Tamil and Sanskrit

As Dr Pawan Aryan of Ambala requested to provide some information about the relationship between Tamil and Sanskrit, I compiled the following points from the books by various scholars about Tamil.  What I have so far read is only a tiny bit of vast scholarship available about Tamil.  However, even what I have read about Tamil [apart from as a language, its culture, rich tradition, literature etc.] overwhelms me and I am so happy that I was born as a Tamilian and knows Tamil well enough to read and understand Tamil Literatures in poems.  I am not sure how many other Indian languages [probably other than Sanskrit] draw the attention of so many scholars to write books on them.  As I never read books related to other languages, I have no right to say even this, as each and every Indian language is a Jewel on the Crown of Bharat Mathaji.  Here I provide only those points about Tamil in its relationship with Sanskrit.  I will share the rest of the notes about Tamil covering various fields separately in another Post under the title: Tamil.  I only share the points from the scholars, not adding my own comments to any of them.   When SCHOLARS SPEAK we students should only listen to them with folded hands not even raising any questions to clear our doubts.  As I always remain a student and prefer to remain as a student till the end of my life, I am happy to share this information about Tamil, specially its relationship with Sanskrit.  I think I have written one or two reviews on some books.  That I will share separately in my blog under Book Reviews.

I personally thank Dr Aryan as his request prompted me to compile this information which I hope others would find useful in their research on Tamil.  ###

Gurukulam, 2-2-2024

…Tamil was itself unique in being the earliest Dravidian language to emerge into literacy, and the only regional speech to develop a “classical” literature (in terms of a formalized grammar, poetics, distinctive genres, and supporting cultural institutions) largely independent of Sanskritic models (Zvelebil 1973)….— The Literature of Hinduism in Malayalam, Rich Freeman, in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, Gavin Flood (ed.), UK, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Indian Reprint 2003,

p.160

               Most interestingly, in the larger Indian context, this Cankam literature seems essentially secular and worldly in terms of its subjective concerns and artistic purpose. Objectively, however, there is considerable reportage of the indigenous forms of religious life in Kerala and the greater Tamil country before the major impact of Sanskritic Puranic culture.

               First, religion was not centered on a sacerdotal, priestly class, like the  Brahmans, but rather gave prominence to the ritual functions of kings and chiefs on the one hand, and to relatively lower status spirit-possessed oracles and mediums, on the other….—ibid. p.161

…The originally local deities of these temples [in South India] were Sanskritized into either the Vaisnava or Saiva Puranic pantheons….—ibid. p.162

…Linguistically, Tamil had shifted from the language of Cankam composition into Middle Tamil, and around this time, from the early ninth century, the first Kerala inscriptions attest the divergence of local language into a distinctively regional dialect that anticipates the later emergence of Malayalam (Sekhar, 1953; Ayyar. 1983 [1936]).—ibid. p.162

2 The Dravidian language family comprises the four literary languages of peninsular southern India (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu), and a score of unwritten tribal languages scattered mostly across southern and central India. These languages are historically unrelated to, and clearly predate the arrival of, Sanskrit and its related Indo-Aryan languages in north India. The distribution of these major languages in the south further coincides with uniquely related institutions of kinship, political and religious culture that were indigenously recognized under the term Draavida many centuries  before the modern Tamils co-opted the linguistic label, Dravidian, for their contemporary political movements. On the antiquity of these Cultural interrelationships, see Trautmann (1981), Freeman (1988), and my accompanying chapter, this volume, on the teyyam tradition of Kerala.—ibid. notes, 2, p.178

Basham:

…In the earliest stratum of Tamil literature, which was probably composed in the stratum of Tamil literature, which was probably composed in the early centuries A.D., we find the three kingdoms in a state of almost continual warfare.  Their kings, and the many lesser chieftains who are also mentioned, seem to have been more bloodthirsty than those of the North, and the literature contains hints of massacres and other atrocities such as are rarely heard of in Sanskirt literature; one passage even suggests cannibal feasts after battle.[Pattuppaattu, Maduraikkanji. Ed. U.V. Saminatha Aiyar, Madras, 1918, p. 212]….— A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India, Delhi, Rupa & Co., (1954) 1990, p.63

Trautmann:

…Burnell also demonstrates, very convincingly, that many of the technical terms of the Tolkaappiyam and of later Tamil grammars are simple translations of Sanskrit ones he attributes to the Aindra school or to other pre-Paninian texts.  For example, a vowel is called uyir, ‘breath” or “life,” and a consonant mey, “sense” or “body,” resorting to ordinary Tamil words.  The “happy little allegory of consonants being the body and vowels being the life” has been invented by European students of Tamil grammar, in ignorance of the fact that these words are translations of the Sanskrit svara, “sound’ “breath,” for vowel and sparsa, “touch” for consonant, which are ordinary words used in a special sense in the grammars.  Hence we must infer that the Tamil words are simple translations of the Sanskrit ones.— Thomas R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras, New Delhi, Yoda Press, 2006. p.54

…as I have already mentioned, grammars for Pali, the Prakrits, and Tamil were composed in ancient times upon Sanskrit models.  There is, however, a great difference among them: While the Tolkaappiyam explains Tamil grammar using some of the analytic techniques of Sanskrit grammar, it does so in terms of Tamil alone and without reference to the Sanskrit language….—ibid. p.16

…the Tamil grammar tradition, though it draws upon the analytical means of Sanskrit grammar, is self-contained in its treatment of Tamil.  This, however, is exceptional; the other Dravidian languages for which grammars have been composed in premodern times are treated in those grammars as deriving from Sanskrit. The presence of large numbers of transparently Sanskrit and Prakrit words in Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam—more so than in Tamil—was no doubt an inducement to do so, and the scripts of those languages, again unlike Tamil, represent the whole range of Sanskrit phonology as well as sounds peculiar to the Dravidian languages.  The singularity of Tamil grammar and of the Tamil script was crucial to the formulation of the conception of the Dravidian language family in modern times.—ibid. p.58

Sastri:

Traditional approaches to the study of society in south India have perpetuated certain stereo types like the Aryan-Dravidian divide and the assumption that the varna based hierarchical caste society of the brahminical order developed in a uniform patter all over the country. While the Aryan-Dravidian divide as a racial category to explain the cultural differences between north India and south India has now been shown to be a red herring and hence incapable of leading to the right conclusions regarding historical processes, it still persists as a tool of political contest in south India.  However, the traditional view of the existence of a four fold division continues to influence studies on caste and society, which have accepted it without question.  These studies often select evidence arbitrarily from the varied and disparate sources to fit into the varna framework, despite the fact that regional specificities led to the evolution different caste structures depending on the integrative processes and the pre-existing divisions, ethnic (tribal), occupational, and the newly emerging professional groups, which were incorporated into the brahmanical order…..— P. xxii.

…The rise of Hindu kingdoms in the eastern lands across the Bay of Bengal is but an expansion and continuation of the process by which South India and Ceylon were colonized and aryanized….—ibid. p. 2

            After the close of the Sangam epoch, from about A.D. 300 to A.D. 600, there is an almost total lack of information regarding occurrences in Tamil land….—ibid. p. 3

…The difficulty of distinguishing the Aryan from pre-Aryan elements in Indian culture has continued to baffle the skill of modern scholarship to this day, and forced efforts to discover ‘Dravidian’ elements has sometimes led to curious results like the attempt to derive the name Hanuman from an mandi—an impossible contradiction in terms unknown to Tamil—or to connect the Sanskrit word puja (worship) with the Tamil words puu (flower) and sey (do), on the one hand, or puusu (smear, with unguents or the blood of sacrificed animals), on the other….— R. Champakalakshmi. Introduction. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri. A History of South India, From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar. With a new introduction by R. Champakalakshmi. Oxford India Paperbacks (1955), 26^th impression, 2007. 11

…Grantha known from the Pallava inscriptions of the seventh and eighth centuries, and then undergoes modifications under the influence of the Tamil alphabet in its tow forms—Tamil properly so called and Vatteluttu or round hand.  The origin of these two scripts is by no means definitely settled yet.  It may be noted, however, that Buhler held it probable that the Tamil alphabet was derived from a northern alphabet of the fourth or fifth century which in course of time was strongly influenced by the Grantha used in the Tamil districts for writing Sanskrit.  He also pointed out that ‘the Vatteluttu may be described as a cursive script, which bears the same relation to the Tamil as the modern northern alphabets of the clerks and merchants to their originals, e.g., to Modi of the Marathas to the Balbodh and the Takari of the Dogras to the Sarada’.  The Vattelutte went out of use in the Tamil country about the tenth century A.D. though it continued in use till much later on the west coast.—ibid. p.13 [No reference is given for Buhler’s quote by the author—db]

…But none can miss the significance of the facts that early Tamil literature, the earliest to which we have access, is already full charged with words, conceptions and institutions of Sanskritic and northern origin, while it is characterized by a direct and forceful expression and an unrivalled vividness and realism all its own….—ibid. p. 19

…The institution of devadasis common in South India was well known in ancient Sumer.  Again, what can be more accurate as a description of the form and spirit of worship in the Indian temple of today, of the raajopacaara offered to the image of God, than this account given by Woolley of worship in the Sumerian temple: ‘Where the God was also the King, where church and state were so nearly synonymous, material efficiency was only too likely to get the better of faith.  Long life and well-being in this world was the reward men asked in return for formal service such as they might have rendered to a human overlord, and they regarded the wealth and prosperity of the Moon-god as a pledge for the welfare of the city.’  The temple and the palace are both indicated by one word kooyil in Tamil, and prasada in Sanskrit, and it is universally recognized that temple-worship was not part of the original Vedic religion.

            It must be admitted that much of this evidence on which the old approach to the Dravidian problem was based is vague and circumstantial, and furnishes no reliable chronological frame-work….—ibid. p. 57. [No reference is given for quote by the author—db]

…the incoming Aryans had to learn the language of the people of the South in addition to cultivating their own Sanskrit idiom, to accept local customs and incorporate them as part of the new composite social order they evolved, and to find more or less suitable places in their elastic pantheon for the many godlings and goddesses cherished by the pre-Aryan peoples.  We shall never know the exact details of the process; but a study of early Tamil literature, the oldest evidence from the southern side to which we have access, produces the definite impression that the new influences were everywhere welcomed and embraced with alacrity, and that the changes were effected peacefully and in an orderly manner.  This impression may be due to Tamil literature being relatively late in its development, and by no means contemporary with the first Aryan impact on the South—the product, perhaps, of an age of peace and harmony that followed a period of initial struggles….—ibid. p. 67

            The affirmation and denial of Agastya’s fathership of Tamil and of his work being the source of the Tolkaappiyam are both symbolic of an attitude to the incoming northern Sanskritic influences … Things went on smoothly so long as Aryan influence, the influence of the ‘Northern’ speech and culture, was content to penetrate the Tamil land quietly and by imperceptible stages, and effect a silent transformation of the native elements.  This process began very early and was accepted by the Tamils to an extent that has rendered it all but impossible to differentiate the elements that have gone to make up the composite culture.  But when a theory was put forward, that is when a legend [of Agastiya] was invented to show that Tamil as a spoken language and with it the entire culture of the Tamil country was derived from a Vedic seer, this was met, naturally, by a counter-assertion and the elaboration of legends in the opposite sense.  And then, as with some even now, legends were arguments.—ibid. p. 69

            The aryanization of the south was doubtless a slow process spread over several centuries.  Beginning probably about 1000 B.C., it had reached its completion before the time of Kaatyaayana, the grammarian of the fourth century B.C., who mentions the names of the Tamil countries of the extreme South….—ibid. p. 69

We have seen that the language of the Tamili inscriptions of the second century B.C. was Tamil with an admixture of Prakrit words, current among the Jain ascetics.  In the Sangam anthologies, the Tamil language has reached maturity and begun to serve as a powerful and elegant medium of literary expression and has already received and assimilated many words and ideas from Sanskrit sources.  It also reflects the existence of a fairly elaborate code of conventions governing the portrayal of social life in literature.  This must clearly have been the result of a long course of development spread over some generations.—ibid. p. 106

…The patron of the Brahmin poet of Uraiyuur was also called Andiran, a Sanskrit word meaning hero….—ibid. p. 110

Sastri:

…the literature of the Sangam gives an unusually complete and true picture.  The most striking feature in the picture is its composite character; it is the unmistakable result of the blend of two originally distinct cultures, best described as Tamilian and Aryan; but it is by no means easy now to distinguish the original elements in their purity.  Some of them may be recognized, however, to have clearly originated in Northern India and made their way into the South during the period of its aryanization and later.  The stories of the Mahabharata and Ramayana were well known to the Tamil poets, and episodes from them are frequently mentioned.  The claim of each of the three Tamil kings to have fed the opposing forces on the eve of the Great Battle has been noted already.  The destruction of the three metallic forts of the Asuras (Tripura) by Siva, king Sibi giving away the flesh of his body to save a dove that was pursued by a vulture, and the struggle between Krishna and the Asuras for the possession of the sun, are among other legends alluded to by the authors.  The presence of a great fire underneath the ocean, Uttarakuru (the northern country) as a land of perpetual enjoyment, Arundhati as the ideal of chastity, the conception of the threefold debt (rinatraya0 with which every man is born, the beliefs that the cakora bird feeds only on raindrop, and that raindrops turn into pearls in particular circumstances, are instances of other Sanskritic ideas taken over bodily into the literature of the Sangam period.  The Tolkaappiyam is said to have been modeled on the Sanskrit grammar of the Aindra school.— K. A. Nilakanta Sastri. A History of South India, From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar. With a new introduction by R. Champakalakshmi. Oxford India Paperbacks (1955), 26^th impression, 2007.. p. 117

            The Tolkaappiyam states definitely that marriage as a sacrament attended with ritual was established in the Tamil country by the Aryas.  It is well known that the earliest Dharmasastras mention eight forms of marriage as part of the Aryan code—itself the result of a blend between Arya and pre-Aryan forms that prevailed in the North; these eight forms are mentioned in the Tolkaappiyam and other works, and much ingenuity is spent in accommodating them to Tamil forms.  The Tamils had a relatively simple conception of marriage; they recognized the natural coming together of man and woman….—ibid. p. 117

…Such difficulties of synthesis apart, the most tangible result of the meeting of the Tamil and the Aryan was the tremendous richeness and fecundity that was imparted to the Tamil idiom thereby and the rise of a beautiful literature which combined classic grace with vernacular energy and strength.  This literature of the Sangam, the earliest stratum of Tamil literature now available, is also in many ways the best.—ibid. p. 118

…those of learned Brahmins versed in the Vedas and performing their daily ritual duties including the entertainment of guests.  Apparently Brahmins ate meat and drank toddy without incurring reproach.  One poem in the Puranaanuuru affirms that there are only four castes (kudi), viz., tudiyan, paanan, paraiyan and kadamban, and only one god worthy of being worshipped with paddy strewn before him, namely the hero-stone recalling the fall of a brave warrior in battle. These castes and this worship were of very great antiquity, perhaps survivals from pre-Aryan times….—ibid. p. 118

…The lot of widows was a hard one; they had to cut off their hair discard all ornaments, and only eat the plainest food.  No wonder, perhaps, that some wives preferred to die with their husbands and earn fame as satis.  The tonsure of widows, it may be noted by the way, like the tying of the taali at the marriage ceremony, was obviously a pre-Aryan Tamil custom taken over and perpetuated into latter times.—ibid. p. 122

…Here is a humorous account of their experiences after meeting a generous patron: ‘The Chola king showered on us great quantities of wealth in (the form of) fine and costly jewels not suited to our condition; on seeing this, some among the large group of my kinsfolk, used (only) to abject poverty, put on their ears ornaments meant for the fingers; some wore on their fingers things meant for the ear; on others put on their necks jewels meant for the waist; others again adorned their waists with ornaments properly worn on the neck; in this wise, like the great group (p.123) of red-faced monkeys which shone in the fine jewels (of Sita) that they discovered on the ground, on the day when the mighty raakshasa carried off Sita, the wife of Rama of the swift chariot, we became the cause of endless laughter.’….—ibid. pp.123-24 [No reference is given for quote by the author.  But I have to refer it from the Tamil book—db]

            In the sphere of religion and ethics the influence of Northern ideas is most marked.  The practice of walking some distance to escort a departing guest was observed by Karikala who went on foot for a distance of ‘seven steps’ (saptapadi) before requesting him to mount a chariot drawn by four milk-white steeds.  The slaughter of a cow, the destruction of a foetus, and the killing of a Brahmin were accounted heinous (p.128) offences; though ingratitude, according to the established code, was held to be even worse.—ibid. pp. 128-29

            That Vedic religion had struck root in the South must have become clear from the reference to the costly sacrifices performed by the monarchs of the age.  Brahmins devoted to their studies and religious duties held a high position in society, and a song of Aavuur Muulam Kilaar portrays in much detail the life of Vinnandaayan, a Brahmin of the Kaundinya gotra who lived in Puunjaarruur in the Chola country….—ibid. p. 129

…The worship of Subramanya (Murugan) and the legendary achievements of that deity are often alluded to.  Other members of the pantheon were Siva, Balarama, Vishnu, Krishna, Ardhanarisvara, and Anantasaayi.  The details of Vishnu worship with tulasi (basil) and bell are set forth in Padirruppattu, and the custom is mentioned of people starving in the temple to invoke the grace of the god.  Women went with their children to offer worship in the temples in the evening.  Asceticism was honoured and tridandi (triple staf) ascetics are particularly mentioned….—ibid. p. 129

…A temple of Sarasvati is mentioned in the Manimekalai which also alludes to the kaapaalikas, an austere class of Saiva ascetics.  Belief in reincarnation, the effects of karma in successive births and the power of (p.129) fate was the common basis of all religion in India, and this was generally accepted in the Tamil country also….—ibid. pp. 129-30

            From the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. three types of village assemblies are traceable in Tamil inscription, namely the uur, the sabhaa, and the nagaram. The uur was the was the common type which included all classes of people who held the land in the village.  The sabhaa was an exclusively Brahmin assembly of villages given as gifts to Brahmins where all the land belonged to them.  The nagaram was quite another type pertaining to localities where traders and merchants were in a dominant position.  In many instances the different types existed side by side in the same locality.  Whenever necessary, there was mutual consultation among these different assemblies and other local associations, and the general rule was to consult all the interests concerned in a matter before a decision was taken on it….—ibid. p. 149

…Amazed at the scantiness of the dress worn by the common people, Marco Polo exaggerates their nakedness and denies the existence of tailors in the country, though tailors are mentioned in inscriptions long preceding Marco Polo’s visit.  He mentions the custom of sati and refers to the practice of allowing a condemned criminal who was sentenced to death to sacrifice himself to some god or other of his choice.  He says quaintly: ‘And let me tell you the people of this country have a custom of rubbing their houses all over with cowdung.  Moreover all of them, great and small, king and barons included, do sit upon the ground only … It is their practice that everyone, male and female, do wash the body twice every day; and those who do not wash are looked on much as we look on the Patarins. You must know that in eating, they use the right hand only …. So also they drink only from drinking vessels, and every man hath his own; nor will anyone drink from another’s vessel.  And when they drink they do not put the vessel to the lips but hold it aloft and let the drink spout into the mouth …. They (p.202) are very strict in executing justice upon criminals and as strict in abstaining from wine.  Indeed they have made a rule that wine-drinkers and seafaring men are never to be accepted as sureties’….—ibid. pp. 202-03[No reference is given for quote by the author.—db]

Sastri:

…At Ennaayiram in South Arcot the Chola Rajendra I endowed a large college of (1) 270 junior students of whom 40 studied the elements of grammar according to the Ruupaavataara, 10 studied the sutras of Bodhaayana, and the rest learnt the Vedas by rote; (2) 70 senior students, 10 studying vedanta, 25 vyaakarana, and the rest Praabhaakara-mimamsa; and (3) a teaching staff of 14.  In another college, in the same neighbourhood at Tribhuvani, there were 260 students and 12 teachers.  Full details have been preserved of the food and residence of the pupils of a smaller institution at Tirumukkuudal in Chingelput district in an inscription of the reign of Virarajendra (1067) which also gives equally interesting details about the stock of medicines maintained in a good-sized hospital in the same place.  A medical school at Tiruvaaduturai where the Ashtaangahridaya and Caraka Samhitaa were taught, and a school for the study of Panini’s grammar at Tiruvorriyur, may also be noted….— K. A. Nilakanta Sastri. A History of South India, From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar. With a new introduction by R. Champakalakshmi. Oxford India Paperbacks (1955), 26^th impression, 2007. p. 293

…Parimelalagar’s …comment on Kural, now recognized as the best, is said to have been preceded by nine other commentaries; however that may be, Parimelalagar is at once learned, concise and clear; he often traces the ideas of the Kural to their sources in Sanskrit or helps one to do so….—ibid. p. 354

Malayaalam

…In the Sangam age, the present Malayaalam area was a land of Tamil speech though grammarians recognized that the dialect of the mountain country deviated from (p.376) standard Tamil in many ways.  The Sangam literature contains many words and expressions that survive in Malayaalam today though they have gone out of use in Tamil.  Attempts to derive Malayaalam from Sanskrit or to postulate for it an origin independent alike of Sanskrit and Tamil are clearly misplaced, and there can be no doubt that it was a natural growth through centuries from the form of ‘Koduum–Tamil’ that prevailed in Kerala at the beginning of the Christian era.  The literary idiom of Malayaalam, like that of Kannada and Telugu, borrowed freely from Sanskrit, and in order to express the Sanskrit sounds adequately, it had to discard the old Vatteluttu script and evolve a new script based on Tamil-grantha.  This happened perhaps about the tenth century or a little later.  The early inscriptions of the country used the grantha script for Sanskrit words in the midst of Tamil-Malayaalam written in Vatteluttu.—ibid. pp.376-77

In the sphere of religion, as generally in all matters of spiritual culture, South India began by being heavily indebted to the North; but in the course of centuries it more than amply repaid the debt and made signal contributions to the theory and practice of religion and to philosophic thought in its various aspects….—ibid. p.381

Sumathi

            The world’s best knowledge, of course, is in Tamil; its poets are the finest, and so is its literature.  The more contestatory devotee insists that Tamilttay’s learned productions are far superior to anything that other languages, especially Sanskrit, can offer….— Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue. Language, Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. University of California Press, Ltd. London. 1997. p.91

36. Nineteenth-century mystics like Ramalinga Adigal and Dandapanisami characterized Tamil as “father tongue” to assert its superiority over Sanskrit, described as “mother” (P. Krishnan.Tamil Nulkalil Tamil Moli, Tamil Inam, Tamil Nattu (Tamil language, Tamil community, and Tamilnadu in Tamil texts).  Madras: Ilantamilar Patippakam.  1984: 197-99).  In recent years, the domination of the feminized Tamilttay notwithstanding, occasionally some verses personify Tamil as king, father, son, and male lover (Mudiyarasan. Kaviyap Pavai (Lady of poetry). 3^rd ed. Pudukottai: Valluvar Patippakam. [1^st ed. 1961] 1976: 32-33, 40-41; K. Nagarajan. Tamile Ellam (Tamil is everything).  Madras: Tamil Patippakam. 1980: 3-8, 13-15, 17-25, 39-41).—p. 164

McEvilley

…Much circumstantial evidence suggests Stoic influence on Tamil literature, and at the same period some Sanskrit books made their way in Greek translation to the Mediterranean.— Thomas McEvilley, Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, (2002), First Indian Edition, 2008p. 502

…Traces of Epictetus have been found in Arabic texts of several centuries later.  Tamil literature in south India seems to show not only a somewhat kindred spirit with the Stoa but actual Stoic influences from the Roman trading colonies that were wealthy and influential in the Tamil country.—ibid. p. 631

Pollock:

…In the south, the one exception regarding bhasakavya in general and Buddhist literature in particular might be constituted by Tamil, but disentangling fact from fiction in Tamil literary history is complicated, and the more reliable the data (as in inscriptions), the more the Tamil case conforms with the general picture of literary South Asia.— Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Ranikhet, Permananet Black, 2006. p.100

…Like the (apparently) archaic Tolkaappiyam, with which it is clearly familiar, the Viiracooliyam {viiracoozhiyam} examines both grammar and literature, but in a way far more profoundly influenced by Sanskrit grammatical terminology and theory and Sanskrit rhetorical science….—ibid. p.398

Venkatachalapathy

…While history writing in English was almost exclusively concerned with dynastic history and obsessed with chronology, a major strand of Tamil historiography turned towards cultural history and literary historiography.  — A. R. Venkatachalapathy, In Those Days there was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History , New Delhi, Yoda Press, 2006. p. 4

All that was original and excellent in the literature of the Tamils was written before the ninth century, and what followed was, for the most part, but a base imitation or translation of Sanscrit works.—)V. Kanakasabhai, The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago, Madras, 1904, p. 3)—ibid. p. 89

…Tamil tradition became the dominant one in Tamilnadu.  To document just one instance, let us turn to a late nineteenth-century text, Tamilalangaram … by Dandapani Swamigal…

Tamil is right and Sanskrit is left.

Sanskrit advocates animal sacrifice while Tamil prohibits killing.

Tamil is Saraswati’s right breast while Sanskrit is only her left breast.

It was Agathiyar, the progenitor of Tamil, who performed Siva’s marriage, not Panini, the Sanskrit grammarian.

Siva and Vishnu follow in the footsteps of Tamil not Sanskrit. Once upon a time Sanskrit was spiteful towards Tamil.  As punishment both Vishnu and Siva decreed that Tamil should be sung ahead while Sanskrit should follow them.  (A reference to the custom in Tamil temple processions where (p.104) Tamil chanting precedes the ceremonial procession of the deity and Sanskrit hymn singing comes behind.)

Tamil is like the cool southern wind while Sanskrit is like the cold northern wind, which causes diseases.

Siva took messages from Sundarar to his ladylove.

Sundarar resurrected an infant swallowed by a crocodile.

Siva inspired Manikkavachagar to compose Thiruvachagam.

Manikkavachagar and Muthu Thandavar attained salvation through Tamil.

The milk that Parvathi fed Thirugnanasambandar burst forth as poetry in Tamil and not in the language which has no short ‘ae’ (that is, Sanskrit).

If Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, Tamil is the father.

It was through Tamil that Thirugnanasambandar resurrected the girl Poompavai from her bare bones.

It was Tamil that helped Thirugnanasambandar to overcome the ordeals of fire and water, and impale the Jains.

The doors of the Vedaranyam Temple closed after chanting the four vedas; they were re-opened by the Tamil poems of Thirugnanasambandar.

It was Tamil that saved Thirunavukkarasar from the persecution of the Pallava king.

It was Tamil that gave Thirunavukkarasar the vision of Kailasam and gave him salvation.

The ultimate truths not known even to Brahma were sung in Tamil by Nammalvar.

Andal who adorned Vishnu with garlands she herself had worn sang only in Tamil.

All the sins of Thirumangai Alvar, the saint-thief, were pardoned because he wrote in Tamil.

Saraswati, the mother of all languages, in the golden lotus pond of Madurai holds aloft Tamil as the Sanga Palagai.

Only Tamil poems can make even sculptures nod their heads.—ibid. pp.104-05

Champakalakshmi:

…the Sangam being a Tamil literary academy of the early historical period, the only such heritage of a non-Vedic corpus known so far.— Champakalakshmi, Religion, Tradition, and Ideology: Pre-colonial South India, Oxford, New Delhi (2011), 2012  p. 12

               The Tamil bhakti hymnal literature derived all its major themes, myths, worldview and institutional forms from the Puranas and the Agamas, while, at the same time, used purely Tamil classical motifs drawn from the Sangam classics (the Puram and the Akam themes).  Tamil bhakti brings several strands together—the typical Sangam humanism; anthropocentric religion; emotional and sensuous character of worship (ecstatic dancing and singing); and the northern Brahmanical and Sanskritic concept of a transcendental absolute (monotheism, together with several mythological structures)….—ibid. notes. 20. P. 42

…Standing on the threshold to a new form of poetry, namely, the bhakti hymns, the Paripatal shows evidence of Vedic, Upanisadic and Puranic influence and, as has been admirably shown in Friedhelm Hardy’s study {Viraha-Bhakti: The Early Historyof Krsna Devotion in South India, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.}of emotional Krsna bhakti, reveals the meeting point of northern Sanskritic devotional themes and the Akam (interior/love) as well as the Puram (exterior/war) themes of Sangam literature….—‘From Devotion and Dissent to Dominance: The Bhakti of the Tamil Alvars and Nayanars’, in  ibid. p. 54

            The origins of many of the beliefs and customs of the Tamils are lost in antiquity, but the picture presented in the early centuries of the Christian era is one of an odd mixture of indigenous gods, animistic beliefs, and ecstatic ritualistic dances, with the incoming Sanskritic ideas of a godhead, and the varieties of their forms and names … Altogether, religion does not seem to have exercised a predominant influence over the life and thought of the early Tamils as it did in later times. There was neither the ritualistic extravagance nor the metaphysical speculation which characterized the religious history of the succeeding periods.— ‘Vaisnava Concepts in Early Tamil Nadu’, in ibid. p. 167

…The Sangam rulers were heroic warriors whose authority derived from their martial skills, their redistributive qualities (generosity) towards to their supplicant kin, as well as the nature of their control over the resource-bases of the river valleys.  The verbal imagery in the texts makes a clear comparison of the king’s person with the mental visions of god as reflected in nature.  Similarly, the intense humanism of their beliefs and practices, the anthropocentric forms of worship, the ecstatic music and dance—became dominant aspects in the later adaptation of the Sanskrit myths into Tamil, into and their acculturation and assimilation into the Puranic tradition.— ‘Symbol and Metaphor.  Temple Architecture and Iconography in South India,’ in ibid. p. 468

Venkatachalapathy

               According to Graham Shaw, of the 1671 books printed in South Asia (including 427 in Sri Lanka) between 1556 and 1800, 266 were in Tamil.  Tamil, furthermore, constituted 40 per cent of the 672 books printed in the Oriental languages during this period….. It pleases the Tamil devotee no end to note that only one Sanskrit book was printed during this period….— A.R. Venkatachalapathy , The Province of the Book, Ranikhet, Permanent Black. 2012,  p.6

Hudson

               Tamil tradition has taken her coiled hair, and as her distinguishing mark, because as a Tamil word, Goda (Goda, Kotai) means ‘woman’s hair’ or ‘garland of flower’ tied in the hair, or, metonymically, ‘a woman with a garland in her hair’  But in Sanskrit, Goda means something different: ‘the earth (go) gives (daa)’ or ‘she gives (daa) sacred words (go)’.  Those  differing Tamil and Sanskrit meanings contributed to the later legend of her life.— D. Dennis Hudson, Krishna’s Mandala: Bhagavata Religion and Beyond, New Delhi, Oxford, 2010, p. 181

Whitney:

…It is equally the case, however, that modern scholarship has been invested in an effort – often unconscious, but sometimes willful and programmatic – to keep the cultural and intellectual worlds of Tamil and Sanskrit sealed off from each other….— Preface. Whtney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani. Pp.vii-x, in Whitney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani, (ed)Bilingual Discourse and Cross-Cultural Fertilisation: Sanskrti and Tamil in Medieval India,  Pondichery, Institut Francais De Pondichery Ecole Francaise D’extreme-Orient, 2013, p. viii.

…The model of consmopolitan and vernacular literary interaction proposed by the Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock, as summarized in his magnum opus of 2006, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, has supplied an argumentative framework that has become more often than not implicit in the recent comparative work on Tamil and Sanskrit, and this volume is no exception.  This is most clearly in evidence in Francis’ contribution, which offers a meticulously documented correction of Pollock’s characterization of the epigraphical practices recorded in the Pallava kingdom.  More generally, however, the basic fabric of Pollock’s historical model, in which the superimposition of cosmopolitan Sanskrit catalyses the literarisation of a vernacular speech-form, which only gradually attains equal dignity with the language of the cosmopolis in the literary and political arena, fails rather dramatically to adequately account for the long shared history of Sanskrit and Tamil….—ibid.  Preface. Whtney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani. Pp. vii-x, in p. ix

…Evidence of non-Sanskrit literary activity in Dravidian-language-speaking areas also survives from earlier than elsewhere, and it is by no means unambiguously clear that such literature with-Aryan models: the degree to which the oldest surviving Tamil poetry influenced or was influenced by poetry in Prakrit and Sanskrit is still a subject of debate.—ibid. Introduction. Dominic Goodall. P. 1-11, in p. 1

…Many texts seem to have been transmitted down to us across the centuries with bewilderingly little indisputably contemporary information that might anchor and contextualize them.—ibid. Introduction. Dominic Goodall. P. 1-11, in p. 2

…the Dravidian-speaking South is well known to be an exception in this regard, notably because of the survival of a corpus of remarkable evocative poetry, the so-called “Cankam” (Sangam) works, in old Tamil, and of a tradition of grammar and poetics.  This means that we can be certain that Southern authors who wrote in Sanskrit must consciously have chosen to write in Sanskrit and, conversely, many authors who wrote in Tamil must also consciously have chosen Tamil over Sanskrit….One should not therefore imagine this choice as being always or typically one between a high, rule-bound and literary language and a free, living vernacular – both languages had higher and lower registers, after all –, but often a choice between two high literary idioms….—ibid. Introduction. Dominic Goodall. P. 1-11, in p. 2

            Sanskrit and the other languages of India are, in other words, so closely intertwined that their interrelationships cannot be reduced to any one simple model of Sanskrit hegemony, still less seen only in terms of a Brahmin conspiracy to abase and subjugate others, a vision influenced by the wounds of a painful social warfare whose divisions are, by some Tamil-speakers, perceived to be rooted in or inseparably associated with the division between Sanskrit and Dravidian languages….—ibid.  Introduction. Dominic Goodall. P. 1-11, in p. 3

…the arid and meaningless debates about the relative superiority or anteriority of one or other language {Sanskrit and Tamil}, about wildly implausible etymologies deriving the words of one language from another, or about impossible dating propositions that are based only upon a sort of nationalist pride….—ibid.  Introduction. Dominic Goodall. P. 1-11, in p. 3

…Paninian grammar may have “fertilized” other Indian languages, beginning with Tamil, in such a way as to stimulate grammatical thinking, but to view Tamil grammar exclusively or primarily in terms of the influence of the Astadhyayi upon the Tolkappiyam would be simplistic: the contact between traditions of grammar in Sanskrit and Tamil continued over many centuries and the dialogue may well have involved many lost intermediaries.—ibid. Introduction. Dominic Goodall. P. 1-11,  p. 8

…Firstly, as mentioned in Asokan inscriptions, there existed the countries of Chera, Chola, Pandya, and Satyaputa in the Tamil area, which means that they had their indigenous culture in the 3^rd century BCE.  Next, Brahmi inscriptions usually contain all kinds of letters used to represent the sounds of Indian languages, namely, voiceless consonants, voiceless aspirates, voiced consonants, voiced aspirates, and homo-organic nasals, while Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions adopt the letters for voiceless consonants, voiced consonants, and homo-organic nasals.  This means that the Tamil phonetic and orthographic systems had already been established by the 2^nd or 1^st century BCE.—ibid. Is clearing or plowing equal to killing?  Tamil culture and the spread of Jainism in Tamilnadu.  Takanobu Takahashi (Tokyo). Pp.53-67, in, p. 62

…the question is: how old is Cankam poetry anyway?  The dates assigned to Tamil Cankam poetry differ widely, ranging from the 3^rd century BCE to the 8^th or 9^th century CE.  However, as I have tried to show on various other occasions, the early date has never been backed up with verifiable evidence.  The evidence is mostly circular, that is to say, once it is accepted that the early date is not established as firmly as one wants to believe, most of the evidence put forward in its support collapses.  In addition to that, if the Tamil literary (p.83) theory has indeed been based, directly or indirectly, on a music theory formulated in Sanskrit, here we have another piece of evidence suggesting that the tradition is not as early or as independent as it is often claimed to be.  As suggested already elsewhere, we should start from a post-Pallava date for Cankam poetry (Tieken, Herman, Kavya in South India: Old Tamil Cankam Poetry.  Groningen: Forsten. 2001).—ibid. Early Tamil poetics between Natyasastra and Ragamala.  Herman Tieken. Pp.69-91, in, pp. 83-84

Above, I have argued that the Tamil literary theory was inspired by a theory of music that originally must have been formulated in Sanskrit….—ibid.  Early Tamil poetics between Natyasastra and Ragamala.  Herman Tieken. Pp.69-91, in, p. 87

…the key term of the Tamil literary theory, tinai, is a loan translation of a Sanskrit theory of music seems one more piece of evidence for a late date of the Tamil theory.—ibid. Early Tamil poetics between Natyasastra and Ragamala.  Herman Tieken. Pp.69-91, in, p. 88

…There is, however, no terminological equivalent in the Tolkappiyam’s text to the rasas that are the subject of the NS’s {Natyasastra}previous chapter: the term cuvai, which in later scholarly Tamil is the functional calque for rasa, strikingly occurs nowhere in the text of the Tolkappiyam. As a result—and somewhat oddly, given the universal acceptance of the direction of influence from Sanskrit sources—what little scholarly discussion there has been of meyppatu has tended to argue for it as an index of the aesthetic difference of Tamil poetry as measured against Sanskrit.—ibid. From source-criticism to intellectual history in the poetics of the medieval Tamil country. Whitney Cox. Pp. 115-160, in p. 118

…It is important to note, however, just how much Ilampuranar is bringing into the discussion here, especially in his importation of the term cuvai itself, which, to repeat, does not occur in the Tolkappiyam at all.  Ilampuranar is not actively trying to foist a perverse interpretation onto the text he is commenting upon; rather, he shows himself to participate in the confident interpretative theory—more familiar from thinkers working in Sanskrit….—ibid.  From source-criticism to intellectual history in the poetics of the medieval Tamil country. Whitney Cox. Pp. 115-160, in p. 122

… “Manipravalam is the union (yoga) of Sanskrit and the vernacular (bhasa)”. {Lilaatilakam: Manipravalalaksanam. Edited and translated by I. Kunnan Pilla. Kottayam, Kerala: National Book Stall, 1985,  {14^th century treatise}}….—p. 202

…for the LT {LilaatilakIam , 14^th century treatise} must specify from the outset that the bhasa that goes into its Manipravalam is the particular speech of the Keralas, Kerala–bhasa. This is because the regional self-designation for the very bhasa whose verses the author wants to cite, as used by the Keralas themselves, is “Tamil”!  Our author must therefore advance arguments to show that this “Tamil” is not that of the neighboring Tamil realms, not that of the Cola–, or Pandya–bhasas, which would collectively claim this Tamil as their own, and demote the Kerala–bhasa to a mere (and distorted) regional dialect (desa–bhasa.).—ibid. Caught in Translation: Ideologies of literary language in Kerala’s Manipravalam.  Rich Freeman.  199-239, in p. 203

            Although the word puja appears in the Sanskrit sections of both the Pallankoyil and Kuram copper-plate grants, it is not taken up very quickly (p.330) in the Tamil inscriptions.  There are a few appearances of the Tamil word pucai or pucanai as the 9^th century, but the word only gains currency in the 12^th century….  Instead, the more commonly occurring words for worship—for what priests do—are other terms borrowed from Sanskrit: arccani….—ibid. Words for Worship: Tamil and Sanskrit in medieval temple inscriptions.  Leslie C. Orr. Pp.325-357, in pp. 330-331

…I will not deny that the history of the Cankam corpus is a complex and debated matter, but when Pollock presents {Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press. 383-385} a description of Tamil in the first millennium, he only mentions facts that go well with his general theory: the late appearance of the legend of the Cankam, the written character of Bhakti poetry, the commentatorial writing modelled on Sanskrit, the adaptation in Tamil of Sanskrit epics, the philologisation of language, the conceptual borrowing from the Sanskrit grammatical tradition.  Not a word about he Puram literature centred on kings, about the tinai concept so specific to Cankam poetry, about the pirapantams (a specifically Tamil type of work, even though its name is Tamilised Sanskrit) which are the heirs of Tamil Cankam conventions, however subverted they may be sometimes….—ibid. Praising the king in Tamil during the Pallava period. Emmanuel Francis. Pp. 359-409, in, p. 393

            First, there is an ancient Tamil literature going back to the first centuries of the first millennium, the so-called cankam corpus known through later anthologies. Pollock quite rapidly dismisses this Cankam corpus as being “obscure” or “opaque” as far as its history and development are concerned.  Even though the date of any particular poem in these anthologies and the status of this literature—the usual opinion is that a bardic oral tradition was taken over by a literary written tradition responsible for its anthologisation—is debatable, it is nevertheless generally accepted that already several centuries before Pollock’s vernacularisation, that is relatively early in the first millennium, there existed an expressive or imaginative Tamil for the description of kings (that is the Puram poetry; see also the theme named paataan in poetics).  However thorny the dating, (p.394) the consensus is that at least before the middle of the first millennium, Cankam poetry, which is a worldly literature comparable to kavya, was established.  However late a written aspect may have come to attach itself to this Cankam poetry, the anthologisation as well as the later creation of a Cankam legend proves that there was an interest for this early literature in the Tamil country, that it was an early revered and known beginning.—ibid. Praising the king in Tamil during the Pallava period. Emmanuel Francis. Pp. 359-409, in, pp. 394-95

            Second, Pollock’s ensuing view that “there is no doubt that for many centuries Tamil was, if not mute, then certainly not loquacious in the domain of political-expressive, until in the last several centuries of the millennium it began to speak with an altogether new and confident voice” (2006: 292) is an overstatement. The Pallava evidence provided above attests to the relatively early appearance of political, literary, expressive or imaginative epigraphy in Tamil, that is at the beginning of the 7^th century, as opposed to the 8^th century, at the earliest, for Pollock.  We may find that the lists of birudas are not very imaginative.  But the venpa at Talavanur and the Centalai verses are good pieces of political poetry.—p. 395

            So, if vernacularisation as conceived by Pollock concerns only the early Pandyas, what is the impact of this fact on his general theory?  Criticism of Pollock’s concept of vernacularisation has already been expressed from a variety of perspectives, ¹¹⁰ but I will concentrate here on Tamil.  Since vernbacularisation as conceived by Pollock played only a minor role for Tamil, as I have tried to demonstrate, and since there was an ancient Tamil literary tradition, we arrive at the question why, before political discourse in Tamil, Sanskrit was adopted, for centuries, as the language of power in certain sectors of the Tamil area.

            One has to keep in mind that Sanskrit appeared relatively late in the epigraphy of the Tamil country.  Sanskrit is used intensively in royal Pallava epigraphy only from the middle of the 6^th century onwards.  Earlier Pallava Sanskrit prasastis exist, but mostly in the Andhra region. Only one has been found near Kancipuram, but it is in prose, not in verse as Pallava prasastis usually are from ca. 550.  It thus seems that before the Pallavas, usually considered as culturally oriented towards the north, there was no need in the Tamil country for a discourse of public power, be it in Tamil or in the Sanskrit, supposing that Puram poetry had no public dimensions. In any case, the Pallavas played a decisive role in making the Tamil country part of the Sanskrit cosmopolis.

            Pollock argues that Sanskrit was chosen for its aesthetic dimension (power and culture being inseparable, see Pollock 2006: 2ff.), not because it was a language associated with Hinduism.  But since there was an ancient Tamil literary tradition—as Cankam poetry certainly presents a form of the language with significant aesthetic dimensions—why then did Tamilian dynasties not rely on it straight away, instead of waiting until after the Sanskrit discourse of power had been established to choose (p.398) Tamil?  In other words, why is it that Sanskrit served as a model in the case of the early Pandyas, and as a trigger in the case of the Pallavas?  The choice of Sanskrit by the Pallavas may be explained not only by the fact that it enabled the aestheticisation of power through its specific features (on these, see Pollock 2006: 254 ff.), but also because Sanskrit was associated with Hinduism, a rationale Pollock dismisses (op. cit.: 74).

            Pallava Sanskrit, with the exception of IP 1`7, is linked to the establishment of Brahmanic institutions (brahmadeya) and Hindu temples (devadana).  When we know the authors of these prasastis, their names reveal they are Brahmins.¹¹²  It is then conceivable that while dynasties turned away from Buddhism—too moralist, not sufficiently sanctifying the violence of royal duty—towards Hinduism, they adopted Sanskrit because it was the language of the religious culture (even though it could be shared by others) and of the Brahman elite.  Pollock shows that Sanskrit was adopted first by foreign dynasties which could emancipate Sanskrit from its religious background, that is, secularise it.  That may be true, but it doesn’t follow that the same logic operated everywhere, every time.  Sanskrit had to be secularized to be able to serve as the language of politics, but once this had been accomplished, it could be adopted also precisely because it was associated with the specific religious specialists that the Brahmins are.  What I want to say is that in a Brahmanic world, dynasties could choose Sanskrit because it allowed them to pretend to be dharmic kings in the eyes or ears of Brahmans, or even to challenge Brahmanic discourse on kingship in its own language.

            This suggestion goes against Pollock’s view about religion in the choice of Sanskrit, and against his criticism of the concepts of brahmanisation, sanskritisation, legitimation, ideology and functionalism (op. cit.: 511).  I believe these theories indeed have their flaws, several of which are (p.399) pointed out by Pollock, but that the analysis of political discourse in Tamil invites us to refine them, not to dismiss them and replace them entirely with Pollock’s aesthetic theory.  I contend that kings were engaged in an ideological debate for legitimation not with the people dominated, but with the dominant Brahmanic Sanskrit ideology and with rival dynasties.  They chose Sanskrit because, after it had been secularized, it was available for political discourse and because it was the language of those at whom their discourse was directed: the Brahmins as source of authority—or of contested authority—and the other competing dynasties.  They chose Sanskrit as a political lingua franca permitting a discursive relation with Brahmin ideology and rival dynasties.

            As Sanskrit developed as a language of political discourse, it triggered expression in the vernaculars.  Such expressions surfaced first in the Tamil country, because it already knew a literary tradition to latch onto.  The early Pandyas adopted a political Tamil fitting the model of vernacularisation described by Pollock. In the Pallava realm, a political Tamil relying more on the Tamil literary culture was adopted, at first mainly on local initiative (Talavanur; Centalai, from a minor dynasty that never used Sanskrit).  This trend finally reached the Pallava court under the reign of Nandin III.¹¹⁶

            In this rise of political Tamil we can discern an early form of regionalism that can be related to the process of “territorialization of Tamil cultural space” and to the creation of a “political regionality in the premodern Tamil world” mentioned by Pollock (2006: 385-86, 413 ff.).  In a sense the intrusion of Sanskrit caused this rise: Tamilians took conscience of their difference in an India globalized through the (p.400) Sanskrit cosmopolis, and wanted to show their Tamilness in the language of public political discourse itself. From the local level this process arrived at the court.  It is maybe symptomatic that this happened in the middle of the 9^th century, at a time when the Pallava dynasty was near its end, no longer playing a major role in South India.—ibid. Praising the king in Tamil during the Pallava period, Emmanuel Francis, pp. 361-409, in pp398-401

110. See Shulman (2007), Tieken (2008) mainly about North India, Fussman (2008:171 ff.), and Ali (2011) about Indonesia. Tieken and Ali insist that the dichotomy between symbolic, expressive Sanskrit and documentary, administrative vernacular during the first millennium is not sustainable. For the same criticism concerning Pallava records, see Orr (2009:99ff.).

Ali, Daud (2011). “The Early Inscriptions of Indonesia and the Problem of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis”.  In P.-Y. Manguin, A. Mani and G. Wade (Editors), Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, pp. 277-297. Singapore: ISEAS—New Delhi: Manohar (Nalanda-Sriwijaya Series 2).

Fussman, Gerard (2008). Review of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India by Sheldon Pollock, Journal Asiatique, 296, pp. 163-180.

Shulman, David Dean (2007). Review Essay. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India.  By Sheldon Pollock.  Journal of Asian Studies, 66, pp. 819-825.

Tieken, Herman (2008).  “The Process of Vernacularization in South Asia”, Reivew of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India..  Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 51, pp. 338-383.

112…..Fussman (2008: Review of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India by Sheldon Pollock, Journal Asiatique, 296, 175-76) rightly remarks that Pollock understimates the role of Brahmins even after the secularization of Sanskrit had begun.

116. Contra, Pollock (op. cit.: 29) places vernacular beginnings “not at the monastery but at the court”. The first part of the proposition is acceptable, but not the second, at least in the Tamil case for which the stimulus for vernacularisation (here simply taken as the development of a political discourse in a vernacular, without necessarily being modeled on Sanskrit) came both from the court (Mahendra I’s birudas) and outside the court (Talavanur).  The Centalai poems, commissioned by a minor local dynasty, stand midway between court and locality.

Kannan:

…And certainly nothing like the varna or jati system existed in any other indo-European-speaking area while the early Tamil poems suggest that the caste system was a feature of early South India and by extension of Dravidian cultures.— Preface, George L. Hart, in Kannan M. Jennifer Clare, Passages: relationships between Tamil and Sanskrit, ed. By Kannan M. Jennifer Clare, Institute Francais De Pondichery, Tamil Chair, Department of South And Southeast Asian Studies, University of California At Berkeley, 2009,  Pp. v-vii p. v

…The Tolkappiyam, the earliest and definitive Tamil grammar/esthetic text, borrows the notion of cases and the alphabetical order from Sanskrit sources while describing the Tamil language in mostly indigenous terms….—ibid.  George L. Hart. Preface, Pp. v-vii p. vi

…One of the major consequences of this borrowing by the Tamil area of ideas originally native to the North was a strange sort of metamorphosis: the deities from the North were, not surprisingly, seen in terms that made sense to the Tamils and turned into the objects of emotional devotional worship.   This process produced the great poems of the Alvars and Nayanmars that defined a new kind of religion that flourished in the South and was, over the centuries, exported back to the North, where it produced many of the saints and poets who defined modern Hinduism in the Indo-Aryan languages and traditions.—ibid. Preface, in George L. Hart. Pp. v-vii p. vi

To one of the protagonists, a non Brahmin Tamil, Sanskrit represents or embodies the following: Aryan, outsider, white or fair skinned, Vedas, the laws of Manu, Sanathana Dharma; a sacred, divine, dead language; cultural hegemony, caste system, untouchability, oppression, North India, Hindi, Hindu fundamentalism, demolition of Babri Masjid, Hindutva, Ayodya, B.J.P., R.S.S….

          To the second protagonist, a pro Sanskrit person (mostly Brahmins with a few exceptions), Tamil represents or embodies the following: Dravidian, black non-(p. xi) Brahmin, Madrasi, South Indian, Sudra, Dalit, tribal, profane, banal, anti Hindi, anti India, vernacular, linguistic parochialism, Tamil nationalism, Tamil chauvinism….—ibid. M. Kannan, introduction, in pp. ix-xxii

…Sanskrit had the initial advantage in the market, being the first to be discovered, identified, and classified as one of the basic classical languages of the world, belonging to the Indo-Aryan or Indo-European group of languages by orientalist scholars and missionaries.  This recognition accorded by foreigners lifted it even further above the pedestal on which the Brahmins had already placed it. (p. xii) […]

          …Although recognized by scholars for its ancient wealth of literature and being genuinely classical due to it, Tamil was boxed into a difficult position from which it had always to fight, so to speak, for its place against Sanskrit. Pushed into the corner of vernacular languages, Tamil struggled to obtain official status as a classical language from the Central government of India. Though the machinations of Dravidian political parties and coalition electoral politics of the recent past, it was finally granted classical status in 2004.¹²–pp. xii-xiii.

12. …Further to this, with other states of South India, demanding the classical status for their languages (Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), regional, electoral politics pushed the Central government to grant classical status to Telugu and Kannada, in 2008-2009.  In this vein, what is not classical in India?—p. xiv.

          The trench warfare between these two languages {Tamil & Sanskrit} spilled over into quite a number of spheres.  Both languages aspire to be the mother of all the languages in India and this pushes them to quarrel over the metaphysics of their origins; each wants to be the one primal source of everything else in India….Another major casualty of this war is the field of etymology where it’s the same story all over again.  Each side wishes to derive all the words in the world from their (p. xiv) language.  We should remember that each side propagates its views with such certainty and self assured pseudo-critical apparatus that it is extremely easy to be misled.  Yet another casualty, are the researches related to the chronology of the ancient literature in both the languages.  Here, too, what prevails is utter chaos and total disregard for scientific methods which are replaced by purely emotional reactions and outbursts.  Further, we see these quarrels affecting public perceptions and attitudes.  Sanskrit, despite official patronage and funding it receives, dwindles to an exotic tool in the hands of upper caste, upper class India and its diaspora used for the naming of children and offering a return path marked by superficial ritual and leading to recently unveiled and very convenient ancient “Indian” Hindu roots.

          Tamil for its part, is in a desperate quest to divest itself of Sanskrit influence but is unable, in the process, to rid itself of a linguistic jingoism which disguises itself as self defense (pure Tamil) and scholarship and opens itself up unreservedly to English.—ibid. M. Kannan, introduction, in pp. ix-xxii pp. xiv- xv.

          Turning to the academic world, we cannot fail to notice certain attitudes. We see the Sanskrit establishment seemingly quite self assured in terms of its origins, history and literature and acts as if the other languages, particularly the Dravidian languages, don’t exist or need not be engaged with.²⁰  On the other hand, the Dravidian language, Tamil, seems to suffer eternally from victim mentality despite its valiant claims and its fight towards an equal status with Sanskrit.  At the very least however, the Tamil academic world, perhaps due to its victim mentality, its fighting spirit and the ever present need to raise itself in the eyes of the international audience, allows itself an internal space which permits of self enquiry and (p. xv) discussion. So, here we are at the present time, fixed between two classical languages and literatures of India, both of them hostile to the other, and both threatened, but content in their own cocoons, in marvelous isolation.—ibid.  Kannan M. Introduction, in pp. ix-xxii, pp. xv-xvi

20. A good example is the well positioned book, rapidly coming to be regarded as a classic in the field The Language of the Gods in the World of Men by Sheldon Pollock { Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Ranikhet, Permananet Black, 2006.} which ventures to present a cultural history of Sanskrit. The uneasiness caused by the Tamil and its history and literature’s being integral to the central thesis of the book, which cannot account for that presence.  Ideally this book should be read along with another, The Last Brahmin by Rani Siva Sankara Sarma (Rani Siva Sankara Sarma, translated from the Telugu by D. Venkat Rao, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2007), for a clear picture of Sanskrit and its religious, caste foundations. Also see the review of The Languages of Gods in the World of Men by David Shulam, The Journal of Asian Studies (2007), 66:819-825 Cambridge University Press.—ibid. notes 20, p. xv,

…It is said that the ignorant are the more innocent, but in this field {Tamil vs. Sanskrit} it was the opposite: the ignorant were the most guilty for they were the most vociferous in shouting down opposing views…..—ibid.  Kannan M. Introduction, in pp. ix-xxii, p. xx.

…The number of essays published on Cankam-era literature still outnumbers scholarship on later periods, and in many institutions, Sanskrit and Tamil studies remain quarantined from one another like quarreling siblings….—ibid. Jennifer Clare, Foreword, in Pp. xxii-xxxvi, p. xxiii.

…The recent explosion into South Asian studies of Sheldon Pollock’s  { Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Ranikhet, Permananet Black, 2006.} elegant theory of vernacularization, while graceful and provocative, leaves the Tamil scholar frustrated and feeds into old anxieties about the hegemony of Sanskrit, eclipsing the more nuanced (and ultimately more interesting) relationship between these two languages….—ibid. Jennifer Clare, Foreword, in Pp. xxii-xxxvi p. xxiv

…A primary reason behind the methodological confusion that often surrounds this topic is the lack of significant scholarship on what we mean when we talk about Sanskrit in a Tamil context (or vice versa).  Pollock’s { Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Ranikhet, Permananet Black, 2006.} contribution to the field was a brilliant and thorough study of what Sanskrit meant, its function as more than just another language on the South (and Southeast) Asian landscape. His interpretation of Sanskrit as a language whose function shifted over time to eventually be associated with a particular type of political power based on translocal cultural (rather than religious or militaristic) capital introduced a new and powerful way of thinking about language and its accessories (grammars, commentaries, etc.) as vehicles of power….—ibid. Jennifer Clare, Foreword, in Pp. xxii-xxxvi p. xxiv.

வடசொற் கிளவி வடவெழுத் தொரீஇ

யெழுத்தொடு புணர்ந்த சொல்லாகும்மே

            The words of Northern language become fit to be used in Tamil when they adopt the Tamil phonetics, discarding their northern ones. {Transl. Sivalinganar, A. Tolkappiyam. Collatikaram, Eccavviyal: uraivalam. Ulakat Tamilaraycci Niruvanam, Chennai, 1988,}.—ibid.  Jennifer Clare, Foreword, in Pp. xxii-xxxvi, p. xxiv.

…Looking at Sanskrit and Tamil as points on a language continuum opens up possibilities for literary analysis that move away from models of power and influence, and towards language choice as a means of effective expressive quality.—ibid. Jennifer Clare, Foreword, in Pp. xxii-xxxvi, p. xxvii.

…Today’s struggle between treating Tamil as a classical language, worthy of preservation and a modern language capable of new expression is not new; the Tamil tradition has always had to struggle with this balance between new and old, past and present. The choice of Sanskrit modes of expression provides a way for Tamils to do something new within their own “classical” tradition, whether this means accessing the power and prestige of a pan-Indian Sanskrit universe, or reconciling the authority of the Tamil past with contemporary literary and aesthetic developments….—ibid.  Jennifer Clare, Foreword, in Pp. xxii-xxxvi, p. xxvii.

…the interplay of Tamil and Sanskrit in post-Cankam Tamil literature and other Dravidian traditions.  Hart’s contribution to Tamil-Sanskrit studies challenged the established understanding of the movement of ideas in India, suggesting that no understanding of Sanskrit literature is complete without understanding of the Tamil tradition.  He also bridged a gap between “classical” and “folk” literary studies, pointing out the importance of shared literary material between these two.—ibid. Jennifer Clare, Foreword, in Pp. xxii-xxxvi, p. xxix.

            The writing of one’s own name falls somewhere between the expressive and the documentary categories posed by Pollock, { Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Ranikhet, Permananet Black, 2006.}when he first raised the question of Sanskrit’s function as language of aesthetic and political power. He argued that in the epigraphical context, for much of the first millennium, Sanskrit did the (p. xxix) “expressive work”, while the vernacular languages did the work of the “documentary”.  Leslie Orr {Leslie C. Orr,} Tamil and Sanskrit in the medieval epigraphical context—pp. 97-114 in this book} challenges such a strict distinction of function, giving examples from Pallava, Pandya and Chola inscriptions (stone and copper plate) that complicate this picture.  To give one example, Tamil and Sanskrit both function equally as “expressive” languages in all the early Pandya copper plates, issued between AD 770 and 940, which contain eulogies in both languages (meykkirtti and prasasti).  Interestingly, the Tamil meykkirttis are not translations or even adaptations of the Sanskrit prasastis, but include different typologies of praise for the king….—ibid. Jennifer Clare, Foreword, in Pp. xxii-xxxvi, pp. xxix-xxx

…Upamanyu Bhaktavilasam, a Sanskrit translation of the 12^th century Tamil Periyapuranam.  Asking questions rarely addressed to the Sanskrit tradition, including how the devotional verses of the Tevaram found within the Periyapuranam are rendered into Sanskrit, as well as the translation of Tamil proper names within, Nagaswamy raises important questions about the communicability of Sanskrit and the complex negotiations of tradition within the Saiva community. The Periyapuranam discussed by Nagaswamy {R. Nagaswamy, Upamanyu Bhakta Vilasam, pp. 197216 in this book} comes to be a defining text in the South Indian Saiva tradition….— ibid. Jennifer Clare, Foreword, in Pp. xxii-xxxvi, p. xxxii

…European Christian missionaries were chiefly working in Tamilnad and they were learning even Sanskrit works through Tamil, Malayalam and also Telugu commentaries.  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Tamil philology was much more advanced than Sanskrit philology. The grammatical work of Beschi is an ever useful achievement. The lexicographical task of Beschi and of de Bourzes is still in use, through the French-Tamil dictionary of the Mission of Pondicherry, in which it was incorporated. On the contrary, Sanskrit grammars and dictionaries compiled before the nineteenth century have at present only a historical value.—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 1

            In the opinion of some early Indologists, Tamil was merely one of the vernacular languages of all India. The languages of India were classified in three strata: ancient Indian or Sanskrit, middle-Indian or prakrts and vernaculars or modern tongues. That is roughly exact for the Indo-Aryan family, but not for the Dravidian one, especially for Tamil.  Tamil is an ancient language preserved till today with evolution and was parallel to Sanskrit, prakrts and Indo-Aryan in its nature but also as its literature was autonomous side by side with those of Indo-Aryan languages.  Nearly all other Indian literatures were also cultivated side by side with Sanskrit literature in every linguistic region of India, but generally without being autonomous and being, on the contrary, dependent on Sanskrit literature.  Furthermore, these literatures are not means of expression of a complete culture.  They possess original poems but not books on all matters of knowledge; books in some fields are only in Sanskrit, or in translations from Sanskrit or do not exist at all in such literatures.   Tamil literature, on the contrary, is complete in itself as means of cultural expression….—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 2

…Compared with Sanskrit, Tamil is surely autonomous. But that does not mean, as some are inclined to think, absence of fruitful and permanent relations.—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 2

            If we listen to the claims of some Tamil traditions, we have to admit not only the independent origin of Tamil literature, but even its priority to Sanskrit literature.  According to these traditions, revered authors, like Agastiyar, wrote several thousand years ago, and even some Vaisnava saints are referred to as having appeared in remote ages of past Yugas.  On the other hand, the Indus Valley civilization of Harappa and Mohan-jo-Daro possibly was Dravidian and very probably was destroyed by Indo-Aryan Sanskrit speaking peoples. It is surely easy to build on these data an hypothesis showing ancient Tamil literature born in the Indus Valley long before the Aryan invasions; then repelled to the South, and partially preserved as well as continued there. The recent attempts at deciphering the Indus Valley writing through classical Tamil favour such a view.—ibid. Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  pp. 3

…Furthermore, the evidence of the evolutionary processes of language is against the possibility of finding classical Tamil in the writings of the Indus Valley, even if the civilisation of the country was Dravidian.—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 3

            If we now consider the ancient Tamil works, we find in almost all some allusions to Vedic or Brahmanic rites and the use of some Sanskrit words, though very few.  When Indo-Aryan words are adopted in Tamil in Cankam literature, they are more frequently borrowed from Prakrt forms or with Prakrtic features.  Surely, Sanskrit and Prakrt cultures were known to some extent in Tamilnad but rather through Prakrt than through Sanskrit.  Massive influence of Sanskrit in Tamil literature took place much more later.

            If we consider it from a historical angle, we can well understand this fact.   During the period when middle-Indian dialects were in common use, Sanskrit was special to Brahmanical circles.  In these circles it was the subject of regular teaching and therefore was well preserved in a fixed classical state.  At the same time, middle-Indian dialects, owing to their wide and popular use, were always under transformation and became more and more differentiated and distinct, from one part of India to another.  Sanskrit alone remained everywhere the same and accordingly (p.5) became soon ready to become a lingua franca…..—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  pp. 5-6

…And it is specially important for us now to observe that close relations between Tamilnad and Cambodia existed through Sanskrit not through Tamil even at the time when the Pallava and Cola influences were at their highest….—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 6

            The absence of strong influence of Sanskrit literature on the Cankam works of Tamil poetry appears to be quite natural. Before and around the beginning of the Christian era, when Sanskrit was just preparing for its secularization and expansion, it was not yet able in the South to replace the Prakrts and to introduce new literary fashions.  But after it was widespread as the language of official documents, diplomacy and general culture for communications between Indians and with foreigners, its influence gradually became deeper.  In all likelihood, that took place in Tamilnad about the fourth century A.D., when the language of the chancellery of the Pallavas, which formerly was Prakrt, gave place to Sanskrit.—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 6

            On the other hand, before Sanskrit expansion took place in Tamilnad, roughly prior to the fourth century A.D., Tamil literature was already fully developed and quite ready to meet and survive the later massive invasion of Sanskrit. Only in some fields of learning it was apparently enriched, but in an original manner, by knowledge of Sanskrit lore….—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 7

            Vedic lore also was surely known in ancient times to Tamil authors, but was not adopted by the Tamils and Brahmanisation or Brahmanical social organization came only with the later influence of dharmasastras of classical Sanskrit.—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 7

…The illustrious Sankaracarya, cira 8—A.D., was thus a Sanskritizing Dravidian and one of the most eminent contributors to Sanskrit philosophical literature and following his example we see Sanskrit literature in Tamilnad, not entirely imported from the North to the South but partly created in the South itself.

            The new Sanskrit literature of the South grew quickly and spread to the North, having, of course, at the same time a large influence in the South itself.  Thus, when Tamil continued to be cultivated in accordance with tis own traditions, it received a double dose of Sanskrit influence from both outside and inside.  That led to an increasing popularity of Sanskrit studies in Tamilnad and to the introduction of an immense number of Sanskrit words into the Tamil language, even doubling some Indo-Aryan words already adopted on a middle-Indian form.—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 9

            The development of philosophical speculations led also to a great effort at reinterpretations of Tamil works of religious interest according to the various views of Vedantic circles.  Thus began, for example, an exegesis on the hymns of the Alvars, chiefly Nammalvar.  Almost every word of Tiruvaymoli was examined and interpreted in Sanskrit by many successive commentators, with the strongest tendency to find in it at any cost a meaning in accordance with the technical Sanskrit Vedantic vocabulary….—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 9

…Moreover, the Tiruvaymoli was looked at as an Upanisad, the Dramidopanisad {Dravidopanisad} and, notwithstanding that, the entire work of Nammalvar was placed parallel to the Vedas: Tiruviruttam to Rgveda, Tiruvaymoli to Sama, Tiruvaciriyam to Yajur, and Periatiruvantati to Atharvana.  That was quite arbitrary and manifestly a pure result of the prestige gained by Sanskrit in Vedantic circles of Tamilnad.  That prestige, the widespread use of Sanskrit philosophy and the necessity of controversy with the Sanskrit school led also Ramanuja in the line of Acaryas, to become a Sanskrit author like Sankara, though he was a Tamilian of Sriperampudur and full of admiration for the Alvars, more particularly Antal.  Founded on Tamil sources before the tenth century, the Srivaisnava movement flourished in Sanskrit alone during the following centuries.—ibid.  Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in,  p. 9

…Sanskrit came into great vogue in Tamilnad after the full development of Tamil literature.  When it arrived, it was welcomed and it gave Tamil literature new wealth without supplanting it.  Thanks to Sanskrit influence, while preserving its own genius, and enriching Sanskrit literature itself, Tamilnad was able to permit two great cultures to flourish at the same time.—ibid. Jean Filliozat, Tamil and Sanskrit in South India,  Pp. 1-10, in, p. 10

            The point is that in these {akam} poems, love between a human couple is not described for merely pleasure-giving purposes.  Rather, hidden in the poems is a whole world view which stresses and inculcates notions which the Tamils have even today regarding marriage and the relationship between man and woman.  The poems mirror the view that woman is a locus of sacred power and hence that the man who would possess a woman—especially a young, chaste woman, and especially a man who possesses her in an unorthodox manner by meeting her secretly—is exposing himself to great danger for the sake of a sacred, transfiguring experience.—ibid. George L. Hart, The relation between Tamil and classical Sanskrit literature,  Pp. 19—57, in, p. 29

            One of the most important elements in ancient Tamil society is fitness.  The king must be fit to rule, and his fitness must constantly be reinforced and recreated.  A woman must be fit for being married: she must wear the proper ornaments, marks, and flowers.  Notions of fitness apply equally to the men whose function is to control the sacred and to create fitness for others—the oral bards and others of low caste.  Thus each low caste has its own drum and musical instruments which the other castes should not play.  And in the literature composed by the oral bards, fitness occupies a pre-eminent place.  The categories of love and heroic poetry (akam and puram) are both divided into five major divisions, each with its own subject, its own raga, and a proper time of day to be sung.  And each subject has its own special flora and fauna, its own season, its own time of day.

            It seems to me that the southern influence on northern culture can be seen as a process of southern notions of fitness being adopted.  In northern music, ragas appear at about the time of Christ,  In literature, notions of rasa appear at about the same time. The monsoon cornes to be seen as a time to describe the separation of lovers; conventional lovers’ situations become very common.   But more important, in the centuries after Christ the whole approach to the world in North India, which of course has influenced its literature profoundly, cornes to be dominated by ultimately southern notions of fitness.  In the Valmiki-Ramayana,the proper or fit role of each member of the family is delineated; in the Kumarasambhava and the Meghaduta, the ideally fit relationship between man and woman is depicted.  Indeed, ideas of fitness become so strong that literature itself becomes convention-bound in the centuries after Kalidasa.  A kavya or a play must have just so many parts and so many elements.  It is this sort of categorization, of notion that each human undertaking must proceed in a proper and prescribed way, that characterizes most strongly medieval India.

            No doubt some part of this mentality proceeds from the earliest Aryan times, where since the Brahmanas the sacrifice had to be conducted with the minutest attention to detail, and where since the Vedas themselves the verbal formula, or brahman, had been thought to have potency such that it underlay the structure of the entire universe.  But the special notions of fitness under discussion here, fitness as it relates to everyday life, to family relationships, to poetry, and to music, are missing in the early Aryan sources. The Vedic hymns and the Brahmanas lack the tight, perfectly formed structure of the early Tamil poems.  They are not intended to be sung at a certain time of day to a certain raga.  Rather, they are intended for special (p.39) ritual occasions, when transcendent gods are summoned and invoked, not for the everyday use to which the Tamil poems were put in order to create a climate of fitness and order and to keep immanent sacred forces under control.

            The idea of fitness that begins to be found in North India at the time of Christ and that characterizes medieval India so strongly conforms to the southern pattern, not to the Vedic one.  A woman must be chaste all of the time, not merely for important rituals²².  A widow must practice self-mortification for the rest of her life, not merely undergo a period of ritual mourning. One’s house and surroundings must be kept in a condition of fitness, free from pollution, all of the time.  One must perform virtually every important action, from waking and performing morning ablutions to going to sleep, in the proper, fit circumstances.  And with regard to artistic endeavour, every creation must conform to certain conventionalized standards.  Medieval Hindu art perpetuate ideals found in the earliest Tamil sources: that art is ultimately an expression of religions modality, that works of art must conform to certain detailed criteria so as to possess the fitness which really makes them works of art, and that the king’s sacred status means that he must support the arts (and that the worth and fitness of a king is judged to a significant extent by the works of art that he has fostered).  It is ironic that notions of fitness were carried to extremes in Sanskrit, ultimately a northern language, whose medieval literature became so convention-ridden as to be forbidding to most rasikas. The living languages of India, such as Tamil, while they did keep notions of fitness and conventions, were continually nourished by living folk traditions and so never became so convention-ridden as Sanskrit.— ibid. George L. Hart, The relation between Tamil and classical Sanskrit literature,  Pp. 19—57, in, pp.39-40

²² On the other hand, the Vedic ceremony of Varunaprakasa, at which the wife of the sacrifice must indicate the number of lovers that she has, shows how different the attitude of the Vedic culture was from the megalithic one described in the Tamil poems.—p. 40

…Below, I have indicated some of the ways in which some major works and genres of Tamil literature are indebted to Sanskrit, and some of the ways in which they are different. On the whole, I find it impossible not to be struck by the differences between Sanskrit and Tamil through their entire histories.— ibid.George L. Hart, The relation between Tamil and classical Sanskrit literature,  Pp. 19—57, in, p. 43

…The most noteworthy in my opinion are the ethical works, especially the Nalatiyar and the Tirukkural.  Without question, these works share some features with Sanskrit ethical works that are probably earlier—especially some of their general ideas on the nature of the state.  But they contain an earthiness combined with sophistication that is characteristic of early Tamil and foreign to Sanskrit.  Indeed, Sanskrit ethical poems are for the most part not great literature, unlike the best of their Tamil counterparts.  In the finest of the Tamil poems, each word is perfectly chosen and perfectly related to the others, and the figures are carefully selected, so that, in the words of the fifth verse of the Tiruvalluvamalai, (p.43)

            Like a drop on a tiny blade of grass,

            smaller in extent that a millet grain

            renecting the full measure of a towering palmyra,

            O lord of a rich land

            where pet birds sleep to songs of women pounding mortars,

            is the breadth of the clear kural verses of Valluvar. {Tiruvalluvamalai, with commentary by U.V.M. Kopalakrusnamacaryar, Madras, 1965, p. 3}.—ibid. George L. Hart, The relation between Tamil and classical Sanskrit literature,  Pp. 19—57, in, pp. 43-44

            In the Tirukkural, the approach to life is typically Tamil, even though some elements have been appropriated from the North.  Thus the work is arranged according to the Sanskrit trivarga of human concerns: dharma (aram), artha (porul), and kama (inpam)…..—ibid. George L. Hart, The relation between Tamil and classical Sanskrit literature,  Pp. 19—57, in, p. 44

               The words for “worship” in general found in medieval Tamil inscriptions seem to have been borrowed wholesale from Sanskrit—including arcana (IEP 80 and SII 14.17), and aratana, together with the related verb arat, Tamilized as tiru aratanai and arati (SII 6.448 and 6.356)—and appear beginning in the eighth century (pucai arrives a bit later).  But when the inscriptions describe the details of worship, the vocabulary is generally Tamil or profoundly Tamilized and in many cases dearts significantly from the Sanskrit usages found in Agamic literature.  For example, the standard term in the Agamas for food offerings—naivetya—is almost never encountered in the inscriptions, although the word for sacrificial oblations, havis, is adapted for use in the context of temple puja, becoming avil in Tamil…..—ibid. Leslie C. Orr , Tamil and Sanskrit in the medieval epigraphical context, Pp. 97-114, in, p. 109

…South Indian temple tower is almost always referred to in inscriptions as kopuram—that is, by the transliterated Sanskrit gopuram.  But the enclosing wall, another typical feature of the temple in the Tamil country, is invariably referred to by a Tamil term—malikai, beginning in the eighth century (SII 2.73) or tirucurralai from the ninth century onward (SII 3.91).  The word used to denote the temple’s inner sanctum, unnalikai, which appears in inscriptions as early as the eighth century (e.g. AD 759 SII 4.827), is a truly hybrid word, composed of Tamil ul (“inner”) together with Sanskrit nadika…..— ibid.Leslie C. Orr , Tamil and Sanskrit in the medieval epigraphical context, Pp. 97-114, in, p. 110

…In spite of all the differences in orthographic practices and conceiving of characters a strong influence from the north is unmistakable in the art of writing of the Tamil south.—ibid. M. R. Raghava Varier , From Sanskritization to nativization: the role of Sanskrit in the cultural formation of Kerala, Pp. 125-130, in, p. 127

…The frequent visits of these men to such outside women caused distress to their wives and their fear of losing their husbands and the wrath aroused by the infidelity of the men often led to unhappiness between husbands and wives.  The resentment shown by the wives towards their husbands when they tried to re-enter their houses early in the morning after spending the night in the company of the other women constitutes the theme of Marutam.  Hence Utal (amorous quarrel) became the dominant and characteristic love theme for the Marutam land….—ibid. R. Vijayalakshmy, The said and the unsaid….Therigatha and Manimekalai,  Pp. 133-144, in,  p. 133

…Unlike the later Saiva poets, Ammaiyar does not praise the Tamil land nor the Tamil language.  However, she uses numerous elements from the Tamil geographic and poetic landscapes to (p.171) localize the Sanskritic god Siva in the Tamil country, making him accessible to his Tamil devotees.—ibid. Elaine Craddock, Karaikkal Ammaiyar: bridging the Cankam and Saiva worlds, Pp.171-196, in, pp. 171-72

…In the eleventh century the Tirumurukaarruppatai was included in the Tamil Saivite canon; it is the only Cankam poem that is also part of a devotional corpus.—ibid. Elaine Craddock, Karaikkal Ammaiyar: bridging the Cankam and Saiva worlds, Pp.171-196, in, p. 177

…there is ample evidences of literary migrations from the north to the south, from as early as the fifth century B.C.— ibid.Tamil versions of the Mahabharata: a study of reception.  A. A. Manavalan. Pp. 313-332, in,  p. 313

…we have evidence to show that Pali and Prakrt were known to Tamil scholars even before they had any contacts with Sanskrit language proper.  As far as grammatical theories are concerned.  Tolkappiyar, does compare certain items of Tamil grammar with those of Sanskrit (102, 1038).  All these references allow us to conclude that northern literary texts were known to Tamil scholarship through translations even before the age of Tolkappiyam, i.e., prior to 4^th century B.C.—ibid. Tamil versions of the Mahabharata: a study of reception.  A. A. Manavalan. Pp. 313-332, in,  p. 314

Cankam Classics

As far as the Mahabharata is concerned, references are found in the earliest Tamil literary works, collectively called Cankamclassics, in the form of similies, metaphors and allusions to the characters, episodes and incidents of the story.

1. The second poem in Purananuru, an anthology of 400 heroic lyrics, hails a Cera king, Peruncorru utiyan ceralatan as the one who provided food for both the parties in the Mahabharata war. {Puram 2: 13-16}
2. Cirupanarruppatai, (II. 238-241) one of the ten idylls of the Cankam period refers to a treatise on culinary art authored by Bhimasena, the elder brother of Arjuna who consigned the Khandava forest to the flames.  This is perhaps a reference to Bhimasena being employed as a chef in the palace of the King of Virata during the Pandavas sojourn incognito in Viratadesa.
3. Perumpanarruppatai (II. 414-417) another longer poem hails king Tontaiman Ilantiraiyan for his victory over his enemies, such as the Panca Pandavas who won the war after defeating and destroying all the twice fifty (one hundred) warriors (Kauravas. (p.314)
4. Kalittokai, another anthology of Cankam poems, has several references to Mahabharata war   and characters. {Poem 25:1-11; 52:1-4; 101:16-20.

It is to be noted that in all these references the characters of Mahabharata are not referred to by their names, but by their specific exploits in the action of the epic.  Again, these exploits are not depicted directly, but used as similies and always as the vehicle of the simile….(p.315) It is therefore clear that the story of Mahabharata, its theme and characters were all assimilated into the social psyche of the Tamils long before these poems were composed.  As such the resultant impact of the epic on Tamil society had already become part of its cultural and literary ethos during the period of Cankam age.

               An interesting absence may be noted here.  We do not find any reference in these poems to either Krsna or the Bhagavad Gita.  Even though Krsna and Balarama are repeatedly referred to in Kalittokai and Paripatal, their childhood exploits only are described in these poems, thus drawing on Bhagavatam, as their source rather than on the Mahabharata.—ibid. Tamil versions of the Mahabharata: a study of reception.  A. A. Manavalan. Pp. 313-332, in,  pp.314-16

Earliest Tamil epics

Reference to Mahabharata characters, incidents etc., are found in Tamil epic poetry too from 3^rd century A.D. to 10^th century A.D. {Cilappatikaram, Manimekalai, } (p.317)

               It may be noted here that these two later epics mention the names of the Pandavas and the Kauravas as found in the Mahabharata, unlike the earlier Tamil texts which refer to them by their exploits.  This change of trend is noteworthy because around this time, say from 6^th century A.D. onwards, the Tamils might have had direct contact with the original Sanskrit texts or with formal translations of the Mahabharata into Tamil.

               Another interesting point that emerges from the analysis of the above data is that even though the mentioned Tamil epics or their authors belong to different religions, non-Vedic as it were, they employ stories, incidents and characters drawn from Mahabharata. The Itihasa with its import and morality had already attracted Tamil society and had by that time been seamlessly grafted into its social and literary psyche and therefore these epics made use of these elements liberally to enunciate their truths among the Tamils.—ibid. Tamil versions of the Mahabharata: a study of reception.  A. A. Manavalan. Pp. 313-332, in, pp. 316 &318

..the second Peruntevanar is called Bharata Venap, said to have been composed between 850-859 A.D. under the patronage of Nandivarman III of the Pallava dynasty better known as the victor of a war at Tellaru against the Pandya king, Srivallaban.

               This Bharata Venpa is the first available Bharatam in Tamil and this work is not available in full.  The available work contains 830 venpa verses, beginning with Udyoga Parva and ending with the 13^th day battle in Drona Parva.  Thus only the middle portion of the work has come down to us…..

…Many of the following additions of alterations or innovations as the case may be were made in the light of the above cultural atmosphere of the ‘receiver’:

1. Durvasa gives five mantras to Kunti (poem 220,prose), though according to Vyasa Durvasa gave her only one mantra. (p.319)
2. The child Karna is laid in a box by Kunti before being cast into the river (poem 222).
3. It is Krsna who tells Karna about the circumstances of his birth. (220)
4. Asvattama becomes a suspect in the eyes of Duryodhana due to a trick by Krsna and this incident is not mentioned by Vyasa.
5. Peruntevanar introduces the Sweta episode (14-18) not found in Vyasa.
6. In Vyasa, Vidura is known as a minister of high ethical caliber and is not presented anywhere in Vyasa as a warrior and a bowman  Peruntevanar introduces in a change in this character who is said to have broken his bow as a protest against Duryodhana’s irreverent behavior towards him (106).
7. The valiant Sahadeva is converted into an evolved man of high wisdom by Peruntevanar.  Krsna blesses him with his Visvarupa (131, 132).
8. Peruntevanar’s Krsna-Karna episode is different from that of Vyasa.
9. In Vyasa, Kunti goes to Karna on her own; in Peruntevanar Kunti goes to the palace of Karna as directed by Krsna.
10. Krsna commissions Indra to rob Karna of his kavaca and kundala (276, 283).  In Vyasa Indra goes to Karna of his own accord.
11. Karna plays a game of dice with Duryodhana’s queen Laksanai (Bhanumati): “One day Karna was playing a game of dice with the queen.  She lost the game.  When she was about to go without paying the stake, Karna caught hold of her sari. The bracelet (mekhala) of the queen gave way and the precious diamonds in large numbers fell helter shelter.  Just as this happened, king Duryodhana entered the chamber.  Karna was stunned.  Duryodhana said smiling, “Shall I pick up the diamonds?”  Should Karna desert such a friend?  “No, he would happily die in the service of such a great king” as Karna said to his mother Kunti (315-320).
12. In Peruntevanar, there is a vivid description of pre war human sacrifice; Aravan, son of Ulupi, Arjuna’s wife, is sacrificed in the battlefield.  This entire episode drawn from folklore and designed to celebrate the eminence of Krsna (Vasudeva0 is an innovation of Peruntevanar.

Peruntevanar calls Duryodhana, as “aravuyartton” meaning ‘serpent banned’.  Vyasa’s work clearly tells us that Duryodhana had an elephant as the emblem on his banner (Drona parva 125-126)….—ibid. Tamil versions of the Mahabharata: a study of reception.  A. A. Manavalan. Pp. 313-332, in, pp. 319-20

…The Vaisnava tradition in Tamil Nadu does not, normally, evince any interest in celebrating the final stages of the lives of the great.  This applies to the Tamil versions of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and Bhagavata.  Wherever we meet Tamil translations of the later portions of these great works, they might have been either by poets of inferior talent or by non-Vaisnava poets.— ibid. Tamil versions of the Mahabharata: a study of reception.  A. A. Manavalan. Pp. 313-332, in,  p. 322

               Villi Bharatam differs from its original in numerous ways and this aspect alone deserves a separate study.  Apart from the additions and innovations first made by Peruntevanar and later incorporated by Villi, the latter has also made several qualitative changes to suit the cultural climate of his times.  A noteworthy addition may be mentioned here: while keeping silent over the references in Cankam and post-Cankam works regarding the munificient gesture of a Cera king in providing food for both the armies of the war, Villi Bharatam introduces all the three Tamil kings as participating in the war in support of the Pandavas (17^th day battle, poems 107-118, 120-134).  Again, he says that the Bharata warriors used to wear garlands of Vetci, Vanci, Tumpai and so on while in different stages of the war, a poetic convention of totemic significance prescribed by Tolkappiyar in his third book, (p.322) chapter two. This is an instance of cultural grafting, usually followed by the receiving culture.  Villi Bharatam abounds in such instances.

               Another interesting aspect of this Tamil version is its treatment of the message of Bhagavad Gita in an extremely summarized form.  While its earlier version Bharata Venap spends just three verses (475-477) on it, Villi Bharatam sums up the message in six verses (29:2-7).  Even a later version Nallappillai Bharatam, an elaborate composition in 14000 verses, expends just 50 verses on Bhagavad Gita.  If such summarized treatment is any indication, we may say that the Tamil versions are more interested in the ethical and aesthetic aspect of the story rather than in the philosophic exposition of the Gita.—ibid. Tamil versions of the Mahabharata: a study of reception.  A. A. Manavalan. Pp. 313-332, in,  pp. 322-23

               Consequent upon the Bhakti cult, and the concomitant emergence of doctrinaire writings, Tamil Nadu entered, during and after 14^th and 15^th centuries, into an era of pravacanas, or religious discourses catering to the social and quasi-spiritual needs of Tamil society and of the whole of South India.  It was in such a juncture that Villi Bharatam was useful to the Pravacanakartas and even to secular scholars, in taking the story of Mahabharata to the lowest of the low and to the remote villages….—ibid. Tamil versions of the Mahabharata: a study of reception.  A. A. Manavalan. Pp. 313-332, in,  p. 323

The relationship between Tamil and Sanskrit is critical to the status enjoyed by either historically in Tamil society.  In the modern period at least, this relationship has been viewed as inevitably conflictual – for several historical and discursive reasons this conflict was displaced into other realms as well.  Sanskrit thus came to stand for an Aryan civilization, whereas Tamil appeared to mark off the distinctive nature of society and culture in the south-eastern corner of the Indian subcontinent.  Further, Sanskrit appeared a disingenuous language that obscured more than it revealed, while Tamil, being more demotic, appeared a language that could easily lend itself to rational and transparent discourse.  Sanskrit was clearly the provenance of the Brahmins, and Tamil, of everyone else.  Sanskrit therefore was a sign of difference and served to define social and in some instances, as when Brahmins received land gifts, economic exclusivity.  In this sense, Sanskrit was clearly a direct and embodied agent of Brahmin hegemony.  Tamil, on the other hand, was considered a valiant, distinctive ‘native’ language that had managed to hold its own against its classical antagonist.

               These views were articulated by a range of persons: antiquarians, linguists.  Tamil scholars, Brahmin pundits, popular publicists, an evolving historical community, political personalities, both of the Indian National Congress and the Non-brahmin Justice party and Ramasami Periyar’s Self-Respect movement.  Today, they appear neither novel nor startling, existing as they do as the very staple of what we might call a Tamil commonsense.  This means too, that they are seldom interrogated in a public context, whatever the nature of the debate in academic and scholarly circles.—ibid.  Tamil, Sanskrit and an Other: reworking the Sanskrit-Tamil dyad.  V. Geetha.  Pp. 359-365, in  p. 359

     தமிழ் இலக்கிய மரபுக்கும், சமஸ்கிருத பிராகிருத மரபுக்கும் வேறுபாடுகள் உண்டெனக் கூறியுள்ளேன். அதில் தமிழ் இலக்கியத்தில் தலைவன், தலைவி, தோழன், தோழி, பரத்தை முதலியவர்கள் கூற்றுகளாகக் கவிதைகள் உள்ளன. ஒரு பெண் தன்கணவனைத் தவிரப் பிற ஆடவரை நாடுவதாக ஒரு பாடல்கூடத் தமிழில் காண இயலாது. ஆனால் வடமொழி இலக்கியமரபில் பெண்டிர் ஸ்வசீய, பரகீய, சாமான்யா என மூன்று வகையாகப் பிரிக்கப்பட்டவருள் பரகீய வகைப் பெண்டிர் கணவனிருக்க மற்றோர் ஆடவனுடனும் தொடர்பு கொள்வக்தைக் காட்டும் பாடலகள் காதாசப்த சதியிலுள்ளன. இலக்கணகாரரும் அவ்வகைப் பென்டிரைப் பற்றிக் கூறுவர். தமிழில் மட்டும் இவ்வகைப் பெண்டிர் பற்றி ஒரு பாடலுமில்லை. இது தமிழ் இலக்கிய மரபின் தனிப்பான்மையாகும்.—வடமொழி-தென்மொழி –ibid. ஒரு ஆய்வு நோக்கு. மு.கு.ஜகந்நாதராஜா. ப. 367-372, in ப. 370

…ஒன்பதாம்நூற்றாண்டைச் சேர்ந்த சேரமான் பெருமாள் தாம் இயற்றிய பொன்வண்ணத்தந்தாதியில் காதா சப்தசதி 2.53 ஆம் காதையை 58ஆம் பாடலில் தமிழாக்கி யமைத்துள்ளார். சங்ககாலத்து ஒளவையார் பாடலான புறநானூற்று 187 ஆம் பாடல்

’நாடாகொன்றோ, காடாகொன்றோ

அவலாகொன்றோ, மிசையாகொன்றோ

எவ்வழி நல்லவர் ஆடவர்,

அவ்வழி நல்லை வாழிய நிலனே’ என்பது

இபாடல் புத்தரின் உபதேசங்களாகிய தம்மபதத்தின் அரஹந்த வர்க்கத்தில் உள்ள 9ஆம் பாடலாகிய (தம்மபதம் 98)

’காமே வாயதி வாரஞ்ஞே

நின்னே வாயதி வாதலே

யத் தாரஹந்தோ ஹிஹரந்தி

தங் பூமிங் ராமணேய்யகங்’

என்றதன் நேரடி மொழியாக்கமாகவே புலப்படுகிறது. இது குறித்து ஆங்கலத்தில் தெ. பொ. மீ அவர்கள் குறிப்பிட்டுள்ளார்கள். அந்த ஆங்கிலக் கடுரையை நான் பார்க்கவில்லை. நான் தம்மபதம் படிக்கும்போது எனக்குப் புலப்பட்டது. நான் தமிழில் கட்டுரையாக வெளியிட்டுளேன். இது சங்ககால அவ்வையார் தம்மபதம் கற்றிருந்தார் என்பதைப் புலப்படுத்துகிறது….—ibid.  வடமொழி-தென்மொழி — ஒரு ஆய்வு நோக்கு. மு.கு.ஜகந்நாதராஜா. ப. 367-372, in ப. 371

Peterson:

…the Tevaram hymns reflected many features of Tamil culture, and differed in many respects from the authoritative sacred texts of the Great Tradition, composed in Sanskrit, the classical language of the brahminical civilization.  At the same time, they provided a powerful new synthesis of the values of brahmanical Hinduism and those of the indigenous Tamil civilization, affirming, celebrating, and transforming both traditions.— Indira Viswanathan Peterson, Poems to Siva.  Hymns of the Tamil Saints, Delhni, MOtilal Banarsidass Publishers Pvt. Ltd. (Reprint:2007), First Indian Edition: Delhi, 1991.p. 5

Israel:

               Many prefer the Sanskrit-based terms of the Union Version because they believe that it is the Sanskrit that adds a sacred quality to the language register of the Tamil Bible. Most, preferring a special language register for the Bible that can be differentiated from the secular language registers of the public domain that they use in nonsacred contexts, have embraced the Sanskritized Tamil of the Union Version…. “this kind of Sanskritized Christian language became an explicit socio-religious marker that is often considered to be part of the Tamil Christian identity.” {Bergunder, 2002:230}.

…attempts to construct a new liturgical language register have not enjoyed wide popularity across all Protestant denominations but are perceived as “experiments” rather than a real alternative.— Hephzibah Israel, Religious Transactions in colonial South India: Language, Translation, and the Making of Protestant Identity, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. p. 155

…However, reasons behind the unpopularity of Tamil Bible translations using “pure Tamil” terminology can also be traced to some failings inherent in the Pure Tamil Movement.  As Bergunder (Michael. “The ‘Pure Tamil Movement’ and Bible Translation: The Ecumenical Thiruvivilium of 1995”. Christians, Cultural Interactions, and India’s Religious Traditions.  Ed. Judith M. Brown and Robert Eric Frykenberg.  London: RoutledgeCurzon. 2002) points out, there were linguistic shortcomings in the Pure Tamil project.  Since Tamil classical literature was their preferred model, proponents of the Movement often introduced strange archaisms into modern Tamil.  Besides, the leaders of the movement failed to adequately take into account the problem of diglossia and different levels of language but unreflectively propagated the idea that “pure” Tamil was always “good” Tamil.  The Movement concentrated mainly on erasing Sanskrit terms from Tamil and did not pay sufficient attention to other aspects of the language such as developing (p. 161) appropriate grammatical rules for a modern Tamil prose style (217)….though there may have been points of consensus, an entirely homogenous notion of what “pure” Tamil is has not developed even among supporters of tanittamil.—ibid. pp. 161-62

Vaithees:

               It was this unique sense of Tamil culture and identity that non-Brahmin Saiva Siddhanta revivalists of the late nineteenth century wanted to resurrect with the help of missionary Orientalism to counter the rising Aryan-Brahmin hegemony in both the religio-cultural and social spheres. Inspired by the Dravidian ideology of the missionaries, many non-Brahmin Saiva Siddhanta revivalists claimed the Saiva Siddhanta tradition as a unique product of Dravidian civilization and denied the role that Brahmins and Sanskrit culture had played in its evolution. In the process, they were clearly disrupting not only an earlier vision and practice of a less ‘racially’ or caste-bound/defined Saiva Siddhanta tradition but also a Tamil tradition.— V. Ravi Vaithees, Religion, Caste, and Nation in South India: Maraimalai Adigal, the Neo-Saivite Movement, and Tamil Nationalism 1876-1950,  New Delhi, Oxford University Press,  2015, p. 16

               Three imperatives appear to have inspired and animated Adigal’s more mature vision of caste, gender, and race in Tamil society. First and foremost, Adigal’s writings on caste appear to have been primarily impelled by the need to forge a united Tamil caste bloc that would challenge what he believed to be the continuing hegemony of the hierarchical and divisive Aryan-Brahmin system imposed on Tamil society and legitimized through religion and myths found in the Sanskrit texts. Second, Adgal’s own vision of caste, race, and gender appears to have been influenced by the need to ensure that it was consistent with that of the more enlightened and scientific vision of society propagated by the progressive European thinkers of his day as well as that espoused by the more progressive and radical mystical figures of the Tamil-Saivite and Siddha tradition. Third, Adigal’s vision appears to have been guided, as well as constrained, by his own recourse to and reliance on Tamil, and particularly ancient Tamil, sources, to fashion his vision of caste, gender, and race.   Thus, the chapter {four} argues that though Adigal offered a complex and sometimes ambivalent vision of caste, race, and gender (p.18) in Tamil and Indian society, he was primarily impelled by the desire to counter what he felt to be the deeply divisive and hierarchical caste and gender practices in Tamil and Indian society….—ibid. pp. 18-19

…It was the anti-Aryann, anti-Sanskrit, and anti-Vedantic imperatives and spirit of the neo-Saivite movement—forged in the context of the rising tide of neo-Vedantic and Vaishnavite revivalist currents as well as the ‘official’ Orientalist discourse privileging the Aryan and the Sanskritic—that came to inform and animate the neo-Saivite readings of the Tamil Dravidian past and indeed the articulation of neo-Saivism as a form of non-Brahmin Tamil Dravidian identity and nationalism.—ibid. p. 28

…{Rev. Caldwel} credited ‘the Jainas of the old Pandiya country’ with ‘a national and anti-Brahminical feeling of peculiar strength; and it is chiefly to them that Tamil is indebted for its higher culture and its comparative independence from Sanskrit’s (Caldwell, Robert. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages.  London: Harrison, 1856, 84)….—ibid. p. 31

…Pope thus attributed the Kurral’s broad appeal to all Tamils, as well as its affinity to the ethical teachings of Christianity, to its absence of caste ideology.  With the same kind of logic, Pope proposed a nationalistic mandate for Tamils:

The Tamil race preserves many of its old virtues, and has the promise of a noble future.  Their English friends, in teaching them all that the West has to impart, will find little to unteach in the moral lessons of the Kurral rightly understood….So far, then, we may call this Tamil poet Christian. (Pope. G. U. The ‘Sacred’ Kural of Tiruvalluva-Nayanar: With Introduction, Grammar, Translation, Notes, Lexicon, and Concordance.  London: W.H. Allen & Co.  1886, xxi)

For Pope, the friends of the Tamils were the English and it was the task of these English friends to guide the ‘Tamil race’:

To understand [the] Tamil, to free him from mistaken glosses, to teach his works, to correct their teaching where it is misleading, and to supplement where it is defective, would seem to be the duty of all who are friends of the race that glories in the possession of this poetical masterpiece (Pope G. U. The ‘Sacred’ Kural of Tiruvalluva-Nayanar: With Introduction, Grammar, Translation, Notes, Lexicon, and Concordance.  London: W.H. Allen & Co. 1886, xxi).

               Pope called on the English to support Dravidian civilization for what he regarded as its Christian elements and its difference from Brahminical ideology. As he wrote in the introduction to the Kural: ‘The truth seems to be that the Madura school of Tamil literature, now too full of Sanskrit (p.34) influences, was supreme till the advent of the St. Thome poet’ (Pope 1886, iv).  Sanskrit culture is thus the ‘other’ of Tamil literature, and Christianity is its ally….—ibid. pp.34-5

…{p.} Sundaram Pillai observes:

By the Saiva community, I mean the Hindus that regard Siva as the head of the Hindu trinity. Saivas, in this sense, form the bulk of the population … in short, wherever Tamil is the prevailing tongue … For all the Saivas, and particularly for the non-Brahmanical Tamil Saivas, Tirujnanasambhandha is the highest authority…. The Tamil Saivas have their own system of sacred literature, compiled and arranged so as to match the Vedas, Puranas, and Sastas in Sanskrit. (Sundaram Pillai, ‘Some Milestones in the History of Tamil Literature or the Age of Tirujnana-Sambhanda’.  The Tamilian  Antiquary (New DelhI; Asian Educational Services) 1, no. 3[1909] 1986, 1-2).

Thus, Sundaram Pillai is here clearly intent on not only conflating Saivism with the Tamil-speaking people but also in positioning it in (p.52) opposition to the Sanskritic Vedic and Puranic tradition….—ibid. pp. 52-53

Though in hindsight Adigal’s stubborn attempt at writing in pure Tamil may seem like a rather arcane obsession, it had great resonance during the 1920s and 1930s. The increasing need for new technical and philosophical terms that were coming into circulation at the time necessitated finding suitable words in the Tamil language leading to controversies and debates over how such words were to be coined.  The question of whether they should be derived from Sanskrit words already in circulation or whether attempts should be made to find (p.128) appropriate root words in Tamil led to great debates and controversies.  Adigal, of course, argued that attempts be made to find appropriate words that may already exist in Tamil rather than to look to Sanskrit or English—a stance that can be seen as an essential outcome of his quest for pure Tamil.—ibid. pp. 128-29

…The nineteenth century, as we know, was witness to an emerging colonially mediated public sphere and print culture that was clearly pan-Indian in its scope and reach. In the debates and discussions that took place in the English-language media regarding the majority religious tradition, a newly constituted pan-Indian Brahminical Hinduism that had been imagined with the aid of European Orientalist researches was assumed as the normative Hindu tradition and practice all over India with less attention paid to regional forms or distinctions. If there was some recognition of the unique place of Saivism and Saiva Siddhanta in the Tamil region, it was assumed to be a minor variant of the pan-Indian Brahminical Hinduism centred on Sanskrit and the Vedas. Although a similar discourse of the centrality of Brahminical Hinduism was in the ascendant in the emerging Tamil vernacular print culture, there was by mind-century a much more spirited resistance to this ascendancy and hegemony in the Tamil vernacular print culture and public sphere.—ibid. p. 176

…Adigal argued that that if not for the act of alien northern/Sanskritic influences the Tamils would constitute the entire population of India ‘from its southern tip in Kanyakumari to the Himalayas….{ Adigal, Maraimalai, Mutkala Pitkalath Tamil Pulovor, Madras: The South India Saiva Siddhanta Publishing Works Ltd. {[1936] 1957, 26-8}….—ibid. p. 242

…In this intermediate era, despite the gradual incursion of the northern religio-cultural and linguistic impact, great Tamil works were still composed that attempted to be faithful to the ancient Tamil grammatical rules and poetics.  Here he takes pains to explain that even though some poets used a great many northern Sanskritic conventions in their writings, these have to be considered more as ways that Tamil poets sought to teach the Aryan scholars rather than as representing a concession to their customs or traditions. Some of the great works in this period included the dramatic work Silapathikaram and Saivite Bhakti literature…. { Adigal, Maraimalai, Mutkala Pitkalath Tamil Pulovor, Madras: The South India Saiva Siddhanta Publishing Works Ltd. [1936] 1957, 111-13}—ibid. p. 243

Ranjeeta:

… The hymns {Periya Tirumatal, of Tirumangai Alvar} also enhanced Tamil by claiming that it encapsulated the essence of the otherwise inaccessible liturgical schema of the Vedas. Thus, through Vaisnava efforts a prominent regional language was exalted in its own right, as well as equated with Sanskrit, the language of scriptures. It should be noted that the ideas of a sacred geography, community singing, and Tamil as a sacred language were also articulated in the Saiva hymns composed around the same time.— Ranjeeta Dutta, From Hagiographies to Biographies: Ramanuja in Tradition and History, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 56

M. Smith:

…It is generally agreed that Tamil devotionalism exerted critical influence on the Sanskrit texts, helping to establish both the fundamental patterns of devotional practice and the emotional or evocational parameters of the devotional constitution ….— Frederick M. Smith, Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asia, Delhi, MOtilal Banarsidass Pub. Pvt. Ltd. (2006) First Indian edition, 2009,p. 439

Subbarayalau:

7

…The script called Grantha was used from the fourth century onwards to write the Sanskrit inscriptions or Sanskrit passages found in Tamil inscriptions. It is now understood clearly that the Vatteluttu script emerged from the Tamil-Brahmi script and the Tamil and Grantha scripts emerged from the Southern Brahmi script….— Y. Subbarayalau, South India Under The Cholas, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, (2012) Second edition 2013, p. 19

Shulman:

…to my ears Tamil, both in everyday speech and in contexts of formal recitation, is always a delicious, bewitching, incantational music, unlike any other that I have heard.— David Shulman, Tamil: A Biography, London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2016, p. 1

…Among the south Asian languages, Tamil is perhaps the only case of a very ancient language that still survives as a vibrant mother-tongue for tens of millions of speakers.—ibid. p. 2

            In fact, “Tamil” as a body of knowledge has a still wider application, so that “to know Tami” can also mean “to be a civilized being.”  We could say that “Tamil” in this sense is a kind of grammar, not (p.2) merely of the language in its spoken and written forms but of the ways of life that have been created and lived out by its speakers.—ibid. pp. 2-3

…Nor was Tamil ever the sole or, for that matter, even the clearly predominant language of the south Indian civilization that I’m referring to. It shared pride of place with other languages such as Sanskrit, the various Prakrits, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. I will thus refrain, in this book, from speaking about a “Tamil civilization,” which seems to me a modern, nationalist construction bearing little relation to any historical reality….—ibid. p. 3

            Does the word tamil have an accepted etymology?  Do we know what it originally meant?  Unfortunately, the answer is no. The medieval lexicons, such as the Pinkala nikantu (10:580), say tamil means “sweetness” (inimai) and also “coolness” or, literally, Waterness” (nirmai), ….Kamil Zvelebil, after an exhaustive discussion of the problem, suggests an etymology from the root taku, “to be fit or proper”  (medial k being  capable of elision or of shifting to m, and –il, being seen as a nominalising ending).  Thus tamil would mean “the excellent [resounding] process,”
the proper [process of] speaking.” {Zvelebil , Kamil.  Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature.  Leidend. The Netherlands: Brill. 1992: ix-xvii.}  I find this far-fetched, but no less so than other suggestions, for example S. V. Subrahmanian’s, deriving the word from the reflexive pronoun tam: thus “our own (sweet sound).”  The (p.4) Tamil Lexicon suggests that the name goes back to tami, “solitude,” “loneliness” – so this would be a rare case of a language calling itself lonely or, perhaps, singular.—ibid. pp. 4-5 [no reference is given for Subrahmanian—db]

…Classical Sanskrit uses dravida both to refer to Tamil speakers specifically and, at times, to indicate south Indians generally: in the royal palace at Ujjayini in central India, in the mid-first millennium A.D., lightly armed servants were mostly men identified by their home region as “Andhar, Dravida, and Sinhala” (the Dravidas presumably speaking Tamil); {Kadambari of Bana (seventh century): 194} the great prose writer and poetician Dandin (seventh century), himself a Tamilian, tells a story located dravidesu—in the Tamil country;{Dasa-kumara-carita 11.}  and the topos of the “Dravida ascetic” (dravida–dharmika) became something of a cliché in Sanskrit narratives.{Kadambari of Bana: 224; Harsa–carita of Bana: 76}—ibid. p. 5

…Once again, such words, which look and sound a lot like their Sanskrit originals, are entirely Tamil, just as no one would think to declare words like “fraternity” or “equality” un-English, despite their Latin derivation.—ibid. p. 14

…In modern south India, Tamil has become a major criterion for collective identity, often seen now as forged in opposition to Sanskrit and an invasive north Indian culture and ideology….—ibid. p. 15

…But I have to mention, at least in passing, the Dravidian, probably early Tamil, loan words in the Hebrew Bible…and tukkiyim, always translated today as “parrots,” as in modern Hebrew tukki, but originally taken from Tamil tokai, the male peacock’s tail, thus metonymically signifying peacocks.  One can, I suppose, imagine ancient Israelite mariners pointing to the splendid tail feathers and asking their Tamil-speaking colleagues what name it had…

Tokai, is not, however, the only Dravidian-based word in the Bible.  We have ahalim, “eagle-wood,” probably derived directly from Tamil akil rather than from the Sanskrit aguru, itself a loan from the Tamil (Numbers 24.8; Proverbs 7.17; Song of Songs 4.14; Psalms 45.9—the latter two instances with the feminine plural form ahalot).  Akil, is, we think, native to south India, and it is thus not surprising that the word was borrowed by cultures that imported this aromatic plant. Karkom, turmeric, curcuma (Song of Songs 4.4) is probably derived from Tamil kukai, Sanskrit kunkuma.  Hebrew armon, “palace,” may be related to Tamil aranmanai, with the same meaning, though again this etymology is only one of several possible ones. The post-biblical He brew word for (p.20) rice, orez—like the words for rice we know from European languages, including Greek oryzon—is probably from Tamil arici, “unhusked rice,” itself perhaps from a Munda source….—ibid. pp. 20-21

            The term dravida–sanghata, the “Tamil collection,” that is, the Sangam poems, appears in Sanskrit commentaries on Dandin’s Kavyadarsa (1.13: Vadijanghala and Tarunavacaspati);….

In short, by the last centuries of the first millennium the image of an ancient community of scholars and poets engaged in a shared literary enterprise, or of several such communities organized sequentially, attached itself to the Tamil cultural tradition seen both from within and from without….—ibid. p. 29

…The Pallavas are mentioned (as Tontaiyor, the Tamil equivalent of the Sanskrit name) in one of the Ten Long Poems but not, it seems, in the anthologies; this striking silence about a major polity has often been taken to mean that the early Sangam poems must predate the existence of the Pallava kingdom. Arguments from silence are, however, usually weak and often wrong.—ibid. p. 84

…Pallava-period inscriptions are primarily in Sanskrit but also reveal strong Tamil elements, including Tamil verse forms and biruda royal titles—so that we can definitely speak, by this period, of “political Tamil” (that is, royal panegyric), a relatively early form of what Sheldon Pollock has called vernacularization, involving local inflection of the Sanskrit cosmopolotian models. Perhaps this is not the best way to state the matter. Pallava and Pandya political Tamil was largely standardized, universalized, and at the same time an integral variant of pan-Indian political discourse; thus “the Pallavas played a decisive role in making the Tamil country part of the Sanskrit cosmopolis.”¹¹⁷  Were it not to reinstate the false dichotomy, I would be tempted to say that Pallava and Pandya patronage of Tamil poets and scribes played a decisive role in making the emergent Sanskrit cosmopolis an organic part of evolving cosmopolitan (p.105) Tamil.¹¹⁸….—ibid. pp. 105-06

117 Francis, Emmanuel. “Praising the King in Tamil during the Pallava Period.” In Whitney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani, eds., Bilingual Discourse and Cross Cultural Fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in Medieval India, 359-409. Pondichery: Institut Francais de Pondichery.

118. ibid. 396

            It is, I think, telling that Dandin, a native Tamil speaker, chose to compose his work on poetics in Sanskrit, the cosmopolitan language accessible to scholars throughout India and beyond—and indeed, the Kavyadarsa became one of India’s bestsellers, known throughout Asia and eventually translated/adapted into Tamil (Tantiyalankaram, possibly twelfth century), Tibetan, and other languages….—ibid. p. 144

…As Pollock himself notes, Tamil occupies a somewhat exotic position in relation to the India-wide movement toward the formation of vernacular literatures at the end of the first millennium A.D. and in the early centuries of the second. {Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Pre-Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.  2006}  The Tamil claim to venerable antiquity and the staggering richness of its first-millennium sources, along with the early, deep-rooted grammaticalization of the literary tradition, suggest that the creation of a strong regional culture self-consciously rooted in Tamil speech preceded by some centuries, at least, the wave of vernacularization that swept over other parts of south India….—ibid. p. 186

…But imperial Tamil, in the senses I have tried to define, is an achievement that cuts across sectarian, social, political, and geographical borders without suppressing the tensions among rival elites. A new, rather inclusive cultural ecosystem has come into being.  Tamil has become a world language.

            Look again at the newly emergent literary canons, especially those linked to both Buddhist and Jain literati. If we read the commentators, such as the Jain Kunacakarar on the textbook of metrics, Yapp’arunkala-karikai, or the Jain author of the Virutti on Yapp’arunkalam, or the Buddhist Peruntevanar on Viracoliyam, we see a shared pattern of wide-ranging citation from sources used to exemplify the rules of the parent text.  These commentaries have been deeply studied by Anne Monius and Jennifer Steele Clare; both note the unusual scope of the exemplary verses, which are extracted not only from the hard-core classics of Sangam-period Tamil but also from the Eighteen Minor Works (most of them on the margins of the conventional canon), Sanskrit or Sanskrit-derived texts such as Dandin’s poetics, sectarian narrative poems such as the (lost) Buddhist Kuntalakeci, the Jain Culamani and the Civaka–cintamani,  moralistic or pragmatic how-to-live poetry from books such as Tirukkural and Nalatiyar, rare Saiva texts, the Sanskrit epics or Tamil versions of them, and other texts of greater or lesser obscurity in the eyes of the mainstream tradition.  Peruntevanar himself also cites Amitacakarar, the author of the Yapp’arunkalam and the Yapp’arunkalakarikai, as well as the Virutti commentary on the former work.  Sectarian authors seem to be aware of one another and to have a similar capacious library at their disposal.—ibid. pp. 186-87

            Historically, Tamil was spoken and written inn Kerala alongside Sanskrit and early forms of Malayalam. The two languages, Tamil and Malayalam, must have separated by the mid-first millennium, but they remained very close in many ways (one might wonder when they stopped being mutually intelligible); Tamil literature flourished in Kerala from the beginning—whenever that was—and was always a prestigious component of Kerala culture. What is more, despite the increasing distance between the two linguistic traditions, speakers of proto-Malayalam thought of themselves as speaking Tamil, or a kind of Tamil, well into late-medieval or possibly even early-modern times.  On the other hand, Lila–tilakam {anonymous grammar from Kerala known as Lila–tilakam (LT) (datable, roughly, to sometime between the late fourteenth and sixteenth centuries)}, the first grammar to address the complex linguistic situation in Kerala, invests considerable effort in differentiating this Kerala “Tamil” from the language spoken in the nearby Chola and Pandya countries.  All this points to an unusual cultural configuration in which bhasa, the spoken language of Kerala, whatever one might have called it, functioned as a mother tongue alongside two highly prestigious and authoritative “father tongues”—Sanskrit and Tamil….—ibid. p. 224

…Tamil Buddhist grammar …Viracoliyam, as we saw, adopts Sanskritic norms in order to provide a basis for the transregional cosmopolitan claims of Tamil….—ibid. p. 230

…We have a large-scale poetic work by Visvanatha Suri, from the late-eighteenth century and the village of Kalamur in northern Tamil Nadu (North Arcot Distirct), which bears the name Virata-parva-mani-pravala-manjari,that is, a Mani-pravalam (p.231) retelling of the Virata–parvan from the Sanskrit epic.  Here we find in every verse fully inflected chunks of Sanskrit—with Sanskrit endings—along with lyrical Tamil (but without Tamil-derived denominative verbs in Sanskrit, one particular features of the LT {{anonymous grammar from Kerala known as Lila–tilakam (datable, roughly, to sometime between the late fourteenth and sixteenth centuries)} as we have seen). For example:

tenutan tava dadaami paayasam

kuurutan kim api khandasarkaraam/

vaa netum polutu kim viliiyase

naan etam tarukiren tavasitum (2.114)

[தேனுடன் தவ ததாமி பாயசம்

கூறுடன் கிம் அபி கண்டசர்க்கரம்

வா நெடும் பொழுது கிம் விலியசே

நான் இடம் தருகிறேன் தவசித்தும்]

I’ll give you milk [paayasam] with honey

And some chunks of sugarcane.

Why do you keep hiding from me, for so long?

Come sit with me: I’ll make room

…As a  verse, there’s nothing very exciting here; its charm lies precisely in the way the Tamil   Sanskrit flow easily and naturally together….—ibid. pp. 231-32

            One stylistic feature, however, needs to be noted; the author{ Visvanatha Suri, from the late-eighteenth century and the village of Kalamur in northern Tamil Nadu (North Arcot Distirct), which bears the name Virata-parva-mani-pravala-manjari,}  articulates it himself in one of the introductory verses to his poem:

muttukkalaalum iva anal pavalankalaalum

kottuk kalanta tamilaal api samskrtena/

ettikkilum bhavatu haara-lateva baddhaa

puttiku’ mat-krtir iyam sudrsam vibhuusaa// (1.11)

[முத்துக்களாலும் இவ நல் பவளங்களாலும்

கோத்துக் கலந்த தமிழால் அபி சம்ஸ்க்ருதேன

எட்டுத்திக்கிலும் பவது ஹார–லதேவ பத்தா

புத்திக்கு மத்–க்ருதிர் இயம் சுத்ர்சம் விபூ ஸா

A fine necklace strung with coral and pearls,

in Tamil and also in Sanskrit,

such is my poem: may it adorn

the hearts and minds of those

keen of sight

throughout the world. (p.232)

…Here Sanskrit and Tamil complement each other perfectly, creating a seamless whole, but they remain sufficiently distinct-especially given the inflected forms of Sanskrit within a Tamil verse—to tease or tantalize the reader….—ibid. pp. 232-33

…This book {Cikaalatti-puranam (“Stpory of Srikalahasti”)} opens with an invocation to the Tamil Divinity, tamiltteyvam:

First the god with the crescent moon in his long hair,

who spoke the root-word of the Veda,

made a grammar that established his name

for the Tamil divinity that has conquered all languages

in the world bounded by the roaring sea

and that compares (and contrasts with) Sanskrit [ariyam].

Let us be aware of this divine being and praise it

in our mind.{Cikalatti–puranam of Karunaippirakaca cuvamikal, Civappirakaca cuvamikal, and Velaiya cuvamikal], verse 1.14, which is attrtibued to Karunaippirakacar.  Madras: Memorial Press, 1948, }

… The most striking element in this verse, however, is the attempt to formulate, once again, the relations of Tamil and Sanskrit. The relevant phrase—aariyattot ural taru tamiltteyvattai—has a subtle complexity suited to this ear.  The verb ural means, among other things, “to be comparable to,” “to resemble,” also “to contrast with,” even “to be hostile to,” “to rival.” {See Madras Tamil Lexicon,  1924-1936. Madras: University of Madras. } This double-(p.260)edged semantic thrust is certainly intentional.  Tamil is simultaneously a rival, possibly even an enemy, of Sanskrit and a necessary complement to the latter, comparable to it: thus Tamil “compares (and contrasts) with Sanskrit” in my translation.  The two languages are distinct entities, wedded, not without tension and conflict, within a single package that, as such, overpowers all other tongues.—ibid. pp. 260-61

            This level of reality is capable of being expressed only through the intensified amalgam of a multilayered Tamil and a thickly Tamilized Sanskrit….

            This language, which we continue to call “Tamil,” has enriched itself so thoroughly with new resources that it bears little resemblance to the language of, say, Kamban or Cekkilar. The bitextual-bilingual world of Katikaimuttup Pulavar and his contemporaries has gained in depth (p.264) and in dynamism (there are verses where the paronomastic utterances split into three or even for phonetically identical levels); moreover, colloquial speech has infiltrated the rarefield registers of Sanskrit-as-Tamil along with quotations from earlier Tamil classics, so that the experience of reading a poem becomes something quite new, a, dizzying pleasure….Yet the tag “bilingual” cannot do justice to the literary dialect we are observing, which is at least trilingual (with colloquial Tamil as the third, after Tamil and Sanskrit) or quadrilingual (if the Tamil-Sanskrit hybrid compounds constitute a mild and novel kind of Mani-pravalam). In fact, tri- and quardrilingual registers have become standard in the best Tamil poetry of this time.—ibid. pp. 264-65

…a thorough mix of normative grammaticalized Tamil, Sanskrit, Arabic, and a dash of Persian, to which we can add a flavoring of colloquial Tamil. The image of Umaruppulavar dressed as a Hindu yet studying Arabic and writing a Tamil sira perfectly encapsulates this organic, interwoven polyglossic culture, which, as Ronit Rici has shown, reflects the creative overlapping of both Sanskrit and Arabic cosmopolitan, trans-regional idioms, always locally inflected and transformed.{Ricci, Ronit. Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  2011: 13-20}…..—ibid. p. 266

…However, this affinity with Sanskrit needs to be formulated more precisely: Sanskrit, the northern tongue (vata moli), and Tamil, the southern tongue (ten moli), are the two eyes of the goddess of knowledge, Kalaimakal. But which of these two eyes is the right eye and which is the left?  The goddess faces east; so Tamil, (p.296) to the south, must be her right eye (Manonmaniyam by P. Cundaram Pillai, Coimbatore: Merkkuri Puttaka Company, 1968,verse 9). Anyone who says that Sanskrit is the right eye is ignorant of the east (kuna ticaiy ariyar, verse 8), or rather, the (no longer soporific)East. A novel opposition between the colonial West and the “real” or authentic East is conscripted, possibly for the first time in Tamil, to an effort to establish the clear superiority of Tamil over Sanskrit, though the two languages remain symbiotic and interdependent.—ibid. pp. 296-97

…”Tamil” slides into “Dravidian,” no longer a linguistic term as used by Bishop Caldwell in his Comparative Grammar (1856) but now an adjective qualifying words like “civilization,” “culture,” and “though.”  The adjective soon begins to conjure up an idealized image of origins: not only were the “Dravidians” in place in southern India from the beginning of time; not only were they subject to invasion and subjugation by the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans, as the Agastya story suddenly seems to show us; but the “manly and virile Dravidian” (Ravana) was obviously and infinitely superior to the “flaccid and effect Aryan” (Rama), as Sundaram Pillai’s friend, T. Ponemballem Pillai, suggested in an early essay on “The Morality of the Ramayana.” {Ponemballem Pillai, T. “The Morality of the Ramayana,” Malabar Quarterly Review 8 (June): 83} 1909)….—ibid. p. 307

…It is important to see clearly the neo-Saiva component in this process: the Saiva Siddhanta philosoph-(p.308)ical and ritual synthesis of the thirteenth century onward was recruited, and powerfully distorted, as evidence of a non-Brahmin, original Dravidian religion that could be pitted against the Aryan-Brahmin systems with their alleged Sanskrit bias.  By the second decade of the twentieth century, rampant mythologizing generated a purist movement aimed at “cleaning” Tamil of its Sanskrit elements: the colorful, emblematic figure spearheading this Pure Tamil movement, tanittamil iyakkam, was Maraimalai Adigal (born as Vedachalam Pillai, 1876-1950).  Focused primary on lexical substitution—nouns derived from Tamil roots replacing prevalent Sanskrit words both in colloquial and in written Tamil—but eventually progressing to sustained efforts to generate neologisms needed for modern domains of science, technology, and government bureaucracy, the movement was ultimately no more successful than we the Young Turks who sought to discard the Arabic and Persian legacy in modern Turkish. Tamil today, like the Tamil of yesterday, indeed like nearly all major living languages, remains saturated with borrowed vocabulary.  What is more, the very intensity of anti-Sanskrit feeling that we see in the Pure Tamil fanatics is itself a sure sign of the deep interdependence of the two languages (if, indeed, we can even isolate them from one another in some artificial manner).—ibid. pp. 308-09

…Extreme Tamil linguism even came to deny the separate existence of the other south Indian Dravidian languages: at times “Dravidian” came explicitly to mean only “Tamil,” rather like the usage of the late-medieval Kerala Lila–tilakam. Tamil language madness could be directed against Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam as well as the primary target, Sanskrit (or Hindi)…..—ibid. p. 311

Anamalai:

…It may be noted that Tamil was, unlike Telugu and Kannada, a literary language when Sanskrit came into contact with it.  This may explain the different ways these languages responded to Sanskrit.— E. Anamalai, Social Dimensions of  Modern Tamil, Chennai, Published by Cred-A, 2011, p. 17

…Spoken Tamil became more open to Sanskrit (and to Prakrit) than literary Tamil.  This is noticeable in the inscriptions, the language of which is influenced by spoken Tamil; unlike in literary works, unassimilated Sanskrit and Prakrit words are found in the inscriptions….—ibid. p. 18

manded to the values they express….—ibid. p. 19

V.K. Suryanarayana Sastri (1870-1903), professor of Tamil at Madras Christian College, described, in his History of Tamil Language, how Sanskrit had mauled Tamil; he had his name replaced with its Tamil translation, Paridimal Kalaignar (Muthukumarasami, R. Maraimalai Adigal. In Gnanaprakasam, V. M. and K. P. Aravanan (eds.) 1975: 72-3).—ibid. p. 20 {no other publisher information is given in bibliography—db}

…Dictionaries were compiled by missionaries like Febricius in 1779, Rottler in 1830 and Winslow in 1862 (German, French and American, respectively) and they brought all the Sanskrit words in Tamil into focus in one book….—ibid. p. 20

…Robert Caldwell (1814-1891), an Irish missionary, published his monumental work, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages in 1856, {(Caldwell, Robert. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages.  Third revised edition.  London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.  Indian reprint by Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi in 1974. (originally published in 1856)} which convincingly proved that Tamil was genetically unrelated to Sanskrit and belonged to an independent family, which he called Dravidian, comprising others like Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, etc….—ibid. p. 22

…The literary discovery brought to light the Sangam literature of the pre-Christian era, which was the best and the most original of all Tamil literature. The fact that this fine literature was least influenced by Sanskrit in language, literary forms and content meant to the Tamils that not only could Tamil stand on its own but could reach (p.22) heights when divorced from Sanskrit..  The Tamils became aware of the injunction of Tolkappiyar, their earliest and greatest grammarian, on the use of Sanskrit words as mentioned earlier.  They realized that following his injunction, Tamil had withstood the influence of Sanskrit on its phonology which underwent very little change in the written form for more than 2000 years.  It became clear that language development could be regulated and sustained.—ibid. pp. 22-23

…Caldwell (Caldwell, Robert. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages.  Third revised edition.  London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.  Indian reprint by Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi in 1974. (originally published in 1856) 1913:454) had made a similar observation earlier: “Tamil, however, most highly cultivated ab intra of all Dravidian idioms, can dispense with its Sanskrit altogether, if need be, and not only stand alone, but flourish without its aid…by dispensing with it it rises to a purer and most refined style”. To demonstrate that this was possible, Pamban Kumaragurubara Swamigal wrote a prabandha, Ceentan CentamiZ, in pure Tamil, although he had used Sanskrit words in his other works (Muthukumarasami, R. Maraimalai Adigal. In Gnanaprakasam, V. M. and K. P. Aravanan (eds.) 1975).—ibid. p. 23[No other publisher information is given in bibliography—db]

…When they found references in the old literature or grammar contrary to their beliefs about Tamil culture and language, such references were reinterpreted or dismissed as interpolations.  Along with the research done, myths were also created.  It was easy to identify Dravidian with Tamil because of its literary antiquity and pre-eminence. Tamil (p.23) was praised to be the mother of Dravidian languages, even as Sanskrit was of Indo-Aryan languages. (P. Sundaram Pillai (1855-1897) in the introductory verse to his play ManoonmaNiiyam).  It was even claimed that Tamil was “not only the earliest but also the primary classical language of the world” and that “there is no major language in the world, perhaps, that is not enriched or influenced by Tamil in some way or other” (Devaneyan, G. The Primary Classical Language of the World.  Katpadi: Nesamani Publishing House. 1966: 52, 124).  Myths and legends about the Tamil language and culture like the power of a particular literary verse (Nanti-k kalampakam of the ninth century) to burn to death an adversary, were narrated elaborately.  New symbols were created and thus Tamil came to have a Veda in TirukkuRal (Circa third century AD).¹³  By all these, pride in Tamil was sought to be built up.—ibid. pp. 23-24

13 This is not really new and TirukkuRaL is referred to as the Tamil Veda even in early literature. But perhaps TirukkuRaL was not glorified and given a symbolic value for cultural and political solidarity to the extent done in the last century. It may be mentioned that it is the Manusmriti, and not TirukkuRaL, which is referred to as the normative code of conduct by rulers throughout Tamil inscriptions (Vijayavenugopal, personal communication).—p. 32

            The focus of the movement {Purism}, however, was on vocabulary. The new letters, sandhi and affixes which came with the non-native words got eliminated as a consequence of the elimination of the non-native vocabulary. But the non-native derivative suffixes added to Tamil roots such as the Sanskrit based –kaaran as in paalkaaran (பால்காரன் ) ‘milkman’, the Telugu based –aTam as in KaTTaTam ( கட்டடம்) ‘building’, were allowed to remain.  Non-native elements in syntax were few and they went unnoticed….—ibid. p. 27

…Tamil came to be claimed by some of its native scholars to be the mother of all Dravidian languages, as Sanskrit is to modern Indo-Aryan languages.  Tamil was taken to be the icon of Dravidian India.—ibid. p. 164

…It must have been used in education and commerce and probably in architecture, navigation, irrigation, revenue and astrology, though there is no direct documentary evidence in the sense that until very late there are no written treatises in Tamil on these subjects.  (Treatises on these subjects were written by Tamil speakers probably in a language other than Tamil, such as Sanskrit).  Tamil was most certainly used orally in these fields for training through apprenticeship.—ibid. p. 176

Stein:

…In early Tamil, sacred power (ananku) clings clings to a woman and, as long as it is under control, lends to her life and to that of her husband auspiciousness and sacred correctness.  But it is a power which must be kept firmly under control, lest it wreak havoc. Thus women must carefully observe chastity; they must restrain themselves in all situations, having “chastity increased by patience, with sharp teeth which their tongues fear if they talk loudly.”  At the dangerous times associated with birth and death, a woman must practice strong asceticism.  When she is monstrous, she must stay outside the house and cannot touch dishes, while for a period of several days after childbirth (called puniru) she is impure and cannot see her husband.  After the death of her husband, she is especially dangerous and must shave her head, cake (p. 43) it with mud, sleep on a bed of stones, and eat lily seeds instead of rice. It is interesting to note that the tonsure of widows appears first in Sanskrit in the Skandapurana in the ninth century A.D.  If a widow is chaste and young, she is so infected with magic power that she must take her own life, her condition being such that “her youthfulness makes her sweet life tremble even though she is alone for a few seconds in the vast guarded palace of her husband where the eye of the drum (mulavu) never sleeps” (Puram 247).  It is possible to trace the importation of virtually all these customs related to woman’s chastity into Aryan India. {G. L. Hart, Related Cultural and Literary Elements in Ancient Tamil and Indo-Aryan (Ph. D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1969, pp. 108ff.}—ibid. Ancient Tamil Literature: Its Scholarly Past and Future. George L. Hart III, pp. 41-63, in, pp. 43-44

            Ancient Tamil illumines several other elements of Indian civilization.  Caste, for example, is found in the anthologies.  There it is clear that caste is indigenous to South India and did not depend for its development on the varna system which was later superimposed on it (and which never had more than superficial importance for the caste systems of South India)….—ibid.  Ancient Tamil Literature: Its Scholarly Past and Future. George L. Hart III, pp. 41-63, in, p. 44

            Other customs found in early Tamil include puja with flower; temple worship; drawing designs in front of houses (kolam or rangavali {rangoli} ); the king as the locus of sacred power (the early Tamil king is far more like the Indian king of classical Sanskrit than is the Vedic one)….—ibid.  Ancient Tamil Literature: Its Scholarly Past and Future. George L. Hart III, pp. 41-63, in, p. 44

…There are some themes which appear in early Tamil that are found as early as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana in Sanskrit.  Through a detailed consideration of their use in both traditions, I have shown that these must have been used originally in the Deccan culture and must have entered North India with other Dravidian elements and words which become prominent in the Sanskrit epics….—ibid. Ancient Tamil Literature: Its Scholarly Past and Future. George L. Hart III, pp. 41-63, in, p. 45

            The history of classical Indian music has yet to be written. Some have seen its origin in the melodies of the Samaveda; yet from evidence adduced by Sambamoorthy, who has written most prolifically in English on Carnatic music, the tie between classical music and the Samaveda must be weak indeed if it in fact exists.{P. Sambamoorthy, South Indian Music, 5 vol. Madras, 1958-1963.}  Certainly the Samaveda has nothing resembling ragas or talas. On the other hand, early Tamil music is known to have had both these components of Indian music; moreover, all important musical elements mentioned in early Tamil have Tamil, not Sanskrit, names….Music is mentioned much more often in the anthologies {viz. Tamil Sangam literatures} than it is in earlier Aryan texts such as the Mahabharata or Ramayana (and far more often than in Vedic literature. In light of these considerations, it seems likely to me that Indian music owes even more to the early Deccan culture of which Tamil civilization was an offshoot than does Indian literature….—ibid.  Ancient Tamil Literature: Its Scholarly Past and Future. George L. Hart III, pp. 41-63, in, p. 48

            The earliest extant Tamil grammar book and treatise on poetics is the Tolkappiyam.  There can be little doubt that where its treatment of grammar is the same as or similar to treatment in Sanskrit, it is Tamil which has been the borrower²¹…..—ibid.  Ancient Tamil Literature: Its Scholarly Past and Future. George L. Hart III, pp. 41-63, in, p. 49

21 For example, the system of seven cases (with with the vocative) found in both the Tolkappiyam and in Sanskrit grammatical works is obviously native to the Sanskrit tradition since it fits that language but is most unsuitable to Tamil.— p. 61

…Pollution itself, which is one of the most important factors in the working of sanskritization, appears to be a development of the ancient Dravidians’ notion of being infected with immanent sacred power.  Thus sanskkritization in Tamilnad can be seen as a process not only of imitating the Brahmans but also of adopting practices which have always belonged to the “high ones.”  It is noteworthy that there are few Aryan customs followed by the Brahmans which have been imitated by non-Brahman castes in Tamilnad.  Vellalars do not undergo upanayana and do not wear the sacred thread; nor do non-Brahman pujaris light the sacred fires. It would in fact be as accurate to say that the Brahmans have undergone tamilization as to say that the non-Brahmans have been sanskritized.  But both notions are simplistic and can only lead to confusion. Until we rid ourselves of the ideas of the supremacy of the Aryan in South India and also of the incorruptibility of the Tamil, we shall not understand the historical processes which have taken place.—ibid. Ancient Tamil Literature: Its Scholarly Past and Future. George L. Hart III, pp. 41-63, in, p. 59

Hardy:

…The overall picture we can obtain shows that Krsna emotionalism constitutes the result of Northern stimuli fertilizing the autonomous Tamil cultural and religious scene and producing what might well be called a new religion…. what is new in the BhP {Bhagavata–Purana }, and that this work is in fact an attempt to render in Sanskrit (and that means inter alia to make available for the whole of India) the religion of the Alvars.  This final result might surprise even Indologists who have only recently begun to become aware of the existence of an autonomous cultural tradition in Tamil, who are used to regard all vernacular phenomena as regional dilutions of Sanskrit models, and who will certainly find it hard to concede that in our case the reverse applies, viz., that the character of intellectual bhakti was completely transformed under the influence of a regional, vernacular religion.— Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti.  The Early History of Krsna Devotion in South India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, (1983), Oxford India Paperbacks 2001, p. 44

…The most important characteristic of the situation in the South is that, quite contrary to the Northern developments (which for our purpose would include Jain and Buddhist developments in the South) we find here an integral fusion of common Indian with specifically Tamil folk-religion, and of brahmanized temple religion (exemplified by the Tirumal hymns in the Paritatal) with Krsna-hakti.  Exaggerating somewhat, we could say that these trends ran contrary to the developments in the North where the Upanisadic ideology tended to absorb and obliterate all other forms of religion…. only with Ramanuja and his school will the normative Sanskritic system gain a dominant position. Alvar religion retains the earlier situation as its foundation and source of inspiration.—ibid. p. 231

I do not know whether there exists a conventional etymology of the term. Theoretically it could be analysed either (ubhaya–Veda) + anta or ubhaya + (Vedanta), but either way we get the final meaning: ‘the philosophical school cum religious movement which derives its inspiration from both the Sanskrit Vedas/Vedanta and the ‘Tamil Vedas’ of Nammalvar.’—notes, 212, p. 479

Tieken:

…the poets who composed Cankam poetry have to be looked for among the authors of the royal grants of the Pandyas in the eighth and ninth centuries. In the Puram poems, they provided Tamil with a past as a literary language, going back to the days beyond the Pallavas during whose reign Sanskrit was the court language.   The rareness of Sanskrit loanwords in the Cankam poems was part of the attempt to produce (p. xiii) a pure Tamil. Together with references to the Pallavas, Sanskrit loanwords were avoided as much as possible. As to the presumably archaic nature of the language, in addition to what I have written about this elsewhere,10 it may be pointed out that the relationship of the poetic language with the contemporary language as known through inscriptions shows striking resemblances to that of Prakrit or Apabhramsha with Sanskrit (e.g. the absence of synthetic past tense forms in Prakrit and of compound verb constructions in Tamil). As I have already argued elsewhere, another characteristic of the language, the combination of elements from various regional dialects, is also typical of the North Indian literary vernaculars.— Herman Tieken, Kavya in South India:Old Tamil Cankam Poetry, New Delhi, Manohar, (2001), Reprinted 2017,  Preface to the second edition,  Preface to the second edition, pp. Xiii-xiv

10 See “The Nature of the Language of Cankam Poetry”. In :Jean-Luc Chevillard and Eva Wilden (eds), South-Indian Horizons: Felicitation Volume for Francois Gros on the Occasion of his 70^th Birthday. Pondichery: Institute Francais de Pondichery/Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient, 2004, pp. 365-87—ibid. pp, xiii-xiv

               The primary aim of the present study is to show that Cankkam literature has to be dated much later than has been done so far. A close analysis of the literature suggests that it cannot be earlier than the end of the eighth or the beginning of the ninth century. As a result Cankam literature must be situated in the period well after the introduction of Sanskrit literature into Tamilnadu. This consequence leads to the second aim of my study, namely to trace the influence of Indo-Aryan literature on Cankam poetry. It will be argued that the various genres of Cankam poetry are adaptations or elaborations in Tamil of particular genres of Sanskrit Kavya literature.  In fact, Cankam poetry is the outcome of the attempt to write Kavya poetry in Tamil.—ibid. p. 2

…It will be argued that Cankam poetry should not be dated in the period it describes but after that period….—ibid. p. 9

               The final, fourth, remark concerns the investigation of the indebtedness of the Cankam texts to Sanskrit literature.  As far as this topic is concerned the present study is mainly restricted to the identification of possible counterparts in Indo-Aryan literature to the various Tamil texts….—ibid. p. 10

Except for the Pallavas, until the beginning of the ninth century the history of Tamilnadu is obscure.  Undoubtedly, there were Pantiyas, Colas and Ceras then, (p. 134) as there already were in Asoka’s time in the third century B.C, and in the beginning of the seventh century and, again, from the end of the eighth century onwards.  However, the problem is that none of these dynasties, or peoples, left any records of their own before that latter date….The Velvikudi inscription, which has two prasastis, one in Sanskrit and one in Tamil, is itself a clear example of the outcome of this linguistic policy. The Sanskrit prasasti traces the Pantiya dynasty back to its mythic ancestor Pandya, who at the beginning of the present Kalpa was reborn as Budha, son of the Moon. Budha’s son, Pururavas, who introduced the dynasty’s emblem of the pair of fish, is said to have shared his throne, and taxes, with Indra.  Next the prasasti mentions Jatila, alias Parantaka, and three of his immediate predecessors.  This is followed by a prasasti in Tamil.  In contrast to the Sanskrit prasasti, which provides the Pantiyas with a purely mythological ancestry, the Tamil prasasti is a piece of concrete and detailed local history. It enumerates altogether seven ancestors of the present king (p. 135) Netuncataiyan and adds many details concerning battles and conquests. (p.136)

…The Pantiya experiment with the two prasastis may be interpreted as (p.137) an attempt, or rather, as the outcome of an attempt to raise the regional language to a status comparable to that of Sanskrit. At the same time, it should be noticed that each dialect was apparently assigned a sphere of its own, Sanskrit North Indian mythology and Tamil local history….—ibid. pp.135-138

…Cankam poetry cannot possibly be older than the Pantiyas of the Velvikudi and Sinnamannur inscriptions.  It is thus later than the introduction of Sanskrit literature into South India. Indeed, on closer consideration we have to do with texts composed fully in accordance with the laws and conventions of Kavya. In this respect the development of Tamil literature agrees exactly with that of the other South Indian vernacular literatures, which without exception have all developed against the background of Sanskrit literature.  Moreover, the development of Tamil literature is not much older than that of the other South Indian languages….—ibid. p. 229

               As shown, Tamil functioned initially as an equivalent of Prakrit. In the inscriptions of the Pantiyas it was used for local history. In Cankam poetry Tamil (p. 229) is the language of primitive, illiterate people or else it has been used for describing these people and their customs. The genres were selected for their potentialities of showing Tamil in its role as a Pakrit.  The reverse mechanism is seen in the Pattuppattu, in which the epic world of Sanskrit Mahakavya has been reduced to the narrow borders of Tamilnadu in accordance with the nature of Tamil as a local language.  Similarly, mythology in the Pattuppattu has been regionalized, dealing with Murukan, a typically local, indigenous god.  By contrast, in Bhakti poetry Tamil is used to address and praise the two great North Indian gods of Sansrit mythology, Siva and Visnu, who have been provided with local, Tamil speaking avataras.  Furthermore, the poetry is equated with the Veda, as issue which has become central to its interpretation in the subsequent period.  The local Tamil language is no longer used as a Prakrit but as a kind of Sanskrit.—ibid. pp. 229-230

Like the other Cankam poetry it shows Tamil in the role of a Prakrit; the only difference lies in the starting point, Cankam poetry being original Prakrit poetry, the Pattuppattu being Sanskrit poetry adapted in accordance with the Prakrit-ness of Tamail.  A reason for the exclusion of the Pattuppattu may indeed be found in the Bhakti literary tradition, which was focused in particular on short lyrical poetry, not on the genre of epic poetry to which the Pattuppattu belongs.—ibid. p. 231

Parpola:

…It seems to me that it was this second wave of Pandu princes coming by sea to Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu that brought the Vaisnava religion to the south….The earliest form of Vaisnava religion in south India is supposed to be the Pancavira cult, that is, the worship of the five Vrsni or yadava heroes, in particular Krsna Vasudea and his elder broter Bala-Rama, worshipped both independently and together in Tamil Nadu in the early centuries CE.  Such a migration of the Yadavas seems to be hinted at in the northern Sanskrit sources too: Krsna Vasudeva moved from Mathura to Gujarat, where he founded the coastal city of Dvaraka or Davravati.  Sanskrit dvaara, “door,” corresponds to Tamil kavvaatam/kapaatam, “fold of a door,” found in the names Pandya-kavata (one of the pearl sources in Arthasastra 2,11,2) and Kapatapuram (the legendary seat of one of the ancient Tamil literary academies).  According Old Tamil traditions, Sage Agastya brought the eighteen Velir chiefs and the rulers of the Aruvala country from  Dvaraka. The Ay rulers of the eighth- to ninth-century south Travancore likewise traced their descent from the Yadavas.— Asko Parpola, Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2015, ibid. p. 153

…Lingustically and culturally Tamil is the most important, as it has remained highly conservative in structure and has a rich literature going back some 2000 years, and even earlier in the case of some short inscriptions.  Most of the other Dravidian languages have relatively few speakers, many being tribal languages with only an oral literature.—ibid. p. 166

…I further claim that the Harappan language was Proto-Dravidian or close to it, and that Old Tamil literature has preserved important elements of Harappan heritage, such as the names of the planets and some stars, notably the pole star, and such original Harappan names of deities as Muruku and Vel….—ibid. p. 314