Saturday 4 November 2017

Excerpts from "Development Poetics: A tiNai Aesthetic View"

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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