Excerpts from a
scholarly chapter on Development
Poetics: A tiNai Aesthetic View
By Dr. Nirmal Selvamony, Professor, Central University of Tamil Nadu, Tiruvarur.
If you are in need of the entire chapter, kindly mail me or write to Dr. Nirmal Selvamony at nirmalselvamony@gmail.com. I strongly recommend that you read this chapter in its entirety, to imbibe the qualities that go into the making of a good research paper. This is obviously a scholarly paper of the highest calibre. And well, Dr. Nirmal Selvamony needs no introduction. He is well-known to the academic fraternity the world over, for having pioneered Ecocriticism as a subject of study in Colleges/Universities across India, way back in the 1980s.
Development Poetics: A tiNai Aesthetic View
If our “late
capitalistic”, crisis-ridden and post-humanist contemporary societies seek
development, they should get rid of those unnecessary acquisitions since the
post-primal era which began around 10,000 BCE (Selvamony 2015c). We should
shake off those deterrents acquired from the time of state
formation—agricultural economy, domestication of plants and animals and all
contagions that disrupted the kinship relation among human and non-human
members of the community—in order to realize the underlying ultimate eco-moral
vision. In short, development consists in letting the primalness of a society
manifest itself.
Primalness of
societies consists in the primordial relation among the social members. In
early Indian tradition, such relation was known as “tiNai”. Etymologically,
tiNai is union, not unlike the "fifth relation in music in which the two
tones become one and yet remain different like spouses (cilappatikaaram 8. 32;
3. 59–60). Such a relation, as among spouses and in kinship, is ontically
continuous though differentiated.
Is it true that
mantiram is an appropriate genre to convey the truth apprehended by seers?
Aurobindo conveys this idea when he says that mantra is always
the highest and intensest revealing form of poetic thought and expression. What the Vedic poets meant by the Mantra was an inspired and revealed seeing and visioned thinking, attended by a realization, to use the ponderous but necessary modern word, of inmost truth of God and self and man and Nature and cosmos and life and thing and thought and experience and deed (2012, 217).
We may compare
Aurobindo’s idea of mantiram, derived from Vedic learning, with the one found
in tolkaappiyam. According to the latter text, mantiram has three characteristics:
It is uttered by those whose words take effect when uttered (niRaimozi, Tamil
Lexicon IV, 2289).
...
Eliotic oxymoron is
based on what we may call “absolute monism” (probably derived from Vedantic
sources), which annihilates difference. Difference is ensured only by the
categories of place and time, which govern the real world. Identification of
one place with another and the annihilation of diachronic time result in
anarchy. Such identification is different from its counterpart in the primal
society. For example, the coastal girl who regards an Indian Laurel tree her
sister (naRRiNai 172) identifies a particular tree (in a particular place) with
her sister and such identification ensures continuity without violating the
laws of place and time, and jeopardizing ontic difference.
For the entire
chapter, kindly mail Dr. Nirmal at nirmalselvamony@gmail.com
Nirmal Selvamony
Central University of
Tamil Nadu, Tiruvarur, India
© The Author(s) 2017
J. Clammer and A.K.
Giri (eds.), The Aesthetics of Development,
DOI
10.1057/978-1-349-95248-9_11
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