Is Kannada classical and Tamil jazz?

It is not every day that newspapers and TV channels talk about historical linguistics. If not for Kamal Haasan’s casual remark that Kannada was born out of Tamil, and the furore it ignited, we wouldn’t be delving into the history of the two languages so avidly. The actor deserves thanks for throwing the spotlight, even if unwittingly, on a matter hitherto confined to the higher echelons of academia.

Consensus has it that the two languages originated from Proto-Dravidian (Moola Dravida), a language not spoken today, but assumed to be the source of many currently spoken languages in south India. A look at the current status of Tamil and Kannada is sure to show them walking divergent paths. I seek your indulgence to borrow from music to describe their impulses as the jazz impulse and the classical impulse.

It is said that jazz is all about improvisation, while every note in Western classical music is written down. Jazz and classical music are seen as forms taking totally divergent approaches to musical presentation. (Classicism in music is defined differently in India. Our classical forms provide immense scope for improvisation.)

Historically speaking, the Tamil purist movement (early 20th century) led to the dropping of several characters from its script. Tamil was then out to keep the Sanskritic influence at bay and jettisoned what it saw as excessive notation. Kannada, on the other hand, prides itself on its capacity for precision, and its ability to represent a wide phonetic spectrum, on the lines of Sanskrit, without any loss or ambiguity.

Officially, Tamil and Kannada enjoy classical status,
granted by the Union government to languages with antiquity and rich literatures. Over the centuries, Kannada has displayed a greater impulse for formality, an impulse you could describe as classical. A lot is contested and debated about how Kannada should be spoken and written today, but Kannada academia has traditionally aimed for a Sanskrit-like ‘correctness’ in the written and spoken forms of the language. Tamil allows a more freewheeling approach both to speech and writing and is big on improvisation.

Take how Tamil treats its consonants. It has one character where Kannada and Sanskrit have four (eg. ka kha ga gha). While Tamil accepts the need for a script, it wants to keep it minimal and uses just one character for all four sounds. As a result, the spoken word gains the upper hand – you use a sound that occurs to you in a context, and it is never contested as incorrect or wrong. In Kannada, we often hear how a mahaprana was missed, or a hakaara (ha) was used in place of an akaara (a). As you might expect, the insistence on a pronunciation as proper is often deemed casteist, and contested. In classicism, the imperative to align to an accepted standard is high. On the other hand, Tamil sets store by context. It is perfectly okay to say ‘ka’ instead of ‘ga’ in Tamil. If you say Kanthi in a speech about the freedom struggle, you know it means Gandhi. The context clears all confusion, and the written word is just an approximation. In Tamil, the spoken word is privileged over the written word. As in jazz, spontaneity, or what occurs to you in the moment, is valued more than what is written down, committed to memory, and rendered. In Kannada, saying or writing Kanthi for Gandhi would invite censure – it is a big mistake.

All of which leads us to intriguing questions about where the jazz and classical impulses lead us. Does a strict, insistence on ‘proper’ spoken and written language restrict the potential of a language for creative abandon? Freed of such constraints, would the language acquire greater ease and eloquence? Does precision in transcription encourage more writing in domains such as science and medicine? Does it instill in speakers the discipline necessary for formal writing?

And by extension, is the jazz impulse contributing to the creation of a thriving popular culture in Tamil, and the classical impulse prompting formal, Sanskritic writing in Kannada? When it comes to coining new words, Kannada does not hesitate to borrow from Sanskrit. Tamil digs into the wealth of the Dravidian lexis, which it also shares with Kannada. Does one language bank on the power of evocation while the other aspires to the exactness of Sanskrit? It may be argued that the jazz impulse and the classical impulse coexist in each of the two languages, but the destiny of a language is likely to be determined by the impulse that enjoys the upper hand.