Pornography Pre-modern: Viṟaliviṭu Tūtu and the Genealogy of Tamil Sexual Literature

The paper aims at tracing the genealogy of modern Tamil sexual literature in the medieval/early modern prostitutional texts written with the patronage of local landlords and rulers, namely Pāḷaiyakkārars, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries AD. Ruling as feudatories of the Nayaka, the courts of these local rulers emerged as major centers for literary patronage and production. In the history of Tamil literature, this period also witnessed the growth of many new literary genres, often classified into the category of minor genres (cirrilakkiyam), composed aiming at an altogether new category of consumers beyond the usual courtly circles. Now, in the erotic textual representation, the sacredness or hubris associated with eroticism gradually reduced. Instead of narrating God’s or the King’s sexual encounters with the courtesans, ordinary men’s relationship with a prostitute became a major theme. Viṟaliviṭu Tūtu was one such popular literary genre of this time. The article discusses the social context of the texts produced under this genre and brings forth a ‘colonial debate’ held in favor of/or against classifying them as ‘obscene’. This colonial intervention created a tension and rethinking among Tamil scholars. With the advent of print, when these texts were reproduced from the original palm-leaf manuscripts, the Tamil scholars (editors) were haunted by an ethical dilemma, which forced them to give a cautionary note requesting the text should not be read for sexual pleasure. The article ends with a survey of twentieth century Tamil sexual literature. Some of them reproduced the Viṟaliviṭu Tūtu in prose form with ‘obscene’ photos/drawings of women, while others narrated stories of prostitutes and their business, claiming to give a moral message to the society. In this context, whether these late medieval texts were composed to ‘educate or to arouse’ their readers/listeners is a question which finds no convincing answer.