OPUS; edycja 15

The proposed project refers to the culture of South India, mostly to the region of historical, pre-modern Tamil Nadu. The region was and still is very rich in many differentiated cultural traditions which, on the one hand are very deeply grounded in the local culture, but on the other hand, they also refer to and influence pan-Indian culture. 

Our purpose is to contextualize the cultural phenomena of this region as seen in hitherto unstudied, locally produced texts that represent various domains of its realities. We will study the culture of the region from the perspective of the cultural ecology of literature, namely viewed as a space of the mutual relations between nature and culture which gave rise to literary texts and other products of culture seen as ecological phenomena, i.e. as grounded in two axioms of ecological thought: interconnectedness and diversity. The chosen examples are religious traditions of Pāñcarātra and Śrīvaiṣṇava as well as the medico-alchemical Tamil Siddha tradition. The religious traditions and their literature, acknowledging the role of the nature and using environment for its needs, refer to sacred geography. Tamil Siddha medicine uses the specific natural features of Tamil Nadu to create original, though referring to Ayurveda, medico-alchemical tradition, widely exploring and applying natural substance specific to the region.