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Songs of Home & Loss: Reconstructions of a Tamil Past on the Basis of the Puṟanāṉūṟu

Author:Eva Wilden
Series:Sanctum Studies in Indian Intellectual, Cultural, and Historical Traditions
Binding:Paperback
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About the Book
Songs of Home & Loss: Reconstructions of a Tamil Past on the Basis of the Puṟanāṉūṟu returns to one of the foundational anthologies of Classical Tamil literature to reconsider both the world preserved in its poems and the historical processes through which that world has been reconstructed.

The Puṟanāṉūṟu is conventionally associated with kings, warfare, heroism, patronage, and public life. Eva Wilden turns attention instead to less visible histories embedded within the poems: women and children in times of war, subsistence and survival, displacement and loss, and the ordinary lives that lie beyond narratives centred on rulers and heroic action.

At the same time, the book asks how the Puṟanāṉūṟu itself became available as evidence for the Tamil past. Its text survives through fragmentary manuscripts, commentary, quotations, editorial reconstruction, and successive acts of interpretation. What later generations have understood the anthology to say is therefore inseparable from the history of its transmission and reconstruction.

Bringing philology, textual criticism, literary interpretation, and historical enquiry into conversation, the book asks not only what kind of past can be recovered from the Puṟanāṉūṟu, but who has participated in deciding what that past was allowed to become.
About the Author
Eva Wilden

Eva Wilden is Professor of Classical Tamil and Manuscript Studies at the University of Hamburg and Director of Tamilex, the long-term project devoted to a historical dictionary of Classical Tamil. A leading specialist in Caṅkam literature, textual criticism, and manuscript transmission, she heads the Caṅkam Project and has produced major critical editions and annotated translations of Classical Tamil texts, including the Naṟṟiṇai, Kuṟuntokai, and Akanāṉūṟu. Her books include Manuscript, Print and Memory: Relics of the Caṅkam in Tamilnadu and A Grammar of Old Tamil for Students. She led the ERC Advanced Grant project NETamil and received the Kural Peetam, the Presidential Award for Classical Tamil, in 2015.
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