Thu. 21^st Jul., 2022
14:15-15:45 Hrs.

CATS, Building 4010,
Room no. 010.01.02

Poster

Abteilungskolloquium (SoSe 2022) | Colloquium (Summer Semester 2022)

▍ The Recreation of Citrakāvya in Tamil

Dr. Victor D'Avella
(University of Oxford)

My presentation will focus on the poetic figures known as cittirakavi (Sanskrit citrakāvya) and described in the Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram, a 12th century translation of Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa, with ex- amples of pictorial representations of the figures found in a BnF manuscript, Indien 206. By way of introduction to this genre of poetry, which is largely borrowed from Sanskrit, I will discuss attitudes toward the “language of the north” as found in the Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram as well as the com- mentaries to the Tolkāppiyam. These passages shed light on the linguistic classification of liter- ary languages at the start of the second millennium CE and justify the incorporation of Sanskrit poetics into Tamil ilakkaṇam (“grammar”) including the genre of citrakāvya. After a discussion of the list of cittirakavi figures and its origins, I will end with a more detailed discussion of the nākapantam (“snake diagram”, Sanskrit nāgabandha), a particularly difficult figure that seems to have its origin in South India.

Dr. Victor D’Avella earned his PhD from the University of Chicago at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, where he studied Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu. Subsequently, he joined the NETamil project at the University of Hamburg and concentrated on the Tamil grammatical traditions. He is currently Lecturer in Sanskrit at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. Dr D’Avella’s research interests focus on the linguistics traditions of South Asia broadly defined, with a particular emphasis on the interaction between Sanskrit and Dravidian languages.