The Silent Scribes - The Mackenzie Collection and its Contributors

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, Tamil scholarship and literary production underwent significant changes. The medium of prose writing gained currency, and set the stage for the newspapers, novels and scientific works that formed the core identity of Tamil literature in the twentieth century. This dissertation maps the production of some aspects of Tamil prose during this period, and argues that their development was not a linear process. This is evident in at least two prose genres of the early and middle nineteenth century: carittiram (historical literature) and vacaṉam (legendary prose). I present this dissertation in four Chapters. Chapter 1 analyses the carittiram genre of historical literature that was created by the South Indian emissaries of Colonel Colin Mackenzie. Mackenzie, a British antiquarian whose ambition was to reconstruct South India’s history. He collected manuscripts and oral reports through his team of South Indian scholars. Today, this vast archive is known as the Mackenzie Collection When Mackenzie died in 1821, the Collection fell into disuse and was dismissed by colonial researchers as worthless. Chapter 2 thus discusses the criticism towards the Mackenzie Collection by the British, focusing on two Orientalists, Horace Hayman Wilson and William Taylor, whose assessment of it was flawed. This chapter aims to contextualise the creation and subsequent perception of the Collection within the larger socio-political environment of colonialism, and argues that colonial hierarchies were the real reason behind its dismissal. Chapter 3 features a detailed survey of the vacaṉam’s grammar, and probes its likely provenance. Chapter 4 threads the carittiram and the vacaṉam together, arguing that they ought to have existed as parallel traditions. The Chapter then leads to the first rudimentary English histories of South India by Lakshmiah and Sreenivasiah, two of Mackenzie’s emissaries, whose work paved the way for the idea of history and historiography that modern India holds. The dissertation concludes with an account of the impact of these writings in the production of modern Tamil prose.