Tamil Satellite Stanzas

In the Tamil and also the wider Indian tradition we find, among the multifarious types of paratexts that accompany and envelop a text in a manuscript, little (and sometimes not so little) stanzas that in one way or another have a bearing on the text and its transmission. Little work has been done so far in order to understand their function(s), and many of them do not even make it into the printed editions. However, the fact that they have verse form shows two things, namely on the one hand that some thought and effort has been put into their production, and on the other hand that it was deemed important that they should be easy to memorise, in other words, they stand on the threshold between an oral and a written tradition. This article, the third in a series, will try to map the positions such stanzas take up, to distinguish their genres and finally to understand how editors dealt with them when developing the standard layout of a Tamil literary edition. In order to demonstrate how widespread the phenomenon was, examples are taken firstly from one well-defined sub-group of classical Tamil manuscripts and secondly from the smaller Tamil manuscript collection in the Cambridge University Library

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• The Song of Vāsudeva

  Open Access•G Sudev Krishna Sharman, Maciej Karasinski-Sroka•Journal of Indian Philosophy•2021

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