The hymns survived; the tunes they were sung to did not

Claim (verbatim)

The Tevaram, the Tamil Shaiva devotional corpus, is a survival success on the textual side - endowed temple singing (the Otuvar tradition) kept it copied and sung by the hundred, as its manuscript abundance shows. But the hymns carry modal labels, the pans (pan), and the pan system is a casualty even where the words survived. The hymns are transmitted under some two dozen pan names (out of the far larger classical Tamil pan inventory that tradition numbers around a hundred), but the actual melodic identity of each pan - which scale, which raga it corresponds to - was not continuously secure. The modern pan-to-raga identifications are a twentieth-century reconstruction, negotiated among scholars, the Tamil Isai movement, and Otuvar lineages, and they do not fully agree. That disagreement is the measurable trace of loss: where transmission had held, the identifications would be uniform; where the melody had gone soft, the reconstructions diverge. The mechanism is that the sung mode is the most fragile layer - the words and even the pan-names outlived the tunes those names once pointed to. Prediction restated: across the standard modern authorities, the pan-to-raga identifications for the Tevaram pans disagree on a substantial share of pans, exposing the modal layer as reconstructed rather than continuously transmitted.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: collating the pan-to-raga identifications for the Tevaram pans across the standard modern reference authorities (the Digital Tevaram / IFP-EFEO tables, the Tamil Isai Sangam settlement, and Otuvar-tradition sources), at least a third of the pans will lack a unanimous raga-identification across those authorities. Primary clause: non-consensus pans are at least one-third of the pans compared. Disambiguation: a pan counts as consensus only if the authorities give the same raga (allowing recognized synonymous raga-names), and "not identified" in a source counts as disagreement. Coverage guard: if fewer than three independent identification tables can be assembled, or fewer than 20 pans compared, the test voids.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Digital Tevaram (IFP/EFEO, Pondicherry, 2007) with its pan apparatus, against the pan-raga identification tables of the Tamil Isai Sangam editions and Otuvar-tradition sources - for each Tevaram pan, compare the raga assigned across authorities and count disagreements.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

That the pan-raga equivalences are twentieth-century reconstructions and that the authorities do not fully agree is stated in the scholarly apparatus - Gros's introduction to the IFP Tevaram edition discusses the pan problem and the negotiated character of the modern settlement, and the Digital Tevaram carries its pan-raga concordance as an editorial apparatus rather than a claim of transmitted identity - but a three-authority collation with a counted non-consensus share appears in none of them; the one-third threshold is un-run. Adjacent: disagreement attested, disagreement-rate never tabulated. Resolver should first check the Digital Tevaram's concordance introduction - if it already juxtaposes divergent identifications per pan, this upgrades toward leaked.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.