Recently, emotion analysis has gained increased attention by NLP researchers due to its various applications in opinion mining, e-commerce, comprehensive search, healthcare, personalized recommendations and online education. Developing an intelligent emotion analysis model is challenging in resource-constrained languages like Tamil. Therefore a shared task is organized to identify the underlying emotion of a given comment expressed in the Tamil language. The paper presents our approach to classifying the textual emotion in Tamil into 11 classes: ambiguous, anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, love, neutral, sadness, surprise and trust. We investigated various machine learning (LR, DT, MNB, SVM), deep learning (CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM) and transformer-based models (Multilingual-BERT, XLM-R). Results reveal that the XLM-R model outdoes all other models by acquiring the highest macro f₁-score (0.33).