Dravidian languages
If India - if we are to believe Tabucchi, but also a famous book that describes the "Indian syndrome"(Fous de l'Inde, Régis Airault, éditions Payot) - is a country where it seems easy to get lost, what can we say of the linguistic empire it constitutes, which claims only two official languages - Hindi and English - but boasts over 800 regional languages, 22 of which have been elevated to the status of "classics" by the government and are now enshrined in the Constitution. Although this corpus may seem impressive, linguistics nevertheless helps to define the contours of the part of the sub-continent that interests us, since it is in South India, generally speaking, that the Dravidian languages are deployed, named after the eponymous peoples who were related neither to the Aryans nor to the Himalayans. In this already smaller group, usually limited to 26 languages, the latter are not on an equal footing from a literary point of view, all the more so as India's literacy rate remains lower than the world average, and the oral tradition continues to flourish. The collection Nouvelles de l'Inde du Sud (News from South India), published in 2022 by Magellan & Cie, does however provide some guidance. In addition to Tamil (the majority language in Tamil Nadu) and Malayalam (Kerala region) , it contains French versions of languages that are much rarer in translation, such as Kannara (Karnataka region) and Telugu (Andhra Pradesh). For our part, we shall attempt to give a brief history of these literatures, from the oldest - in Tamil - to the most recent - in Malayalam.
The origins
The first is that ancient manuscripts were written on ôles, palm leaves that may have been well preserved but were nonetheless putrescible. The second is that it is very difficult to untangle the tangle of ancient chronologies, as oral transmission has propagated historical dates that appear fanciful, to say the least, to some researchers. In the interests of conciliation, however, some agree that it dates back to a few hundred years BC, and that it is older than Sanskrit, the other predominant language in ancient India (albeit in the north). This classical Tamil literature is also known as "Sangam". This word - "confluence" in French - designates both the three literary academies (the first of which, according to legend, was submerged by the waves) that succeeded one another under the Pandya empire (the duration of which varies considerably from one source to another), and all the works produced by them. Although the circumstances surrounding their creation remain unclear, a few thousand surviving texts have been associated with this period. Compiled in the 10th century, these generally "secular" poems have usually been classified according to two predominant themes, as in the Ettutokai anthology: those responding to theakam (the interior, love for example), and those describing the puram (the exterior: wars, life in society). We would also have to mention a fundamental grammar(Tholkaapiam), treatises on ethics or morality, then - later - epics(Silappadikaram and Manimekhalai) or "devotional" poetry, as theakam finally encompassed God.
The 10th century was also a turning point for the Kannada language, as it took on a new stature under the influence of Jainism, a religion then in full expansion. Until then, Kannada texts had tended to focus on poetry - as demonstrated by the 9th-century treatise Kavirajamarga, "the royal way of poets" - but now they took on a spiritual dimension - theAdi purana by the monk Jinasena, recounting the journey of a man who renounces power in favor of his brother, is a good example - and even a warrior dimension, with the rewriting of the famous epic Mahâbhârata, which Pampa Bharata entitled Vikramarjuna Vijaya. In the following century, Kannada adopted another poetic metric, vachana, a kind of rhymed aphorism, while retaining its religious inspiration, this time nurtured by the Lingyatist movement.
A popular language par excellence, it was nonetheless influenced for a long time by Sanskrit, as was Telugu, which also asserted itself in the 11th century thanks to Nannaya Bhattaraka, who wrote the first grammar while devoting himself to poetry. His works are the oldest known (or preserved) in Telugu. On his death, Tikkanna (1205-1288) continued the translation of the Mahâbhârata he had begun, before Yerrapragada put the finishing touches to it. However, the real golden age would begin two centuries later - with poets such as Srinatha and Bammera Pothana, or Allasani Peddana, and works such as the epic poem Amuktamaliada, or those stemming from the "Prabandha" genre (biographies of famous people) that would succeed them in medieval times - at the very moment when Malayalam literature was taking shape. The "youngest" of the Dravidian languages had been in use since the 10th century - the Darukkavadham, dedicated to the goddess Kali, dates back to this period - but was gaining independence from Sanskrit and Tamil, to which it owed much, a family of poets from Niranam (Kerala) reshaped the language until the 16th century, when Thunchathtu Ezuthachan, considered the father of modern Malayalam, popularized kilippattu, a type of "parrot poem" in which the narrator is an animal. Along with Cherusseri Namboothiri, his 15th-century predecessor, and Kunchan Nambiar, his 18th-century successor, he belongs to the "Great Trio" (Mahakavitrayam), that trilogy of poets whose talent remains unrivalled and who form the basis of Malayalam literature.
From colonization to the modern era
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Portuguese and British respectively began to colonize India. In addition to the writing produced by the colonists, the links forged between the sub-continent and Europe had an influence on indigenous literature, which took on new themes and new forms, took an interest in world trends and benefited from the development of printing tools. The first printing press was set up by Christian missionaries in Kottayam (Kerala) in the mid-19th century. At the time of independence in 1947, some writers chose to continue using colonial languages - in particular English, which, for practical and international reasons, continued to be widely used - such as R. K. Narayan, born in Madras in 1906, where he died in 2001. Educated at a Lutheran school and enthusiastic about reading Dickens, Shakespeare and Walter Scott, it was only natural that in 1935 he should publish Swami and Friends in English - an autofiction about his childhood, the first volume of his Magudi Days trilogy - which his friend Graham Greene would try to promote in London. Gradually, his style, akin to Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness, won over his readers, including the French, thanks to the translation work carried out by the fine publishing house Zulma(Le Magicien de la finance, Le Guide et la danseuse).
Among the Indian authors who opted for English, even though his mother tongue was Urdu (spoken in northern India and Pakistan), it's impossible not to mention Salman Rushdie, who was born in Bombay in 1947, even though he left his hometown as a teenager for the UK. Born into a middle-class, secular Muslim family, his prolific work has been marred by a fatwa since 1989, the year following the publication of The Satanic Verses. This daily danger, confirmed by the new attack on him in 2022, inspired him to write the fictionalized autobiography of his literary double, Joseph Anton, but the range of his inspirations is much wider, as confirmed by his other texts, from Enfants de Minuit published by Plon in 1997 to Quichotte published by Actes Sud in 2020.
Born in 1952, also in Bombay but now living in Canada, Rohinton Mistry also uses English. His novels are published in French by Albin Michel(L'Équilibre du monde, Un si long voyage, Une simple affaire de famille), as are those by Kerala-born Anita Nair: Dans les jardins du Malabar, L'Abécédaire des sentiments, La Mangeuse de guêpes..
These international successes - Rushdie is Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Mistry is a recipient of the Governor General's Award and Nair of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi - do not obscure the fact that the Dravidian languages reached a sufficient degree of maturity in the twentieth century for them too to enjoy a wide audience, both within and beyond the borders of the Indian subcontinent. Malayalam literature, for example, can take pride in the achievements of G. Sankara Kurup (1901-1978), who was the first writer to receive the Jnanpith Prize in 1965, now recognized as India's highest literary distinction, and OV Vijayan (1931-2005), who won acclaim with his first novel, Khasakkinte Itihasam, published in 1965. Since then, Madath Vasudevan Nair, born in 1933, has been recognized as one of the greatest writers of the post-independence period, with his realistic works on subjects as intimate as family life. His youngest daughter, Khadija Mumtaz, born in 1955 in Kattor, continues in this psychological vein, drawing on her experience as a doctor: her second novel, Barsa, was awarded the prestigious Kerala Sahitya Akademi in 2010. On the Tamil literary front, we should mention Jayakanthan (1934-2015), a native of Tamil Nadu, who gave a voice to the most humble in his novels, the prolix Sujatha Rangarajan (1935-2008), who won his readers by publishing in newspapers before turning to cinema, and finally Pérumal Murugan, born in 1966 near Thiruchengodu, whom we will be lucky enough to discover in French thanks to Hauteville Editions: Le Bûcher evokes the impossible love between two young people from different caste backgrounds.
