THE ROLE OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY AS A FRAMEWORK IN HANDLING CULTURE SPECIFIC CONCEPTS WITH REFERENCE TO TAMIL EGAI

Abstract

Interdisciplinary framework is one of the viable methodologies and it is considered feasible for handling issues that are pertaining to human life. The magnitude of human crisis or the emergence of the complexity of social and cultural concepts has created the necessity or necessitates the approach in which there is a need for inputs from more than one discipline, and thus, the cognate fields of study have to be brought together to deal with the problem that cannot provide a solution due to the nature and complexity of the problem. And despite the speculation that the interdisciplinary framework has limitations in its applicability, and confining it to academic settings, this study makes an attempt to conflate various elements for building up an argument towards its relevance beyond and outside the academic purview. By critically evaluating the feasibility and deliverability of the proposed framework, with the help of an example from ancient Tamil society and its much-celebrated concept of egai, this paper highlights the inevitability of the existence of some of the elements of concepts, or sometimes concepts themselves, being rooted in other concepts. It forces us to claim that a holistic study could be made possible with the interdisciplinary framework which is evidenced here. To move towards the proposed concept, it builds the environment of ancient Tamil society, its contribution in terms of a corpus of literature and its universal significance that is used to contextualize the universal importance of the proposed concept and its contemporary relevance.