In my first year at university, while still trying to decide between an economics or statistics degree, I accidentally fell in love with Greek and Roman classics. I had taken an English class because it was my favourite subject and I just couldn’t let it go, despite thinking it would be a completely fruitless career path.
In the overview course ENG150 — Literary Traditions, I read texts ranging from the Odyssey to My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. What I primarily learned was exactly what the course promised I would learn — that storytelling has traditions, and that you could find sparks of stories from thousands of years ago in the countless works that have followed them.
While I didn’t end up in classics, I did take the path of the so-called ‘useless’ English degree. I’ve never looked back. However, there have always been two major limitations that have plagued my education: the lack of exploration of diverse traditions given the limitations of translation, and the prevalence of Eurocentrism in academia. The Eurocentrism of academia and university classes fails to give diverse storytelling traditions — especially oral storytelling — the time and respect it deserves.
Scholarship is slowly recognizing these limitations, as is made clear by UTSC Library’s most recent fellowship program, which focuses on retelling an ancient Tamil epic and applying it to contemporary life. I sat down with the members of the project to discuss their goals, the project’s process, and what it signifies for the broader Canadian artistic landscape.
There are currently three fellows in the program: Raina Daniel, Christy Lorentz, and Shajaky Parameswaran. They’re working on exploring diverse ways, both virtual and in-person, to deliver an ancient Tamil epic — a story they are calling The Legend of Ponnivala Nadu — to audiences in Canada.
The title can be translated to “The Legend of the Land Where the Golden River Flows,” and references the Kaveri waterway in India. The story follows three generations of families descended from nine men created by the goddess Parvathi.
For Brenda Beck, an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology, the goals of the project really centre around applying the story to modern times and giving back to the rich Tamil community in Scarborough.
“Nobody to date, really, outside of the Tamil-speaking area, is familiar with the marvellous power of Tamil stories,” Beck explained in an interview. “So this is a way of bringing that out for the community to more thoroughly appreciate.”
Moreover, Beck pointed to themes in the story surrounding mental health, the environment, and colonialism that modern society could take important lessons from.
Sayantha Baskaran, who has been helping produce the team’s podcast and who is of Tamil descent, noted that the story connects with people specifically because of their own roots and their interest in their ancestry. “I hope that more of these stories that people are unaware of come up because it’s a way of learning about our lifestyles… and the reasons why we do certain things,” Baskaran added.
As an Eela Thamizh — Parameswaran’s preferred term to describe her specific Tamil identity — she has a similarly deep connection to the material. In an email to The Varsity, Parameswaran wrote that she loved the authenticity of the project and how it has helped her connect to her culture, history, and religion.
“I feel like I have transported into the actual story!” Parameswaran wrote. “It really is nice to learn about the material through this opportunity, something I may not have gotten if I never applied to this fellowship.”
She added that she hopes the story will encourage Tamil people to think critically about where they come from. She specifically wrote about how incredible it is that the story has managed to travel such large distances, all while primarily being conveyed orally. She compared it to the story of how her parents sought refuge from Jaffna, Sri Lanka and ended up in Toronto.
“Like many, we may feel disconnected to our roots, homelands, language, or culture,” Parameswaran elaborated. “But by having such opportunities, it allows us to think about our origins, and what we can do to preserve them.”
In an email to The Varsity, Daniel, another fellow, wrote that she hopes the project will show people of Tamil descent and other immigrant communities that their stories are just as valued as those of everyone else, even if they aren’t very accessible at the moment.
Both Lorentz and Beck stressed the importance of the oral storytelling tradition, pointing out that the story changes based on which bard is telling it. Beck explained that certain elements are emphasized depending on the speaker. This flexibility helps to make oral storytelling traditions applicable to modern times.
Lorentz added that the story becomes rich with history as it gets told and retold. She explained that the importance of studying stories that are part of an oral tradition in an academic context is “noticing how culture and text and literature collaboratively [shape] these values that are… passed down from one generation to the next.”
For me, the fellowship represents the shift that I’ve always wanted to see. In the same way I love learning about how ancient texts like the Odyssey connect to contemporary life, I’m excited to see how The Legend of Ponnivala Nadu permeates through other stories and cultures, leaving its distinctive mark across periods of time.
