Programme
Anne Monius
Professor of South Asian Religions
Harvard Divinity School
Harvard University
E/ amonius@hds.harvard.edu
Humour and Being Human in Medieval Tamil Jain Literature
This paper explores the relationship between aesthetics and conceptions of human personhood in pre-modern Tamil Jain literary culture. Jain literature in Tamil, since its "rediscovery" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the work of U.Ve. Caminataiyar and others, has been surveyed (Chakravarti, Venkatacami) and individual works studied (Ryan, Vijayalakshmy), but little has been made of the obvious and significant role that literary production (both kavya and kappiyam and literary theory) must have played in Jain monastic life. Why are so many of Tamil literary culture's grammars, theoretical works on poetics, lexicons, and kappiyam authored by Jain monks?
After a brief overview of the extant Jain literary corpus in Tamil, this paper will argue that literary aesthetics--particularly the cultivation of nakai, "laughter," the Tamil meyppatu analogue to Sanskrit literary theory's rasa of hasya or "the comic"--played an important role in Jain conceptions of personhood and personal cultivation. Focusing in particular on the Civakacintamani, one of the five "great poetic works" (perunkappiyam) of Tamil literary tradition, this paper examines the ways in which Tamil Jain narrative texts cultivate "the comic" through a variety of literary techniques, including over-the top excesses of sexuality and violence. In the context of the Jain hero's inevitable renunciation, such humorous excesses of poetic presentation distance the audience from the characters and situations in the text, cultivating the sense of vairagya or disgust so central to Jain conceptions of the human path to liberation. The ways in which Jain aesthetic techniques of cultivating humor and thus distance from the world affect other, non-Jain literary production in pre-modern Tamil will also be considered.
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Prof. Monius' research interests lie in examining the practices and products of
literary culture to reconstruct the history of religions in South Asia. Her
first book,
Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in
Tamil-Speaking South India (2001), examines the two extant Buddhist
texts composed in Tamil; her current research project considers the role of
aesthetics and moral vision in the articulation of a distinctly Hindu religious
identity in twelfth- century South India. Both works point to a larger research
focus on the ways in which aesthetics and ethics define religious identity and
community in South Asia, as well as to the creative and productive encounters
among competing sectarian religious communities. Future research projects will
explore the relationship of Hindu devotional and philosophical literature in
Tamil to its Sanskritic forebears, as well as consider the transmission of South
Indian strands of Buddhism and Hinduism to Southeast Asia.