Orientalist Sanskrit bias excluded Tamil literature from the Indian canon

Evidence

Winternitz did devote one of the three volumes of his history to the early Buddhist and Jain classics, so that the emphasis on Sanskrit becomes less exclusive, but it is significant that ‘Indian Literatute’ to him still meant, in the first decades of the present century, predominantly a universe of Vedic, Sanskritic, religious and metaphysical texts of North Indian antiquity. Tamil literature seems not to have interested this tradition of Orientalist High Textuality, despite its own antiquity, perhaps because of the inherent Northerly/Sanskritic bias of the Indo-Aryan philological construct, perhaps because of late availability of the Sangam anthologies even in printed Tamil, and, conceivably, because the secularity and this-worldliness of Sangam poetic traditions really do not appeal to the kind of mind for which the outstanding attribute of the Indian tradition is its purported spirituality. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 505

Categorization

• QUESTION: The suggested reasons for Tamil exclusion are speculative and worth testing against actual philological histories of the Sangam corpus.
• XREF: connects to: Orientalist scholarship constructed ‘Indian Literature’ as Sanskritic, religious, and North Indian, excluding Tamil. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1134; Orientalist translation freed Sanskrit texts from sectarian control despite its biases. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1138

Related

• Orientalist scholarship constructed ‘Indian Literature’ as Sanskritic, religious, and North Indian, excluding Tamil. (similarity 0.93)
• Orientalist translation freed Sanskrit texts from sectarian control despite its biases. (similarity 0.88)
• South Indian literary languages remain understudied compared to contemporaneous Sanskrit literature (similarity 0.84)
• Dismissing Orientalism as bad faith ignores its material scholarly functions. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism argued Western literatures were complicit in colonialism (similarity 0.79)
• The unified ‘Indian Literature’ was assembled alongside a canonical syndicated Hinduism. (similarity 0.78)