and various Tamil liberation groups. As we turn the page, we shift, without transition, to the small town of Kunjan Fields in Sri Lanka. This is the home of a man known to everyone as “Gorilla,” a violent thug who steals and terrorizes his family and others. The nickname is a play on words, since the Tamil word korillā can refer to both “guerrilla” and “gorilla.” Gorilla’s eldest son, Rocky Raj, runs away from the violence at home and joins an LTTE training camp for teenage boys. At the camp, the boys are assigned new names to make them part of the common “Movement.” Rocky Raj is excited at the possibility of renaming himself and wants his Movement name to be Arafat, but he does not get to choose and is assigned the name Sanjay, after Indira Gandhi’s second son. Everyone in the Movement, though, comes to call him Gorilla, after his infamous father. Rocky is intelligent and studious, an idealistic soul who subscribes wholeheartedly to the LTTE’s political and ideological engagement for the creation of an independent Tamil state. But he is not a fighter. He finds the strenuous physical training difficult to endure and is disillusioned by the classes he is taught in the camp, which have little to do with political theory and instead teach the future soldiers about different types of explosives and weaponry. 11 My reading of Shobasakthi’s work has benefited from the extended discussions I had with the author in June (2010) in Paris. 401 sascha ebeling His training concludes with a final session on how one escapes from the army. The boys are put through a simulation in which they are tortured until they admit to being members of the LTTE. Rocky is determined to prove himself, so he endures the torture without surrendering, and therefore passes the training. But now that he is an approved soldier of the LTTE, he comes to find the tactics of the movement increasingly questionable, strategically as well as ethically. He objects to harming innocent civilians and demands fairness in the daily operations. Shunned by his fellow soldiers because of his sense of morality, Rocky finally becomes a victim of the movement’s own internal corruption. He is detained, interrogated, and severely tortured. Eventually, he manages to escape and returns home, where his little sister tells him that their own father had a hand in his denunciation. A physically and morally wounded Rocky decides to leave Kunjan Fields for Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo. The novel then shifts to Paris. We learn that the asylum seeker Anthony Thasan (who wrote the letter at the beginning of the novel) is actually Rocky Raj and that the personal history presented in his petition is a fabrication. Anthony/Rocky lives in Paris with another Sri Lankan refugee, who is also the first-person narrator of this last section of the novel (while the part set in Sri Lanka is told as an authorial narrative). Their friend Lokka, a fellow Sri Lankan Tamil, is a particularly interesting character. He is a humanist and idealist, and a proponent of nonviolence. Lokka thus serves as a sharp contrast to the angry, disillusioned, violence-prone Anthony. It is hard not to read the two as allegories of two opposite emotional and intellectual dispositions prevalent among the Sri Lankan refugee community. At one point, when Anthony is about to get into a physical confrontation, Lokka steps in and asks: “Are you not refugees who have come from a country where you have seen enough murders to rot both eyes?” (Shobasakthi 2008: 157). Before long, however, it is Lokka who is arrested by the French police for murdering his wife, who had begun a relationship with another immigrant. The same Lokka who had been preaching nonviolence to Anthony and others apparently throws all convictions overboard when his own life is concerned. As part of the murder investigation, the police connect Anthony to a lie detector. The first question they ask him is his real name. Anthony is truly confused by the question. He tries the various names he has had over the course of his life: Thaninayagam (the false name under which he garners employment in Paris), Anthony Thasan, Rocky Raj, and finally Gorilla. But the lie detector declares him a liar every single time. The interrogation is 402 From Diasporic to Global: Tamil Literature interrupted when we hear through the policeman’s walkie-talkie that another innocent Tamilian has been murdered. So the violence continues as the novel comes to an abrupt end. In fact, there is no ending, no closure to this story, which is really several stories intertwined, fabricated, misremembered, to such an extent that even its protagonist Rocky/Anthony/“Gorilla” finds it hard to disentangle fact from fiction. The very physicality of the text alerts us to this incoherence in a thoroughly postmodern mode of montage. One narrative blends into another, and there are no chapter titles, but the paragraphs are numbered instead. At crucial narrative turning points, we turn toward an empty page with a single word totarum “to be continued” printed toward the bottom. ˙ Each new section begins with larger-font incipit letters and the paragraph numbering starts over. The text seamlessly ingests various letters, and it has footnotes providing biographical information on historical and fictional characters and other explanations. There is something desperate about this attempt at authenticity and authority through footnotes and numbered lists. As if the narrative were striving for order, sequence, and cohesion at the level of form, while the content repeatedly narrates chaos and leads to a hollowsounding “to be continued.” The text thus mimics, or stages, what we also find at the level of diegesis. After Rocky’s life had to be retold so many times, there is no real life left. Rocky is suspended somewhere in-between all these intersecting life histories. His life in the diaspora as a refugee begins with a lie, the story he tells in his petition and that he has to concoct in order to be granted asylum. His past lives, as a victim of childhood abuse in the village and later as a boy soldier in the LTTE, also become blurred fragments in his memory, fissured histories not contained, not circumscribed by a name for the person which should have been the focus point around which they crystallized. Rocky’s predicament is that of many Sri Lankan Tamils who live in the diaspora. Edward Said’s formulation of the exile’s contrapuntal life that we encountered above takes on an uncanny quality here. Rocky’s diasporic situation does not seem to provide an enhanced or sharpened vision, but instead a total eclipse of the ability to see the past. Rocky Raj’s story, as told in Gorilla, alerts us to the fact that Said’s new set of lenses, the redemptive side of exile, does not come easy. For Sri Lankan Tamil survivors of physical and psychological trauma, a diasporic contrapuntal awareness often comes with the dark underside of past terror, fragments of trauma, and the struggle against one’s former life histories which keep crowding back into the present. 403 sascha ebeling The novels by Shobasakthi and Thiagalingam provide only a small sample of the rich and vast writing by Sri Lankan authors living in exile. Moreover, in addition to the two primary waves of migration described above, there have been others. For instance, at least since India’s independence Tamils have migrated to the United States and Australia to seek economic success. Today there are a few Tamil authors who belong to that group of economic or labor immigrants, such as the poet and short story writer Gokulakannan (b. 1970).12 But this type of migration has not had the same powerful impact on the worldwide spread of Tamil literature as Sri Lanka’s war. From the Diasporic to the Global Compared to the first wave of migration, the second wave has had very different cultural implications. The situation could be described, in broad terms, as follows: During the nineteenth century, South India and Sri Lanka formed the Tamil homeland or the Tamil cultural center and places like Singapore and Malaysia constituted a small number of different diasporic peripheries. Since the 1980s and for the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, Sri Lanka constitutes the cultural center. But given the global spread of diasporic communities, the periphery for that cultural center is now the world. This larger, indeed global canvas has become an essential part of what constitutes “Tamil literature” today. While I agree that the term diasporic Tamil literature might remain useful for certain purposes, I would like to propose an analytical emphasis on the larger perspective, moving from tāyakam katanta tamiḻ ˙ ilakkiyam or “diasporic Tamil literature” to ulakattamiḻ ilakkiyam or what I would translate as “global Tamil literature.” Put succinctly, the argument could be phrased like this: Over the past thirty years, the system of Tamil literary production and consumption has undergone a major transformation that involves a number of interconnected processes, such as the establishment of diasporic hubs or centers of Tamil literary culture all over the world in the wake of global Tamil migration (especially after the outbreak of Sri Lanka’s civil war in the 1980s); an increased attention to other literary cultures around the world reflected in the increasing number of translations into Tamil and extended debates in literary magazines and journals; an increased circulation and global distribution of Tamil literary writing through larger networks of publishers, booksellers, and notably the Internet. This large-scale transformation 12 Gokulakannan, who lives in California and works in the IT industry, has published two collections of poems and a book of short stories to date. 404 From Diasporic to Global: Tamil Literature has led to a scenario in which Tamil literary culture has become both broader and deeper, while at the same time still operating through what seems to me to be best described in terms of a cultural center and periphery. It appears that as this process of globalization of Tamil literature is continuing to unfold, the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the historic homeland of Tamil culture, has so far remained the prime center of Tamil literary culture in terms of infrastructure (with the largest concentration of readers, publishing houses, literary magazines, and literary awards) as well as in terms of discursive hegemony, that is, with regard to what critics and readers say about books, what gets published, or which themes are dealt with by authors. But unlike two or three decades ago, both the infrastructure and the literary discourses of this center are today increasingly inflected and altered through the activities of authors and readers located in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia – what I would like to call a Tamil literary and cultural periphery. These inflections and alterations, the ways in which the periphery puts pressure on the center, so to speak, appear in many forms. For instance, the periphery is developing increasingly profitable markets for Tamil books and literary magazines from which South India’s Tamil publishers benefit. At the same time, new publishing houses open and compete with the established institutions of South India. Furthermore, literary awards and prizes from the periphery (such as the Toronto Tamil Literary Garden award) help to bolster an author’s fame and thus boost the distribution of his or her books in South India. The emergence of global Tamil literature has hardly been studied so far.13 For the scholar of world literature in the twenty-first century, the case of global Tamil literature provides an opportunity to study a wide range of questions – from the interconnections between literary processes and migration to the emergence of “significant geographies”14 – outside of the usual bias of the commonly studied Western literary traditions. Global Tamil literature offers a fresh archive to develop the study of world literature further in the sense of what Ottmar Ette has recently outlined as a future philology of the literatures of the world: “The question of ‘world literature’ versus ‘the literatures of the world’ boils down to this: how to design and create a world – with the aid of literatures coming from many places, many languages, and many cultures – that is not one world, in the sense of a ‘big family’ allowing only one predominant logic, but one world, in the sense of its innumerably diverse logics of life, of experience, of survival, and, above all, of living together” (2016: 150). The study of global Tamil 13 The present author is currently preparing a monograph-length study on the subject. 14 On overlapping discourses in the fields of world literature and migration studies, see Friedman (2018); on significant geographies see Laachir, Marzagora, and Orsini (2018). 405 sascha ebeling literature, its histories, texts, authors, readers, and institutions, will help bring to this future philology of the literatures of the world the diverse logics that Ette envisions. As a historical analysis, the study of global Tamil literature will also help us understand how Tamil writers pursued their project of the modernization of Tamil literature through the repeated negotiation of influences from world literature, mainly European and American writers, but also other Indian literatures, and Japanese and Chinese writing. This is, of course, not to say that Tamil authors completely abandoned earlier genres, styles, tropes, and modes. Rather, among other things, Tamil authors also kept their eyes on literature produced by the rest of the world. In this manner, Tamil literature has been extraordinarily receptive, so that sonnets and haikus have found their way into Tamil as well as existentialism, psychoanalysis, postmodernist experimentation, and climate change. In drawing on and responding to other literary works, Tamil authors have shown extraordinary creativity. Some pivotal moments in that process of intercultural conversation would include the early Bible translations and theological arguments which altered the practices of writing Tamil prose; the translations of Shakespeare’s works into Tamil from the 1870s onwards; the experimentation of poets like Bharati (1882–1921) and Maraimalai Adigal (1876–1950) with writing sonnets and their fascination with British Romantic poets like Keats and Wordsworth; the popular novels of the 1900s to the 1940s and their indebtedness to Sherlock Holmes and other Western popular fiction; the crucial contributions of avant-garde literary magazines, such as Manikkoti (“The Jewel Banner”) in the 1930s, Eḻ uttu (“Writing”) in the 1960s, ˙ and˙ Kalachuvadu (“Footprints of Time”) and Nirappirikai (“Color spectrum”) in the 1980s and 1990s; the participation of Tamil writers like Bama (b. 1958) and Salma (b. 1968) in the international Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse); the novelist Charu Nivedita’s (b. 1953) fascination with Kathy Acker, Italo Calvino, Roland Barthes, and other experimental/postmodern writers and thinkers; or the publication of Perumal Murugan’s (b. 1966) highly controversial novel One Part Woman (Mātorupākaṉ , 2010) in English translation in the United States in 2018. What Tamil authors achieved and continue to achieve in all these moments of intercultural negotiation has never been a derivative enterprise, merely trying to imitate the established forces or avant-garde movements of other literatures and places. Instead, Tamil writers have time and again drawn on other literatures as well as on Tamil’s own long literary history and indigenous forms, styles, and themes in order to create genuinely new works. Thus, Tamil literature, in its global form today, offers the reader a vast and rich archive to study world literary phenomena. 406 From Diasporic to Global: Tamil Literature References Adorno, Theodor W. 2005. Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. Verso. Amrith, Sunil S. 2013. Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Harvard University Press. Dhandayudham, R. 1977. A Study of the Sociological Novels in Tamil. University of Madras. Ebeling, Sascha. 2010. 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