Arte da Lingua Malabar is a grammar of the Tamil spoken in the sixteenth century by the Parava pearl fisher community on the east coast of South India between Kanyakumari and Rameswaram. Fr. Henrique Henriques, S.J., a Portuguese Jesuit missionary to South India, was the first diligent student of Tamil from Europe. He wrote this grammar in Portuguese around 1549 CE for the benefit of his colleagues engaged in learning the local language for spreading their religious beliefs. Consequently, Arte da Lingua Malabar reflects the first linguistic contact between India and the West.

This grammar is unique in many aspects. It is not based on traditional Indian grammars; rather, it uses Latin grammatical categories to describe sixteenth-century Tamil. The effort to describe a language (Tamil) in terms of an unrelated language (Portuguese) has resulted in several inaccuracies in transliteration and scribing. Yet, Arte da Lingua Malabar is the best evidence for showing how sixteenth-century Tamil was heard and written by a sixteenth-century Portuguese. This English translation by Jeanne Hein and V. S. Rajam also includes analysis of the grammar and a description of the political context in which it was written.

Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue for so many speakers. David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil—language, literature, and civilization—emphasizing how Tamil speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history. Impetuous, musical, whimsical, in constant flux, Tamil is a living entity, and this is its biography.

Two stories animate Shulman’s narrative. The first concerns the evolution of Tamil’s distinctive modes of speaking, thinking, and singing. The second describes Tamil’s major expressive themes, the stunning poems of love and war known as Sangam poetry, and Tamil’s influence as a shaping force within Hinduism. Shulman tracks Tamil from its earliest traces at the end of the first millennium BCE through the classical period, 850 to 1200 CE, when Tamil-speaking rulers held sway over southern India, and into late-medieval and modern times, including the deeply contentious politics that overshadow Tamil today.

Tamil is more than a language, Shulman says. It is a body of knowledge, much of it intrinsic to an ancient culture and sensibility. “Tamil” can mean both “knowing how to love”—in the manner of classical love poetry—and “being a civilized person.” It is thus a kind of grammar, not merely of the language in its spoken and written forms but of the creative potential of its speakers.