abstract: This article demonstrates how the colonial-era depreciation of poetry and the linguistic nationalism it launched made poetry unavailable as a medium for making Tamil literature modern during the interwar period. Temporarily, this genre could not advance Tamil modernism. Tamil writers' elevation of prose opened a space for reconsidering poetry, while debates about music and language supplied the terminology for this reconsideration—leading to the recasting of poetry as suitable for postcolonial expression. A modernist poetics of sound emerged from the intersection of prose discourses about individual alienation with music debates' framing of alienation as the separation of Tamil speakers from their language.
Preetha Mani (Mon,) studied this question.