We are grateful to Ms Jayalalithafor siting the World Tamil Conferencein the land of the Tamilsand that too at Thanjavur which isrich in Tamil legacy and whichbears the imprint even today of ahoary tradition. We do not viewher now as our Chief Minister butas one, who like us, has cared toremember that this inimitablelanguage is our breath, our lifeand our spirit.
We are aware of the jeer levelledat us for an emotion that is allegedto be not adequately supportedby scholarship. We ignore itbecause our emotions arise directlyfrom the urge of traditionwhich has kept us what we are inthe reflex of the mundane andnon-mundane traditions of Tamilculture as surely down generationsthat have gone before us asit would in the generations tocome. It is a case of owning up toour predecessors the wealth thatthey left us to pass on to posterity.
Our everyday life has many athrill derived from our language.When, in wintry mornings, thedevout go round the car streetsinging the glory of God, theyelevate themselves as well as ourselves by the music of piety of Tiruppavai and Tiruvembavai. When someone quips about how there can be no greater peril than a woman wronged, we are reminded of Kannagi of Ilango’s matchless creation, Silappadikaaram. When we go on a tour of hill and dale, we see and are amazed by the realism with which Nakkirar and others speak about Nature’s beauty in as dissimilar poems as Tirumurugartruppadai and Nedunalvaadai.
And how can we forget the poet-savant, Thiruvalluvar, who lives in the counsel he gives us in Arutpaal, Porutpaal and Kaamatuppaal of his Thirukkural?
And in every temple of note we visit, we hear the serious and sonorous, the beautiful and the lyrical in the Thevaaram and Divyaprabhandham. We learn to admire Kamban’s description of Sita in the forest as the Kendai-ttadangannaal ullay kilukuluthaal. We are moved by the heroic and the sensuous in Bharati’s Achchamilllai and Kuyilpaattu. And, we are proud, that till yesterday, there was with us a ‘Kannadasan
who ostensibly wrote for the world of celluloid but was recapturing all the time the sublimation of his poetic inspiration in Oru Koppayile en kudiyiruppu besides reminding us of the eternal verity of Hinduism in Arthamulla Hindumatham.
The torch that was handed down through Bharatidasan and others is kept alive in poetic meets and patti manrams. As in the West, so also in Tamilnadu, contemporary modern poetry believes in freeing itself from the shackles of prosody. There is also a slant in favour of the sensual as contrasted with the sensuous. Time alone will tell how long and how much of this can endure because, unlike the poetry of the earlier eras, modern poetry does not reflect the nuances (as against the brashness) that can assure eternity for it. The conference, we are sure, will have messages to offer on these instead of being an exercise in mere eulogy of poets, playwrights and prose writers of the past and present. We invoke you, Tamil, the goddess of our hearts, not to disappoint us in this.