Ponniyin Selvan Varalaatru Peravai

Vedic Roots of Early Tamil Culture


Summarized versions of this paper were presented at the Naimisha
Vedic Workshop, "Looking beyond the Aryan Invasion," organized by
Naimisha Foundation at Bangalore on March 12-13, 2001, and at the
National Seminar on Origins of United Vedic Culture organized by
Pragna Bharati and sponsored by the Indian Council of Historical
Research at Hyderabad on March 17-18, 2001. [*]




In recent years attempts have been made to cast a new look at ancient
India. For too long the picture has been distorted by myopic colonial
readings of India's prehistory and early history, and more recently
by ill-suited Marxist models. One such distortion was the Aryan
invasion theory, now definitively on its way out, although its
watered-down avatars are still struggling to survive. It will no
doubt take some more time—and much more effort on the archaeological
front—for a new perspective of the earliest civilization in the North
of the subcontinent to take firm shape, but a beginning has been made.
We have a peculiar situation too as regards Southern India, and
particularly Tamil Nadu. Take any classic account of Indian history
and you will see how little space the South gets in comparison with
the North. While rightly complaining that "Hitherto most historians
of ancient India have written as if the south did not exist,"[ 1]
Vincent Smith in his Oxford History of India hardly devotes a few
pages to civilization in the South, that too with the usual
stereotypes to which I will return shortly. R. C. Majumdar's Advanced
History of India,[2] or A. L. Basham's The Wonder That Was India[3]
are hardly better in that respect. The first serious History of South
India,[4] that of K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, appeared only in 1947. Even
recent surveys of Indian archaeology generally give the South a
rather cursory treatment.
The Context
It is a fact that archaeology in the South has so far unearthed
little that can compare to findings in the North in terms of
ancientness, massiveness or sophistication : the emergence of urban
civilization in Tamil Nadu is now fixed at the second or third
century BC, about two and a half millennia after the appearance of
Indus cities. Moreover, we do not have any fully or largely excavated
city or even medium-sized town : Madurai, the ancient capital of the
Pandya kingdom, has hardly been explored at all ; Uraiyur, that of
the early Cholas, saw a dozen trenches ;[5] Kanchipuram, the
Pallavas' capital, had seventeen, and Karur, that of the Cheras,
hardly more ; Kaveripattinam,[6] part of the famous ancient city of
Puhar (the first setting of the Shilappadikaram epic), saw more
widespread excavations, yet limited with regard to the potential the
site offers. The same may be said of Arikamedu (just south of
Pondicherry), despite excavations by Jouveau-Dubreuil, Wheeler, and
several other teams right up to the 1990s.[7]
All in all, the archaeological record scarcely measures up to what
emerges from the Indo-Gangetic plains—which is one reason why
awareness of these excavations has hardly reached the general public,
even in Tamil Nadu ; it has heard more about the still superficial
exploration of submerged Poompuhar than about the painstaking work
done in recent decades at dozens of sites. (See a map of Tamil Nadu's
important archaeological sites below.)
But there is a second reason for this poor awareness : scholars and
politicians drawing inspiration from the Dravidian movement launched
by E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker ("Periyar") have very rigid ideas about
the ancient history of Tamil Nadu. First, despite all evidence to the
contrary, they still insist on the Aryan invasion theory in its most
violent version, turning most North Indians and upper-caste Indians
into descendants of the invading Aryans who overran the indigenous
Dravidians, and Sanskrit into a deadly rival of Tamil. Consequently,
they assert that Tamil is more ancient than Sanskrit, and
civilization in the South older than in the North. Thus recently,
Tamil Nadu's Education minister decried in the State Assembly those
who go "to the extent of saying that Dravidian civilization is part
of Hinduism" and declared, "The Dravidian civilization is older than
the Aryan."[8] It is not uncommon to hear even good Tamil scholars
utter such claims.
Now, it so happens that archaeological findings in Tamil Nadu, though
scanty, are nevertheless decisive. Indeed, we now have a broad
convergence between literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence.
[9] Thus names of cities, kings and chieftains mentioned in Sangam
literature have often been confirmed by inscriptions and coins dating
back to the second and third centuries BC. Kautilya speaks in his
Arthashastra (c. fourth century BC) of the "easily travelled southern
land route," with diamonds, precious stones and pearls from the
Pandya country ;[10] two Ashokan rock edicts (II and XIII[11])
respectfully refer to Chola, Pandya and Chera kingdoms
as "neighbours," therefore placing them firmly in the third century
BC ; we also have Kharavela's cave inscription near Bhubaneswar in
which the Kalinga king (c. 150 BC) boasts of having broken up
a "confederacy of the Dravida countries which had lasted for 113
kingdoms must have been established around the fourth century BC ;
again, archaeological findings date urban developments a century or
two later, but this small gap will likely be filled by more extensive
excavations. But there's the rub : beyond the fourth century BC and
back to 700 or 1000 BC, all we find is a megalithic period, and going
still further back, a neolithic period starting from about the third
millennium BC. While those two prehistoric periods are as important
as they are enigmatic, they show little sign of a complex culture,[*]
and no clear connection with the dawn of urban civilization in the
South.
Therefore the good minister's assertion as to the greater ancientness
of the "Dravidian civilization" finds no support on the ground. In
order to test his second assertion that that civilization is outside
Hinduism, or the common claim that so-called "Dravidian culture" is
wholly separate from so-called "Aryan" culture, let us take an
unbiased look at the cultural backdrop of early Tamil society and try
to make out some of its mainstays. That is what I propose to do
briefly, using not only literary evidence, but first,