The dancer's library fell with the temple stage

Claim (verbatim)

Tamil tradition tells its loss as myth — the Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ commentary's three drowned Sangam academies — but documents it as citation. Aṭiyārkkunallār's medieval commentary on the Cilappatikāram, a poem built around music and dance, cites by name a technical literature of icai and kūttu — the Agattiyam, Icainuṇukkam, Indirakāḷiyam, Paratacēṉāpatīyam, Mativāṇar's treatise on drama, among others — invoked as live authorities and now almost entirely lost, while the poetry and grammar he cites (the Tolkāppiyam, the anthologies) largely survives. The mechanism is institutional: performance treatises lived in professional lineages of temple dancers, drummers, and actors, and died with their patronage structures, while poems and grammar rode religious canonization and scholastic pedagogy, which kept scriptoria interested. One genre-shelf of a major literature went down as a block, and its outline survives only in one commentator's footnotes. Prediction: cataloguing every work Aṭiyārkkunallār cites and classifying each as performance-technical (music, dance, drama) or poetic-grammatical, the lost share among performance-technical works will exceed 80% and will exceed the poetic-grammatical lost share by at least a factor of three (primary clause: the 80% lost share; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a citation census assembled from U. V. Swaminatha Iyer's edition of the Cilappatikāram with Aṭiyārkkunallār's commentary (Madras, 1892) and the lost-works registers in Kamil Zvelebil's Tamil Literature (Handbuch der Orientalistik, Brill, 1975).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: cataloguing every work Aṭiyārkkunallār cites and classifying each as performance-technical (music, dance, drama) or poetic-grammatical, the lost share among performance-technical works will exceed 80% and will exceed the poetic-grammatical lost share by at least a factor of three (primary clause: the 80% lost share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a citation census assembled from U. V. Swaminatha Iyer's edition of the Cilappatikāram with Aṭiyārkkunallār's commentary (Madras, 1892) and the lost-works registers in Kamil Zvelebil's Tamil Literature (Handbuch der Orientalistik, Brill, 1975).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That the icai/kuttu treatises Atiyarkkunallar cites are almost entirely lost is explicitly stated in Tamil literary and music history — the standard accounts count only the Pancamarapu, Bharatasenapatiyam and Kuttanul as survivors of his fine-arts references — while the poetry and grammar he cites largely survive. The genre-classified citation census with the threefold performance-versus-poetic differential has not been run as a computation.

• K. Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (Handbuch der Orientalistik, Brill, 1975)
• P. Gurumurthy, 'Contribution of Tamil to Classicism of Karnatic Music', Journal of the Music Academy, Madras 74-76 (2003-2005)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.