However, we can look back a little further than 200 B.C., a possible date for south Indian megalithic culture, for definite record of Dravidian; this is pro­vided by the south Indian Brahmi inscriptions mentioned earlier, and these date from the third century B.C. The first of the seventy-six known inscriptions was discovered by Venkoba Rao in 1903 some 23 miles north-east of Madurai.

There are in addition twenty short graffiti in the same script on pottery from Arikkamedu, an important site on the east coast of Tamilnadu, excavated by Wheeler in 1945 and by others since. The first certain identification of their language as being Old Tamil was made by K. V. Subrahmanya Ayyar and presented by him at the Third All-India Oriental Conference, held in Madras in 1924.

The most important and recent work on these inscriptions is that of I. Mahadevan and R. Panneerselvam. They show that the inscriptions con­firm certain kings and place-names mentioned in the earliest extant Tamil literature, of roughly the same date.

Mahadevan’s brilliant work demonstrates that, as early as the third to second centuries B.C., the main modifications to the ‘All-India’ syllabify of 36 consonants and 10 vowels plus diphthongs had been made to equip the script suitably for writing Tamil: the consonants had been reduced to 18, by the removal of letters for the voiced plosives, aspirated plosives, and sibilants, and by the addition of characters to represent Tamil retroflex / and / and alveolar r and n. As for vowels, these were reduced to 9 by the omission of the diphthong au, the existence in Tamil of separate short e and o not being recognized in this script (or until the time of Beschi in the eighteenth century).

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Mahadevan established an important phenomenon in these inscriptions, the use of the character for medial a to represent medial a also, the vowel con­sidered inherent in all consonants in all other Indian scripts and in those in South-East Asia developed from them. Thus there was no need for a ‘killer’ symbol to remove this inherent vowel, such as the virama in Sanskrit, and Mahadevan is able in consequence to read the hitherto-baffling kala (inscr. 29), makana (inscr. 13), and maniya (inscr. 72) as correct Tamil kal, makan, and maniy.

In effect, the early Tamil Brahmi inscriptions show a letter system comparable to our own alphabet, rather than a syllabary; thus the other ‘An­iridia development of conjunct consonants for such sounds as ksa, tra, or ktva was rendered unnecessary.

Mahadevan convincingly suggests that the absence of the (available) voiced plosive characters from this script means that Tamil at this stage did not have the voiced intervocalic plosive phonemes that are one of its principal modern features (though one still uncatered for in the script).

In addition to their linguistic interest, these inscriptions have helped corro­borate some of the royal names occurring in early Tamil praise-poetry, as just noted. One king mentioned is Ko Atan Ce(ra)l Irumpdrai (inscr. 56 and 57), and from one of the earliest collections of Tamil poems, Padirruppattu, an anthology of praise-poems on the Serai kings, we know of two with the title of ‘He of the great mountain’, IrumpdraiMore important perhaps is the fact that Pugalur, where these two inscriptions were found, is about ten miles from the modern Karur, mentioned in the form Karuur in the same cavern (inscr. 66). We know from Ptolemy that Karoura was ‘the royal seat of Kerobothros’ and several references in the colophons to early Tamil poems indicate that Karuvur was a Serai royal town.

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Consideration of these inscriptions has led us, then, to a discussion of the earliest Tamil literature, with which much of the remainder of this essay will be concerned, as it represents probably the most important single contribu­tion of Dravidian language and culture to the Indian heritage.

The bulk of it is contained in Eight Anthologies (Ettuttogai) two being of bardic poetry and six of courtly love-poems (though one, Paripadal, includes religious praise- poetry and descriptive verse also). On the basis of internal evidence most of these anthology-poems have been assigned to the first three centuries of our era, and it looks as if the epigraphical evidence now to hand confirms this.

While it is clear that a good deal of synthesis with Indo-Aryan, especially Brahmanical, cultural and linguistic elements from the north had already taken place, these poems yet present a distinct culture, one in which attitudes and values come across to us in a very vivid and fresh manner.

For its part, the literature is simple and direct in appeal, and relatively free of the obscurity and sophistication of much later Indian literature, including that of Tamil itself. Unlike the near-totality of medieval literatures in the south, these poems are secular. The praise-poetry is quite unlike anything else extant in the south.

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At the same time, a ‘grammar’, Tolkappiyam, parts of which are probably contemporaneous, sets out an elaborate rhetoric for bardic and love-poetry that is quite unlike other Indian literary theories which have their origins in Sanskrit rhetoric, in which the needs of drama played a large part. While it is true that, in Tamil courtly love-poetry, there are ‘dramatis per- sonae’, stock characters such as the hero, heroine, foster-mother, and so on (it being a convention that personal names are never mentioned), the rhe­toric of this poetry, and even more that of the heroic, arises in the context of ‘ Natural Tamil’ (Iyarramil’) name given to poetry, as opposed to ‘ Drama Tamil’ and ‘Musical Tamil’ (Natakattamiland For this purpose, love is considered as interior or subjective, Agam, and the heroic as exterior, Puram. Both topics are classified under seven heads, five plus two in each case, the sets of five being the kernel, as it were, of both Agam and Puram.

For Agam, five aspects of love are involved: union, separation, awaiting (the re­turn of the lover), anguish, and love-quarrel. For Puram, five stages of war­fare are envisaged: the cattle-raid,.the fight of two kings over disputed terri­tory, the attack on the fort, open warfare, and praise of the king.

The five aspects of love are suggested by associations with regions of the Tamil country by means of the names of five plants that grew therein; the literature is, then, one of allusion. For example, union is suggested by Kurinji, the Strobilanthes that grew in the mountains, which were considered suitable for elopement.

It sufficed to mention the Strobilanthes to set the tone of the whole poem: ‘My love for the lord of this land, where delicious honey is won from the black-stemmed Strobilanthes on the mountain-slopes, is greater than the earth, vaster than the sky, and deeper than the ocean.

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The two other aspects of love were unrequited and forced love; they were considered to lie outside the realm of usual love-poetry; indeed some of these poems are not in the Agam anthologies at all, but in Puram collections.

An example of unrequited love is:’ My bangles are slipping off, for I waste away with love for the young stalwart with the dark beard and closely fitting anklets. I have my mother to fear; I have to fear the assembly because I caressed his death-dealing shoulders. May this city of confusion be stricken with great distress like me, ever smitten not from one side but from two?

In the same anthology, the poet Paranar addresses the chieftain Pegan on behalf of Kannagi, whom he had deserted:

Not to have pity is cruel. While in the evening I sang of your rain-drenched forest to the strains of the raga Sevvali, she whose kohl-bedecked eyes resemble blue water- lilies was so distraught that the tear-drops were as dew upon her breast. Piteous was she.’ Young lady, tell me whether you are related to him who desires my friendship’, said I as I greeted her.

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She wiped away the tears with fingers slender as the flame- lily’s petals as she replied: ‘I am nothing to him! Listen. Even now he is savoring the beauty of another girl like me every day they gossip about how the famous Pegan goes in his noisy chariot to that fair place surrounded with wild jasmine’.

A good description of a very human situation appears in poem 7 of Paripadal. This is a rather later anthology; its poetry is more sophisticated and much of it is religious verse in praise of Tirumal (Vishnu) and Sevvel (Skanda).

However, there are some fine poems describing the river Vaiyai that flows through Madurai, the capital of the Pandiyar, another Tamil ‘dynasty’. Poem 7 is one of these, and, after a description of the bathing of girls in the river, the following incident occurs:

Wet from the river she had sought, and wishing to avoid a chill, she whose eyes resembled water-lilies took some strong toddy around which hummed bees. As she drank a great draught of the liquor that bestows joy, her eyes shone like honey-sweet flowers. Seeing the loveliness of her eyes, he praised them; he sang her praises as if he were a bard.

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Not realizing the direction in which his interest lay, another girl thought he was singing about her, and was rather surprised. He whose chest was broad grew nervous at this and, sorrowfully wondering what would happen to him, went up to his beloved. Because of the ridiculous misunderstanding, her eyes, al­ready inflamed through drinking the toddy, grew still redder.

The pretty girls who had gone bathing began squabbling among themselves; she became very cross and snatched the chaplets from their heads. Her lover, who had seen how beautiful she was while she bathed, prostrated on the ground his body smeared with sandalwood- paste. But she would not stop scolding him, and even trod on his head! Meanwhile, the others went on bathing in the bright river.

One example of the bardic poetry must suffice. The five stages of warfare were likewise suggested by flowers; garlands of them were worn by warriors to indicate what stage of warfare they were engaged upon, recalling American Indian war-paint. Mumbai, the white Indian dead-nettle, was worn in open combat, and we have a poem upon this theme in Pur am:

Whoever you are, do not talk about collecting your scouts and flanking-troops before you have seen my lord of the drum-like shoulders. His warfare is good, and is celebrated with festivals. On his beautiful and mighty chest he wears finely wrought orna­ments that flash in the sun. He is a renowned scion of the vigorous Malavar clan whose glittering, scintillating spears are long.

All the literature so far considered, and another extensive collection called the Ten Songs, Pattuppattu, consists of discontinuous poetry. Until the epic Silappadikaram, composed sometime between the second and the fifth centuries A.D., we do not find in Tamil a continuous narrative of the type present in other early literatures, such as heroic poetry from outside India.

Space forbids a detailed examination of Silappadigaram, but it must be men­tioned as being a distinctly Tamil story contributed to Indian literature. The portion of it relating to the Seralar kings clearly shares the traditions em­bodied in the early anthology of praise-poetry about them, Padirruppattu.

The story is the popular theme extolling the virtuous wife. Kovalan, the chief male character, hardly a hero, is a merchant in the Sola city of Pugar. He neglects his wife Kannagi, throwing away his fortune upon a courtesan well versed in music and dancing called Madavi. After quarrelling with her, how­ever, Kovalan returns to his faithful wife Kannagi and they both migrate to the Pandiya city of Madurai. They attempt to start life afresh, and raise capital by selling Kannagi’s anklets (silambu).

But an evil-minded goldsmith brings a false charge of theft of the queen’s anklet that had been reported lost; Kovalan is apprehended, accused, and killed. Kannagi goes to the king and proves that the charge was baseless; the king dies of grief, but the enraged widow curses the city to destruction by fire, plucking off her breast and hurl- it over the town. She then goes to Vanji, another Seral city, and is received into heaven as the Lady, Pattini, together with her husband.

The sequel to this story, Manimegalai, need not detain us. It is largely a Buddhist work, inspired by the logical system of the philosopher Dinnaga, and demonstrates the extent to which, by the time of its composition, Tamil had become influenced by external factors. Much of its later literature, and all of the extant literatures of Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam, the other three main Dravidian languages, consists of the reworking of themes origin­ally presented in Sanskrit. They are none the less important for this, but it be­comes less easy to quantify the purely Dravidian element in them.

By reason of the fact that these four were, and are, spoken as well as written languages, there is an element of the popular and spontaneous in their liter­atures that may seem to be absent from some Sanskrit writing. But this feature they of course share with Indo-Aryan vernaculars such as MarathI and Hindi. Thus the Tamil version of the epic Ramayana presents the hero Rama as a god, and to that extent is a religious poem, unlike its Sanskrit prototype. But this feature is common to all the vernacular Rama stories, in India and in South-East Asia.

One must in conclusion note that the great medieval bhakti movement, ex­pressing itself in hymns and mystical utterances in all the spoken languages of India, had its real beginnings in the Tamil Saivite hymns composed from the sixth century onwards, and collectively known as the Tirumurai.

The most famous portion is the Garland of God, Tevaram, but the mystical poems by Manikkavasagar, Tiruvasagam and Tirukkovaiyar, should be mentioned. The figure of the divine lover and his beloved, the soul, becomes common enough in medieval India, especially in the worship of Krishna. But Manikkava- sagar’s Tirukkovaiyar antedates this to a considerable extent. The Virasaiva Vacanakavyas of Basava were, in Kannada, an extension of this genre.

Similarly, the medieval philosophical texts of the Saiva Siddhania were popularized through Tamil and, with the digest of moralistic treatises known as Tirukkural, were hailed by early European missionary-scholars as the finest literary work produced in the south.

But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, in this roseate view, they were influenced by the apparent closeness of many of the concepts in Tirukkural and in, say, Sivananabodam to those of Christianity. The Tamils brought to these subjects an original and fresh approach, but in their anthology-poems they were themselves the originators.