Description

Writing the history of the literature produced in a particular language which combines text-critical methods with varying shades of language nationalism is a genre which emerges in South India in a process along the lines of C. Hallisey?s ?transcultural mimesis?
between Indian and British scholars and on the basis of literary histories of Sanskrit in the late 19thth/early 20th century.
Throughout this process a recurring motif in the historiographies of two of the four dominant regional literary traditions of South India, those of Kannada and Tamil, is that these literary cultures themselves supposedly began with and were continuously enriched by authors who were Jaina, and it is as recurrent a claim that this was not the case, that on the contrary literature thrived independently of or in opposition to the literary products of an ultimately peripheral tradition. I will discuss how on the desks of influential literary scholars and historians of South India, particularly M.S. Purnalingam Pillai and A. Chakravarti for Tamil, but also P.K. Parameswaran Nair for a Malayali literary perspective on Tamil as well as A.S. Altekar for Kannada, the British and the Jaina were brought together to hand over to supposedly Jaina texts the agency to help fight ever-intensifying battles over colonialism, caste and ethnicity and over which communities may rightfully call certain authors, texts and languages their own. Relating these readings to how the Jaina?s role is required and redressed in conflicts imagined particularly between Sanskrit, the Prakrits, Tamil and Kannada in more recent interventions by S. Blackburn and S. Pollock on language, knowledge and power, shall show that these conflicts, for which a resolution is sought by giving a key place, or no place at all, to the Jaina, do not stop at the doorstep of Western academic literary historiography.