Here are your brief notes on Agastya

There are certain legends which must be referred to, to complete this account. Two famous personalities of Aryan epic mythology are spoken of in two different regions of the south as the progenitors of their cultures; Parasurama is deemed by the Keratites as the father of their national identity and Agastya is deemed by the Tamils as the maker of their culture and creator of their language as well as literature.

Parasurama and Visvamitra are noted in mythology as eccentric sages famous for their individuality and non-conformism. Hence there is little wonder that Kerala should adopt Parasurama.

In the case of Agastya however the legend has assumed interminable ramifications. There is no doubt a Vedic rishi called Agastya and a star in the firmament, bears his name. The Tamils however claim Agastya to be their patron saint and disaffiliate him from the Vedic tradition. Anyway both traditions make of hint a short, pot bellied-wise man noted equally for his wisdom, determination, scholarship and courage. There was no limit to his inventiveness. He was a great musician and the author of the first great Tamil grammar which was in three parts dealing with literature, music and drama.

There is another story which makes him defeat the great Ravana himself in a musical contest. The Manimekalai credits him with the supply of Kaviri water. A later story makes him balance the earth by going to the Podiyil hills all alone to restore equilibrium to the earth upset by great concentration of the celestials and mortals ?n the Himalayan hill top whereon Siva wed Parvati.

There is another legend which speaks of Agastya humbling the Vindhyas whose wings had already been broken by Indra. No doubt Indra and Agastya represented Aryan agents who successfully crossed the Vindhyas; Agastya was perhaps one of the earliest to cross the Dandakaranya into South India which held great terrors for any newcomer.

The Daityas who were perhaps related to the Dasyus whom the Puranas know as Visvamitra’s unpopular sons, roamed about the forests around the Western Ghats. Agastya under strange circumstances accosted two such Daityas who had planned to eat him up but the intrepid sage from the north was too much for them and he destroyed the destroyers.

This was but one of the dangers he encountered on the way. A commentary on the Tolkappiyam speaks of Tolkappiyar being a disciple of Agastya who is said to have had eleven other disciples (most great teachers are credited with twelve disciples of whom one invariably turns renegade).

Agastya according to this account was jealous of his own pupil and cursed him only to be cursed back by his equally sacred pupil. This clearly reveals the development of an antagonism between Agastya and Tolkappiyar, the former standing for the Deva tradition and the latter the Asura tradition supported by Sukra who was also known as Kavi.

The tradition of Kavi became Kavya and the Tamil form of that name is Kappiya and this is part of the name of Tolkappiya-he of the ancient Kappiya lineage and therefore a Brahmin. This again shows that the struggle between the oncoming culture and the indigenous one contending for supremacy, possibly struggling for survival, was as old as those times.

In spite of all that has been said above the personality of Agastya in still a puzzle. As we have seen above he is found in the Aryan tradition as well as in the Tamil tradition and he is found in Indonesia and other South East Asian countries receiving worship and being gratefully remembered.

In epigraphy and iconography as well as in mythological literature Agastya is enshrined. It looks as if Agastya instead of being a historical personality was but a progenitor of a movement which can be called a cultural wave which spread from Aryavarta to Indonesia via South India. It is noteworthy, however, that he is not found mentioned in the Sangam literature though a few sutras here and there are quoted by medieval grammarians.

These latter could well have been fathered on Agastya as a respectable progenitor. Thus it may be that Agastya was perhaps an epitome of ancient memories of proto-historic struggles, movements, etc., in the minds of later generations.

While Aryanisation of the natives of South India and the reciprocal Dravidianisation of the immigrants were taking place one of the more important consequences of this dual process was the interaction of the totemic system of the tribes and the gotra system of the Aryans in such a manner that we are left with a curious type of varna system in South India.

This system is markedly different from the classical Varna system of the north. The difference mainly is the absence of Kshatriyas and Sudras in the south. The kings belonged to one community part of which was trading and called Vaisya and the other part peasant farming and called velala.

The untouchable chandalas were an all India phenomenon kept beyond their cultural periphery by the Aryan as well as the Dravidian. The Brahmins were the only common factor in the two systems so that the south stayed with the Brahmin non- Brahmin dichotomy from the beginning. By the time the Sangam literature was written, much of what has stated above had been stabilized.