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May 27, 2004. |
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June 2, 2004 COSAS will be holding its “first annual picnic” on Wednesday, June 2, from 3:30 to 6:30 pm on the Social Sciences Quad (1126 E. 59th Street.) |
| September 22, 2004 Welcome all new and returning students to Academic Year 2004/05! |
Norman Cutler, 1949-2002, smaranartham
On Friday, May 20, members of the university community gathered to pay tribute to Associate Professor Norman J. Cutler, who passed away suddenly in February. Norman was a professor of Tamil language and literature with a specialization in the bhakti (devotional) literature of southern India. At the time of his death, he was also serving as Chair of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and as the Associate Director of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies. Norman was a respected scholar, a skilled administrator, and a thoughtful teacher and advisor. He will be greatly missed.
Professor Sheldon Pollock, who is on sabbatical for the 2001-02 academic year, was not able to attend the memorial but contributed the following reflection on Norman’s contributions to the study of Tamil literature. These words were read on Shelly’s behalf at a gathering of Norman’s colleagues, students and friends on Friday, March 8.
Norman Cutler, 1949-2002, smaranartham
By Sheldon Pollock
I regret that I can't be with you all today in person to remember Norman. But I am very much with you in spirit and in sorrow. Norman's death has been a source of deep sadness for me personally, and the more I think about it the more awful does the sense of loss grow—loss for our department, for his students and colleagues, and for Tamil studies world-wide.
Others today will talk about Norman's remarkable capacity for leadership, quiet yet firm, compassionate yet disciplined—he was the only one of us in the department that remembered all the rules, and he gently insisted on applying them. And others will talk about his selfless attention to the needs of his students—no one read a dissertation with greater care than Norman, every word no matter how long it took.
What I for my part would like to say in remembrance concerns Norman's scholarship. It was a distinct privilege for me to work so closely with Norman over the past seven years on our collaborative project, Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. The book that is the outcome of the undertaking will be published by the University of California Press in the late fall, and will be dedicated to Norman’s memory and the memory of another beloved colleague and author of the chapter on Kannada, D.R. Nagaraj, who passed away in 1998. Norman’s chapter is a supreme expression of his remarkable scholarly strengths. The seventy-five-page essay brilliantly engages the history of Tamil literary culture from front to back, so to speak, by exploring twentieth-century literary histories, nineteenth-century continuities and rediscoveries, and eleventh-century innovations. Without ever trumpeting his grasp of postorientalist theory (something those typically do who grasp nothing else), Norman fully understood how the present produces the past, but he also understood what many postorientalists too readily dismiss, how the past does indeed produce the present. And he was one of the very few to perceive that these complex historical processes are nowhere more powerfully in evidence than in Tamil country, and nowhere more powerfully in evidence in Tamil country than in reflections on the literary past.
I want to read to you (or rather have Whitney Cox read to you on my behalf) the conclusion of Norman's chapter. I know this may not, at first glance, seem quite as appropriate to the occasion as some of his beautiful translations or the more intimate and warm reminiscences that people will rightly cherish in their memories. But this text is important, and it represents what we have all come to Chicago to learn to do—to produce scholarship—and it offers an exemplary instance of how to do it right. Listen to Norman’s prose: straightforward, limpid, balanced, striving for intelligibility and refusing the easy refuge of jargon. Consider his historical reach—from the present back to the eleventh century and beyond (the dates of the poems included in 
, the “Anthology of poems from the public domain”)—and his struggle to try to make sense of the interconnectedness of this vast time-period. See how he uses theory, not by flamboyant name-dropping but rather by making theory his own and unobtrusively using it to recalibrate core questions in the humanities, like those relating to orality, textuality, literature, tradition, and memory. And last, take note of what was perhaps Norman’s most winning trait, his way of opening up issues rather than closing them down, of inviting participation in an ongoing quest rather than proclaiming, with the arrogant, hollow finality we hear too often in scholarship, that the quest is now over.
* * *
Summing Up [from “Three Moments in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Edited by Sheldon Pollock. Berkeley/London: University of California Press, to be published November, 2002.]
Can meaningful comparisons be made between the three moments in the genealogy of Tamil literary culture that provide the focal points of this essay? Will such comparisons enable us to discern the contours of Tamil literary culture as its defining features change in response to and in tandem with changing cultural and historical circumstances? To make such comparisons we require some points of entry, and the following are just a few of many possible “ways in.” We might ask, for instance: In the cultural environment that prevails in each of these moments, how closely are literary consciousness and historical consciousness related to one another? What sorts of texts are included in and what sorts of texts are excluded from the realm of “literature proper”? How is literary knowledge institutionalized? What is the relationship between the literary and textuality? In what ways does the literary intersect with, serve, or draw sustenance from other cultural concerns? 
autobiography and his biography of 
are, of course, very different kinds of documents from the literary histories discussed in the second section of this chapter, and both are quite different from a literary anthology such as Purattirattu. To the extent that we give credence to his representation of the world in which he and his teacher moved, writings provide much more direct answers to the kinds of questions posed here. But certainly the histories, and perhaps to a lesser extent the anthology also, afford glimpses into the particular cultural perspectives that produced them and into the nature of the literary as constructed by those perspectives.
The realms of the literary as represented by 
and by the compiler of the are related in certain fundamental ways that set these two moments apart from the world envisioned by the literary historians. Perhaps what we are dealing with here is a fundamental distinction between premodern and modern modes of literary culture. In the former, variables such as genre and meter articulate and categorize the literary realm, with the historical location of texts playing a much less central role. This is not to say that the literary domain as constituted in the fifteenth-century anthology and in the curriculum of literary study portrayed by are identical. Indeed, there is relatively little overlap between the texts that Pillai taught his pupils and the texts included in ; but the two are similar in their seeming lack of concern with the historical origins of the texts they contain. Also, both implicitly acknowledge the complementarity of the textual categories of literature and grammar/poetics, and include texts belonging to both, even if texts of the former type predominate. Further, both emanate from a culture in which the usage and performance of literature—that is, literature as event—predominates over literature as written artifact. The debut of a literary text, as described by , as well as Pillai’s manner of instructing his pupils, are essentially oral performances. While we have only scant evidence that enables us to reconstruct the contexts in which was deployed, in all likelihood the anthology was intended principally as a source of literary citations for practitioners of traditional oral performance genres.
The worldview that informs the writing of Tamil literary histories in the twentieth century provides a striking contrast to this picture. Literature is plotted on a time line, and the category of literature generally excludes texts on grammar, meter, and poetics. These histories also include kinds of texts that Pillai and the compiler of Purattirattu would exclude from the domain of “literature proper,” such as bhakti poetry. And perhaps most importantly, the literary historians are deeply concerned about the context in which particular texts are produced. This concern extends to the dating of texts, identification of the sectarian affiliations of their authors, and the cultural conditions that prevailed at the time of their composition. And as we have seen, projects of writing Tamil literary history have often served commitments to particular versions of Tamil cultural history or political agendas.
The break between the premodern and modern envisionings of literature is significant. We might well ask: Do these two perspectives share any common ground? Perhaps so obvious that one might tend to overlook it is the fact that in each of the moments explored in this essay, “Tamil literature” is a meaningful category—that is, the Tamil language is axiomatic for the definition of a definable literary realm. This is not to say that the force of literary creation and propagation in Tamil is hermetically sealed off from contact and cross-fertilization with other languages and their literatures. But in each of these moments, there is an underlying sense that the Tamil language provides an arena for the creation of, transmission of, and reflection upon literature.
* * *
One will look elsewhere in vain for writing on Tamil literature of this quality. What a profound pity that we won’t have any more.