The anthology counts its own dead

Claim (verbatim)

The Paripāṭal, one of the eight Caṅkam anthologies, comes with a table of contents in verse: an old Tamil catalogue-stanza transmitted with the text counts seventy poems and departments them by subject — eight to Tirumāl, thirty-one to Cevvēḷ (Murukaṉ), one to the forest goddess, twenty-six to the river Vaiyai, four to the city of Maturai. What survives is twenty-two poems plus quoted fragments, and the deaths were not random. The Tirumāl poems survive nearly entire: they had become theology, the earliest full-throated Vaiṣṇava bhakti in Tamil, and reading communities with a doctrinal stake never let go of them. Murukaṉ's readers, by contrast, had a substitute — the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, canonized inside the Śaiva Tirumuṟai, absorbed the devotional demand — and the river-festival and city poems had no sect at all to carry them. Survival required a community with no replacement text: that is the mechanism, and the anthology's own catalogue-stanza turns it into a five-cell computation. Prediction: computing per-class survival from the catalogue-stanza's counts against the extant corpus and its fragments, the Tirumāl class will survive at no less than double the pooled rate of all other classes, while the Cevvēḷ class, despite Murukaṉ's flourishing cult, will survive no better than the sectless river-and-city classes — the signature of substitution, a living cult whose textual demand a canonized replacement had absorbed (primary clause: the twofold Tirumāl survival ratio; the verdict follows it). Kill: François Gros's edition and study, Le Paripāṭal (Institut Français d'Indologie, Pondichéry, 1968), with the U. V. Swaminatha Iyer edition (1918) for the fragments and catalogue-stanza, and the survival tabulations in Kamil Zvelebil's Tamil Literature (Wiesbaden, 1974).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: computing per-class survival from the catalogue-stanza's counts against the extant corpus and its fragments, the Tirumāl class will survive at no less than double the pooled rate of all other classes, while the Cevvēḷ class, despite Murukaṉ's flourishing cult, will survive no better than the sectless river-and-city classes — the signature of substitution, a living cult whose textual demand a canonized replacement had absorbed (primary clause: the twofold Tirumāl survival ratio; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: François Gros's edition and study, Le Paripāṭal (Institut Français d'Indologie, Pondichéry, 1968), with the U. V. Swaminatha Iyer edition (1918) for the fragments and catalogue-stanza, and the survival tabulations in Kamil Zvelebil's Tamil Literature (Wiesbaden, 1974).

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The per-class ledger is published: the catalogue-stanza's 8/31/1/26/4 distribution and the surviving poems' class distribution (Tirumal nearly entire at 7 of 8, Cevvel and the river-and-city classes decimated) are set out in the standard treatments, and the Tirumal poems' privileged survival through Vaisnava devotional interest is a standard observation - the twofold survival ratio of the primary clause is arithmetic on an already-published table.

• F. Gros, Le Paripatal (Institut Francais d'Indologie, Pondichery, 1968)
• K. Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (Wiesbaden, 1974), on the Paripatal's contents and losses

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.