Bibliographic record

*Collected Papers of Thani Nayagam Adigalar*, International Institute of Tamil Studies (Taramani, Madras), publication no. 224, English, first edition, December 1995. Gathers important Tamilology articles from *Tamil Culture*. Internet Archive mirror: 523 scan leaves (item language metadata incorrectly says Tamil).

How to read

Front matter and cleaned essays follow on this page. Start from the contents list; open the IA scan when a footnote or plate is unclear.

Collected Papers of Thani Nayagam Adigalar

On-site reconstruction of the 1995 IITS *Collected Papers*. Front matter from eng-OCR of the TDL scan; essay bodies from Tamil Culture OCR and cleaned article files matching the volume contents. Not a page-faithful 1995 reprint. Machine OCR errors remain.

Contents

1. Front matter (IITS 1995)
2. This Journal of the Academy
3. The Survival of Tamil Culture
4. The Ethical Interpretation of Nature in Ancient Tamil Poetry
5. Tamil Culture—Its Past, Its Present and Its Future
6. Educational Thoughts (Culture essays)
7. Ancient Tamil Literature and the Study of Ancient Indian Education
8. The Educators of Early Tamil Society
9. Ancient Tamil Poet-Educators
10. Language Rights in Ceylon
11. The First Books Printed in Tamil
12. Earliest Jain and Buddhist Teaching in the Tamil Country
13. Doctor R. P. Sethu Pillai
14. Indian Thought and Roman Stoicism
15. Antao De Proenca’s Tamil-Portuguese Dictionary

Front matter (IITS 1995)

Lightly cleaned bibliographic leaf and preface from the 1995 IITS *Collected Papers* scan. Decorative OCR noise removed; prefer the scan for imprint details.

Bibliographical data

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Title | Collected Papers of Thani Nayagam Adigalar |
| Publisher | International Institute of Tamil Studies, C.I.T. Campus, Taramani, Madras 600 113 |
| Publication number | 224 |
| Language | English |
| Date | December 1995 |
| Edition | First |
| Size | 22 × 14 cm |
| Copies | 1000 |
| Pages | 314 |
| Price | Rs. 100/- |
| Printers | Pavai Printers Pvt. Ltd., Madras 600 014 |

Preface

~ Xavier S. Thani Nayagam Adigal is a scholar who took steps to propagate the greatness of Tamil all over the World. | | He was: born at Karampon in Yazhpaanam. He was a professor of Indian Studies, at the. University of Malaya, Kualalumpur, and the joint Secretary General of the International Association of Tamil research, He was a great scholar, priest and patriot. His entire life was dedicated to the field of Tamil research as an ardent patron of the language. He was one of the founders of International Institute of Tamil Studies and World Tamil Conference. - Thani Nayagam Adigal visited many countries.all over the World and understood tht there was | “No use in secret among ourselves Repeating a stale old story The test of all true greatness is that outsiders hail our glory”’ To fulfil the dream of Bharathi, Thani Nayagam ‘Adigal published the “Tamil Culture’, a quarterly Journal of the Academy of Tamil Culture from 1952 to 1966. He expressed the aim of the Journal as “‘the scope of which is to promote studies of the Tamil language, literature, history, religion, philosophy and other aspects of culture within the larger context of South India and Dravidian’. He published a number of research papers in the Journal of Tamil Culture. His main Contribution to Tamilology are 1. A Reference Guide to Tamil Studies; 2. Tamil Studies abroad, 3. Tamil Culture and Civilization, and 4. Landscape and Poetry. He quotes in his book “Tamil Studies abroad’ Mi “Though Tamil is a Dravidian language with ancient and uninterrupted literary and artistic tradition, it is studied in most foreign Universities mostly either because of its peculiar linguistic characteristics or because it is a tool for field work in Tamil district . In the last two decades its importance as a modern language of India, and the peculiar political problems and movements of Tamil-Speaking groups and minorities has attracted attention. Scholars of Indo-Aryan in foreign universities find Tamil and the Dravidian languages increasingly useful in their understanding of both Ancient and Modern India. The architecture and the music of the Southern now begin to obtain a place in academic syllabuses.abroad. But Tamil literature, Philosophy and religion are not so widely known as Tamil linguistics and contemporary social and political movements.” In this work we have brought out the important articles written by' Thaninayagam Adigal on Tamilology in the Journal Tamil Culture. We hope this book will be of use to Tamil Scholars and Tamil lovers at home and abroad. We expiress our sincere thanks to Honourable Education Minister, (Chairman of this Institute and the Secretary, Tamil Culture and Development, for their constant encouragement given to our institute. We express our sincere thanks to Rev. Gnanaprakasm, and Rev. Amudan Adigal who permitted us to publish this book. Our thanks are also due to Dr. M. Valarmathi who has helped us in collecting the precious works of Thani Nayagam Adigal. DIRECTOR CONTENTS , | General 1. This journal of the Academy cae 3 2. This quarterly Review a 14 3. Two decades of Tamil Studies vine 21 4. The Tamil Development and . Research Council _ 40 5. The First book printed in Tamil ate 43 6. The Survival of Tamil Culture ... 68 7. A bibliograpical Guide to Tamil Studies » «=74 Tamil Literature 8. The Tamil said it all with flowers wea WS 9. The Ethical Interpretation of nature in ancient Tamil Poetry cme = 10.

This Journal of the Academy

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. IV No. 1 (January 1955), pp. 1–11 · IA leaves 1007–1017

Tamil Culture in its fourth year of publication leaves the press as the organ of the Academy of Tamil Culture which has been recently constituted in Madras by representatives of every field of Tamil “scholarship and Tamil interest. The Memorandum of ‘Association and the rules and regulations of the Academy, extracts from which we publish elsewhere, are sufficient indication of the comprehensive aims and objectives of the Academy in promoting the study and development of the Tamil language and literature, the Tamil arts and sciences. As the journal of the Academy, this review. will in future have a wider scope and include within its pages the activities of the Academy of Tamil Culture and other allied and affiliated bodies.. This journal aims at reaching as wide a circle of readers as possible. It is being circulated in such a manner that it may come within easy reach of the teaching profession and student population, two categories of readers among whom the review has a mission to fulfil. For this purpose the Academy is also organising the publication.of a Tamil edition of the Review ‘which will present. to the Tamil reading world the results of modern scholarship and which will serve as a forum of exchange of views and of discussion among Tamil sangams and Tamil scholars.
_ In its activities and functions, the Academy proposes to be directed by the high principles of scholarship and steer clear of partisan politics and sectarianism, which unfortunately so often invade the hallowed precincts of study and research. The Academy of Tamil Culture hence bids fair not only to become a rallying centre of the:Tamil renaissance at a period when all the resources and all the talent of Tamildom are neccessary to ward off dangers but also to contribute to the positive growth of the many aspects of Tamil culture.
- Jt has been for along time the desire of many students and well-wishers of: Tamil literature and Tamil culture, that there be some journal in English through the medium of which these subjects may reach the non-Tamil world, and reach also that class of Tamil society which on account of various circumstances finds itself more proficient in English than in Tamil. Requests for such a review came during the writer's world tour five years ago when he met several scholars and persons of general culture who lamented the want of some means of contact with the Tamil world. In Japan, in the United States of America, in Ecuador, in Peru, in Chile, in Argentina and Brazil, in Europe, the necessity. of such a review was again and again impressed upon him, and having edited this journal for three years and circulated it amongst scholars and institutions round the world, he has come to know of more and more reasons why this journal should have a long lease of life and be wél€ established. The means of achieving these ends have beenfound in the Academy of Tamil Culture.:
Nearly every generation during the last one hundred years has had a few. men in South India and Ceylon who realised the unique features of the Tamil language and literature and endeavoured to have their enthusiasm shared by others. A good number of these men were foreigners whose appreciation of Tamil culture was allthe more. precious because of their scholarship in Latin and Greek, and their acquaintance with European culture. The judgements of Walter Elliot, Stokes, Ellis, Gover, Winslow, Caldwell, Pope, Vinson, have been of a most enlightening nature even though they. did not have the benefit of recent editions and critical studies; but the complaints they voiced in their day concerning the neglect regarding Dravidian culture,in general and Tamil culture in particular, may very well be made even today. So little has been accomplished in the meantime; so vast is the field that is offered for research and:study. Dr. G.U. Pope wrote thus in 1910 of British neglect of Tamil literature:
‘Although the very ancient, copious, and refined Tamil language is inferior to none, it is regarded by most people as the (probably - barbarous) vernacular of a people living somewhere in a remote district of Great Britain’s imperial possessions. Neither does our Indian Government nor do our Universities fully recognize the value of Tamil: literature; and so those who spend their lives in the study of the great South Indian classics must resemble men seeking for pearls under water.”? 1 One wonders if these words may not be applied here in India and Ceylon to the neglect that Tamiliana and Tamilology suffer at the hands of those whose duty itis to protect and develop them. What W. W. Hunter said of philology is true also of many other fields of Tamil studies: _ ** Philology has hitherto concerned herself almost exclusively with Indo-Germanic and - SeItIC + speech; with speech that is at a single stage, and perhaps not at its most instructive stage. The study of the non-Aryan tongues of India is destined, I believe, to open the. door to the vast linguistic residue, and to furnish’ the basis of a new science of language, as the study of Sanskrit in India, eighty years ago, ‘afforded the foundation upon which the present system of philology has been reared.” 2. _ 1, The Tamilian Antiquary, No. 6, p. 3. idee A Comparative Dictionary of the languages of Asia. W. V’. Hunter.
‘There were a number of Tamils themselves who, roficient in the English language and familiar with ieaoneuss thought, sought through translations and critical studies to interest the rest of the world in their own literary and cultural. heritage. Kanagasabai Pillai’s ‘The Tamils Thousand Eight Hundred Years Ago’, Isaac Tambyah’s ‘ Psalms of a SaivaSaint’ Gnana Prakasar’s unfinished Lexicon, the various issues of that excellent journal The Tamilian Antiquary, not to mention the scholars of the South like P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar and J. M. Nallasamy Pillai have reminded students at home and abroad of the hidden wealth that yet remains to be discovered in Tamildom. Our Universities, particularly those of Annamalai and Madras, have periodically published works that are most useful to foreign students interested in Tamil studies. But it will not be sufficient to consign Tamil studies only to Universities. Private institutes and private agencies must as well take up the diffusion of Tamil Culture. And that diffusion cannot hope to achieve success unless the centres of Tamil research set before themselves the highest standards of scholarship? The more such scholarship embarks on comparative studies, the greater will be its benefit to the world at large. There is need for the disinterested and dispassionate activities of an Academy which will not relegate exclusively to Universities and the State the patronage of Tamil studies.
There are dark and disconcerting obstacles in the way of a dispassionate appraisal of the Tamil contribution to the culture of India and Ceylon. An American scholar sent by the Rockfeller Foundation returned from India to America five years ago with the impression that the Government of India was not interested in any studies that would prove the non-Aryan origin of cultural trends and historical events in India. The activities of the Southern circle of the Department of Archzology have not been conspicuous in the Tamil country. Now that the Indus Valley has been lost to us (and that loss is probably more Tamil’s than that of any other language) one would expect more intense work in Adichyanallur, in Arikamedu, in Kaveripoompattinam, but the Archeological Department lacks either the will or the means, or possibly is deficient in both. Similar complaints have been made by scholars with regard to the neglect of Tamil antiquities and epigraphy in Travancore and Ceylon. The function of the research scholar is not to actas a partisan but to be a witness to the truth. It is fatal to scholarship when it is blinded by prejudice or made to serve the interests of a party. Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Let the petty politician keep his hands off culture and learning.
* * *
' The lot that has befallen ‘Tamil is happily not the lot of the Sanskrit language. This other great vehicle of Indian thought is an Indo-European tongue. Because of its affinities with Latin and Greek, and German and
‘ other modern languages, it has received recognition abroad. Since the days of Willian Jones, and more recently, since the days of Max Muller, scholars in the West have come to a better knowledge of the characteristics of the Sanskrit language and literature. Vedic Sanskrit definitely antedates Latin and Greek by many centuries, and displays the original Indo-European structure better than any other known tongue, with the exception of Lithuanian. On the other hand, there should be a better knowledge of Latin and Greek in India. Scholarship in our Universities, particularly in comparative philology, is woefully inadequate.
Scholars in Tamil should be better conversant with the languages and literatures of the other “ cultivated” and “uncultivated ” Dravidian tongues, and of Sanskrit and English if they are to make their work truly worth while. Comparative studies in Dravidian languayes have not advanced far since Caldwell’s time.
Because of its affinities with the North Indian languages, and because of the unique position it has held as a vehicle of religious and philosophic thought, Sanskrit holds a prominent place in Indian culture. Writers like Max Muller, Winternitz, Macdonell, and Keith have revealed to Indians themselves the treasures of the Sanskrit tongue. Tamil cannot expect the same amount of study or spontaneous interest on the part of non-Tamils for the want of such linguistic affinities.. No heed has been paid to the observation of Max Muller himself that
“‘Tamil literature hitherto has been far too much neglected by students of Indian literature, philosophy and religion.” 3
Most of the pioneer work, therefore, that will cause interest in the rest of the world must proceed from the Tamils themselves. Some of them should be prepared, even at the cost of sacrifice, to acquire a literary profiiciency in foreign tongues so that they may translate the Tamil classics into other languages. So far no translation.of a Tamil classic seems to have been incorporated in any series of the world classics in English or in any other language, nor any extracts from Tamil poetry included in the anthologies of world poetry. The Academy of Tamil Culture proposes to sponsor the work of scholars who embark in making original research in the various fields of Tamil culture and will ‘‘ establish and maintain effective contact and collaboration with University or other academic organisations at home and abroad ”’.
There is in European Universities a growing desire to examine the Dravidian contribution to Indian culture. It is a relief tofind that such research is popular among at least a few scholars in India. In the new series of ‘‘ History and Culture of the Indian people’, published by the Bharatiya Itihasa Samiti, the first volume entitled “The Vedic Age’? contains a study of particular interest, and that is, the study entitled “‘Race Movement and Prehistoric Culture ”, by S. K. Chatterji of the University of Calcutta. He says,
‘It has been generally admitted, particularly after a study of both the basis of Dravidian and Aryan culture through language and through institutions, that the Dravidians contributed a great many elements of paramount importance in the evolution of Hindu civilization, which is after all (like all other great civilizations) a composite creation, and that in certain matters the Dravidian and Austric contributions: are deeper and more extensive than that of the Aryans. The
. pre-Aryans of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were certainly in possession of a higher material culture than what the semi-nomadic Aryans could show.”’,;; Again, while estimating the Dravidian and other non- Aryan contributions he points out -tersely that
**In culture, speaking in the Indian way, one may say that over twelve annas in the rupee is non-Aryan origin ”’, meaning that. more than three-fourth of Indian culture is non-Aryan and predominantly. Dravidian. He proceeds to show that Indian food, the Indian way of thinking, the Indian counting and computation, the Indian marriage and religious customs, and Hindu worship and ritual are mostly Tamil or Dravidian.*
It is clear that the néglect of studies and research concerning Tamil India can give room to gross errors
#. The Vedic Age, pp. 151 - 165, London, 1951.
and misleading judgements in the writing of Indian: history and the exposition of Indian culture and Indian literature. The peculiar characteristics of the Tamil language, its phonetics, its antiquity, its one and only declension and one and only conjugation, its classification of gender so unlike the Indo-European that attributes gender to inanimate objects, and even _ changes the gender of objects from century to century, its ancient and obsolete particles should arrest the attention of all those interested in the structure and the history of human speech. Tamil is as mucha classical language;with @ \classical literature as Greek or Sanskrit with this difference that while her ancient contemporaries have changed beyond recognition or been long regarded as “‘ dead”, Tamil continues to be one of the most vigorous of modern Indian languages, and perhaps offers the only example in history of an ancient. classical tongue which has survived to this day and yet remains young as it was two thousand years ago. “It is not perhaps extravagant to say that in its poctic form the Tamil is more polished and exact than the Greek, and, in both dialects, with its borrowed treasures, more copious than the Latin. In its fulness ' and power, it more resembles English and German than any other living language’.: During the last fifty years a number of ancient Tamil works have been edited in print by that prince of editors, the late Swaminatha Aiyer. Knowledge about these ancient literary anthologies has not yet reached those who contribute articles to books of reference in the West. Hence their studies generally are confined to the Kural and the Saivaite and Vaishnavite hymns. The love lyrics of the Tamils, their Nature poetry, the panegyric and ethical poetry of the. Puram anthology, the Tamil epics like Silapadikaram and Kambar’s Ramayanam have not been critically studied side by side with the other masterpieces of the world’s literature. There are few languages that can claim such a refined and classical love-poetry as Tamil. Few literatures in the world seem to contain such a large volume of ethical and devotional works. And no other language seems to have been the literary vehicle of the poetry of so many different religions, for in Tamil there are’ poetical works representative of the Jain, the Buddhist, the Saivaite, the Vaishnavite, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the Moslem faiths.
The Kural, no doubt, holds a unique place in the literatures of the world. Suffice it to quote Albert Schweitzer, and his comparative comments on the Kural::
**What a difference between the Kural and the Laws of Manu... Whilst the Bhagavad-Gita in a forced and chilly manner gives as a motive for remaining in active life that it is in accordance with the order of the Universe, the Kural justifies it—what an advance!—by the idea of ethical activity...There hardly exists in the literature of the world a collection of maxims in which we find so much lofty wisdom...We already find here the knowledge that good must be done for its own sake...Maxims about joy in activity bear witness to the strength of the world and life affirmation present in the Kural...It has appropriated all the valuable ethical results of the thought of world and life negation. But in addition to this ethic of inwardness there appears in the Kural the living ethic of love’’. 5 ~ Just as the Kural merits even greater recognition, so does the Siddhanta philosophy, said to be the choicest product of the Dravidian intellect. The fine arts are also fields in which the achievements of the Tamils are conspicuous. In music, in dance, in painting and in sculpture, the Tamils have an inheritance which must be diligently studied in the interests of gracious living.
* ‘ é
The Tamils were also great traders and empirebuilders. Warmington has written an admirable work from Western sources but an equally valuable work remains to be written from Eastern and Tamil sources about South Indian commerce. The sea ports of the then Tamil country, which included all the Malabar coast as well, were busy ports of call into which ships from the West sailed with their gold, lamps, wine and goblets, to return home laden with pepper and silks and cotton and ivory, and with pearls of the Tamil seas. Teak from the Tamil country has been found in the ruins of Ur of the Chaldees, and peacocks and apes of the South were sold abroad as early as Solomon’s time. Yavanar, or men of the Graeco-Roman world, established colonies and trading stations in the Tamil kingdoms, and were even employed as engineers, bodyguards, palace-guards, and city-guards in the service of Tamil kings. Tamil Nad was perhaps the best known part of India to the countries of the West, and the Tamils developed a breadth of outlook as a result of their international trade. The sagas of the Tamil navies form inspiring records in Indian history since seafaring was not forbidden to the Tamil people.
This expansiveness resulted in foreign conquests, in colonisation and in the establishment of empires, comparatively shortlived like all empires carved out by Indian dynasties, but of sufficiently long enough duration to admit of a permanent impress on the
_ countries that were conquered. Ceylon, Burma, Malaya Siam and Indonesia have all their tales to tell of the “‘ Greater India ” that the Tamils established.
Today the Tamils are found in many parts of the world outside of the Tamil country. In Malaya, in Burma, in Indonesia, in Mauritius, in Africa, in the Isles of the Martinique, in Jamaica, in Trinidad, and in other countries they have left the stamp of their language, their religion, their fine arts and of their enterprise. That the Tamil people are industrious and enterprising, and immigrated in modern times to different parts of the world to earn their bread by. manual work, need not lower them in the esteem of scholarship, or render study concerning their contribution to the world, fruitless. The superiority that intelligent men admit is that which is merited because of contribution to thought and progress and human happiness. By such standards the Tamil world may well be proud of its achievement, and in their long and unbroken history, the Tamils have deserved to be classed with the Egyptians, the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Romans.
We need not insist further on the peculiar features of the culture, the language, the history, the literature, the fine arts and crafts that will form the subject matter of this Review. To bring these to light, to make them available to as many people-in the world as possible, is a duty that must be done in the interest of truth. To have had some glimpse of these hidden beauties and not to have shared them with others would be unpardonable selfishness. The Academy of Tamil Culture and its journal are therefore pledged to the noblest purposes and ends that can inspire Tamil speaking peoples. Fazit Deus.

Notes

Footnotes on this essay (IA leaves 1007–1017) are only partially recovered by OCR. Prefer the Internet Archive scan for full citations.

The Survival of Tamil Culture

Re-OCR’d from Internet Archive page images (*Tamil Culture*, Vol. I No. 2, June 1952, printed pp. 99–103; IA leaves 3–9) and lightly edited for readability. Hyphenation rejoined; obvious character errors corrected against the scan. Signed **THE EDITOR**. Tamil closing verse and some footnotes may still need the scan.

Contents

1. The Survival of Tamil Culture

The Survival of Tamil Culture

Synced from re-OCR’d `survival-tamil-culture` (IA leaves 3–9; Tirukkural closing couplet + Eliot note restored).

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam (as Editor) · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. I No. 2 (June 1952), pp. 99–103

THE DISINTEGRATION and disappearance of dominant cultures is one of the most painful observations in the study of history.

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep.

A sense of sadness and regret comes over the student of culture that walks among the ruins of Sumer or Akkad or Crete or Athens, and realises that men could have altered the course of history. The disappearance of cultures is not explained by a blind and predetermined cyclic process as Otto Spengler attempted to prove in his book on the *Decline of the West*. While it is true that a culture may not be produced artificially or developed according to a pre-conceived plan, it is no less true that the rational and spiritual elements in a culture are those that determine its creative activity, and these are contributed by the mind of man. It is in the power of men to contribute the causes and work at those conditions necessary for a flowering of culture, and it is also in the power of men to combat those intellectual errors and the emotional prejudices which stand in the way of such conditions. The survival as well as the growth of Tamil Culture is, therefore, in our own hands.

There need be no fear that the growth of Indian or Ceylonese national unity, or even the spread of a world culture, threatens the survival of the culture of the Tamils. If the culture of India and Ceylon is to have an organic and natural development in the future, it will be in the interest of these countries to promote a culture which has been basic and is at the roots of their history, and to foster the language and the literature that has been responsible for the preservation of that culture. If the growth of separate regional cultures in Wales, in Scotland, in Ireland have been argued to be necessary for the development of English Culture, with how much more justification may it not be stated that any attempt to interfere with the language, the literature, and the way of life of the millions of Tamils or to weaken their culture by questionable politico-economic methods would spell ruin for that wealth, vitality and diversity which have been characteristic of culture in our parts of the world.¹

From that dawn of history when Dravidian religious, ethical, and material elements entered Vedic and post-Vedic civilization and made a cultural conquest not unlike the classical one related by Horace,

*Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes*

to the present day when Tamil artisans from Tanjore create beauty with stone and chisel at the Dalada Maligawa and the edifices of the Ceylon University, the Tamil contribution to other cultures has been consistently considerable. Since a healthy diversity is necessary in a unity for the development of culture, any attempt in India or Ceylon to impose the tyranny of one language, one outlook, one way of life would be tantamount to the negation of culture, and would result in the failure that like experiments have encountered in our generation in Italy and Germany. Even in a country like Malaya where the Tamil-speaking people form a minority, the conservation of Tamil culture will strengthen the future development of the Federation. It is this belief that has made the University of Malaya organize a department of Tamil Studies and South Indian culture. It is the unimaginative statesman that aims at the tyranny of a rigid uniformity and embraces the view that any culture incompatible with his own should be forcibly uprooted.

Nor is it reasonable to fear that dominant cultures like Tamil, and *a fortiori* satellite cultures, would cease to exist before the advance of a future world culture. T. S. Eliot has stated very clearly what the reaction of a student and lover of culture would be to the evolution of a world culture such as is envisaged by the promoters of a world state and a world government. “We can only conceive it (world culture) as the logical term of relations between cultures… It must follow from what I have already pleaded about the value of local cultures, that a world culture which was simply a uniform culture would be no culture at all. We should have a humanity de-humanised. It would be a nightmare.”²

Tamil culture far from being absorbed in a world culture would receive from it opportunities for growth and for service. The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation has thus defined its objectives:

1. To develop and maintain mutual understanding and appreciation of the life and culture, the arts, the humanities and the sciences of the peoples of the world, as a basis for effective international organization and world peace.
2. To co-operate in extending and in making available to all peoples for the service of common human needs the world’s full body of knowledge and culture, and in assuring its contribution to the economic stability, political security, and general well-being of the peoples of the world.

The activities of the international body have been said to be vague and impractical, and such observations are probably due to the new ideas that the organisation has introduced in the educational and cultural field. It is certainly giving an orientation unemphasised before. Ananda Coomaraswamy realised the need to establish world unity and understanding on a knowledge of the culture, literature, and the spiritual achievements of peoples, and he advocated that norms of conduct should be taken not only from Greek and Latin classics, but also from Tamil, from Arabic, from Persian and from Chinese. The Unesco up to now has not turned its thoughts to Tamil, but we fervently hope it will. The lover of Tamil culture is not concerned so much about a possible weakening or inadequate recognition of Tamil culture, as about the world neglecting or losing a most precious heritage.

The manner in which Tamil culture has resisted all attempts at being absorbed by alien cultures argues an inherent vitality which strikes the student of culture as a most remarkable phenomenon. By the usual laws of change known to history there were periods when the Tamils and their culture should have been so absorbed as to have lost their identity; when their language should have been so changed as to have lost its original structure, and should have been so Sanscritized as to create today controversies regarding its origins and its classification. The advent of the Aryans, the activities of the Jains and the Buddhists, the patronage of exclusive classes by Tamil kings, an exaggerated appreciation and imitation of foreign styles and modes, the conquest of the Tamil country by European nations, all these events brought in their wake a number of trends unfavourable to the organic growth of the culture of the Tamils. But every period of danger was marked by a reaction in favour of maintaining its purity and identity, and thus has Tamil Society reached its present state with its own system of values and its own cultural ethos.

In the relations between a given culture and contemporaneous cultures, there are always two forces of action, the force of attraction and the force of repulsion. Especially in our age is contact with other cultures a source of strength and inspiration. Even those influences mentioned above which occasioned a struggle for survival, eventually served to enrich Tamil culture because Tamil society had the vitality to react in time and assimilate foreign elements of worth into its organism without any danger to its identity. The force of repulsion too, paradoxically enough, is one of the most creative forces in the realm of culture. It is friction that produces the spark, and it is danger that augments the instinct of self-preservation. There are enough causes today for Tamil Society to be constantly vigilant, and vigilance is as much the price of culture as of liberty.

When we compare the state of the Tamil language and literature and Tamil way of life fifty years ago with their present state, we see many encouraging signs to show that we are witnessing the beginnings of a great revival. It has been usual to attribute this revival to the great patriot and poet, Subramania Bharathi. While we are willing to ascribe to him the chief influence in the reawakening of a national and political consciousness among the Tamils, and new trends in Tamil poetry, the literary and cultural revival, we feel, should be traced to another source.

Just as the popularization of the classics of Greece and Rome and the study of the origins of European Culture occasioned the Renaissance, so too the popularization through print of the Cangam works and the classical epics of the subsequent epochs are responsible for the new life that is manifest in Tamil letters, and the new interest shown in Tamiliana. To no single man would it be possible to attribute the beginnings of this Renaissance. It is a movement towards the success of which many outstanding men have contributed their share; religious revivalists like Ramalinga Adigal, Arumuga Navalar, and Vedanayagam Pillai; scholars like Meenakshisundaram Pillai, Sundaram Pillai and V. P. Subramania Mudaliyar; editors like C. Y. Thamotharam Pillai and Swaminatha Aiyer; writers like Maraimalai Adigal and Thiru V. Kalyanasundara Mudaliar; interpreters in English like Kanagasabai Pillai and Dr. Pope. This movement has created a deep interest in the roots and origins of Tamil Culture; it has been responsible for the eschewing of superfluous words and phrases of Sanscrit origin which were introduced in Tamil vocabulary during periods when Sanscrit was considered “the language of the gods”, and Tamil thought to be an inadequate medium of expression. This movement has caused a revival of interest in Tamil Music, in Tamil dances and in Tamil drama. In brief, it has made the Tamil conscious of his past, and that is the happiest augury for the future since the future should be well rooted in the past.

In the realm of poetry, this is Bharathi’s age, but little of genuine poetry has been produced since his death. Tamil prose reveals the signs of conscious attempts by writers to make it the medium of expression of modern thought and literary criticism. The output has been prolific in certain sections of Tamil prose, but depth, vigour, strength and character have not been its noteworthy features. Arthur Clutton-Brock said some years ago “The English Plato is yet to be.” So too the Tamil Newman, the Tamil Milton, the Tamil Cronin, and even the Tamil Tagore are yet to be.

The survival as well as the positive growth of Tamil Culture is happily based on the study of the past of the Tamils. The present revival is bound to be yet fruitful in proportion to the study that the Tamils themselves are able to make of their own language, their own literature and their own origins. For the maintenance as well as for the transmission of a culture there is no safeguard more reliable than language, and no means better suited than the family. It is in the family that the earliest and also the permanent attitude towards a culture is developed. Hence in bi-lingual areas an effort should be made in Tamil homes to teach the mother-tongue in all its purity, and inculcate the finer and nobler elements of the Tamil heritage.³

The many Tamil festivals, lectures and conferences that are becoming popular in the Tamil country are promoting a very welcome enthusiasm. But enthusiasm can be short-lived unless it springs from intellectual convictions. Such convictions are formed by study, by the cultural climate in the family, and by an understanding of that “perfection”, and that “sweetness and light” that culture bestows on the individual and on society. It is because of persons endowed with such “perfection” that life is livable. To quote the Tamil sage:

பண்புடையார்ப் பட்டுண்டு உலகம் அது இன்றேல்
மண்புக்கு மாய்வது மண்

Notes

1. Christopher Dawson, *Progress and Religion*, p. 117 f.; London, 1945.
2. T. S. Eliot, *Notes towards the Definition of Culture*, p. 62, London, 1951.
3. The following lines about satellite cultures from T. S. Eliot, op. cit., p. 54, may stimulate thought in those that advocate indiscriminate bi-lingualism: “The unmistakable satellite culture is one which preserves its language, but which is so closely associated with, and dependent upon, another, that not only certain classes of the population, but all of them, have to be bi-lingual. It differs from the culture of the independent small nation in this respect, that in the latter it is usually only necessary for some classes to know another language; and in the independent small nation, those who need to know one foreign language are likely to need two or three: so that the pull towards one foreign culture will be balanced by the attraction of at least one other. A nation which has a weaker culture may, at different periods, become a satellite culture: a sure satellite culture is one which, for geographical and other reasons, has a permanent relation to a stronger one.”
4. Cf. Matthew Arnold, *Culture and Anarchy*.

The Ethical Interpretation of Nature in Ancient Tamil Poetry

Re-OCR’d from Internet Archive page images (*Tamil Culture*, Vol. I Nos. 3–4, Sept. 1952, printed pp. 186–196; IA leaves 94–104) and lightly edited for readability. Hyphenation rejoined; obvious character errors corrected against the scan. Tamil verse lines that remain unclear in the scan are marked; prefer the scan view for citations.

Contents

1. The Ethical Interpretation of Nature

The Ethical Interpretation of Nature

Synced from re-OCR’d `ethical-interpretation-nature` (IA leaves 94–104; Tamil quotations restored).

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. I Nos. 3–4 (September 1952)

IT IS a favourite point with writers on India to say that the “historical sense” is wanting in all ancient Indian literature. If by a “historical sense” is meant a sense that ought to have produced chronological tables, and authors like Herodotus and Livy who wrote to recount the deeds and facts of the past, then it must be admitted that no literature has come down to us that warrants the existence of such works.

Yet, ancient Tamil literature abounds with allusions, both to contemporary and past events. If even in the absence of works similar to those written by Greek and Roman historians, it has been possible to trace out a history of the Tamil people during the Cangam period, it is due to the historical references in Cangam literature.¹ Many of these references occur in love-poetry. This fact ought to prove to some extent how much the Tamils relished historical references. At the same time, it must be observed, that even these references were often made not only to praise the memory of great Tamil personages of the past but also to eulogize their patron-kings and patron-chiefs. For instance, a poet writes about the gossip in the locality regarding the courtship and clandestine meetings of a hero and a heroine. It may be he has an actual “case” in mind, or it may be he is just imagining a poetic situation. The poet would compare the wide-spread gossip and scandal-mongering (அலர்) of neighbours to some contemporaneous or past victory in battle achieved by a king or chief he admires, or from whom he has received bounteous gifts, saying that the gossip was more resounding than the shouts with which the foes of his hero retreated in battle, or louder than the jubilant cries of his patron’s soldiers when they cut down the “guardian tree” of his enemy. Or the allusion may be manifestly to historic exploits performed by the nation’s heroes in the past.²

Apart from the purely historical allusions, Cangam literature contains also numerous passages in which the poets associate landscape with historical events and historical persons. This historical association in nature poetry is also to be found among poets of other nations like Vergil. English poets have used it in poems here and there. Byron’s *Childe Harold* contains many passages where landscape evokes thoughts and reflections on the past, and Scott is famous for seeing his landscape always through historical association. The Tamil poets too had a capacity to see the earth coloured by this historical association, but their manner of expressing historical association is worth noting for it is both rare and impressive.

The tresses of the heroine have a fragrance that floats in the breeze. The fragrance reminds the poet of the fresh sweet smell that emanates from parks and jungles on a morning when the mullai is in bloom, and forthwith he compares the fragrance of the tresses to the fragrance of the forest-reserve of one of his patrons, say Ori:

Her tresses smell like the fragrant breeze that blows having traversed through the forest-park of Ori of the liberal hand and the valiant chariot.³

The tresses of a heroine are compared sometimes to a flourishing city, but often to the wavy river sand, or the wavy dry bed of a river. The waves of her tresses are thus compared to the side-bed, of not any river, but one that the poet would like to extol, say the ford of the Kaveri at Uranthai, the capital of the Colas or the banks of the Vaigai near Kudal.

Potiyil, one of the peaks of the Western Ghats, stands like a lofty sentinel in the Southern portion of the range. The sandal-wood that grows on this mountain and these ranges has been always a favourite term of comparison with poets including Kalidasa. The hill would seem to have been included for sometime within the kingdom belonging to chiefs of the Ay family. The heroine is said to be as fragrant as the sandal-wood, or the vengai and kanthal of Ay’s Potiyil, and cooler than its water-lilies.⁴

The eyes of a heroine are usually compared to neydal blooms or to water-lilies. But often the flowers are specified as belonging to the lakes or tanks of some historic place or famed ruler. Thus, in a poem of the *Akananuru* collection, the eyes are compared to the neydal blooms of a maritime lake (கழி) bordering the sea near Korkai, the emporium of the Pandyans.⁵ Paranar, in another poem of the same collection, after having enumerated the various difficulties and obstacles that a hero has to overcome to keep a tryst with his heroine, concludes saying that they are as difficult to overcome as the outer defences and the defence-forests of Tittan’s Uraiyur.⁶

நொச்சி வேலித் தித்த னுறந்தைக்
கன்முதிர் புறங்காட் டன்ன
பன்முட் டின்றால் தோழிநங் களவே

Another poet compares the forlorn appearance of the heroine on learning of the impending departure of the hero, to the groves around the Kaveri:

Thy forehead is like unto the honey-smelling groves floored with white sand on the tender shores of the great river. After the March festival, under the dense trees rich with foliage and flowers may be seen the ashes of fires kindled by those who have been feasting. As desolate as the grove without people art thou. Your shoulders too, once resembling the elegant and stately bamboos that grow on the flanks of the Potiyil hill that belongs to the Ayan, master of the Southern sea rich in peerless pearls, have also lost their pristine elegance.⁷

And thus numerous examples may be given of the brief but significant ways in which history and Nature and personal association are linked together by the Tamil poets in the composition of imagery. As great an attraction for them was, however, to consider an ethical aspect in Nature, often based on historical and personal association.

The Tamils were always a hard-working and industrious people. The fertility of the soil was greater in the Cangam period than now, but was not so great as to require much less energy and industry on the part of cultivators than are required at present.

It happened that Nature made up by providing an abundance of luxury goods in exchange for what she exacted by labour from the Tamils. The hills of Tamil Nad provided pepper, cinnamon and other spices; her seas gave pearls and red coral; her forests yielded metals and precious stones. Therefore, as early as historical records go the Tamils have distinguished themselves as traders, with China to the East, with Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Roman Empire to the West. They made the most of what Nature gave them, and their commerce added not a little to the wealth of their country.⁸

The Tamils were also known for their spirit of warfare. The chiefs and kings fought intermittently among themselves, and as it happens when war and diplomacy and alliances have become common, they developed early a very honourable code of warfare.

Their commerce with foreigners, and their warfare made them develop high ethical standards of conduct. Honesty, truthfulness, bravery, love of honour, are virtues without which no people may distinguish themselves in trade or war. Mercy and sympathy are also qualities which are natural to those who have attained a position of permanent wealth and to the warrior used to the miseries of the battle-field. Hence the repeated emphasis in Tamil literature on the right use of wealth by distributing it to the poor and the needy.

Cangam literature is nearly one-fourth ethical if you consider the didactic poems as well as those that personify and illustrate virtuous deeds and allude to virtuous persons. “Ethics in Cangam literature” would certainly form enough matter for a voluminous study. Here is a typical poem of four lines by Avvai, “The Tamil Sappho.”

Land whether it be high or low, cultivated or uncultivated may be called good not because it yields good crops, but because it yields good inhabitants.⁹

And here is a typical comparison where a certain lover’s words are said to be as faultless and true as the arrows shot by the archers of the army chief, Palyan.¹⁰

கொற்றச் சோழர் கொங்கர்ப் பணியியர்
வெண்கோட் டியானைப் பேஎர் கிழவோன்
பழையன் வேல்வாய்த் தன்னநின்
பிழையா நன்மொழி தேறிய இவட்கே

Tamil poetry abounds with passages in which the fertility of a region or kingdoms, unfailing rains, well-watered rivers, abundance of birds and beasts and general prosperity are ascribed to the righteous rule of the sovereign. The panegyric poems of the *Pattuppattu*, the *Patirruppattu* and the *Purananuru* are impregnated with this idea. The praise of a sovereign’s rule meant the praise of the hills, the rivers and the general beauty and fertility of his kingdom. Sometimes the panegyrics assume a language reminiscent of Vergil in the fourth eclogue. Describing the region of Ilanthirayan, the poet says, “in his land there are no marauders that attack way-farers to rob them of their goods. Peals of thunder you will not hear; the serpent will not kill, nor the forest animals hurt. Proceed, therefore, as you will.”¹¹

When praising sovereigns, the roar of the ocean or the cataract, and the sound of thunder are said to be the drums that announce his greatness. The heights of the mountains bespeak the heights of greatness achieved by him. The streams that descend the mountain sides may be seen shimmering silverlike from far and wide; they are the silver banners that proclaim his victories and his unrivalled prowess in war.¹²

The waters even in the biggest and deepest of his rivers are so clear that ornaments that have fallen off from those sporting in the river may be seen lying deep down on the sands. The clear waters are an indication of the unsullied record of his rule.¹³ This mode of praise occurs in the panegyric poetry, both in explicit terms and by suggestion.

Nature’s reflection of righteousness is not due to the actions of the sovereign alone. It may be due to deeds of individual chiefs as well as the deeds of a people of the entire village. An amusing and significant poem of the Kali odes presents a young lady and her companion as apparently wondering that Nature could be so luxuriant in the country of her lover who has not kept his tryst. The inference is that since he has not kept his word he cannot be an upright man, and consequently Nature cannot appear lovely in his land.

What! The river glimmers! Can it truly glimmer in the land of one who is not true to his promises,—who has not kept his word? What! the rain cloud wanders,—does truly the rain cloud wander in the land of him who is the cause of wasting form?¹⁴

இலங்கு மருவித் திலங்கு மருவித்தே
வானி லிலங்கு மருவித்தே தானுற்ற
சூல்பேணான் பொய்த்தான் மலை

She expresses her surprise in similar language about these beauteous and beneficent aspects of Nature, for she would expect that the land of one who has been false to her would be deprived of Nature’s beauty and Nature’s bounty.

Another poem in the same collection is an imaginary exhortation to relatives of a young lady not to refuse her hand in marriage to the young man who has rescued her from being swept away by the waters of a river. In rescuing her, the young man has had to clasp her to himself, and according to the Tamil code, it was but proper to get her married to the one who was first to touch her. It was the ancient ideal that a young lady should not touch or be touched by anyone else than the one who was to be her partner in life. The speaker who counsels her people threatens that unless propriety is observed in this regard and the young lady given in wedlock to the one who had clasped her for the first time,

The valli will not yield its roots, the hilltops will not yield honey, the garden pannicum will not bear fruit—because the mountain dwellers have observed that which is evil.

In the mountain summits which attract the eye, and there the gloriosa superba casts around its fragrance, the bows of the archers fail not just because their wives are devoted exclusively to their sires.¹⁵

The inference in the latter part is that the hunters in the hills will not be successful in obtaining food with the bow and arrow if they do not regard the propriety regarding the wedlock in question. Such is the power of chastity, that a chaste maid or a chaste wife could merit seasonal rains for her village.¹⁶ Such is the power of the prayer of these good men that their devotions bring rain when they are in need, and keep away the rain clouds when it threatens to rain too much.¹⁷

Vergil enunciated a principle of poetry much in vogue among the ancients when he said that what is described ought to correspond to the dignity of the theme or the hero—*si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae*. The Tamil poets took pains to describe everything noble even in the landscape of imaginary heroes. In love poems, the heroes and heroines may be real or imaginary. The poet may have in mind actual incidents from life or he may be describing incidents his poetic fancy has built up. The heroes and heroines are depicted as ideal persons for Tolkappiyar and the poets believed in another principle enunciated also by Aristotle that a class is represented by the best of its type.

They chose the best of the types they described, and the nobility of the landscape is always made to reflect the nobility of character of their heroes.

Descriptions and allusions to Nature contain historical references of a kind which allude to the goodness, gentleness and kindness of the historical heroes. When Shakespeare in *Coriolanus* refers to Valeria as—

chaste as the icicle
That’s curdied by the frost from purest snow
And hangs on Dian’s temple¹⁸

he no doubt meant that ice, pure everywhere, becomes purer by association with the temple of Diana at Ephesus, the celebrated edifice in honour of the goddess of chastity. The Tamil poets work in similar associations where possible. The eyes of a lady are compared to the round water-lilies. A Tamil poet would not be satisfied with any simile in general; he would want a historical simile. He would rather refer to the water-lilies growing in the region of a particular king or chief. This topical and specific setting served a double purpose, namely to praise the region, or its ruler, as well as to say that the flowers in the particular region would be lovelier because of the goodness and righteousness of the persons associated with it. The latter inference is derived from the historical allusion and the lesson is that the beauty of a landscape is commensurate with the moral beauty and ethical ideals of its rulers and citizens. While in *puram* poetry such assertions are directly made as may be seen in any panegyric poem, in *akam* poetry they are alluded or suggested as in the examples that follow.

The taste of water after eating the goose-berry is sweet. However, the poet thinks that it will be sweeter after eating of the goose-berry in Pannan’s garden, for he is one who does not live for himself but for others.¹⁹

Pari, one of the last seven patrons of poets, had a picturesque lake in the hilly territory of which he was chief. The water-flowers that bloomed there are sometime objects of comparison. In a poem in which a lover is remonstrated for his coldness and indifference towards his beloved, the lady’s nurse addresses him in these words:—

Once, even if my lady had offered you the green fruit of the margosa, you would have received it as sweetest sugar. But now, were she to give you even the clearest water of a January morning from the cool lake of Pari’s hill, it might scald you and taste bitter. Such is your wavering love.

Waters on a January morning would be cool and crystal-clear in all lakes. Many lakes could have been taken as a term of comparison in the Tamil country. But here the poet pays a compliment to Pari as well as teaches a moral lesson. Waters in Pari’s territory ought to be clearer because he has a clear and unsullied record, and his lake is cooler because he refreshes with his giving all those who have recourse to him. Similarly, the flowers of his lake are more fragrant, and the poet would compare the heroine’s fragrance, not to any flower in general, but to the flowers of Pari’s lake, or to the flowers that bloom on Sirumalai of the Pandyans, or on the hill of Ori, the beneficent chief, or of Ay.²⁰

Much that was ethical entered also into the world of Tamil imagery. A few examples will suffice. The bee goes from flower to flower. Having spent the day among aquatic flowers, when the sun sets and the aquatic flowers close their petals, the bee betakes itself to the flowers on creepers and branches which flower at night. The bees that abandon the lotus and the water-lily in the evening for the jasmine and the kantal remind the poet of those who forsake the friendship of men whose wealth and influence are on the decrease.²¹ Another poet imagines a trial of strength between a rogue elephant and a tiger. To the bee the tiger’s spots seem to be flowers of the vengai. It flies to and fro between the elephant and the tiger, trying to taste of the elephant’s rut, as well as of what it imagines to be the flowers of the vengai. The bee reminds the poet of those peace-makers who seek to bring together two contending armies or two opposing parties.²²

For wealth of Nature imagery the kali odes occupy a very prominent place in Cangam literature. In the kali odes of the palai class the sun is represented as cruel as a sovereign that is an unjust ruler. On the other hand in a neydal kali where Nature is considered under a different aspect, the sun is compared to a victorious and virtuous king proceeding to another world to enjoy the fruits of his good deeds.²³

Trees in the palai region are said to be dried up like the tree under which has sat a man that hath borne false testimony.²⁴ They are also said to be devoid of fruits and leaves like a young man whose youth has passed in a lonely existence. Like the petty-minded man whose wealth does not benefit those who approach it, and like the end of him that lives a life of wrong-doing which ends in self destruction, the tree too dries up even to its very roots.²⁵ The luxuriant trees, on the other hand, that border rivers and tanks are suitable similes for those who flourish because they share their wealth with the poor and the needy.

The trees on the well watered river banks grew like the wealth of him that gives without stint, and lives a virtuous life doing no evil to others.²⁶

The trees were heavy with flowers like the bounty of him who realises the transitoriness of life.²⁷

Like the wealth of the bountiful man, the trees bloomed; like the effortless ease of those who enjoy the wealth of such a man, the bees sported among the flowers.²⁸

The petals of the gloriosa superba are compared to women’s fingers and the entire flower, especially before it has unfolded itself is compared to the two hands joined in an attitude of supplication. Trees and plants that are bent or drooping are compared to the bent head and shy posture of wise and learned men who have heard their own praise spoken in their presence.²⁹

From animals too the Tamil poets learned wisdom. The hero as well as the heroine recall their own course of love when they observe what part love plays in the behaviour of animals. The elephant that strokes with its trunk the back of its mate or helps it to feed on bamboo-shoots, the deer calling unto deer, the dove cooing unto dove, the buffalo, the crab, all these teach them or remind them of the affectionate relation that should exist between those who are pledged to each other.

Notes

1. Writers like P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar and K. N. Sivaraja Pillai have based their works entirely on this literature.
2. Kur.; 328; 393; Agam 36; 45; 209; 253; 256.
3. Kur., 199.
4. Kur.; 84.
5. Agam; 130. Cf. Agam; 47, 69.
6. Agam; 122, 21–23. நொச்சி வேலித் தித்த னுறந்தைக் / கன்முதிர் புறங்காட் டன்ன / பன்முட் டின்றால் தோழிநங் களவே.
7. Agam; 137.
8. E. H. Warmington, *The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India*, Cambridge, 1928.
9. Puram; 187.
10. Nar.; 10, 6–9. கொற்றச் சோழர் கொங்கர்ப் பணியியர் / வெண்கோட் டியானைப் பேஎர் கிழவோன் / பழையன் வேல்வாய்த் தன்னநின் / பிழையா நன்மொழி தேறிய இவட்கே.
11. E.g. Puram; 143, 12, «நின்று நின் மழையும் பாட»; Puram; 231 ff.; *Maduraikkanci*; 105 ff.; Patir.; 28.
12. Perumpan.; 40–43; Patir.; 69, 78; Agam; 162, 358; Patir., 70, 22; Puram; 126 ff.
13. Patir.; 86.
14. Kali; 41, 42. இலங்கு மருவித் திலங்கு மருவித்தே / வானி லிலங்கு மருவித்தே தானுற்ற / சூல்பேணான் பொய்த்தான் மலை.
15. Kali; 39.
16. Kali; 19, 20; Kali; 39, 8.
17. Puram; 143, 1–3.
18. *Coriolanus*, V, iii, 65–67.
19. Agam; 54.
20. Kur.; 19. Cf. Agam; 47, 69, 78.
21. Agam; 71, 1–4. நிறைந்தோர்த் தேரும் நெஞ்சமொடு குறைந்தோர் / பயனின் மையிற் பற்றுவிட் டொரூஉம் / நயனின் மாக்கள் போல வண்டினம் / சுனைப்பூ நீத்துச் சினைப்பூப் படா.
22. Kali; 46.
23. Compare Kali 13 with Kali 118.
24. Kali; 34, 10.
25. Kali; 10.
26. Kali; 27, 1–2.
27. Kali; 32, 11.
28. Kali; 35, 1–2.
29. Kali; 118.

Tamil Culture—Its Past, Its Present and Its Future

Re-OCR’d from Internet Archive page images (*Tamil Culture*, Vol. IV No. 4, 1955, pp. 341–364; IA leaves 1374–1397) and lightly edited for readability. Hyphenation rejoined; page headers and footnote blocks separated; obvious character errors corrected against the scan. Tamil verse that remains unclear is marked — prefer the scan view for citations.

Contents

1. Opening
2. What is Culture?
3. The Antiquity of Tamil Culture in Ceylon
4. Twin Cultures
5. The Tamil Language
6. Tamil Literature
7. Ideals of Life
8. Present State
9. Tamil at the University
10. Responsibility of the State
11. Some Ways and Means
12. Unto the Last

Opening

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. IV No. 4 (1955), pp. 341–364

*An address delivered under the auspices of the Tamil Cultural Society, Colombo, 2 August 1955.*

"Tamil"means"sweetness, "and"Culture"has been defined as"sweetness and light."'"Tamil"and"Culture, "therefore, make a most graceful combination both in Language and in Life. It is this graceful combination that has brought us here this evening.

The Tamil Cultural Society has completed three years since its inception. If it is to be of greater service to the Tamil-speaking peoples, it should be our privilege to welcome to the Society more members from every walk of life. It is by the growth of organised action among the Tamil-speaking population that the Society may hope to realise what it has so elaborately planned. There was never a time in the history of this Island when concerted action was so vital to our existence as it is today. It is the aim of the Tamil Cultural Society to have an Island-wide membership of at least ten thousand people, all united in the furtherance of the cause of Tamil Culture, the Tamil Language, Tamil Literature and the Tamil Arts. This may seem an ambitious aim, but it is not beyond realisation, provided every Tamil-speaking citizen is conscious of his heritage, and of his duty to pass on that heritage to the generations that will succeed him in this Island.

What is Culture?

Culture has been defined as a "way of life, "as"sweetness and light", as "activity of thought and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. "These brief definitions are sufficient to show the comprehensiveness and the indispensability of culture, for one must have a way of life, and that way of life should be combined with sweetness and light, with activity of thought, and with beauty and humane feeling.

Tamil Culture is nothing else but the Tamil way of life, a pattern of gracious living that has been formed during the centuries of Tamil history. It has been conditioned by the land, the climate, the language, the literature, the religions, the customs, the laws, the food, the games and toys of the Tamil people, by the palmyra palm, the gingelly oil, and the vegetables associated with them. Culture is a most elusive and at the same time an all-embracing term.

The Antiquity of Tamil Culture in Ceylon

Tamil Culture has existed in this Island from time immemorial. All the weight of geological, anthropological, historical, literary and linguistic evidence point to the existence in Ceylon of a people with racial and cultural affinities with the inhabitants of South India.

The Mahavamsa itself recognizes the existence of a civilized people living in cities at the time of the landing of Vijaya. The Mahavamsa too supposes a pre-Buddhist period in Ceylon when the religion of the people was Hindu. The story of Elara's reign, the statement,

"When he had thus overpowered thirty-two Damila

Kings, Dutthagamini ruled over Lanka in single sovereignty, "the rule of Tamil kings, the accounts of the Vaitulyan doctrine, and references to "Damiladevi," "the Chola

people,""the further coast"and"the other coast, "point to an ancient time when Tamil Culture and Sinhalese Culture existed side by side upon this Island. The relations of the Sinhalese Kings with Nagadipa, with the Chera, Chola, Pandya Kings of South India their dynastic alliances, their embassies, their treaties, and even their wars and their intrigues, are evidence of a fraternal rivalry that existed between these neighbouring kingdoms. There is a tendency to exaggerate these wars and to portray these cultures as if they were perpetually in conflict. Such a portrayal is one of the dangers of history. The truth is, that to one well read in Ceylon and South Indian history, these conflicts seem like the internal conflicts of kindred peoples. The wars of the Tamils against the Sinhalese are not any more numerous or hostile than the wars among the Tamil kingdoms themselves. At the time the Portuguese landed on this Island, there is ample evidence for the honoured place Tamil had at the Court of Kotte and for the Tamil schools that the Portuguese founded in the Western and North Western Provinces. When printing was introduced into this Island for the first time, the Dutch published books both in the Tamil and Sinhalese tongues. A copy of a Tamil book published in Colombo in 1754 by the Dutch Pastor Bronsveld, refers

in its dedication to the Tamil language spoken within the greater area of this Island. (Maxima cum hujus insulae parte Tamulice loquentem).

Robert Knox and the Dutch despatches speak of the Tamil townships and the Tamil-speaking people of the Kandyan Kingdom.

Twin Cultures

The comparative study of the Tamil and Sinhalese languages, of the literatures and grammar in the two languages, of place-names, of the drama, the dance, the architecture, the sculpture peculiar to the two cultures of this Island reveal to what limits they influenced each other. Anthropological surveys have shown the extent to which the common racial characteristics are shared by the populations that speak the two languages, and history testifies to the shifting of populations from one kingdom to another and to the sections of people that have changed one language for the other. The laws, the caste system, the patterns of social structure, reveal very many common elements. For the existence and inter-penetration of these cultures, there is no better evidence than a religious shrine like Kathirgamam held sacred by the Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims, located in the southernmost part of Ceylon, and the religious shrines of the Buddhists located in Nainativu, a northernmost outpost of the Island, held sacred also by Hindus.

The existence of two different religions did not always prevent the patronage that kings of one persuasion extended to the religion that was not theirs; did not prevent the patronage and employment of Saivaite Brahmins at the Sinhalese Courts; did not prevent marriage alliances of Sinhalese Kings with Tamil Saivaite Queens; did not prevent the teaching of Tamil along with Sinhalese, Pali and Sanskrit at the more famous pirivenas as testified by the Gira Sandesa (15th century).

There was a time when Buddhism counted many Tamils among its followers, even in Ceylon, and Tamil Buddhist monks contributed in no small measure to the enrichment of Tamil literature and Pali literature.

Viharas were established in the Tamil-speaking areas of Ceylon and South India, and Tamil monks came to teach as well as to learn in the Sinhalese kingdoms. It will always remain a source of pride to us that the greatest, if not the only classical epic of Theravada Buddhism exists in the Tamil language. The poetry of Manimekhalai (2nd cent. A.D.) has been forgotten by scholars because of its didactic and doctrinal appeal, but it remains one of the finest jewels of Tamil poetry with an abundance of quotable lines, like

*(Tamil verse — see scan.)*

*(Tamil verse — see scan.)*

*(Tamil verse — see scan.)*

The Virasoliyam, a compendious Tamil grammar, was compiled in the 11th century by a Tamil Buddhist, Buddhamitrar. The origin of Tamil is attributed in this grammar to Avalokitesvara (Bodhisattva). This grammar seems to have influenced the Sinhalese grammar Sidatsangarava. Among the more famous Tamil Buddhists that visited Ceylon on religious and cultural missions were Sangamitta (4th c.), Buddhadatta Mahathero (5th c.), Vajrabodhi (7th—8th c.), Anurudha (12th c.), Dharmakirti, author (?) of the Culavamsa (13th c.). Dignaga, Dharmapala of Nalanda, Bodhidharma of China were three other illustrious Tamil exponents of Buddhism. '

The Tamil Language

The Tamil language has been spoken in this Island, it would seem, at least for the last three thousand years. The punchmarked coins of an early era point to connections that Ceylon may have had with Mohenjodaro and the Indus Valley civilisation. Tamil poetry composed in Ceylon has been included in the earliest Tamil Anthologies, and the Tamil spoken in Ceylon represents a pre-Pallava period with its ancient morphological and grammatical forms and its repertoire of words considered obsolete for centuries on the neighbouring continent.

A language is always a mirror of a people's genius.' The Tamil language has been spoken basically in its present form for the last two thousand years, and it continues even now to be the living language for thirty to forty million people—about thirty million people in India, more than two million people in Ceylon, nearly one million people in Malaya, Vietnam and Indonesia, and many thousands scattered over Fiji, Mauritius, Madagascar,

Africa and even Trinidad and the Martinique Islands.

Tamil is as much a classical language as Greek, Latin or Sanskrit, with this difference that while her ancient contemporaries have changed beyond recognition or been long regarded as"dead", Tamil continues to be one of the most vigorous of modern languages, and perhaps offers the only example in history of an ancient classical tongue which has survived to this day and yet remains young as it was two thousand. years ago. |

TAMIL CULTURE.REFERENCE TO CEYLON 347

The monumental Tamil-English Dictionary by Miron Winslow was commenced in Jaffna by Joseph Knight, assisted by Gabriel Tissera and Rev. Percival (two Ceylonese), and it is in the introduction to this Dictionary that Dr. Winslow has the oft-quoted passage:

"It is not perhaps extravagant to say that in its poetic form the Tamil is more polished and exact than

the Greek, and, in both dialects with its borrowed

treasures, more copious than the Latin. In its fullness

and power, it more resembles English and German than

any other language."

Dr. Slater said, "The Tamil language is extraordinary in its subtlety and sense of logic"; and W. Taylor observed earlier, "It is one of the most copious, refined and polished languages spoken by man.";

Tamil speech as obtaining in Ceylon, and Tamil phonetics as obtaining especially in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, show a fidelity to the earliest Tamil grammars which the speech of South India does not—a clear indication of the development of Tamil in Ceylon unhampered by the extraneous influences to which South India was subject.

Tamil Literature

Tamil Literature has made certain definite contributions to world thought and letters. Its love poetry and its inclusion of love poetry in its theory of poetics are indications of the humanistic approach to life that is characteristic of Tamil Culture. The love poetry of the Tamils is the product of a people among whom the finest ideals of courtship and wedlock had long been cherished. The ethical poetry of the Tamils has been the wonder of all foreigners who have studied it. The maxims of Thiruvalluvar or the Tirukkural is a book of which Dr. Albert Schweitzer has said. a. Quoted in Preface to Winslow's Tamil-English Dictionary, Madras,

"There hardly exists in the literature of the world a collection of maxims in which we find so much lofty | wisdom.'? And Dr. Pope observed:°"I have felt sometimes as if there must be a blessing in store for a people that delight so utterly in compositions thus remarkably expressive of a hunger and thirst after righteousness."1° If English be the language of commerce, French the language of diplomacy, Italian the language of love, and German the language of philosophy, then Tamil is the language of devotion. The devotional poetry in Tamil is so great in bulk, and in depth and intensity of emotional fervour, that its continued study has given the language a certain aptitude for the expression of themes pertaining to mysticism and contemplation. The Nature Poetry of the Tamils is again the result of a people who lived intimately with Nature. No people, except perhaps the people of the Pacific Islands, have made so much use of flowers and plants in daily life for various purposes as the Tamils have done. The Tamils said it with flowers not only in love but also in warfare. The ancient Tamil warriors went to battle, their brows decked with garlands, and each strategic movement had its own symbolic flower. The influence and vitality of Tamil Culture in Ceylon has been such that it has produced a Tamil literature of worth, of which there is indisputable evidence from the 13th century, and many a Ceylonese poet and scholar crossed the Straits and won fame and recognition in other lands where Tamil is spoken. The name of Arumuga Navalar is associated with a great revivalist movement in Tamil and Saivism; C. Y. Thamotherampillai was a pioneer editor of the classics which spear-headed the Tamil Renaissance; V. Kanagasabaipillai opened up a new A. SCHWEITZER, Indian Thought and its Development, pp. 200— 205, London, 1936. KANTHA, Terra Tamulice, Colombo. 1910 SN"Dictionary; SRE

horizon to many a foreigner with his"The Tamils Eighteen Hundred years ago;"N. Kathiravelpillai distinguished himself as a lexicographer; Cumaraswamy Pulavar was recognized as a scholar of outstanding merit; Swami Vipulananda occupied the Chair of Tamil at the Annamalai University, and Swami Gnana Prakasar established his reputation for comparative philology and for the history of the Tamil-speaking people. The records of some of the earlier Tamil writers of Ceylon have been included in the"Tamil Plutarch"compiled by Simon Casie-Chetty. Sinhalese sovereigns of various periods extended their patronage to Tamil poets, and the story is told of the forlorn Tamil bard that set out from Jaffna with his poem to the Court of Rajasingha at Kandy, to be told on the way that the last Tamil-speaking King of Ceylon had been taken captive.

Ideals of Life

Tamil Literature was the result of the Weltanschauung, the world outlook of the Tamil-speaking peoples, and at the same time that literature kept alive the outlook and those ideals which shaped it. Imagination is a gift which has been associated with great commercial peoples, and no people in this part of the world were such skilful navigators or traders as the Tamils.

The sea ports of the then Tamil country, which included all the Malabar coast as well, were busy ports of call into which ships from the West sailed with their gold, lamps, wine and goblets, to return home laden with pepper and silks and cotton and ivory, and with the pearls of the Tamil seas. Teak from the Tamil country has been found in the ruins of Ur of the Chaldees, and peacocks and apes of the South were sold abroad as early as Solomon's time. Yavanar, or men of the Graeco-Roman world, established

350 TAMIL CULTURE |. colonies and trading stations in the Tamil Kingdoms, and were even employed as engineers, body-guards, palaceguards,and city-guards in the service of Tamil Kings."

In this trade and overseas expansion the ports of North Ceylon played a great part which is forgotten in the age of the steamship and the aeroplane. Kalpitiya, Mantote, Kayts, Elephant Pass, Trincomalie have a naval. history that has yet to be studied from local and foreign records, including the Arab chronicles.

The Tamil Argonauts turned their eyes even more naturally towards the East and with them they carried their art and architecture, their religion, their language and their laws. It is agreed by most writers on Indian influences on South East Asia that the Tamil Kingdoms were among the earliest and the most active.

The author of the Periplus and Ptolemy speak of the ships that used to sail from the Eastern coasts of South India and Ceylon to the land of gold (Malaya and Java), and Fa Hien refers to his voyage to Java, via Trincomalie. Having travelled lately through South East Asia, I have been able to follow the routes taken by the Tamil Argonauts and see the many lands where the Tamil-speaking people left behind the traces of their genius and culture. In the architecture of Champa and Cambodia, in the sculptures of the Museum of Tourane, in the Saiva Siddhanta system of religion once followed in Indonesia and Indo-China, in the bronzes of Siam, may be seen the traces of Tamil influence. The Bharata Natyam has affinities with the dances of Cambodia and Bali; the Tamil sacred verses are recited by the Court Brahmins of Thailand at the Tamil feasts of Thirupavay and Thiruvempavai and during the coronation of their kings; certain tribes in Sumatra go under the Tamil names of Chera, Chola, Pandya and Pallava; and the temples of Dieng plateau, of Po-Nagar,

TAMIL CULTURE.REFERENCE TO*CEYLON 351 of Mi-son (Vietnam), of Angkor Thom, show the influence of Tamil architecture.

Islam was spread in the Malay Archipelago largely by Tamil-speaking people.

Because of their international outlook, trade and navigation the Tamils eschewed insularity and developed a remarkable universality of outlook. Wendell Wilkie in One World begins his book with the statement, "In future our thinking must be worldwide. "The Tamil poet anticipated him by two thousand years when he said

Every country is my country;
Every man is my kinsman.

*(Tamil original — see scan.)*

This sense of universality was instrumental in fashioning Tamil society after a broad and tolerant pattern. Albert Schweitzer in his Indian Thought and its Development shows exhaustively the optimistic, humanistic sense of life and life affirmation, the joie de vivre, that is characteristic of the Tamil attitude to life. He has also shown that three of the greatest philosophers of India, namely, Sankara, Ramanuja, Ramananda came from the South and were indebted to Tamil thought.

The happy warrior delineated by the Tamil classics is one who has a sense of honour and of chivalry, and who will rather die than turn his back upon a foe or an adverse circumstance. Honour, bravery and nobility ( urert ) required one to bear the marks and scars of battle on the bosom. The story is told of the Tamil matron that heard of her son who had fallen in battle. She hurried to the battlefield in distress lest he should have fallen in retreat, but was relieved and happy when she saw the wounds on

his chest, the infallible sign that he had fallen facing the enemy. | 13 G. COEDES, Les etats Hindouises, Paris, 1948. _

The Tamil warrior was expected to cover himself with glory in the arts of war and of peace. Men were illustrious because they left a glorious name ( ys ):—

*(Tamil verse — see scan.)*

The ideal of tolerance, the will to live and let live, is well illustrated by the anthologies which include poems of every shade of religious and philosophic belief. It is further clear from the scenes in Manimekhalai of Tamil cities where philosophers of rival schools expounded their own doctrines from their respective booths, under their own flags—a two thousand-year old anticipation of Hyde Park Corner.

The tradition of Bhakti and the ideal of tolerance explain the fact that nearly every world religion can claim in Tamil a voluminous literature. Tamil Culture has been enriched by poetical works of Saivaites, of Vaishnavites, of Jains, of Buddhists, of Muslims, of Catholics, of Protestants. No other language in the world has been the vehicle of the epic poetry of so many different religions, not Latin, not Sanskrit.

As the ideal of the Philosopher-Statesman was outlined by the Greeks, as the Orator was delineated by the Latins, the Courtier and Governor by the English, the Tamils conceived their educational ideal as the Complete Man, the Perfect Man (#1erG@er) endowed with honour, greatness, culture, benevolence and grace.

Further, a life of altruistic love was recommended to every Tamil. It has been found that persons dedicated to service and love live longer than others, and probably it is the altruism of Tamil Culture

*(Tamil verse — see scan.)*

Present State

When one examines the present state of the Tamilspeaking peoples and their fidelity to the ideals that moulded their culture one wonders if they have not lost a great deal of the virility and resource that characterized them of old. It is true they continue to live, to be theistic, and to have a love of the language and literature that nurtured them, but enterprise, initiative, creative activity and philosophic thought are necessary to them, if they are not to be noted for inertia and apathy. Some of their ancient contemporaries are no more; the Chams and the Khmers with whom they traded and who under their inspiration erected colossal monuments are themselves spent forces in the world of today. Unless we are alive to the needs for the conservation and transmission of this culture, it may well be that a few centuries hence we shall have precious little of this heritage left behind in the country of our birth.

'- 1. As the basis and source of this apathy and inertia, I would point to the ignorance of the language, of the literature, of the arts, of the history, of the culture, that exists among our people today, especially among those sections that combine wealth and influence and a lop-sided Western education. Cultures disappear by those very causes by which they flourish, and the disappearance of the ideals that nourished Tamil Culture will eventually lead to the disappearance of Tamil Culture itself. They say the Lion and the Lizard keep The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep.

During the last fifty years there has been a revival of interest in Tamil, and this revival must be attributed to the printing and popularising of the Tamil classics. But that revival in Ceylon will not be complete unless it reaches every section of the Tamil-speaking public, particularly those who establish the norms of appreciation and the standards of refinement.

2. The dearth of philosophic thought is, perhaps, the greatest drawback in the popularising of true values in Ceylon. In the spate of talk and oratory about our past glories, we run very dry concerning the problems that affect us in the domain of thought, concerning our beliefs, our code of right and wrong, our political creeds, our ideals of service, our national unity. Philosophy is not the peculiar business of the angels; it is human business, everybody's business.

The want of creative activity in writing and the Fine Arts that we remark today is mainly due to the lack of an interest in philosophic studies and in pure thought. The publishing houses are bringing out translations and adaptations of foreign works and commentaries on the ancient classics, but original works, works in Tamil that deserve translation into foreign tongues, books on the problems vital to man today are noticeably scarce.

3. A lack of originality is seen in the Tamil radio, the Tamil films, and the Tamil newspapers. It is also visible (or audible) in the platform oratory that is being developed in a manner so that the sense follows the sound; it is audible in the alien Tamil accent that is heard over Radio Ceylon; in the hybrid imitations that pass for Tamil dance, and in the poor norms of appreciation of Tamil music."*

- - 4, The emphasis hitherto in the Tamil Renaissance has been on the study of literature. An equal emphasis is necessary today on the Fine Arts of the Tamils. We have not produced recently any great sculptor or any great painter. It is by a revival of these arts that we shall teach our people the art of life and the art of gracious living. A very famous English writer on. the Tamil dance wrote to me some time ago from Canada:"I would give anything to have a glimpse of a Pallava sculpture. or a Chola bronze. "It requires an aesthetic mind to be so moved by art.

"4 BERYL DE ZOETE, The Other Mind, p. 14, London, 1953.

TAMIL CULTURE.REFERENCE TO:CEYLON 355 I have no intention of continuing these observations because I see at the same time a few signs of an awakening of effective mterest in our cultural heritage. But the question that agitates our minds today, the mind of every Tamil-speaking citizen be he Muslim or Hindu, Catholic or Protestant, or Buddhist, concerns the future of Tamil Culture in this country. LANGUAGES OF ADMINISTRATION The stagnation in Tamil Culture that has been noted before is not a little due to the want of State patronage during the last three or four hundred years. With the dawn of a new era in our national life, it is but legitimate for us to expect the State to extend the same measure of support to the development of the culture of the two major nationalities that form the Ceylonese nation. (I follow A. L. Kroeber's definition of nation and nationality:"Here are some contemporary cases of political nations that include two or more nationalities. Belgium is almost equally divided between Waloons speaking a French dialect in their homes and Flemings speaking a ' variant of Dutch. Switzerland is 72 per cent German speaking, 21 per cent French, 6 per cent Italian, 1 per cent Romansch. The Union of South Africa has a white population that is part English speaking and part Afrikaans or Dutch speaking, plus the racially distinct Bantu-Negro natives. India in 1947 set up house-keeping on its own, as two independent political nations with dozens of nationalities and languages."') 15 In the formation and preservation of nationalities. language is by far the most objective factor. It is the free inter-communication of common speech that provides the consciousness of kinship. Language is the rational and spiritual matrix in which a culture lives, moves and has its being. Hence the Tamil poets have consistently lost

356 TAMIL CULTURE |

themselves in a mystical enthusiasm over the nature of

the language, calling it the sweetest possible names: Aste, Aérpdp, acid, sorb, Gasp, usted, Qeyisup, Sisip, 2utsdp, Car Pdsdyp, gprrr_.yp,

The use of the Tamil language in the civil, educational and social life of this country is an absolute necessity if Tamil Culture is to survive. Today, Tamil is spoken in every part of Ceylon by over two million people; it is indigenous to this Island; its speakers constitute a major nationality; its cultural influence in the nation is very much greater than, may be gauged from the numerical strength of its speakers. Words are the living memorials in which are enshrined much of social and political history. The inner life of every people is stereotyped in their language, and retained there for the instruction of future generations. I could give you hundreds of Tamil words and terms, the disuse of which in administration would impoverish the Tamils in Ceylon in more ways than one. It is but a fundamental and human right that Tamil be one of the languages of administration all over the country so that the Tamil-speaking population may transact their business with Government in their own language, and consequently that their business is attended to by members of the Government service who have a minimum knowledge of the Tamil language.

There is a flagrant contradiction in the' statements of those thinkers who would have Tamil as a medium of instruction in schools but not as a medium in administration. If there is equality of opportunity in this Island, it should be made compulsory for a Government servant to have a minimum knowledge of both languages so that he may serve in any part of the Island.

That two languages should function as languages of administration is nothing new in the history of multilingual or bilingual states. South Africa, Canada, Belgium,

Switzerland have their own solutions to the language problems. When three nationalities, four languages, and adherents of three religions have co-operated to build an exceptionally"national"nation in Switzerland, two languages in Ceylon should present no difficulties provided we are determined to preserve the unity of our nation and the territorial integrity of our country. The rule by majority as practised in homogeneous states which have only one language, one nationality, one race, one religion, may not be exercised in countries with a plurality of cultures, nationalities, languages and religions. If the

Swiss confederation has made concession to a language like Romansch which is spoken by only one per cent of its population in one of its twenty-five Cantons, and to Italian spoken by six per cent of its population in two of its Cantons, there must be an affinity between democracy and language that is worth learning."

"In all these countries, Belgium, South Africa and Switzerland, none of the linguistic groups can be properly called a ' national minority,' as each has absolute equality of status with the majority group and its language is

used by the state side by side with the language of the

majority."—(N. Hans, Comparative Education, p. 50.)

In the interests of national stability and solidarity it might be useful for cultural leaders of bilingual and multilingual states to study the questions of national languages on an international plane. Such conferences would strengthen the claims of the Tamil language in Ceylon. sw £

Tamil at the University

If a language is to be the matrix of a flourishing and progressive culture, it is necessary that it be taught at a University level both as a language and as a medium. I am making no suggestion here with regard to the time when our national languages may be introduced into the University or about the preparation needed for its intro-

358 TAMIL CULTURE | duction. Nor am I minimising the importance of a high standard of English desirable at our Universities, but if we wish to develop our languages and our literatures for modern needs and the expression of modern thought, such a development is inconceivable without the national languages becoming the medium in which our intelligentsia think and write, speak and teach. Even for the success of the national languages medium in the elementary and secondary schools, it would seem that a literature at a University level of thought is a prior requisite. So too it is a prior requisite for the progress of all technicalized means of mass communication like the press, the radio and the cinema. The history of the great Buddhist Universities and the Hindu Mutts of the neighbouring continent, as well as the history of Universities in other parts of the world, should convince us 'of the creative influence exercised by these institutions of higher learning in the transmission of language and culture and in the development of the mother-tongue.

The complaint of creative inactivity in Tamil letters and the barrenness of Tamil Art in Ceylon of today is primarily due to the absence of a centre of Tamil thought and Tamil basic research. Our population and our need, would justify the founding of two more Universities, which would be mainly concerned with the development of the national languages. A University in the Northern or Eastern Province with a Tamil cultural emphasis and another in the South of Ceylon, heir to Totagamuwa, would meet the needs. Of the Wijaya Bahu Pirivena, Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam speaking at the Calcutta University Institute in 1916 said:

"In the fifteenth century we had in Ceylon a

splendid College of the University type in the Wijaya Bahu Pirivena at Totagamuwa in Galle District, presided over by Ceylon's greatest poet, Sri Rahula Sthawira. It was catholic in its aims and provided instruction for Buddhists and Hindus, clerical and lay, in all the knowledge of the time."(Eastern Ideals in Education, in Studies and Translations.)

To deny Tamil, equality of status and opportunity at the University or at the Universities of Ceylon, is to deny to the Tamil-speaking people that scholarship and opportunity for national service and cultural refinement which are the ends and aims of higher learning. A University

"aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm

and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlarge-

ment and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating

the exercise of political power and refining the inter-—

course of private life."—(Cardinal Newman, Idea of a

University.)

Are we to be denied these gifts of University life merely because a bilingual University is supposed to be a novel institution in our national experience? Bilingual Universities are no uncommon feature of bilingual and multilingual countries. They tend to set the tone and the example in tolerance, good understanding and co-operation for the rest of the country. And bilingualism at the University and in administration function on the understanding that on the part of the language groups there will be no linguistic or cultural imposition which involves the sacrifice of the mother-tongue.

The existence of the age-long cultures side by side should be looked upon as a source of fruitfulness and mutual benefits. Hence our Universities, schools. and adult educational agencies should provide opportunities for the study of the two national languages. Citizens should be encouraged to learn the other national language so that they may break the linguistic barrier in the interests of social harmony. In Ceylon, we possess already a linguistic environment favourable to the study of Sinhalese, Tamil and English, and as many citizens as possible should avail themselves of this opportunity to obtain a knowledge of the three languages, naturally, in varying degrees of proficiency. 7

Responsibility of the State

Thus far I have spoken of State patronage and of institutions for the promotion of Tamil Culture in Ceylon. The State may not relinquish its obligations in favour of private enterprise and initiative, nor may it attempt at consoling us with the assurance that"Tamil will be taken care of in South India. "Our reply then would be:"We are Ceylonese and the Tamil language belongs here in its own right, and even if Tamil per impossible ceased to be the living language in other parts of the world, we shall endeavour to make it continue to flourish in this Island reserve. "An assurance of Tamil prosperity in South India would be similar to assuring the French-Swiss nationality that French need not be an official language in Switzerland because it is the official language across the border in France, or that the University of Lausanne is superfluous because there is a University in Paris, or to Saying that the mother-tongue may be neglected in Australia because English is taught in the United States. The growth of Tamil.in Ceylon has been independent, though that growth did always admit of influences from across the seas in the same manner as the other great language of this Island.

Nor is it accurate to say that the Tamils are so endowed with intelligence that they will learn the Sinhalese language and wield it with the facility of a mother-tongue even better than the Sinhalese themselves. This is a very unscientific conjecture entirely unsupported by facts. The Tamils can never acquire the same command of Sinhalese as those to whom Sinhalese is the mother-tongue, unless they are prepared to change their mother-tongue. There are very, very few people in the world who are able to think, speak and write two languages with the same equal facility. "And what guarantee is there that even -¥MARIO PEI, The Story of Language, New York, 1940, p. 1047

"A trace of foreign accent is present in about 99% of cases where Bre on one linguistic background tries to speak another

TAMIL CULTURE.REFERENCE TO. CEYLON 361 if they. sell their birthright, origins, religion, names and antecedents will not prevent discrimination should Govern- ~ ment or society choose to discriminate against them ?

Some Ways and Means

There are ways and means by which individuals may promote Tamil Culture, either Singly or in a body. It would not be wrong to say that the State and the Universities receive their tone and their standards also from the society which they represent, so that the higher the standards of society, the higher is the standard of cultural patronage by the State and of efficiency at the University. Here are some ways and means by which the objectives of a cultural revival may be achieved:

A. Active support should be given to associations

dedicated to the study and promotion of Tamiliana. 2. Tamil society should set the highest standards in this revivalist and progressive movement. Awards (cash, medals, books) should be offered for creative work and for translations.

3. Libraries and Museums should be established as means of adult education and films should be made of the Tamil heritage. The project of the Jaffna Library merits the support of the entire country.

4. A comprehensive Tamil-Sinhalese-English Dictionary and a Tamil Encyclopaedia for Ceylon should be compiled. '

5. Basic research should be undertaken by cultural associations so that the significance and import of Tamil

"Pagel: © |

"It has been fully established that a change in language on the

part of an individual is attended by corresponding changes in

gestures, facial expression, carriage, even humour and taboos.

This is readily observable in the case of bilingual speakers when

they pass from one language to the other."

customs and habits and way of life may be popularised among the Tamil-speaking people.

6. Teachers of Tamil should be well-qualified and be lovers of Tamil literature that enjoy Tamil poetry in their leisure. A new orientation in the prescribing of books of study and in their teaching is necessary if Tamil children are to love their language and enjoy poetry and the Tamil Arts as the expression of life and experience, and wield their language for intelligent and effective citizenship.

The writing of poetry should receive especial attention, since poetry, more than any other Fine Art, is a powerful vehicle for the transmission of a people's ideals, history and language.

7. Tamil monuments in Ceylon should be better studied and preserved. If the State for some reason or other, has not hitherto prepared specialists in Tamil archaeology or Tamil history, it should be the duty of the Tamil Cultural Association to request the State to do so. The University, the Department of Archaeology, the Public Museums should have scholars well versed in Tamiliana.

Scholarships may be offered to deserving students by the Tamil-speaking public.

8. Tamil studies should be made to show the points,of contact and elements common with Sinhalese Culture so as to promote understanding and national solidarity.

9. The Tamil classics should be translated into Sinhalese and books on Tamil Culture be written in English and Sinhalese for the promotion of international harmony.

10. The contribution in thought, in literature, in art made by the Tamil-speaking people should be made known through translations in the principal languages of Europe and Asia, because that contribution is part of the world's heritage. In the past, for political and religious reasons, Tamil studies had enthusiastic students in Portugal, Holland, France and England. In the future, it will be the duty of Tamils themselves to give their treasures to their fellowmen, and a few Tamil scholars at least should learn Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian for this purpose.

11. Culture is dependent for its origin and its development on geography and on the land. Tamil Culture has had always an intimate communion with the land

as is to be seen from the earliest Tamil poetry down to our own day. The tendency of people to flock to the towns should be arrested, for extreme urbanization and the consequent change means death to a culture such as ours. One cannot be opposed to change or to the absorbing of elements that are conducive to cultural progress. But the process of change should not involve the ceasing of a vital internal development. The Tamil-speaking people should co-operate in colonisation programmes and revive the agricultural bias of their social structure. 12. Every Tamil-speaking citizen should make his own contribution to this cultural movement, by study, by doing promotional work, and by material assistance. Many associations and authors fail to give of their best for want of adequate finances.

Unto the Last

These, ladies and gentlemen, are some of the measures that we may adopt in order that we may reacquire our Culture for ourselves and our generation, and that we may leave it to those who follow us, richer and nobler, if possible, than we found it. There is no doubt that the task of nation-building is not a light one, and that the problems that beset us are many and varied. While other bilingual states are parts of continents and have large territories contiguous to them, Nature and history and a common patrimony intend us to be one nation in our Island home. Because Tamil is the mother-tongue also in other countries, no Tamil-speaking Ceylonese has ever ceased to think of this Island but as his home, his country and his motherland. For two thousand years and more, our two major nationalities have lived together, and there is no reason for not hoping that Sinhalese Culture will be a source of inspiration and strength to Tamil Culture and that Tamil Culture will be a source of inspiration and strength to Sinhalese Culture. The great Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam in a speech that inaugurated the national movement in this country saw the vision of a future Ceylon which because of progress and leadership would serve as a beacon light to the rest of Asia. Asia today throbs with the consciousness of a new hope and destiny, and within the framework of a new world, our country situated in the centre between East and West has the new opportunity to evolve a life of its own, her own democracy, by learning from the experience of other nations on either side of her but by solving her own problems in the manner best suited to her own national genius.

If I have ventured to suggest to you a few measures for the continued preservation and development of Tamil Culture, I have done so in the spirit of a student. The history that I have outlined, the language in which our mothers sang to us when rocking our cradles, the words that have become dear to us by traditional usage and the phrases that have become consecrated in our prayers at home or at common worship, the literature that has formed, nurtured and elevated us and offered us the ideals which we cherish, these are some of the factors that contributed to the Tamil-speaking peoples existing as a nationality upon this Island. One is not less a Ceylonese for being loyal to Tamil Culture or to Sinhalese Culture.

While it is true that a culture may not be created artificially, it is equally true that it is in the power of men to contribute to the causes and work at those conditions necessary for a flowering of culture, and it is also in the power of men to combat those intellectual errors and the emotional prejudices which stand in the way of such conditions. The survival and the continued growth of Tamil Culture is, therefore, in our hands.

It is selfless and noble to dedicate one's time and energies under God to one's Culture and one's Country. The Tamil sage implied that Tamil Culture is the dearest possession of the Tamil people for the preservation of which no sacrifice would be great enough, not even life itself:

*(Tamil verse — see scan.)*

Notes

Footnotes remain noisy in OCR; prefer the scan for citation. Selected bibliographic anchors:

1. An address delivered under the auspices of the Tamil Cultural _ Society, Colombo on August 2nd, 1955. 5 8 .

2. See Articles by Swami Gnana Prakasar in Tamil Culture, Vol. 1 (1952) Nos. 1—4.

3. W. GEIGER, The Mahavamsa, p. 165; Pp. 264f., Colombo 1950. wr H. BUTTERFIELD, History and Human Relations, p. 158ff., London, 1951. 4 DE QUEYROZ, The Temporal and Spiritual Conquest of Ceylon, p. 241, Colombo, 1930; S. G. PERERA, The Jesuits in Ceylon, passim, Madura, 1942; See G. SCHURHAMMER, Ceylon sur zeit des konigs Bhuvaneka Bahu und Franz Xavers, 2 Vols.; Leipzig, 1928; and Die Zeitge- nossischen Quellen zur ge

4. Dj = Colombo, sa (Copy seen in the Museum Library of

5. On place names, see B. J. PERERA, Some observations on the study of Sinhalese place names in The Ceylon Historical Journal, Vol. II (1953) pp. 241—250; page 244: “Tamil place names are found mostly along the sea-coast and in the Anuradhapura, Chilaw and Puttalam districts. Though there are no native Tamils living along the sea-coast south of Colombo, the Tamil origin of most of the present inhabitants there is seen f

6. in literature produced many centuries before the opening up of plantations and show that the Tamil element in the composition of the Sinhalese is far greater than is usually conceded. Ranmalaya, Kotmale and Gilimale are some of the examples.” I am indebted to my colleague, Mr. K. Nesiah for the above reference. C. E. GODAKUMBURA, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, The Dravidian Element in Sinh

7. K. KANAPATHI PILLAI, Ceylon’s Contribution to Tamil Language and Literature in University of Ceylon Review, Vol. VI, No. 4 (1948) ; Articles by K. P. RATNAM and K. K. NADARAJAH in the Ceylon Tamil Festival Volume (Tamil), Jaffna, 1951. - 9

8. A. L. KROEBER, Anthropology, p. 226—227, New York, 1948.

9. Consult A. SIEGFRIED, Switzerland, A Democratic Way of -Life, London, 1950. 10

10. Page 254: “Linguistic intolerance is manifested in the aversion to other languages than one’s own. As a student of linguistic sociology : puts it, ‘To the naive monoglot, objects and ideas are identical with and inseparable from the particular words used to describe them in the one language he knows; hence he is inclined to consider speakers of other languages as something less than human, or at least foreign and hos

Educational Thoughts (Culture essays)

Three *Tamil Culture* essays on education in ancient Tamil literature. Synced from re-OCR’d `educational-thoughts-ancient-tamil` (IA leaves 1417–1431, 1523–1537, 2099–2111). Footnotes may still need the scan.

Ancient Tamil Literature and the Study of Ancient Indian Education

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 1–15

The contribution that Comparative Education bids fair to make towards the promotion of international understanding and fellowship in this latter half of the twentieth century is similar to the contribution made by Comparative Philology, Comparative Law, Comparative Religion and Comparative Literature in the last two centuries. There is already the promise of educational Bryces and Montesquieus classifying and analysing educational institutions of the Western World, but Comparative Education opens up yet wider horizons, and these include the evaluation of the ideals, aims and values of educational systems and thought in the ancient world as a whole, and not merely in the sector represented by Graeco-Roman culture. It is but natural that the educationists of Europe and America should be concerned with the well-springs of their educational thought, but Comparative Education in an era of internationalism has the opportunity to extend its scope and purposes both in time and in space. Just as research workers in Comparative Education today and Modern Year Books of Education would consider it necessary to include India, Africa, China, Japan and Indonesia within the range of their studies and their surveys, a cultural history of Comparative Education would always remain incomplete without the inclusion of thought in India and China when, for instance, Plato was outlining his Republic and formulating his Laws, and Quintilian was instructing students for the Roman bar.¹

European scholarship, particularly that branch of it engaged in historical, cultural and philosophic studies, has been mostly Hellenocentric and Europacentric and has neglected to a large extent synoptic and synthesising studies of the World that belongs to Mankind as a whole. For this restricted world-view the specialist should shoulder much of the blame. Excessive specialisation has resulted in the most restricted meanings applied to “humanism” and the “humanities”. The classification of specialists into Egyptologists, Indologists, Sinologists under a general trade-mark “Orientalists” has not contributed to their acquiring respectability on an equal plane with those engaged in classical scholarship. The narrow outlook engendered by a certain type of Hellenocentric scholarship sometimes leads to the most startling and unscientific conclusions, as in the following passage in which the author dismisses the consideration of non-Grecian cultures with much the same sweep as Macaulay dismissed the study of Indian literatures.

“We are accustomed,” says the author of *Paideia*, the Ideals of Greek Culture,

“to use the word ‘culture’ not to describe an ideal which only a Hellenocentric world possesses, but in a much more trivial and general sense to denote something inherent in every nation of the world, even the most primitive. We use it for the entire complex of all the ways and expressions of life which characterise any one nation. Thus the word has sunk to mean a simple anthropological concept, not a concept of value, a consciously pursued ideal. In this vague, analogical sense it is permissible to talk of Chinese, Indian, Babylonian, Jewish or Egyptian culture, although none of these nations has a word or an ideal which corresponds to real culture.”

Humanism could hardly be less humanistic, at least not in a world that reads Max Müller and Berriedale Keith and Lafcadio Hearn, Ezra Pound and Radhakrishnan. Plato himself would repudiate this branch of humanism, for his liberal education consisted partly in his travels and in his study of institutions of those countries and peoples associated with Hellas. Like the histories of literature and the histories of the world that by-pass the East, even histories of Education forget one-half the world in spite of their comprehensive titles; and even if they do provide a section or two to India and China, they seem to do so to satisfy some qualm of historical conscience or much in the fashion of a sop thrown to an intellectual and cultural Cerberus.³

The student of Comparative Education, therefore, has a vast and unexplored field before him, and it is yet possible for him to work as a pioneer in synthesising the world’s experience and cultures at given epochs and at given periods of her history. The world is not understood and the achievements of mankind are not understood except “by an appreciation of the intangible, impalpable, spiritual and cultural forces” operating in various parts of the world at given epochs. It comes naturally to persons familiar with Eastern and Western thought to desire that standard works on the History of Secondary Education and the History of Universities and reference books on educational wisdom should include the wisdom of the other half of the world which they tend to neglect.⁴ The interplay of

international forces and the communication and communion of ideas between peoples of the world may be traced even further than the age of the dolmens, and the deeper we go into history, the more surprising are the common characteristics of a uniform development to be traced among groups divided both in space and in time. The vision of reality, for instance, which dawned upon the thinkers of Greece and Asia Minor about the sixth century was not confined to Europe. It was broadly the age of Zarathustra in Persia, of Confucius in China, of the Buddha in India, and of the Hebrew prophets in Palestine. If we go still further, it does not become impossible to trace relationships between the Indus Valley Civilization on the one hand and Sumer, Akad, Egypt and the Aegean Civilization on the other.⁵ Our failure in synthesis arises from the fact that we wish to educate for international understanding, on a curriculum and a literature meant for instruction in nationalism.⁶ We have also failed to note that the school is so much dependent on the scholarship of the University, that so long as scholarship takes a restricted view, education in internationalism and a synthesis of world-knowledge,

what should be the twentieth century realisation of the pan-sophic ideal of an Alexander and a Comenius must remain distant and remote. If the ideal of one world is not to become an empty word, children of different continents should hear not only of Alexander but also of Asoka, not only of the Parthenon and the Ara Pacis but also of Anuradhapura and Angkor Wat, Prambanan and Panataran, not only of the Iliad but also of the Ramayana, and the Silappadikaram. It is not unlikely that at some future time it will be possible for the student of Comparative Education to have a synoptic perspective of educational thought down the ages. It is stimulating to see how certain ideas and techniques dominate parts of the world, at the same epoch or at different epochs. A comparison of the Indocentric area with the Hellenocentric points to certain dominant factors which show a parallel development across the centuries. There were eras, not necessarily synchronistic, when wandering minstrels and poets were the great educators of the two continents. There were periods when great epics like the Iliad, the Ramayana, the Silappadikaram constituted the content of popular education. There were long periods when exegetical works and commentaries on grammarians, philosophers and poets formed the subject of study and scholarship. University life at Taxila, at Nalanda, post-Christian Athens and at the Mediaeval Universities of Europe offer striking resemblances. Monks and monasteries in India and Ceylon played a similar role to that played by monasticism in the West in spreading learning and preserving the traditional lore. Chantry schools and Cathedral schools find their Eastern counterparts in the educational institutions that were attached to Buddhist and Jain monasteries and Hindu temples. Just as a great missionary movement carried the torch of learning to new peoples and remote places of Europe, a similar movement carried the Indian religions and Indian learning to the many states and peoples of South East Asia.

It is instructive to trace how literature, the theatre and the Fine Arts were the media of adult education in both regions. Whole systems of Comparative Education study await the - enterprising students that will function as interpreters of one part of the world to another so that men may see human destiny and human thought steady and see them whole. Such vision is an absolute necessity for a world that needs to understand Asia and her peoples., Further, these studies become indispensable at this stage of Asian history when countries that have once again achieved independence are searching for the roots of their culture and their beliefs. Few Europeans and Americans are in a position to imagine the extent to which the history, philosophy and culture of these countries as extant before their contact with Europeans is being studied by these nations. There is every indication that educational thought, which in these countries has been mostly European in content during the colonial era, will be modified and altered by the study of the nation’s past. It is but proper and natural that while on the one hand they are open to the influences of the outside world, they set up their educational house after their own indigenous traditions and in answer to their own social and economic needs. This will secure for them the most natural and organic development. Indian and Ceylonese education during the period of English rule has not been characterised by any great philosophy of education. It has been mainly utilitarian, arising as it did out of administrative needs. If foreign ideas were imported under foreign rule, they were mainly in the domain of methods, not of values, and hence a rethinking of education is observable in all countries which have become independent.” rt wun Wen eb pam

Dr. Nicholas Hans in defining the international scope of Comparative Education says: “The task is tremendous and can be successfully completed only by team-work of educationists of all countries and international educational agencies. The first step is to study each national system separately in its historical setting and its close connection with the development of national character and culture.”⁸ - An attempt should be made to trace in the spirit of team-work that Doctor Hans has envisaged the educational thought contained in one of the most ancient literatures of the world, written by a very ancient people in a very ancient part of peninsular India and Ceylon. It is true that ancient Indian education has been the subject of a number of studies by various scholars but like most studies on India they have been concerned almost exclusively with Northern India and the ancient Sanskrit and Pali literatures.° The notion that the Sanskrit and Pali literatures are fully representative of the entire field of ancient Indian culture is widely prevalent. This view overlooks the fact that an accurate and complete understanding of Ancient India and Ancient Ceylon is well nigh impossible without a study of the history and the only remaining literature of the Dravidian language-speaking peoples. On the distinctive and independent culture of the non-Aryan peoples of India and Ceylon in ancient times and on their importance in the evolution of the composite culture of India and Ceylon, I prefer to quote from non-Tamil speaking critics. Dr Suniti Kumar Chatterji in a notable contribution to a new series of volumes on the history of India says:

“When the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion and ' occupation of India was first proposed some four genera tions ago, it was believed that the white-skinned, blue-eyed and golden-haired Aryans, like their kinsmen of Northern Europe, entered India from the plateau of Central Asia, which was then a land of romantic mystery, came to this land of the black-skinned non-Aryans, made an easy and matter-of-course conquest of them, and imposed upon an inferior race or races their superior religion, culture, and language. It was believed that all the better elements in Hindu religion and culture—its deeper philosophy, its finer literature, its more reasonable: organization, everything in fact which was great and good and noble in it—came from the Aryans as a superior white race; and whatever was dark and lowly and superstitious in Hindu religion and civilization represented only an expression of the suppressed non-Aryan mentality. This view is now being gradually abandoned. It has been generally admitted, particularly after a study of both the bases of Dravidian and Aryan culture through language and through institutions, that the Dravidians contributed a great many elements of paramount importance in the evolution of Hindu civilization, which is after all (like all other great civilizations) a composite — creation, and tiiat in certain matters the Dravidian and Austrie contributions are deeper and more extensive than that of the Aryans. The pre-Aryans of Mohenjodaro and Harappa were certainly in possession of a higher material culture than what the semi-nomadic Aryans could show.’!0 And again: “By far the most significant elements in the ancient civilization of India as it had evolved by the middle of the first millennium B.C. were contributed by the Dravidians.” ¹⁰ The Dravidian language groups today are represented by the Telugu (33 m.) the Tamil (28 m. in India, Ceylon and Malaya) the Kannada (14 m.) the Malayalam (13 m.) AE RE ain oli, ements neinie ln wumbunes.

and by smaller populations in the Southern part of India and in isolated pockets in Central and North India.“These chief Dravidian language groups formed a solid bloc south of the Vindhyas in Ancient India and at least the Tamil area arrested active and intense Aryanisation at the frontiers during the period under survey while permitting the inflow of trade and to some extent of religious thought. Their country, their language, their culture and what we have of their literature are different from those of the Rig- Vedic Aryans. Southern India, therefore, especially the Tamil-speaking area, at least up to the period of Pallava ascendancy was not the scene of an ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural interfusion of Dravidian and Aryan elements, the like of which was vigorous and active in the land roughly north of the Vindhyas. Pāṇini whose knowledge of Indian geography is extensive mentions none of these races except the Andhras, and his silence may be taken as an indication that his literary contemporaries recognised no linguistic or literary affiliations with the Southern societies.”. The Dravidian speaking peoples of Ancient India are best known in history by the kingdoms which the Kalingas, the Andhras and the Tamils.established in the Deccan and by their overseas trade and colonisation.” The Tamil speaking areas being at the southernmost extremity and having other Dravidian language groups as buffers between — Aryavarta and themselves were not open to the non- Dravidian influences that were so active during this period

in the Northern and Central parts of India. Ceylon, though in the South and in ‘the pre-Buddhist period for cultural purposes dependant on South India, may have been an exception, since Central Indian influences, before the how up to the beginnings of the Pallava period - (3rd century A.D.) when strong political forces penetrated the Northern boundaries of Tamilakam (the Tamil land), the Tamil language area enjoyed an autonomy in culture, and how it becomes culturally and historically an independent source and subject of enquiry. I am aware that the term ‘cultural autonomy” is misleading and might suggest a complete absence of foreign impact. No culture of civilised people, especially of a sea-faring and commercial people, is ever isolated. But if it be legitimate to speak of Rigvedic culture or Sanskrit culture or Greek culture or Aegean culture as separate autonomous independent cultures, then it is equally legitimate to speak of the autonomous and period. Our field of enquiry ranges broadly from the third century B.C. to the second century A.D., a period of five centuries to which may be ascribed the corpus of ancient Tamil literature known as literature of the third Academy or Academy literature or Cankam literature.® At the beginning of this epoch itself, during the reign of Chandragupta Maurya and of Asoka, the Tamil. states appear island (Ceylon) were probably people from the Malabar Coasts who Naya being but the Prakrit form of the od. me iaa«, 15 i as academies to approve Tamil works of ira nat Sone ys teray

possessed of a developed language and a literature and enjoying commercial relations with the Western world and possibly also with the East.° The evidence of Megasthenes, it should be. remembered, is fragmentary and second-hand, but it is remarkable that of the fragments of his four books preserved for us, those fragments pertaining to the South are valuable for their witness to Southern political stability and trade. The political stability is confirmed by the second and thirteenth rock edicts of Asoka, from which may be argued that the Tamil kingdoms were independent states with which the Mauryan emperor had established good-will relations. While Tamil sources of probably a little later date refer to the wealth of the Nandas and the military prowess of the Mauryas, non-Tamil sources of this period, both Indian and foreign, are evidence of the commercial intercourse between Tamilakam and the outside world.” Endowed as were the Tamil kingdoms with a. coastline of more than a thousand miles and with islands in the neighbourhood, the Tamil kingdoms probably developed seafaring from very early times, a calling in which the Austrics, their predecessors on the Indian peninsula were accomplished.“The pearls of the coasts of Ceylon and the Pandyan kingdom, the soft muslin of Madura, the peacocks, teak, and sandalwood of the western range reached Northern India and the Mediterranean regions, and a few Tamil words for exported commodities lingered in the Hebrew and Greek and Sanskrit tongues to indicate the extent of 16 NILAKANTA SASTRI, K. A, Foreign Notices on South India, University of Madras, Madras, 1939.

southern trade earlier than Chandragupta Maurya and Megasthenes.” The case for an independent and developed Tamil society at the opening of this epoch receives most strength from the independent cultured vocabulary and the literary conventions of the earliest Tamil poems extant which argue a very long period of literary and social culture preceding them.”” The absence of direct evidence for the growth of Tamil literature from its primitive and earliest stages is no indication that these stages did not exist, and it is the function of the critic to attempt reconstructions of earlier societies from the available evidence and from the laws of human development observable in similar. societies. When Tamil literature makes its appearance in history, it does so as in a flourishing age of letters. But within this literature of a flourishing age are to be found the relics and reminiscences of tribal customs and primitive conventions and old forgotten far off things and battles long ago.”4 In spite of the independent light thrown by Ancient Tamil literature on the non-Aryan influences prevalent on the Indian peninsula, no non-Tamil speaking scholar appears to have hitherto published any work which necessitates the study of the entire volume of this literature in its original, The reasons for this neglect are many. The notion pointed out earlier that Sanskrit literature along with Pali is representative of the totality of Indian thought is widespread both in, India and outside of India. Since the Sanskrit language is an important representative of the tipping 1875 5 ERISHNABVAMY. AIYANGAR, Some Contributions of South BURROW, T, The Sanskrit “Lantern oot Calcutta, Calcutta, 1942; Influence on Sanskrit guage, 0.C., pp. 373-388, Non-Aryan at. Pg IYENGAR, P. T., Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture, University

Indo-European family of languages, it has been a subject ‘of most industrious and laborious scholarship in Europe and America. Its affiliations with Old Iranian, with Greek and Latin, with Baltic and Slavonic, with Hittite and Celtic make it an indispensable study in Western Linguistics. Rig-Vedic literature is the earliest of the literatures of the Indo-European languages and has an importance that can be scarcely attributed to any other literature in the world. Further, in the field of Indian studies, there is a false assumption that the historic process in India is one of progressive Aryanisation of the Indian peninsula, a process which, according to the same assumption, was complete several centuries before Christ and which did not accept of any exceptions. This assumption is responsible for the ignoring of the Austric and Dravidian constituents of Indian culture and of the process of Dravidisation of the Aryan speaking colonisers and the extent to which Dravidian cultures and languages held the field in Central and Northern India over long periods of time. Scholars like Max Müller and Sylvain Levi did deprecate the “too exclusive examination of India from the Indo-European standpoint,” but so far it is only in the field of Linguistics that the non-Aryan elements have received a certain recognition. Pali literature, of course, as the sources for the study of Theravada Buddhism has been consistently examined with Sanskrit in the examination of pre-Christian Indian thought, as also the Jaina literature written in the Prakrits.; - The study of Sanskrit literature in Europe and even America has been also promoted on the basis of supposititious blood relationship between the Aryans of India and the Aryans of Europe. Max Müller did repudiate in later life the transfer of his linguistic nomenclature to ethnology by saying: “T have declared again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair, nor skull; I

an an language... blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.”

picture of early society portrayed by Ancient Tamil poetry. He says:

If, as is commonly believed, the colophons embody a tradition, which, apart from the corruptions and losses due to neglect and time, may be ‘accepted as correct, then we must recognise in these poems a quantity of literary evidence of unique value; because then, no other part of India can be said to provide such sober and realistic pictures of contemporary life and politics as these early Tamil classics furnish.

Notes (Essay I)

Footnote text from the journal pages is only partially recovered by OCR. Prefer the scan (IA leaves 1417–1431) for full citations. Principal references include Kandel, Jaeger (*Paideia*), Monroe, Cole, Brubacher, Ulich, Hrozný, Hans, Chatterji, Nilakanta Sastri, and related works on comparative education and Dravidian culture.

The Educators of Early Tamil Society

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 105–119

The Sangam literature and the twin-epics represent Tamil society essentially between the years 200 B.C. and 300 A.D. The anthologies do perhaps contain poems of earlier and later periods, but that the great bulk of poetry belongs to this epoch is accepted by most scholars who have examined this body of literature. When it comes, however, to stratification of the poems contained in the anthologies on the basis of the contemporaneity of the poets and their respective patrons, or on the basis of language and grammar, or when it comes to assigning even approximate centuries and generations to them, the student is faced with some intransigent and, in the present state of evidence, insoluble problems. But the attempts at chronological stratification from different angles are all the time making the panorama of early Tamil life clearer and clearer, and reducing the obscurity which hangs over the centuries represented by this literature.

The educators of this early society are the parents, and pre-eminently also the bards, minstrels and poets; but towards the end of the period, particularly in the society reflected in the twin epics, religious teachers, Vedic Brahmins, and Jain and Buddhist monks become also the chief educators of the Tamil country. While the system in the earlier part of the Sangam epoch is secular and informal, towards the latter part of the epoch it becomes religious and formal. What is remarkable about the growth of the educational process as reflected in this literature is that it seems to correspond to the main lines of development in other ancient countries like Northern India and the Greek and Celtic worlds, and as in those countries illustrates a normal uniform development whereby a certain type of society evolves a pattern of education in response to the social and economic needs of that particular type of society. The more numerous the societies examined, the greater is the possibility of illustrating with more examples a certain uniformity of development in the educational process among peoples. It would seem that education originates with religious rites and songs and dances, and with prophecy and mantic poetry as may be seen by the origin of the Vedic mantra and the Greek molpe. From these religious and magical beginnings, education seems to proceed to a period of reliance on the powers of man. It becomes progressively anthropocentric, and the chief educators are those who sing the praises and the deeds of heroic men. This second stage which may be known as the bardic age of literature as of education is succeeded by a third stage in which not bards and minstrels but poets play the important part as the educators of a country. Close upon the poets come the philosophers and religious educators of a sophisticated and civilised society which represents a fourth stage in the history of education among ancient peoples. These stages of development do admit of variations in different societies but the variations are not of such a nature as to invalidate the general principles, and the stages of development have been classified according to those who were the chief educators of each epoch, though such a classification does not exclude at any given stage of growth the presence of educators characteristic of a preceding or succeeding stage.'.There is all over the ancient world the phenomenon of single persons being invested with multiple functions in a social phenomenon among both primitive and civilized peoples; MURRAY, GILBERT, The Classical Tradition in Poetry, O.U.P., London, 1927: pe elgg a hn he gen sorter Lig oo“of Greek philosophical

primitive and tribal stage of society, and as social development becomes more complex, these functions come to be distributed among different individuals. Thus in primitive society, whether Tamil or Indo-Aryan or Greek or Celtic, priesthood, prophecy, poetry, philosophy and teaching are seen to reside in one and the same individuals while later there is a differentiation of functions and persons. There is already in early society a dim association of religious, prophetic and poetic inspiration with the intuitive wisdom of the philosopher. Five types, priest, prophet, poet, philosopher and pedagogue repose in a single figure. Even today among the Tatars and other Siberian peoples, the shamans and bakshas are described as “singers, poets, musicians, diviners and doctors, the guardians of popular religious traditions and the preservers of ancient legend”.² This may be said also of the quasi-priests of several tribal societies not excluding the Pre-Dravidian and semi-Dravidian tribes living in India and Ceylon today.³ J. G. Frazer’s “Golden Bough” is perhaps one of the most comprehensive works in which this multi-functional priesteducator type may be traced in the customs of the five continents. I. THE SHAMANS ### I. The Shamans

Though the Sangam anthologies reflect predominantly a panegyric and anthropocentric age and the twin epics reflect predominantly a philosophic and didactic age, all these works do contain references to religious rites, taboos and social customs which are remains or developments of an earlier mantic period when in the priest or priestess resided multiple functions like ritual dancing, prophecy and augury. The earliest phase-of Tamil society as inferred from this literature was a social organisation based on physiography with a differentiation and specialisation of functions and customs proper to each of the five regions, hunting and cultivation of wild plants in the mountain districts, pastoralism in the “bush”, rice and sugarcane cultivation in the riverine belts, and fishing, diving and sailing along the sea-coast, and plunder in the less inhabited districts. These societies which are adumbrated: seem to have been of the early food-gathering type in which populations were sparse, social classes were unknown, mates were selected by freedom of choice within the regional clan, government was under local chiefs and social life was imbued with a keen sense of kinship and community.⁴ The first formal educators of these earliest societies were persons endowed with shamanistic power. Their office was neither full-time nor hereditary, but they seem to have been often elderly persons. The priest (Kuruntogai 53) or priestess (Puram; 253, 5) of Murugan, the hill-god, danced vigorously “like the gambols of herds” in an open ‘Space covered with white sand and performed the sacrificial ritual of the offering of the blood of rams, rice, roasted rice grains and red flowers. He entered into a trance as a result of his ritual ballet, and both dance and offerings were meant to appease the god and thus prevent him from afflicting people with illness and calamities (Aham; 22). There is also evidence for men and women and even children engaged in community religious dancing in order to obtain prosperity or to avert impending disaster. When the fisherfolk found that their nets failed to bring sufficient

reward for their toils, they planted the horn of a shark and danced around it a ritual dance with offerings of flowers; when there: were portents of impending disaster the shepherds and shepherdesses danced in order that the god: of the flocks might avert the calamity; when marauding tribes found their cattle-wealth diminishing, they danced before their mother-goddess in order to obtain greater prosperity for their villages and more abundant plunder® Worship in its earliest recorded form was ritual dance joined with offerings both animal and vegetable, especially flowers of the region. The dances were mimetic in that the priests and priestesses imitated the action of the god and wore the insignia of the god. Sometimes a person was accoutred like the god or goddess and offerings were made before him. This custom may possibly be among later developments of the original religious dance.⁶ The priests and priestesses were also the authentic interpreters of omens and were credited with prophetic vision. Their songs and sayings were probably the earliest poetry and oral literature to which society paid any heed. For the origin of Tamil poetry from a mantic stage, there is a very interesting piece of evidence in the name given to the ancient fortune-teller who divined the future from the configuration of rice-grains spread on her winnowing-fan. Her appellation was ‘akaval-makal’ or “the woman who calls”. The word “akaval” by itself means a call, an appellative utterance, and referred in this context to the custom of the priestess calling upon the gods and spirits. This usage led to the designation given to the “The means of cure were not solely supernatural, for, as the hilly region abounded in simples, the magic of the priests and priestesses was fortified by the use of drugs. Hence the early priest was also the medicine-man ‘and even today, notwithstanding millenia of philosophical evolution, the devil priest-cum-medicine-man of the degraded Kuravar tribe drives a flourishing trade among the elite of society, on the sly.” —

earliest Tamil poetic metre which originally must have been a recitative chant like the religious chant of early ritual.⁷ The role of these early priests and priestesses was also prophetic, In the course of their ritual ballet they entered into a trance and revealed what was occult and predicted what might happen to the tribe. The cantos describing the dances of the shepherds, of the marauding-tribe and of the mountain-folk in the epic Silappadikaram are reminiscences of earlier periods, and the dance and mantic declarations of Salini give us a short but illuminating indication of the importance of the seer in early regional and clan organization. Because the village of the tribe is destitute of cattle wealth and its rivals flourish, Salini dances into a trance and recommends a more martial and plundering attitude on the part of the tribe and offerings and worship to their traditional goddess. She makes mantic declarations in a voice of authority, and a people used to plunder and cruelty watch her dance and listen to her. with awe. The entire canto is worth close study by an anthropologist as each word in the description of the dance may contain significance for anthropological knowledge of an ancient tribal class of which there is such early recorded evidence in literature.’. Vedic literature also contains pointers to a time when the priesthood had not as yet been organized into a rigid caste, and sacrifices were offered by the paterfamilias. Some writers are inclined to believe that there is sufficient evidence for ritual dance and mime in the Rig-veda. The Atharva-veda contains sufficient evidence for the existence of shamanism and for the power which the atharvans could have wielded with their spells, incantations and magic. The Atharva-veda is indicative of a society and a stage of thought more ancient than the one represented by the

Rig-veda arid is of greater anthropological interest than the Rig-veda itself. The atharvans, corresponding to the “magi” in Persia were the earliest shamans and teachers as revealed by Indo-Aryan sources. ' In Greek literature, however, the evidence for shamanism in the earliest hellenic society is not so patent. “The Greeks with their love of fact and reason, disowned the old magical chains, but they lay somewhere in the background and were connected by tradition with their first poetry.” The origins of Greek poetry are also intimately connected with song, music and dance. To Musaeus and Orpheus, the authors of the first poetry, are attributed magical powers. While Apollo and the Muses inspire mantic declarations, Dionysius is the inspirer of the kind of prophecy which is exercised to discover the ancient wraths of offended spirits whose vengeance causes hereditary maladies and afflictions, such as regional spirits and gods like Murugan were said to cause in the Tamil world.” In Celtic society, the institution of Druidism points to an earlier period when a priestly class developed as a result of its priestly and shamanistic power. This class developed later into the intellectual class among Celtic peoples. From the evidence of classical writers like Caesar, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo it would appear that in Gaul, in Britain, in Scotland and in Ireland, the history of education began with them and that they functioned in a plural capacity as ritual officiants, poets, law-makers, judges and teachers.¹⁰. THE BARDS AND MINSTRELS ### II. The Bards and Minstrels

A second stage in the manifestation of educative impulses in early Tamil society is to be seen in the growth of a hereditary class of professional singers, dancers, musicians and panegyrists known as ‘pāṇar’. The earliest poems concerning this class point to a stage of societal evolution in which the regional culture and regional community has broken into many villages with chiefs and super-chiefs presiding over a village or over a number of villages. The Tamil names for the chiefs of the different regions are reminiscent of this period.” A good few of the Puram poems are illustrative of this society in which warfare of the feud-vendetta type took place. In these poems recognition and merit are attached to physical strength and bravery, and persons who are connected with feud-vendetta for the seizure and plunder of cattle and of land are greatly eulogized, namely, the chief who leads the foray and distributes the spoils, the blacksmith who makes weapons of warfare, the potter who makes the jars for the corpses or ashes of heroes, the drummer who infuses a martial spirit and the bard who sings to the accompaniment of his lute heroic and panegyric songs in honour of his patron both in the battle-field and at home.” While a sense of community grows around the leader and chief who leads forays and distributes plunder, the bard becomes the voice of the community which expresses in song its past achievements, and its present ambitions and ‘hopes and fears. He sings the heroic deeds of the tribe, chiefly of the leader, and thus keeps alive the spirit of bravado and bravery, and other qualities associated with a warrior especially hospitality and liberality. In the village community centre, the manram, the bard entertains the members of the village with his song and music and dance, and with his accounts of the deeds of his tribe and of the warriors it has bred living and dead.! J2SRINIVAS IYENGAR, PT, History of the Tamils, OG. S300” aes to ee 7. lane oe we Rei in ale Antiquary i2c Patir., 43, 26—28.

The origin of bardic poetry demonstrates a bifurcation of functions which were originally resident in the priest or priestess. Since a martial society tends to centre its ideals, thoughts, ambitions and praise around the achievements of men themselves, exclusively secular persons are needed to make them articulate for the clan and tribe. The function of the bard is both to inspire to heroism as well as to entertain, and thus fer entertainment purposes he has with him his troupe of men and women and children, dancers and’ musicians. Bardism and minstrelsy in the Tamil country become gradually the hereditary occupation of a class of people. The Tamil name for the professional bard is itself} derived from the word “pan:” which stands for any kind. of instrumental music.“* Instrumental accompaniment was an indispensable feature of early song and dance as in Greece. The bards were differentiated by the kind of musical instrument they played, the large lyre or the small lyre; by the posture they adopted while singing panegyrics in court, whether they were entitled to sit or stand before their patrons; and by the kinds of dances they performed. We have no means of assessing the number of bards or bardic troupes which existed in the period, but all evidence points to their having been numerous. Each village seems to have had its class of panars. Many of these troupes led a wandering life in search of patrons in various parts of the Tamil country; and they are 124'The common origin of early literature from dance and song is further illustrated by the early association and derivation of Tamil terms like <gi-o) (lit, movement, dance), and wrt. (ur and gt) (song with dance). In prosody, besides #&@@), are the terms Ms (originally movement) and #9. A number of primary activities of early society contain the word for movement e.g. S&rwri@ (play, creative movement); aerrme@ (lit. dance with food and drink); @grevtmrew (feasting; lit. to dance with someone or something);Gumrgmto (to battle) tert, stort (to bathe in stream or lake, or to bathe in the sea). sO SRINIVAS IYENGAR, P.T., History of the Ancient Tamils, O.C., p. 16, derives pa:t:t:u (song) from pan: (instrumental music). oe

extremely important not only in the development of oral and written literature but also in the growth and popular appreciation of the Fine Arts like music and dance. Wherever they travelled they carried their different musical instruments with them, harps, lyres, flutes, horns, tambourines and.cymbals. Several poems about the troupes of bards and dancers, men and women, refer to the soiled tattered clothing and lean worn-out hungry frames with which they enter the palace of a chief or king and the. rich silks and sumptuous entertainment with which they are rewarded so much so that the abundance of food and drink makes them forget the very arts which procure for them a living. The gifts they received from chiefs and kings were the conventional ones of a bunch of lotuses of gold fastened together by a band of silver given to the head of the troupe, and jewels of gold given to the women. Bards and minstrels were also given gifts of elephants, horses, and chariots as well as gifts of land. These gifts may seem exaggerated, but gifts made to bards seem to have been equally wealthy and precious in panegyric and heroic ages in other parts of the world. The Huns, Celts, and Saxons were used to presents of jewels, bracelets, bags of gold, and extensive lands being given by their chiefs and kings to bards and minstrels. Princely patronage was the bard’s reward for his service to the community,” Through the Tamil bards and their troupes a tradition was maintained in society and in literature and the fine arts, though like all panegyrists they are mostly concerned with contemporaries, their patrons, whom they praise or whose: passing away in the palace or in the foray, they lament. Almost their entire literature, even if it was recorded, has perished and what remains are probably a few eulogistic poems which were preserved in the courts of the patrons they celebrated. Heroic Age, University wide jaan -; K, The and KERSHAW, B The Growin af Liversnes Go ey MONRO, H.

An evolution in the role of the bard is easily traceable in these poems. He began as an individual necessary, like the drummer, to stir up the martial spirit of the clan engaged in battle and to sing the praises of the chief and the warriors when after victory they danced and drank and feasted. At a later stage song and dance became choric and musical instruments developed, and thus the bardic tradition became more organized and turned into a troupe from a hereditary class. Anonymity is generally a feature of bardic life, and the names and particulars of these bards have not been preserved, not even in colophons. When at a later stage the poet becomes the respected personality of a more developed and literate society, music and poetry which hitherto were combined separate to. a certain extent. The bard and his troupe continue with music, and song and dance, but poetry, reflective, didactic, and panegyric of a higher order becomes the property of poets. The Tamil distinguished between the bard (pāṇar) and the poet (pulavar) as much as the Greeks did between the bard (aoidos) and the poet (poietes), and Indo-Aryan society between the bard (suta) and the poet (kavi). The bards were so prominent and numerous members of early society and were so identified with panegyrics, that in subsequent development when poets compose panegyrics in praise of kings and chiefs they do so in a “bardic convention”, as if a bard were praising the hero of the poem. The āṟṟuppaṭai is such a situation where the poet imagines a bard who has received bounteous gifts for himself and his troupe encountering a similar band of minstrels in search for a patron, and recounts to them the reception and wealth his troupe received from a particular king or chief and recommends his fellow-bards to betake themselves to SINCLAIR, T.A., A History of classical Greek Literature, pp. 4—9; Rout ledge, London, 1934.

the same patron. The following is a short poem composed in a bardic convention by a poet:.

Minstrel, with little lute of sweetest strain!
Suppliant with words of wisdom full!
Importunate thou askest me to rest and listen to the pleasant sounds of thy tambourine.
But hear what I shall say!
The modest homes of Paṇṇaṉ, whose hands are full: of gifts, is near the wide city..
If thither,—together with thy songstress, whose hair ‘diffuses fragrance of the ‘trumpet-flower’, the brightbrowed, sweetly smiling,—you softly advance, you shall prosper well.
His gifts are not mere chance, like gold found by the woodman in the forest.
Hesitate not.
- ‘“Long may he flourish.
(Pur: 70.)

The bards being panegyrists by profession were extremely skilled in the use of words, and when poets gained ascendancy in society their institution degenerated in certain ways. They are used in the poems of a subsequent stage of development as. conventional pimps and as companions to young men in love, obviously because of. their gifts of persuasive speech. A poem in the kuruntogai expresses the marvel of a damsel at a bardic messenger’s flow of language which she argued should be far more copious in his own village if he could be so eloquent before strangers In a strange place. (Kuruntogai; 33). The expression ‘é” °: e youthful student” (@ers wrenéser) used in this poem is significant as one of the rare examples in Sangam literature of evidence for formal studentship.’* For the same competence in language, the bards were used by chiefs and kings to carry messages from the battlefield or camp to their queens in the palace. ISPOPE, GU. The Fou hoa Vol. XXIK, (13005, See cur hundred Lyrics in the Indian Antiquary, 16 Kur., 33, 12: bei) YaCe herurentadc SU BT wer ps Qsererar QariGer

It is significant that women constituted an integral part of the bard’s. troupe, and that they were the principal singers and dancers at the performances in courts and village community centres in programmes of entertainment. They do not appear to have been panegyrists directly apostrophizing the patrons of the band. Transmission of the arts within the class was easy since entire families, children included, went from chief to chief, and kingdom to kingdom, entertaining the villages on their way and receiving their hospitality. Their diverse musical instruments they carried with them protecting them in cases sewn of thick cloth. — - Tamil society did not have in its early stages religious traditions of the kind Indo-Aryan society had. Along with the religious tradition in Indo-Aryan society there grew pari passu a secular tradition. The Rigveda contains a kind of panegyric poetry in the praise for gifts (dānastutis). The Brahmanas contain songs in praise of men (gāthā nārāśaṃsī) which are laudatory as their title indicate. Further at the time of the Buddha himself, there were already a large store of narratives in prose and verse. All this secular literature in pre-Buddhist India is evidence of a twin tradition, one mantra or religious and the other suta or bardic.”” It is from Sanskrit bardic literature that the two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, took shape and form. The sutas were the charioteers of chiefs and accompanied the chiefs to battle. They sang the praises of their chiefs both in war and peace and they formed part of the court. The role sutas played in the courts were played by

wandering minstrels and singers (Kusilavas and Magadhas) among ordinary people. The Mahabharata presents: Sanjaya the suta, describing the battle-scenes to Dhritarashtra; and Kusa and Lava, the two sons of Rama, are said to have. wandered from place to place singing in assemblies the tale of Rama they had heard from Valmiki. The sutas like the magadhas formed a separate caste in Aryan-speaking India. According to the lawbook of Manu, the sutas are represented as a mixed caste originating from the union of kshatriya warriors and brahman women, and the -magadhas as the offspring of inter-marriages of vaisyas with kshatriya women. Originally, says Winternitz, the magadhas were bards from the land of Magadha and the sutas were bards from a country situated to the east of Magadha. Hence there is room to surmise that this bardic tradition in Northern India may have received its greatest strength from non-Aryan sources, especially so as the Aryanisation of Magadha and neighbouring provinces had not been accomplished at the time the earlier mantra literature was composed. In Greece also education both among princes and people evolved along similar lines. The original religious lyric and dance gave birth to man-centred arts of which the bards surrounded by their choruses of women, were the chief exponents. Homer himself refers to bards older than himself, and even if Musaeus and Orpheus seem legendary, there is no doubt that Homeric poetry was preceded by the poetry of wandering minstrels, some of whom may have been blind, who took to professional singing and recitation at courts and at festivals. After Homer, a guild of bards called Homeridae or “sons of Homer” existed at Chios who professed to popularise Homer’s compositions. When Homer became the “educator of Greece”, the rhapsodes mostly made dramatic recitations of Homeric epics.¹⁸ A certain decline in the nature of minstrelsy and i a

the importance of the rhapsodes synchronises also in Greece with the increase of the social prestige of poets, sophists and ‘philosophers. Plato’s Ion is.a revealing dialogue on the nature, popularity and artificiality of the rhapsode’s calling during the classical period. The place of the minstrel and bard as popular educators, and in some societies as formal educators, is made clear again by the study of educational factors among Celtic and Teutonic peoples. In Pre-Christian Ireland, for instance, instruction was not only in the hands of druids, but also of the filidh or bards. They were generally peripatetic, teaching in the open air, and the profession seems to have become hereditary among certain families. Both the chiefs and the agricultural population had to support these bards and their pupils. They were so numerous that the people resented their privileges. Their influence became more systematized when bardic schools were organized in each chieftaincy.¹⁹ Wandering minstrels and the troubadours are the persons to whom the beginnings of literatures in the Romance tongues are attributed. The minstrel and bard have been studied by critics and. historians of literature but their role as educators deserves greater notice in histories of the education of early societies.

*(To be continued — see Essay III, Ancient Tamil Poet-Educators, below.)*

Notes (Essay II)

Footnotes on IA leaves 1523–1537 remain partially noisy after re-OCR. Prefer the scan for full citations. Principal references include Mackenzie, Murray, Cornford, Bowra, Chadwick, Thurston, Linton (*The Tree of Culture*), Srinivasa Iyengar, Winternitz, and Edgar on bardic education.

Ancient Tamil Poet-Educators

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. 6 No. 4, pp. 273–285

The role of the poet as educator of groups of disciples as well as of the community in general corresponds to a society in which kingship prevails, and the chieftaincies and clans have been welded into feudal monarchies. With the evolution of a chieftaincy into a larger political unit embracing other chieftaincies, an additional dignity is attached to the singer of praise the range of whose vision and whose gifts have to be broader and more elevated than those of the bard. Political and social life are developed on a larger scale and with a more extensive and variegated background. The problems which confront the king and his administration as well as society are much more complex and include moral and ethical values involving inter-action between individuals and groups. The inflow of wealth into the capital cities and the seaports makes the problem of wealth and poverty, of taxation, trade, war, peace and good government, subjects of reflection on the part of the poets who have become the friends and counsellors of kings. Thus, from the panegyric role of the bard, emerges the poet of a complex and wealthy stage of society, relinquishing popular entertainment and education to the bard, but retaining for himself and developing those aspects of formal teaching which were contained among the bard’s functions.

The increase of wealth and splendour at the court, the higher and more universal values with which the poet deals, his cultural activities at courts, and his friendship with the royalty of the land and his interventions with kings on behalf of his friends confer on the poet an aristocratic standing even though the poet is almost entirely dependent on royal patronage.¹

The poems which describe the rule in the Tamil monarchies show that kingly society was developed on a money economy and that there was wealth and affluence in the royal household. The forest defences, the regular armies and provisions made for the elephants, the horses and chariots of warfare, the different parts of a palace and their costly appointments, the gold and silver vessels in which food and drink are served, and the imported articles of ornamentation in the royal households are evidence of the economic prosperity which marks the poetic stage of culture, a correlate of an aristocratic tradition of education. The organisation of clan has given place to the feudal monarchy and the bard’s functions in tribal forays are taken over by a formal war-drum, enthroned in the palace, the sounding of which summons a regular army in the hour of danger.

The Tamil kingdoms during the poetic period are predominantly agricultural, commercial and militaristic.² The Tamil kings encounter their rivals not only on land but also on sea, and navies and naval battles are recorded in the poems.³ Nedunceralatan, victorious alike on land and sea, is said to have taken into custody a group of Roman soldiers, probably stationed in a territorial concession near Cochin, and released them only after the payment of a ransom.⁴ This period (first century A.D.) is also the period of the largest volume of trade of the Tamil kingdoms with the Roman Empire. From the Tamil country the Roman Empire received spices, fine muslins, pearls and beryls and in exchange for these commodities Tamil India received gold and silver, wine, coral, crude glass, lampstands and gold and silver vessels.⁵ Hence there was a surplus economy and a progressive growth of cities, not only of the inland capitals like Karur and Kudal (Madurai), but also of the many sea-port towns which were important in the sea-trade, for instance, Musiri, Tondi, Korkai, Kaveripattinam, sea-ports on the western and eastern coasts of Southern India which were nourished by secondary industries and foreign trade. Thus more people were released for occupations other than primary production, and thus opportunities were created for the introduction and development of formal education. Though Tamil society continues to cherish the values of a warrior society and even voluntary suicide by fasting to death is undertaken to vindicate a point of honour in the same manner as the religious suicide of the Jains,⁶ there is an insistence on intellectual perfection and a moral enrichment and an uninhibited development of music and other arts in addition to the warrior ethics and arts of the bardic period. From the warrior ethics developed gradually more universal values. For instance, the Kosar, a fierce and warlike tribe, are said to be as true to their word as are their arrows to hit their targets.⁷

What are the differences in function which appear between the categories of bard and of poet? The bard is a peripatetic with his troupe and his family whereas the poet journeys alone; the bard and his troupe entertain, act plays, sing, praise and dance and use musical accompaniment, whereas the poet instructs and counsels as one having authority, scholarship and learning with an unaccompanied technique of poesy; the bard is the voice of the community, whereas the poet goes under his own name and his poems are mostly personal, expressive of his own relations with his patron and his own reflective thoughts; the bard is more the entertainer of the people and of the court while the poet is found mostly in the court and in gatherings of poets of his own standing and learning; the bards sing panegyrics, martial exhortations and heroic verse, while the poet’s preoccupations even when praising a king’s valour are with human conduct and ethics and morals; the bard may be found in the battlefield during this period to exhort the troops to bravery, but the poet has no place in the battlefield except as a peacemaker or through excess loyalty to a king or chief who is his valued friend. The Tamil names for a bard and his troupe were derived from roots which are associated with music, drama and dance, while the name for a poet is associated with a word which signifies general knowledge, reasoning and learning.⁸

That the period represented by the anthologies was truly a poetic stage of culture and education is admirably illustrated by comparing it with the subsequent epoch of the longer poems, the *Silappatikaram*–*Manimekalai* period when the place of the poet has been almost taken by the religious teacher and the philosopher. The poet seems to vanish from the foreground and it is the philosopher who uses the language and the conventions of poetry. But during this poetic stage, the number of poets and the range of their activities more than amply illustrate the formal function of education which they performed among their groups of disciples and the informal education which they imparted as the moral guides, informal law-givers and counsellors of society. K. N. Sivaraja Pillai has distributed the four hundred and fifty-nine Tamil poets of the earlier anthologies over ten generations extending from 50 B.C. to 200 A.D., which gives an average of about forty for each generation of twenty-five years. From the several allusions to gatherings of poets at the courts and the institution of poesy as the educational technique of the age, we may rightly infer that the average of forty poets for each generation represents but a very small number among their contemporaries whose works have perished.⁹

An analysis of these poets and poetesses according to their places of origin shows that they belonged to various cities, townships and villages of the Tamil kingdoms, and an examination of the occupational and social groups to which they belonged shows that the poets and poetesses came from royalty, from agricultural and merchant classes and from various trades and crafts. Of the one hundred and forty-seven different poets in the *Purananuru* anthology alone, about fifteen are women and fourteen are kings.¹⁰ This and other anthologies include princesses and men and women of different groups, such as the mountain and marauding clans, as well as medical men, mathematicians, astronomers, carpenters, blacksmiths and potters. Avvai, the most renowned of the poetesses, moves about royal courts and is as much the friend of kings and chiefs, their counsellor and as powerful a teacher of Tamil society as any of her poet contemporaries. The names and occupations of the poets and poetesses of the Tamil country show that learning and poesy were not restricted to any particular sex or occupation and that poetic composition was indulged in not only by professional poets but also by others who found in poetry an accepted form of expressing their knowledge, their thoughts and their emotions.

The bards and poets by their frequent visits to kings and chiefs all over the Tamil country brought about a certain cultural, language and literary uniformity within the Tamil kingdoms, and contributed not a little to political stability, unity and understanding between various Tamil kings and chiefs. Further their frequent allusions to cities, festivals, friendly meetings of kings, to celebrated patrons and to famous battles established a sense of tradition and history within the Tamil country.

Tamil society had its own religions. The anthologies contain references to the worship of Murugan, Siva, Visnu and other lesser deities, but the priests of the religions at this stage do not appear to have formulated even formal systems of religious education. Probably a strong current of Saivaite philosophy and personal devotion (bhakti) to the God of one’s choice was existent, but, unlike the North Indian society, Tamil society included no dominant priestly caste or organised monasticism to impart even an “official” religious education. Neither did Tamil society have a revealed book or revealed scriptures to establish ethical and moral norms. The poetic period in the Tamil country was like the poetic period in Greece, and the poets themselves, and not priests, were the teachers of ethics and morals.¹¹

The social standing of the poets in the Tamil country is shown by the numerous examples of poets who refuse to be slighted by kings and curse kings and chiefs and rebuke them should they fail to confer on them the regard, patronage and gifts which are their due.¹² A poet who is slighted by a king hastens to another chief famous for his gifts, returns with an elephant received as a gift from the chief and ties the elephant to a tree in the defence-thickets of the king who slighted him, an act tantamount to an insulting declaration of war.¹³ Another poet discriminates between two princes whom he meets, embraces one and does not embrace the other. On being asked by the prince who was slighted why he should have treated him so, the poet replies:

This other prince belongs to a family which, if the chief were away from home, has conferred gifts to us (poets) through their women-folk who would even adorn themselves for the occasion; but you belong to a family which has shut its door in our face. Since then we have avoided your hills.¹⁴

The poet Kapilar, a great friend of Pari, a patron chief of bards and poets, advises the kings who besiege his mountain fortress that it cannot be taken by elephants and armies. They might capture it if the kings went dancing and singing with bardic troupes following them.¹⁵ A poet’s praise is accounted worthy of heaven while his curse results in an entire town ending in ruins so that the town remains only a memory and a name.¹⁶ Something of the fierce moralising of the Hebrew prophets and their championship of social justice and truth is seen vested in the Tamil poets, and this is no surprise, since it is the prophetic function of original shamanism which appears developed among the Hebrew prophets while the poetic function of the shaman is found developed in Tamil society.

The social prestige of the Tamil poets is again evident in the manner in which they are received and feasted at courts, and in their frequent interventions in political affairs, often counselling against war either because of its baneful effects or because of the power of the enemy, sometimes urging Tamil unity against non-Tamil foes, or a confederation of two or more kings, or dissuading unjust taxation or pleading on behalf of rebel sons and subjects and innocent victims condemned to torture.¹⁷ The kings had their assemblies of counsel and government, but the poets enjoyed an advisory and teaching capacity even more than they. The following poem which urges the minor king Pekan to return to his lawful wife whom he had condemned to a life of loneliness is a subject about which four celebrated poets have sung poems upbraiding Pekan and interceding on behalf of his lawful queen, Kannaki, that he might live with her again. Arisil Kilar is persuasive even in his imperious manner:

Be thy rare gems and treasures what they may,
We seek not these, O Pekan, great in war,
When with our little lyre, in tender strains,
The fruitful fields of thy good land we sing,
If pleased thou boon on me bestow, O King,
Thy spouse, erewhile with choicest gems adorned
Now suffers bitter grief because no love is hers.
Let her this night perfume her tresses bright
Like pea-fowl’s plumes upgathered by the wind,
And wreathe her brow with fragrant blooms—
Yoke to thy mighty car thy swiftest steeds.¹⁸

Another poet dissuades a king from a heavy taxation of agriculturists. As the economy became diversified and as foreign trade brought greater wealth, rulers seem to have overlooked agrarian welfare. The poet points out that even “the victory of the army that is engaged in a last-ditch combat is the result of the efforts of the army of the plough” and adds:

If thou has marked and known this well:
Reject the wily counsels of malicious men,
Lighten the load of those who till the soil,
The dwellers in the land protect. If thou do this
Thy stubborn foes shall lowly bend beneath thy feet.¹⁹

There occur in the *Purananuru* anthology accounts of close friendship between kings and poets. Some of them even choose to die of voluntary starvation together with their royal friend when he decided upon that warrior manner of death.²⁰

Learning and poesy were transmitted at this stage by formal discipleship. The titles of some of the poets in the colophons indicate that they were renowned teachers and had famous disciples.²¹ Two aspects of learning were said to make the complete man, *kalvi*, the positive, personal effort at learning and apperception, and *kelvi*, the student’s acceptance of instruction imparted by another. The word *kelvi*, literally “hearing”, shows the oral and aural origin of learning, and even the most learned poets are praised by their contemporaries because of their twofold competence, their learning and their having heard instruction from learned men.²² Both personal effort and learning by hearing learned men are of little value unless the learner acquires the ability to impart his learning by clear, coherent, logical discourse and convince his hearers in the assembly of learned men (*avai*) or in the assembly of the king’s advisers. The ideal of the poetic stage of education is a preparation for prominent civic life and the scene of intellectual activity shifts from the village community centre (*manram*) to the royal courts and assemblies of learned men. The life of learning is for the purpose of service to the community, and if time is expended in the acquisition of wealth it is in order that that wealth may serve those who are in want and that hospitality may be increased.

Though about twenty-two poetesses are counted among the four hundred and fifty-nine persons whose poems are found in the anthologies, no system of formal instruction is outlined for women. There is no strict segregation of the sexes, and courtship and mixed dances are described as popular, and women accoutred with daggers are found serving even in war-camps.²³ The ideal which is constantly kept before women in the Ancient literature is that of the chaste, loyal and loving wife. In a culture in which plants and flowers acquired a high degree of symbolism, chastity and marital love and loyalty are symbolised by the whitest and most fragrant of indigenous flowers, the *mullai* (jasmine). Poetic conventions in the *Tolkappiyam* and in the anthologies have young women trained in aristocratic fashion and amidst aristocratic surroundings by an elderly nurse (*sevili*) with the companionship of a maid (*toli*) who are both experts on the depths of love psychology plumbed by the Ancient Tamil poets.

The universal value of formal education is stated in an oft-quoted poem in which formal education is taken for granted as the basis of self-realisation and recognition by the world:

It is good to learn though it may involve a humble discipleship, humble service and paying an emolument. A mother among her many children is apt to like him most who is distinguished (by learning); among a group or class the king is apt to follow the counsel not of the eldest but of him who is well instructed, and even among those (Aryans) who preserve a fourfold division of society, suppose one of a lower caste were to be known for learning, one of a higher caste would be compelled to respect him (or seek his help).²⁴

The education and learning which are referred to in this poem and understood in the anthologies is not religious education even when learned men are known as “resplendent men”.²⁵ It is a learning which perfects the learner and equips him for this life and for an honoured place in the assemblies of learned men and of the elders of a locality. It is no world-denying learning but one which affirms the world, its joys, and finds a self-sufficiency in human powers. It has a great love for children and for the home and knows little of a state of homelessness.²⁶ It is an education which equips the learner for courtship, marriage and a life of altruism. A great hero of the period, Ay, a warrior chief and patron of bards and poets is praised because he does not do good for “mercenary motives, in order to win praise in this life or happiness in the next”, or because of the example of wise men but because good should be accomplished for its own sake. A. C. Bouquet has no grounds whatsoever to assume that “self-forgetful service of others” is in origin a Christian idea.²⁷ Altruism and “living not for self but for others” is recommended because of its own intrinsic worth and not for any future reward or for the benefit of a future birth.²⁸ Albert Schweitzer has pointed out the discovery of this ethic of goodness and benevolence in the *Tirukkural*, but it occurs even earlier than the book of gnomic verse and is an active and creative concept among a people whose literary records testify to a humanism, an optimism and an altruism which are the fundamental characteristics of ancient Tamil culture as yet uninfluenced in the main by the priestly and monastic cultures from Northern India.²⁹

In order to assess this Tamil humanism one has to consider the entire complex of attitudes prevalent and fostered in Tamil society, and the abstractions and universals which comprise the conscious and unconscious metaphysic of the age as expressed in the anthologies. The love poetry and the panegyric poetry show the range of psychological insight of the poets themselves and the *Tolkappiyam* is probably derived from one of the several compendia which existed as aids to the study of the phonetics, grammar, prosody and the conventions and psychology which were to guide poetic compositions. Life is considered pleasant and joyful, and death a sad ending; there is no attempt to obtain release from life except to vindicate honour and bravery and the love for a husband who has passed away; there is a note of nostalgic sadness in the poems about senescence and old age; liberality and ethical goodness are indulged in without motives of expiation and penance; rebirth is seldom spoken of in the earlier poems but the life after death is represented as an abode of permanent happiness for the good and permanent suffering for the wicked; happiness in the future world is conceded only to those who by their bravery and altruism have established their glory in this world;³⁰ love and courtship, marriage and children are considered necessary modes of human fulfilment and perfection of personality; and the norms and ideals of statecraft, ethics, truth, justice, equity, gratitude and love which run through the anthologies and the *Tirukkural* seem to make by comparison Kautilya, Manu and Vatsyayana small, exclusive and petty in the ideals and concepts they teach of moral and ethical goodness.³¹

The following poem tersely expresses certain dynamic and creative thoughts underlying the poetic period:

Does this world really exist? If it does, it is because therein live persons who if they came by even Indra’s nectar would not consume it selfishly alone; they bear ill-will towards none; they fear not nor quail before what others fear; they waver not. With ideals of striving not for their own good but for the good of the rest of men they live—hence one may believe the world exists.³²

This development of secular poetic thought was not to blossom forth immediately into a full and pure philosophy as it did in Greece. The political movements in India and Ceylon and international trade were bringing Indian kingdoms and foreign countries into very close relationship, and the political and commercial routes were also the highways along which Vedic Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism and Ajivikism travelled to the Tamil kingdoms. The *Silappatikaram*, *Manimekalai* and the *Tirukkural* represent an age of philosophic thought, religious and secular and of inter-cultural contacts and inter-cultural conflicts.

Notes

1. Arnold Hauser, *The Social History of Art*, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 71–130. Page 124: “The poet is looked upon as the guest-friend of his patron, even at times when he is utterly dependent on him.”
2. S. Krishnaswami Aiyengar, *The Beginnings of South Indian History*, p. 59 ff., Modern Printing Works, Madras, 1918; id., *Ancient India and South Indian History and Culture*, Vol. I, p. 435 ff., Vol. II, p. 668 ff., Oriental Book Agency, Poona, 1941.
3. E.g. Puram., 66, 126, 130.
4. See K. N. Sivaraja Pillai, *The Chronology*, op. cit., p. 117.
5. See Mortimer Wheeler, *Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers*; J. M. Casal, *Fouilles de Virampatnam–Arikamedu*, Librairie Klincksieck, Paris, 1949; Pierre Meile, “Les Yavanas dans l’Inde Tamoule,” in *Mélanges Asiatiques*, pp. 85–123, 1940–1942.
6. Puram., 65, 66, 236.
7. Puram., 169; Kur., 15, 73.
8. Compare *panan*, *kuttan*, *virali* with *pulavan*.
9. K. N. Sivaraja Pillai, *The Chronology*, op. cit., p. 192; S. Vaiyapuri Pillai, “History of Tamil Language and Literature,” in *TC* Vol. III (1954), p. 346 ff.; S.I.S.S.W. Publishing Society, *Lectures on Purananuru* (Tm).
10. See sources cited in note 9.
11. See W. Jaeger, *Paideia*, op. cit., p. 148: “In the age of the Presocratics, the poet was still the undisputed leader of his people; and he was being joined by the lawgiver and statesman. There was no change in this situation until the rise of the sophists…”; cf. W. A. Smith, *Ancient Education*, Philosophical Library. The following article by an eminent Hindu scholar is important confirmatory evidence of the conclusions reached in these pages with regard to early Tamil religion: Swami Vipulananda, on the development of Tamilian religious thought, in *TC* Vol. V (1956) number 2, p. 254 ff.
12. Puram, 196, 205–211.
13. Puram, 162.
14. Puram, 151.
15. Puram, 109, 15–18.
16. Puram, 27 and 202. In Puram, 72 the young sovereign who has composed the poem swears that should he fail to achieve victory against the other kings who have joined against him, may he turn out to be an unrighteous sovereign whose subjects curse his cruelty, and may his territory be forever forsaken by the band of illustrious poets headed by Mankudi Marutan.
17. See e.g., Puram, 43–47, 58, 92, 95, 97, 102, 104, 109, 110, 143–145, 212–213, 246, 336. Cf. *Patir.*, passim re gifts given to poets.
18. Puram, 146. The translation is by G. U. Pope in *IA*. See also 143–145 and 147.
19. Puram, 35.
20. Puram, 214–223.
21. The titles added to the names indicate and differentiate between the more celebrated and the less celebrated poets and sometimes show the lineage of discipleship and special teaching functions.
22. See Puram, 26, 12; 53, 12; 72, 13. See *Tirukkural*, chapters on learning.
23. *Mullaippattu* (*Ten Idylls*) 45–49; e.g. Puram, 116; Nar., 159, 331; Aham, 190.
24. Puram, 183.
25. E.g., *oliyor* in Puram, 39.
26. The anthologies of love poetry and the *Tolkappiyam* amply demonstrate this humanism. See, for instance, Puram, 188.
27. *Comparative Religion*, op. cit., p. 147.
28. Puram, 134, 138, 20 ff.
29. Albert Schweitzer, *Indian Thought*, op. cit., p. 200 ff.
30. Puram, 50, 14, 18; also see 18, 13; 21, 13; 24, 34; 135–6; 165; 174; 179, 9; 206, 8.
31. Albert Schweitzer, ibid., p. 201: “What a difference between the *Kural* and the *Laws of Manu* which originated some four centuries before it! In the latter under the dominance of the Brahmanic spirit, world and life affirmation is still just tolerated alongside world and life-negation. In the *Kural* world and life-negation is only like a distant cloud in the sky.”
32. Puram, 182. See Aham, 55. High ideals are constantly emphasised. See simile in Puram, 69, 5.

Language Rights in Ceylon

Synced from re-OCR’d `language-rights-ceylon` (IA leaves 1637–1650; p. 228 from djvu).

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. V No. 3 (1956), pp. 217–230

On the language issue, fairness and justice demand that Ceylon studies the nature of language rights and their application in international law before hurrying with any legislation which may mean a threat to the peace and unity of the country: So

Public opinion on the language policy in Ceylon, even among prominent political leaders, is not founded as yet on a sufficient or full and accurate knowledge of language rights for any government to consider as decisive and final the demand of any section of the people, howsoever large. For even a majority demand to be considered, that demand must be just, right, lawful and reasonable.

- A popular slogan in recent months has been the one that the language of the majority should be the language of the entire State. This demand would be valid only if the end and purpose of political life in Ceylon were the creation of a homogeneous sovereign Sinhalese nation and a Sinhalese State in the predominantly Sinhalese-speaking areas, but not if the end and purpose were the formation of a Ceylonese nation and a Ceylonese State co-extensive with All Ceylon. The concept of a uninational unilingual State in a multi-national, multi-lingual country is fraught with the greatest dangers for the unity and peace of the country. The multi-lingual, multi-national State is the ideal state in political theory today, particularly in the light

of the experience of the last two world wars and the peace-

treaties which followed. There is a return in political

thought to the principles outlined by Lord Acton :

“If we take the establishment of liberty for the realization of duties to be the end of civil liberty, we must conclude that those states are substantially the most perfect which . . . include various distinct nationalities without oppressing them. Those in which no mixture of races has occurred are imperfect, and those in which its effects have disappeared are decrepit. A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a state which labours to neutralize, to absorb or to expel them destroys its own vitality ; a state which does not

_include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government.” Very much earlier King Stephen of Hungary had said:

“A state with but one language and one way of life is both weak and decrepit.”

Rule by Majority

The rule by majority is misunderstood even by very educated people. Appeals have been made to the Jeffersonian principle of lex majoris partis with no regard to the different federal conditions in which that principle was defined and worked. Democratic method is rule by majority indeed, but not a rule for the exclusive good of an ethnic-religious-language majority. Democracy is rule by majority for the good of all the groups which have membership within the state. Jefferson himself explained his principle in words very familiar to those who value laws and liberties :

“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is to prevail in all cases, that will to be rightful must be reasonable ; that the minority possess their equal rights which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” 2 _

____We are liable to give a twist to majority rule in the traditions of our autocratic, monarchic, and feudalistic past. 1 Essays on Freedom. 4 First Inaugural Address..

The rule by majority is but a working substitute for rule by unanimity which is the ideal. To impose one language only all over Ceylon as the language of the State would be to deny liberty and freedom to a major nationality and to oppress it by what Tocqueville called the “tyranny of majority.” Such an imposition would justify the separatist tendencies and movements for decentralisation implied in the American Declaration of Independence :

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted amongst men, receiving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government.” Such primary human rights as language rights intrinsi-

cally connected with freedom of speech are not to be decided by the mere arbitrary demand of any single group, or by an anachronistic and antiquarian appeal to the pre-Vijayan period of Ceylon’s proto-history, but according to the principles of the common law of nations and their practice in this mid-twentieth century. Neither are the language rights of a people to be sacrificed for a naive Machiavellianism. The language problem is wider than political expediency. It is basically a problem of philosophy, of political and constitutional theory and practice, of ethics, and of sociology and human dynamics. Hence it is a field of enquiry not only for politicians but also for statesmen, for philosophers, for jurists and for sociologists.

The present trends in political, sociological and educational thought are towards self-determination and cultural autonomy within the framework of a decentralised State which combines political unity with cultural freedom, or which exercises “separation in union.” The emphasis is not on national uniformity but on national unity, not on coercion but on liberty. Political unity is not to be achieved —

at the expense of cultural liberty and freedom. One language is the basis for a culture and a nationality, but not for the making of a State. |

The Prime Minister of Ceylon has summarised his ideal as an “ Asian Switzerland.” Switzerland has made a clear distinction between the “nation” and the “ state,” and its success is due to its democracy, its cultural freedom and its decentralised government. People who have lived long enough in the Cantons of Geneva, of Berne, of Zurich and of Ticino and travelled sufficiently through the unilingual and bilingual Cantons of the three major language groups will see in Switzerland more than passive neutralism and a remunerative rendezvous of tourists and international conferences. It is the home of liberty, of religious and language freedom, and the best example of a multi-national State. Switzerland has not thought it wisdom to prescribe one national religion or enjoin one national language though there is a language majority preponderantly large (72%). Loyalty to the State is high in Switzerland because of the freedom and cultural and language autonomy given to each of its component nationalities. Every citizen is first and foremost a Swiss, and then the member of his own nationality.

History does not offer one example of language speakers, in short a nationality, possessing a rich culture, literature and traditions, being assimilated by political methods by -a neighbouring people numerically stronger. The associations of the Tamil language with Ceylon are so ancient, so widespread, so productive of creative energy and inspiration to both cultures, and so well established, that to seek to exterminate these associations by legislation is futile. :

Neither coercion, nor assimilation, will achieve these purposes. . Where language rights have been suppressed by force, they have always after a period assumed an irresistible and invincible strength. The Empire of the Hapsburgs,

Central Europe, Finland during the period of “Swedish only,” Belgium during the period of “French only,” Wales today, and Catalonia today offer us memorable warnings not to tamper with the language rights of a nationality. Prof. Vincent Harlow, Beit Professor of the History of the British Empire in the University of Oxford, after a recent visit to Ceylon wrote thus:

“My wife and I landed at Jaffna and moved about the arid plain of the North which is the home of the

_ ancient Ceylon Tamils. Unhappily one could not fail to sense the anger and distress of this hardy and intelligent community concerning the policy which is being strongly pressed among the Sinhalese majority, to establish Sinhalese as the sole official language and to create a ‘Buddhist State’ ....

“The determination of the Sinhalese to rebuild their ancient glories is perfectly understandable and their national tradition is a precious asset ; but unless Ceylon develops a satisfying Sinhalese-Tamil partnership, its future as an independent nation-state will be weakened and distracted by animosity and frustration.

“I was talking the other day to a very intelligent Sinhalese student who stated the argument that if there was one official language it would exert a unifying influence. I told him that Britain herself in the course of

her history had on more than one occasion fallen into that costly error.” 3 ‘Tue Nation-State | This repeated emphasis on “ majority ” and “ minority ” as if the majority possessed greater rights and were entitled to greater privileges creates in members of smaller groups a sense of frustration and disappointment with the result that the strength and vitality of a State is constantly weakened. Macartney after a voluminous study of the minority problem in Europe concludes :

“In its pursuit of the chimera of the national state

Europe has entered upon a path beset with dangers to 3 United Empire. Jan.–Feb., 1956. nS

itself. It has set itself a false ideal, and one which, right

or wrong, it can never achieve. Minorities will continue

to exist, and will continue to present problems which

statecraft will find insoluble until it tries the method—

so rarely adopted hitherto—of applying the principles of

justice, equality and good government. Then minorities

will cease to be a torment to the State possessing them, and will become instead a blessing. May that day come

soon!” 4

Alfred Cobban makes the same reflection on the future of the problem in Ceylon

‘‘ We must conclude that in Asia, as in Europe where there are inextricably mixed communities, containing two

or more distinct, unassimilable and communally consci-

ous people, the idea of the nation-state is out of place.

In so far as the problem may be reduced to its simplest

elements by taking out separable regions, this should be

done. Where this is not possible, as for example in

Ceylon or Singapore, the only hope lies in the establish-

ment of cultural autonomy and the development of a sense

of common citizenship by the operation of common politi-

cal institutions . . . If federalism has a future in the

Western world, where the tradition of the sovereign state

has been so strong, it is not less likely to find appropriate

conditions for its developments in the East, in which the

conception of national sovereignty is a new and as yet a

_ far from deeply rooted growth.” 5 :

What is significant in the practice of language rights in bilingual and multi-lingual countries is that the language of the smaller group may be restricted in function to an area as Swedish (9%) in Finland, and Italian (6%) in Switzerland, and English (15%) in Quebec, and French (45%) in Belgium, but the language of the smaller group always enjoys an equal official and national status with the majority language and official publications of national status are issued in both languages. The minority language is also recognized as a national language in the Constitutions.

4 Macartney, National Minorities, p. 501. 5 National Self-determination, p. 138.

Area: 130,827 sq. miles.

Population : 4,000,000.

National Languages : Finnish and Swedish. Se

(Swedish is spoken by 9% of the population).

Adopted, July 17, 1919.

Art. 14: Finnish and Swedish shall be the National Languages of Finland. .

The rights of Finnish citizens to use their mothertongue, before the Courts and Administrative authorities, and to obtain from them documents in such language, shall be guaranteed by law, so as to safeguard the rights of the Finnish population and the rights of the Swedish population of the country in accordance with identical principles.

The State shall provide for the intellectual and economic needs of the Finnish and Swedish populations in accordance with identical principles.

Diet Act, Jan. 13, 1928: .

Art. 88: In the transaction of business in the Diet, the Finnish or Swedish language shall be used.

The opinions and reports of committees as well as the written proposals of the Speaker’s Conference and of the Committee for the Secretariat, should be drawn up in these two languages.

' Written communications addressed by the Government to the Diet should likewise be drawn up in Finnish and Swedish, |

Switzerland

Area : 15,737 sq. miles.

Population : 4.4 millions.

Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation. Sept. 12, 1848. .

Art. 116: German, French, Italian and Romansch are the national languages of Switzerland.

The official languages of the Confederation shall be~ German, French and Italian.°

The Tamils are not a minority in Ceylon. They are a self-determining nationality, and the rights of Tamil to official and national recognition by the Ceylon State are far greater for legal, historical and cultural reasons than - the rights of Swedish in Finland or English in Canada or English in the Union of South Africa or French and Italian in Switzerland. If Tamil has no national rights in Ceylon, no other language has a right in any country of the world. .

If we are to form a Ceylonese nation, one may hope to do so not with the help of factors which divide us and which we need never surrender, not on one religion or one language or one culture, but on the common well-defined sea-gift territory which Nature and Nature’s God have given us, on our common traditions of the past, and on a common form of government, federal or unitary. The essential constitutive element of the nation is sociological and psychological. There has been no single definition of a nation applicable to all times and to all countries. If I were to define a nation in the special context of Asian countries which are just beginning to form into nations, I would define it as “a group of people who belong to different ethnic stocks who speak different languages and pro-

6 Peaslee, Constitutions of the World. . eee

fess different religions, but who occupy a well-defined territory and have willed to live together under a commongovernment.” The essential element of a nation consists in group sentiments and in the will to live together. It does not consist only in one language or one only religion or race, taken singly or the three even taken together. The Tamils form the Ceylonese nation together with the Sinhalese. because the two groups while not surrendering their separate identity and cultural autonomy have willed to live together under common political institutions.

It is strange that the movement to deprive Tamil of a national status should synchronize with the Jayanthi Celebrations. One of the earliest charters of language rights was issued by the Buddha himself when, on being petitioned by two Brahmin monks that the doctrines be written in Sanskrit so as to prevent their being corrupted by monks probably speaking non-Aryan languages, the Enlightened One replied : “I allow you O Bhikkhus, to teach the word of the Buddhas each in his own language.” What was wisdom for the religious teacher is also wisdom in statesmanship, for the language of religion has often been esoteric in the past, but never the language of affairs of government and of the state.

Appeal to Nobleness

A period of about two thousand five hundred years separate the Buddha and the present Prime Minister of Canada, Mr. St. Laurent, but the inalienable language rights have grown in definition and understanding since then. In answer to a question on purely constitutional federal practices in Canada, Mr. St. Laurent, then Minister of Justice, replied in words which any Tamil Parliamentarian may use today in Ceylon’s House of Representatives :

“It is not the manner of those who have themselves had the formation that comes from that long history which has brought us to this point in the civilization of

mankind, to do things which the conscience of human-

ity at large would regard as dishonourable ;. and the

conscience of humanity at large would frown upon an

assemblage in this house that attempted to take from me and those of my race the right to speak the language I learned from my infancy as one of the official languages in which the deliberations of this house may

be carried on. So it is of everything else that is not

within Section 92. If it is fair, if it is just, if it is proper

according to the standards of human decency, it will be done; if it is unfair, if it is unjust, if it is improper, all members of this house will say, “It is not our manner

to do such things.””

Is an appeal to such noble sentiments too elevated for Ceylon ?

One who has studied sufficiently the theory of language rights and seen their working in governments and education in bilingual and multi-lingual countries will realise that the language problem in Ceylon can be solved with fairness and justice to both groups without prejudicing the cultural autonomy and the national status of either. He would be aware that both Sinhalese and Tamil require protection from the bilingualism which the present policy would tend to favour indiscriminately all over the country. He may propose no definite solution because he would feel a great deal of further discussion with persons of different views has to precede any definite solution. What is now required after the elections is more light and less heat in this controversy, more truthfulness and honesty and less exaggeration and rhetoric in this discussion. The method of dialectics, be it Buddhist, Hindu or Socratic is to confront ideas with opposing ideas in order that the dispute may lead to true ideas.

Whose Reason? What is the reasonable use of Tamil? And whose reason ” is to decide what shall be its use? Is the reason ⁷ R. M. Dawson, Government of Canada, p. 146,

to be the decision of a Sinhalese-speaking majority formulating its law upon the basis of its own demand, or is the reason which decides the use of Tamil to be the body of constitutional law and language rights as developed during these centuries of the evolution of human rights ?

: The problem of language nationalities is no new problem in the world. It has existed from the period of the origin of languages. Today there are over thirty bilingual and multi-lingual states and their number is ever on the increase. These states have solved their language problems according to the principles of inalienable essential rights and the rational universal concepts of political liberty and the Rights of Man. These rights which were more and more clearly defined since the American declaration of Independence and the French Revolution were enunciated in uncompromising terms, for instance in the resolution of the House of Representatives in Massachussets in 1765: :

“Resolved that inhabitants of this province are unalienably entitled to those essential rights in common. with all men ; and that no law of society can, consistent with the law ‘of God and nature, divest them of those rights.”

The solution to the language problem is primarily to be sought in the principles of liberty and equality, and cultural autonomy of which language rights are the logical derivatives. Thus Oscar Ianowsky concluded his study on Nationalities and National Minorities:

“We are left no alternative but to incorporate nationalities and national minorities in the structure of the state, with respect for, recognition of and legal protection extended to the pattern of life of every group.” Consonant with the principles of liberty and equality

and cultural autonomy the following principles are deduced from the actual working of language rights in bilingual and multilingual countries :

If there be within a country two or more languages spoken by large groups at the time new constitutional laws are being framed, or a new Government alters language policies, these two or more languages are recognised as languages of the State, and have equal national and official status. This principle may be verified in the unitary states of Finland and Belgium and in the Constitutions of Switzerland, Canada, South Africa, Pakistan and India. The modern tendency in language rights is to give more and more concessions to the languages of groups within a nation. Ceylon is the only country in which an attempt is being made to withdraw and suppress the existing rights of a language. Alfred Cobban points out in his study on *National Self-determination*:

“Switzerland gets on very well with three—for some purposes four languages; South Africa and Canada with two. The principle to be followed seems so obvious that one wonders why so much fuss has been made on this matter. If in a State two languages are each used by large sections of the population, then for all common purposes the State must be bilingual and all official business be conducted and recorded in both languages.”

A second principle of language rights is the need for one inter-provincial language in a multilingual and multinational state which counts several nationalities and several languages. India has fourteen national and official languages operating in different states and several minor languages—hence the need in India for Hindi or English as an inter-provincial language.

The U.S.S.R. is as large and varied a linguistic mosaic as India with its many constituent states. Hence Russian is a common language for the whole of the U.S.S.R. Similar reasons and the extensiveness of the numerous Islands which form the Republic of Indonesia compelled Indonesia to adopt a common language, the Bahasa Indonesia.

Language has assumed in this twentieth century an importance in the identification and circumscription of culture and nationality which it never had before in the history of States. In earlier times languages were never imposed by coercion upon minorities or upon aliens and it was even fashionable to have a foreign tongue as the language of the courts mainly because of royal marriage and cultural prestige. Thus Italian and Spanish were once fashionable in the French Courts and French was fashionable at the German Courts, as Tamil was during certain periods fashionable at the Courts of the Sinhalese Kings. But now each nation and each nationality or minority idolises its language and regards it as a symbol of its autonomy and honour, and as the supreme expression of its own personality. The social sciences and psychological research have fully endorsed the importance of language, and hence ours is an age of the use of the mother-tongue in the teaching and practice of religion, of the mothertongue in education, and of the mother-tongue as the language of the state and of Government. a Such ruthless and cruel imposition of a foreign language by law as happened in Wales, Scotland and Ireland is not possible today, because, with the growth in the definition and understanding of language rights, language tolerance has also been growing. It is even acknowledged that language tolerance is a further advance in human relations and social virtue than religious tolerance, and that conversely language persecution is even more odious and reprehensible than religious persecution. Says Karl Vossler in Language and Civilisation : “Tolerance of national languages is a still later tenderer flower of human culture. Once that insight has been gained, thereafter intolerance on this point is an even greater idiocy. If I grudge my neighbour his religious beliefs, and hammer my own into his skull, I shall . at any rate be able to excuse myself on the ground that

I believe my own to be the only one that leads to salvation, that his leads to damnation, and that I want to save his soul.

“ But if I throttled my brother’s mother-tongue in - order to impose mine on him, what excuse can I have except that of conceit? For my neighbour’s language is his inner eye, his form of thought with all its potentialities of expression, his spiritual childhood and future.

To everyone who has understood this, all repressive measures directed against a language must seem like crimes against the budding life of the spirit.”⁸

_ A full, integrated and equal partnership and citizenship and intelligent Tamil participation in Government demands a recognition of Tamil language rights. No State has ever found it of advantage to have a permanently discontented minority within the body politic. The reasonable use of Tamil demands that Tamil also be made a national and official language, and if justice demands that a concession be made to the sentiments of the majority, let Sinhalese be made the first language of the State and Tamil the second language of the State. But let both languages have a national and official status though in function the official use ‘of each language may be restricted to ‘those to whom it is the mother-tongue.

The First Books Printed in Tamil

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. VII (1958), pp. 288–308 · IA leaves 2481–2505

The establishment of schools and the introduction of printing was part of the educational programme of the European missionaries who entered India and Ceylon in the sixteenth century. Many of the leading missionaries in the sixteenth century, like Francis Xavier, were scholars who had been educated at the universities of Europe, at Paris, Coimbra, Salamanca and Rome, and came from countries which had felt the impact of the Renaissance and the revival of learning; and hence we find them introducing into India and Ceylon educational methods and techniques which were current in the Europe of their day. Such, for instance, were the founding of schools, both for religious and secular instruction, and the recruitment, training and financing of catechists and teachers, and the language methods they adopted for mastering spoken and written Tamil. One of the pioneer foreign scholars, Henrique Henriques (1520-1600), the first known European to have initiated a scientific study of the Tamil language and to have written copiously in Tamil, even proposed the erection of a Tamil University at Mannar or Punnakayil as early as circa 1560.1 The work of these leading missionaries was not confined to exclusive educational methods; they made great use of the popular media of instruction that are the theatre and the printed word. Printing was one of their best allies in the propagation of the Gospel as well as in the spread of literacy, and in spite of what has been said at times to minimise the value * SG. PERERA, SJ, The Jesus tn Ceylon, pie De Nob of their contribution to Indian letters and to typography because their motive was religious preaching, the contribution of missionaries to educational methods, to linguistics and language study, to lexicography, and to literature has not been as yet adequately assessed in the overall history of learning in India and Ceylon.? Because their motive was the propagation and the preservation of a particular religion, their contribution to education and literature is not to be underestimated. ' The introduction of printing into India was itself of great educational and social significance. In 1556 the Jesuits in Goa opened the first printing press in India with Latin types brought from Europe.’ But during this period the Goa press did its printing in Latin and Portuguese. The first Tamil booklet, however, appeared in Lisbon in the year 1554, two years before the printing press was introduced into India. The Roman script was used throughout the booklet to reproduce Tamil texts. The first known Tamil types were cast in the year 1577 at Goa but they were obviously not satisfactory, and hence a second and satisfactory attempt at casting Tamil types was made in Quilon in the year 1578, and a book of prayers and catechetical instructions printed in Quilon on 20th October 1578. With this booklet of 16 pages entitled Doctrina Christam or Tambiran Vanakkam (gibi gresr asooréatd), Tamil became the first Indian and Ceylonese language in which books were printed.. The establishment of the printing presses and the publication of these books were occasions for a justifiable pride in the Tamil districts. The Tamil Christians of the Fishery Coast contributed very liberally to the establishment of the first printing presses,‘ and the first books were received with great wonder, and bought and treasured both by Christians and non-Christians. An Indian poet even celebrated in verse the achievements of the invention which printed and multiplied books.® These facts which are gathered from the Jesuit letters and Francisco de Sousa’s Oriente Conquistado find a singular confirmation in the Preface to the Tamm Doctrina Christam printed in Cochin in 1579. The Preface is written in the name of the missionaries of the Fishery Coast and addressed to the Christians of the Fishery Coast as well as to other Christians whose language 1s Tamil. “You have desired to have several books which will teach you and your descendants the path to heaven and therefore you have contributed large sums of money towards the press. Therefore we are giving you this book as a gift. Because you spent large sums of money and established a press you have gained respect and praise before the world”:
Sf PEDMPHEM F FFIGHEGOGOETDES HS GUT ManH GUISES SSS UVUOUIT SSE mMEOT EAC Uy soorL_maceCasgeny Cer HACE Lpsresemor reser Reva SraCorwm anaes BSUIUT SSS PRG Hae Gor Qsrerrwmsarai_QmoGeora sro SyarH cor coAI55 56 Ave mensuymuer 56) Wyler Sr upsruTsudup ih ieOear
The passage shows to some extent that punctuation and dots above mute consonants had not come into use, and the script reforms of Beschi were yet to be made The orthography of the period may be seen from the printed pages reproduced in the plates The non-Christians had not merely bought or admired the books; some of their learned men had collaborated with the European author m the revision of the language and style of this early Pioneer Christian literature in Tamil.®
* FRANCISCO DE SOUSA, S 37 Ona ee
PINTO, De famosa Arie op at, py ee ee on © See Preface to Doctring Chrstam, Cochin, 1579: “ “ sieop wer muDis Ra SAP Lor ar «dard Qsrax@ SOPSS aexep
*[Facsimile plates of early Tamil printed pages; prefer the scan.]*
The date of the introduction of printing in the Tamil country is rather significant when considered with other comparable dates. The first printing by Europeans in China was in 1584 and in Japan in 1590, in the Philippines in 1593 The first printed book which has come to light from the New World 1s a Doctrina in Spanish, Quichua and Aymara printed in Lima, Peru, in 1584, though a Doctrina in Aztec and Spanish of which no specimen has yet been found, 1s believed to have been printed in Mexico City in 1539 The first printing for an African language seems to have been done for Congolese in 1624 and on the same lines as the Tamil Brochure (CartiJha) printed 1n Lisbon in the year 1554 Russia printed its first book in 1563, Constantinople had its first press in 1727, and Greece in 1821 Thus the Tamil printed books of the 16th century seem to be the earliest samples of printing along Western lanes undertaken outside of the European continent and its immediate neighbourhood ” ### The Four Printed Copies There has been and continues to be a great deal of conjecture and confusion about the character and content of the first books printed im an Indian language and about the dates and the location of the first presses on Indian soil Now, however, after the finding and identification of four specimen copies of Tami] publications printed im the "Wardiadsda Aw arfeseroa Bigs Qsron@ Or peer arid #»GssQueorés Qsern.gert ", Preface to Flos Sanctorum 1586 “agora nuevamente en este ano di 86 se imprimio esto hbro di la vida de los sanctos las quales communiqu: con algunos naturales que saben y entienden bien esta lengua, y porque estas vidas saliessen bien apuradas gaste en las tresladar en esta lengua mas de tres anos” th ks quoted above of 7 ee eS CORTHE PINTO, Da fomosa Arte, and GEORG SCHURHAMMER and G W COTTRELL, The first printing tn Indic characters, o¢, cf S H STEINBERG, Five hundred years of Printing Penguins Ltd, Harmondsworth Middlesex (England), 1955 The Welsh Bible was printed in 1588 and the first book in Insh was published in 1571 sixteenth century more precise data is available regarding the place of printing, their authorship and the circumstan- ces of their composition.
1. Cartilha: pp. 38, Germano Galhardo, Lisbon, 11th February, 1554.
The entire title of the brochure as it appears in the title page is ‘‘Cartilha che conte breuemente ho q todo Christo deuce apreder pera sua saluasam, A qual el rey Dom Joham tercero deste nome nosso senhor mandou imprimir e lingoa Tamul c Portugues co ha decraracam do Tamul por cima de vermelho”. “ Brochure which contains in brief all that a Christian should know for his salvation and which our lord the King Dom John the third of that name ordered to be printed in the Tamil language and in Portuguese with the Tamil meaning printed above in red ”.
This particular copy which is now kept in an iron safe of the Ethnological Museum of Doctor Leile de Vasconcellos at Belem, Lisbon, originally belonged to the Library of the Carthusian monastery of Scala Caeli of Evora. The copy was presented to the Library by the Jesuit Theotonio de Braganca (1536-1602) a distinguished scholar who was born in Coimbra, educated in Rome and Paris and who as Archbishop of Evora founded this Carthusian monastery of Scala Coeli in 1598. A handwritten note on the copy supplies the information that the copy was his gift to the Carthusian Library.* When later the monastery was disbanded this copy may have gone to the Torre do Tombo, for at the beginning of the twentieth century it was in possession of Jose Bastos, a former director of Torre do Tombo. In 1909 it was found in the hands of an illiterate person from whom Dr. Vasconcellos bought the copy for his Ethnological museum?
B 4 oa. an Sala 2 CC eee SO
Braganca, Archbpo de Evora, che fez Diario de Noticias, March 16. 1900, bo EER BO. in Bibtiogrs.
Bos crops ——_ tr ba torre —_ C1103 ne $040, Agajanim bimium paradycuan Girapannin Lrco cw —— devs —— padre todo — poderofo —— anauane: pidduc tambirdne visyican. Huuandn cCriadoz d05 ceos 73 ———-— terra;——-£ on ——, ea nets fenhor_— Jefe. rfo —_fen—__ tito, hs ennare cartiue iefit chrifto auuanaré ptirane on 3OU—— 7.90 ie —— yatco filbbp— fo —— Hance. Xuddamiua xitatinorea carunecénddu fenboz: au at for ———concebido ——py ipa fancto eracetido — fo7.—.— 93 viraem.— Mata. nacep 2 Gucrbam si: carilaftri mariatil perandenii: naceo——_——— e:narta ——_—- —_———— vir gan—;—— Boe POLO mae PEC IG meee DONS me mendede —- sa. Padeteo—, fRontio pilato vidita vidicsndu’ vecena- PH xkccco—fob — poder de poucio plato foy —cruci- Pe cme 8 TUS fol —_. he pEdurgdo morte: ne fepeicro poto — patti = criffimel equi retan: cull vditu < Scada —— morfo — 7 ————_—_ fepu tado; ——— ge Rae e c) eo wm 4 % SoD eRe Ts he! Hg £5 OS » »& Ba cat E gebg peoerar: ed onccs Be 5 69 Dee ® eS Po \ 33; a8 ye oe: eeRh alts beotl Gs cae a Rika
The Spunish Prologue (handwritten) of the Vatican C opy of the Flos Sanctorum. printed in Punnaikayil (7?) in 1586
In 1948 this copy received publicity by the prominence it received in a work on the history of printing in Portugal. Americo Cortez Pinto was gathering material for his work Da famosa Arte da Impressao when he happened to mention to Professor Manuel Heleno, the present director of the Ethnological Museum of Belem that he had not come across a rare sample of printing which was mentioned in ancient bibliographies like Innocencio da Silva's Bibliografia Lusitana but which even the ancient bibliographers had not seen Professor Heleno invited him to see the copy of a rare book he had in the iron safe of his museum and the identification was made Cortez Pinto has devoted a few pages to the description of this unique specimen and. has reproduced in colour four pages of this booklet A manuscript copy of this brochure 1s said to be in the municipal library of Oporto *
The present writer examined the copy during a brief visit to Lisbon in June, 1954, but did not take very detailed notes since he expected photostats to be sent to him of the booklet for study So far he has not been successful in his attempts to obtain photostats or a microfilm of the copy. Even the reproductions in Cortez Pinto’s book do not do justice to the magnificent specimen of printing and language study that 1s the Tamil Cartilha of 1554 obtained a photostat copy of the booklet by courtesy of G. W. Cottrell Jr., Librarian at Harvard. This Harvard copy is the earliest example of printing in the characters of one of the languages of India and the earliest available example of printing executed in India in an Indian language.
The copy was sent from India to Rome and received in November, 1579, presumably by Father Pedro de Fonseca, S.J. (1527-1599) who was in Rome (1578-81) as Assistant
- for Portugal to the General of the Jesuit Order. A legend in ink reads “ Portata dall’India. Hauuta dal pre Fonseca del mese di Novembre M.D. LXXIX”. The copy seems to have been in one of the Jesuit Colleges of Siena until the suppression of the Jesuit Order in 1773, and then in the Fideikommissbibliothek in Vienna of the Princes of Liechtenstein. Recently it passed into the European and American book markets and was purchased in January 1951 for the Harvard College Library from William H. Robinson Ltd., of London.
3. Doctrina Christam: AFASHwreoh asoréard, pp. 120, Collegio da Madre de Deos, Cochin, 14 November, 1579.
This copy which was in the Library of the Sorbonne and bore the stamp “ Bibliotheque de l'Université de France”, was recorded by Fr. Robert Streit, O.M.I. in 1928.% Subsequently the copy has disappeared from the Sorbonne; it was probably misplaced or taken away during the second world war. Fortunately, while it was yet available at the Sorbonne, a photostat copy had been made for the Jesuit scholar, Fr, Georg Schurhammer, the authority on St. Francis Xavier and his times, and that photostat copy was presented by him to Bishop Francis ll URHAMME es. COTTRELI. dhe Fen Printing ‘on Falke character ne, eles a Janette ok thie
T. Roche, S.J., of Tuticorin who in turn presented it to the present writer in 1951. It was this copy which was loaned to Harvard for purposes of study and microfilming in 1952 and now continues to be in the possession of the present writer.
Copies of this Doctrina were found in circulation in South India as late as 1732, for Sartorius, the Danish missionary, in his Diary for 1732 mentions having seen a copy of this book at Pulicat and another at Tranquebar.*
4. Flos Sanctorum o Libro de las vidas di algunos santos trasladas en lengua malavar, pp. 669, (Tuticorin or Punnaikayil), 1586.
The present writer identified a copy of this book in June 1954 in the manuscript section of the Vatican Library. Various writers have given different dates for the Flos Sanctorum printed in the Fishery Coast, but from the ecclesiastical calendar given at the end of the book it may be reasonably supposed that it was printed in or before 1587. The Calendar which gives the dates for Ash Wednesday, Easter Sunday eic., begins with the year 1587 and continues on the same page for each successive year until 1614. The Spanish preface by the author leaves no doubt regarding the date since it clearly states that after having had some books (algunos libros) printed earlier, finally in the year ’86 was printed “ this book of the Lives of the Saints *. The author also says in the same preface that he has been working in the Fishery Coast for 37 years. Henriques arrived at Goa in 1546 and at the Fishery Coast after a year or two. Hence if he had arrived at the Fishery Coast in 1548 or 1549, the evidence of the preface tallies. The intervening period between the Doctrina of 1579 and the Flos Sanctorum of 1587 would have given him sufficient time for the composition and printing of what was a monumental work for its time, a book of 669 pages. = ahanaaeneainienanaaantasiienncaie Maint ipaetiits Pain RC As
Unfortunately the Vatican copy does not possess the title and introductory pages in Tamil which certainly should have been in the original copy and which would have given the precise dates and place of printing. Instead there is a brief introduction and a table of contents in Spanish written in ink. These hand-written pages may have been substituted in the specimen copy or copies which were despatched to Europe.
The provenance of this Vatican copy is not exactly known. Fr. S. G. Perera, S.J., in his Jesuits in Ceylon when listing the works of Fr. Henrique Henriques says: “A copy in Tamil of his “ Vitae Christi Domini, Beatissimae Virginis et aliorum Sanctorum” sent to Rome in 1602 is now in the “ Bibliotheca Vaticana”’.* Fr. S. G. Perera was not able to give me the source of this information nor were the Vatican Librarians aware of any such title. For certain reasons I am disposed to believe that the book mentioned by Fr. S. G. Perera is the Flos Sanctorum under a more descriptive title. There is a handwritten note on a fly-leaf of this Vatican copy of the Flos Sanctorum: “se dar alla biblioteca Vaticana ”,
### Authorship
Ceylon in the middle of the sixteenth century. That Fra Joam was familiar with a Tamil milieu is evident from a multiplicity of circumstances. He travelled in the Tamil parts of Ceylon and India and kept up correspondence with missionaries in these parts. In a speech at the Court of Bhuvanaike Bahu (1521-1551), King of Kotte (Ceylon), Fra Joam cites the Tirukkural as one of the works with which the King and court and he are familiar." A Tamil Christian community among whom the Franciscans worked existed in Colombo in the sixteenth century. A Tamil-speaking Catholic poet living in Colombo composed a prose catechism to be chanted and some canticles to be sung under the inspiration of Fra Joam, and Fra Joam sent to Mannar from Colombo “a priest of the country well-versed in Tamil” to help Fr. Henriques in the earlier period of his Tamil studies. 2. The Doctrina Christam (gibiIgresr aeoréard) of 1577 was made, as a printed note in Portuguese, says in the booklet by Fr. Anrique Anriquez (same as Henrique Henriques) of the Society of Jesus and by Father Manuel of St. Peter. The latter was evidently a native secular priest since he is not designated as belonging to the Society of Jesus: Doctrina Christaa tresladada em linqua Tamul pello padre Anrique Anriquez de Copanhia de Jesu & pello padre Manoel de Sao Pedro. The Tamil title, however, bears the sole name of Father Henriques S.J. The omission of the name of the second author may have been merely because of the restricted space available below the block on the front page. The Tamil title reads:
AarnueEerEsw 5 Fe amaievsoer ig Ha8u urAfurr sHyPde IpssupHer sodigneor sssvorssio MER, ‘Ceylon zu Zeit des komgs Bhuvaneka Bahu und Franz ce ge Co ere iritual Conquest ‘‘ ny Be Oa ae t.. Btiy Me ee cavarcuiant Press, 1930, 17S. G. PERERA, The Jesutts in Ceylon, 0.c., passim,
In today’s characters and mode of writing it should read:
AarbuGsehu Os Cee amauwled Sovorig Hs ur Hfwas
Sse WSO sepHer sibUgrer aswréaebd
No information other than that provided in the note on authorship is available about Fr. Manuel of St, Peter. He was obviously one of the Tamil-speaking secular priests who since the coming of the Portuguese were being trained at Goa and then sent back to their districts of origin. One of Father Henrique’s helpers in the study of Tamil and in the composition of his books was Father Pero Luis, S.J., the first Brahmin to become a Jesuit. His name, however, does not occur as a joint-author in any of the printed books which are available to us.
It is suggested that this Quilon Catechism of 1578 is basically the Catechism which St. Francis Xavier had earlier prepared in Portuguese (1542) and in Tamil (1544) and which in turn had been prepared by St. Francis Xavier on the Doctrina published by Joam de Barros in Portugal (1539). If that be so, it should have been subject to extensive revision both by Francis Xavier and subsequently by Father Henriques.'®
Father Henrique Henriques, S.J., the principal compiler of the Tamil books published in the 16th century was a student of law at the University of Coimbra when he joined the Society of Jesus in 1545 at the age of about 25. He reached Goa in 1546 and the following year was sent to the Fishery Coast. On the advice of Francis Xavier he set himself 1o the study of the Tamil language “ day and night” as he says. From his first days on the Fishery Coast (at Tuticorin and Punnaikayil) he commenced a systematic study of the Tamil language modelled on the Latin Grammar of Joam de Barros, and as early as 1552 compiled a Tamil Grammar in Portuguese which he sent ““} GEORG SCHURL —EOEEEEEEEEEE—ES to Rome with a request that it be printed. He was resident at Mannar from 1561 to 1564 and baptized a chieftain from Trincomalie whom the Portuguese intended to put on the throne of Jaffna. He took pleasure in meeting Hindus and Moslems and in discoursing with them on religious matters, as well as in consulting non-Christian learned men regarding the style and language of his Tamil manuscripts. Besides the three books mentioned in this article, he repeatedly says in his letters that he was compiling for print—
(a) A Grammar of the Tamil language.
: (b) A Vocabulary of Tamil words and terms.
It is not yet precisely known how many of his books were printed in the 16th century. In his preface to the
Flos Sanctorum he says that before 1586 “ algunos libros”
(some books) had been published in Tamil.”
3. Doctrina Christam (&fASHwur@f suswréawd) Cochin,
1579.
This book in the authentic style of a catechism with questions and answers is the translation into Tamil of the Portuguese work of Marcos Jorge, S.J., a very popular catechism which was first published in Lisbon in 1566 and which continued to be the standard of its type until it was supplanted early in the seventeenth century by the
Doctrina of St. Robert Bellarmine. The Preface states that the learned Marcos Jorge of the Society of Jesus pub~ lished this catechism and since then Christians both in
Portugal and other kingdoms have benefited by it to a great extent. That the Tamil-speaking Christians might derive the same benefits, this book was being published in Tamil.
"—i® For particulars regarding Fr, Henriques, see Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, IOSEPHUS WICKI, Documenta Indica in which the letters of H, Henriques are rcproduced. See also XAVIER S. THANI NAYAGAM, Tamil Manuscripts in European Libraries, in Tamil Culture, Vol, HI (1954), pp, 219-220, and BSOAS, Vol. III, p. 147.
This translation of Marcos Jorge came to be used very widely in India and Ceylon. Catechetical instruction was imparted in a very thorough manner by the Jesuits in Jaffna in the seventeenth century so that it was said that the children in the mission of Jaffna were ‘the best instructed in the whole of the East”. Copies of the Tamil catechism were obviously used there in 1644 when Figureydo wrote: “They are all so well instructed by our Fathers that there is scarcely a boy or a girl who does not know the catechism thoroughly, besides the whole book of Marcos Jorge which has been translated into their language ”’.”° 4. Flos Sanctorum, 1586:
The handwritten preface in Spanish found in the Vatican copy of the Flos Sanctorum gives many interesting details regarding the authorship of this work. Since it was not necessary for this new community of Christians to have a very elaborate and complete “ Lives of Saints ah Father Henriques chose those lives which seemed most relevant to a new Christian community. Hence he trans- Jated part of the Flos Sanctorum of the Friar Diego del Rosario and part of the Flos Sanctorun: of Lipomani and the Lives of the Apostles by Perion. He also added, where it seemed relevant, reflections and observations suited to the readers. He had laboured 37 years among those who spoke Tamil and had written “ algunos libros ” which after approval had been printed. Finally in 1586 he was publishing the Flos Sanctorum after having worked at it for more than three vears. In revising it he had consulted “algunos naturales que saben y entienden bien esta lengua” (“some natives well-versed in this Janguage ”’).
Details are available regarding the primary sources of the Flos Sanctorum. Friar Diego del Rosario published in Coimbra in 1577 a revised version of his Historia das vidas e feitos heroycos e obras insignes dos sanctos, com muitos "305, G, PERERA, The Jesuits in Ceylon, oc. p. 157.
sermoes e praticas spirituais que servem a muytas festas do anno. This revised edition should have been available to Father Henriques. The second work which he used was the Sanctorum priscorum patrum vitae centum sexaginta tres, one of the first scientific volumes of hagiography. The author was Luigi Lippomano, an Italian, who published this work of eight volumes, first in Venice in 1551 and then in Rome in 1560. The third work he mentions in the Prologue is De rebus gestis vitisque Apostolorun liber compiled by the French Benedictine, Joachim Perion, and published in Paris in 1551.7"
### Table Of Contents
1. Cartilha of 1554.
Page 1: Title page with the coat of arms of King Joam III.
Pages 2-3: Prologue by the three Tami) Christians.
Page 4: Indications regarding transliteration and the phonetic peculiarities to be observed in the pronunciation and accentuation of Tamil in Roman script.
Pages 6-34: Per signum Sanctae Crucis, the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo (Apostles Creed), The Ten Commandments, the Commandments of the Church, the Seven Capital Sins, the Seven Capital Virtues, the Confiteor, the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar and other important responses of the Mass (these last are printed only in Latin).
End: “The present work was printed by order of the King Our Lord in the very noble and ever loyal city of Lisbon and seen by the holy inquisition: printed by Germano Galhardo, printer to His Highness. 2nd of February, 1554. Laus Deo.”
The method employed in this brochure of a trilinear printing of the Romanised Tamil version, the Portuguese version, and a word to word Portuguese rendering corresponding to the Romanised Tamil version has been praised as the first introduction in print of such an effective method in foreign language study. Further, the printing in two colours in order to facilitate quick comprehension of the meaning of the Tamil version through the corresponding Portuguese words printed in red above the Tamil version is again a novel didactic introduction for its time —an anticipation of Comenius by a hundred years. The Romanised Tamil version is printed in black in large type; below the Romanised Tamil version is the Portuguese version in black but in smaller type, and above the Romanised Tamil version is a word for word Portuguese rendering of the Tamil text.
2. The Doctrina Christam of 1578 is printed in Tamil and shows that doctrinal and liturgical material has been added to what was the content of missionary instruction about 1554. It consists of 16 pages of conventional octavo.
Page 1: Title in Portuguese and Tamil ang woodcut of the Holy Trinity worshipped by saints and martyrs.
Page 2: Note regarding authorship and transliteration of foreign words,
Pages 3-14: Por signum sanctae crucis, Credo, The Ten
Commandments, the Commandments of the Church, Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Salve Regina, Confiteor, The - Articles of Faith, The Capital Sins, Tho Works of Mercy (Corporal and Spiritual), The Five Senses, The Theological Virtues, The Cardinal Virtues, The Enemies of the Soul, The Last Things, The Eight Beatitudes. These different titles are prominently printed in Portugcuese.
Page 15: Contains a note of typographical] interest. It is a type-specimen page of which the first lines reproduce specimens of Tamil types, 7 vowels, @ and 94 consonants, and vowel-consonants cast in Goa in 1557. The latter half of the page reproduces eight vowels, aj and 116 consonants, vowel-consonants, and double consonants. These consonants are followed by a line of Tamil numerals from one to ten and the symbols for one hundred and one thousand, soar eos cs Se ee a ee
These types are said in the last page to have been cast in Quilon in 1579 and are the types used for this Doctrina Christam. The types cast in Quilon are executed with greater skill, are more numerous and more precise than the Goa types. The Quilon prefers “#” to “g@” which is found in the Goa type. No work, however, printed in the Goa type has come to light. This page shows the advance in technique made within a year in the art of casting Tamil types. 3. Doctrina Christam (AFAFDwre aewréad) of 1579 consists of 120 pages.
The front page contains a large block of the traditional Jesuit Abbreviation of IHS with rays emanating from the circle containing the letters. The title has changed from Tambiran Vanakkam, (God worship) to Krisitiani Vanakikam (Christian worship) which is certainly an improvement.
Page ii (unnumbered): Contains a note in Portuguese on the author, place of printing, etc.
Pages iil-vi: Introduction.
Chapter I: The significance of the name Christian, pp. 1-6.
Chapter 11: The significance of the Holy Cross, pp. 6-12.
Chapter lIl: The Pater Noster, pp. 12-22.
Chapter IV: The Ave Maria, pp. 22-27.
Chapter V: The Salve Regina, pp. 27-35,
Chapter VI: The Credo, pp. 36-42,
Chapter VII: The Articles of Faith, pp. 42-58.
Chapter VIII: The Commandments of God, pp. 58-74.
Chapter IX: The Commandments of Holy Mother the
Church, pp. 74-86.
Chapter X: The Scven Capital Sins, pp, 86-96.
Chapter XI: The Seven Sacraments, pp. 97-103.
Chapter XII: The Works of Mercy (Spiritual and Corpo- ral) and the Theological Virtues, Cardina) Virtues, The Eight Beatitudes, The Confiteor, pp, 103-12. The book ends with a square IHS Block around which are printed the words: @£5 semiorBevevr LwGlevr (15 55 SbOr_plar
4, Flos Sanctorum:
While the other three publications limit themselves to the prayers and the articles of faith and the explanation of basic doctrines, the Flos Sanctorum represents the more ambitious attempt to publish in Tamil a sustained work of considerations of the principal mysteries and feasts, and the lives of the principal saints of the Church’s Calendar. As a single work of considerations on the principal feasts of the year, it does not seem that this work of 669 pages has been greatly surpassed in Catholic Tamil Literature during the last four hundred years.
The Tamil title page and the contents in Tamil are not to be found in the Vatican copy. There are, however, four pages of a handwritten introduction in Spanish and the table of contents in Spanish. Since the first page of the Tamil text has the Arab numeral “8” printed in a corner, it is probable that seven Pages of printed introductory matter preceded the text.
The following is a table of contents prepared by the writer from the titles and other data furnished in the book.
Janwary:
. The Feast of the Circumcision (pp, 1-6); The Feast of the Three Kings (7-12): Saint Sebastian (12-28): St. Vincent (28-34); St, Ignatius of Antioch (34-41),
February:
The Feast of the Purification of Mary (pp. 41-48); St Blasius (48-56); St. Agatha (56-63); St, Apollonia (63-66); St. Mathias, Apostle (67-69).
March:
St. Benedict of Nursia. 70-85); Annunciation (85-93), a OS AE eet
April:
Movable Feasts:
Ash Wednesday and Lent (pp. 558-565); The Passion of Our Lord (566-608); The Resurrection (609-616); The Ascensian (616-622); Pentecost (623-636); Corpus Christi (636-645): Advent (645-651); The Last Judgement (652-661).
List of Holy Days of obligation, and of days of fasting and abstinence (pp. 662-666); Calendar of Movable Feasts from A.D, 1587-1614 (666-669).
Note: ‘The original has the Tami] numerals printed on each leaf in serial order, but not on cach page.
The text of the handwritten Spanish prologue and table of contents in the Vatican ‘“ Flos Sanctorum".
Prologo A] Lector.
Porque en este libro se imprimyo’ para los christianos malavares, que estu’n en la Costa de la Pesqueri’a. se imprimio todo en su letra malavar, que los Jaman Tamul. Mas para que tambi’en los que no entienden esta lengua, sepan lo que se contiene en este libro, me parecio’ hezer esta breve declaracio’n en lingoaje, con los nombres de las fiestas principales de las quales en este libro se trata. Y cscogie’ronce e’stas, pareciendo que, pues no podi‘amos imprimir por agora todas, e’stas seri’an ma’s a prepo’sito para aquella neuva christiandad. Y translada’ronse, purte de Flus Sanctorum del R.“P.*« Fray Diego del Rosario, y parte del R.™° Lipomano y de Joachi’n Perionio en las Vidas de Jos Apo’stoles, anadicndo, en algunas de Jas dichas fiestas, las concideraciones que me parecieron mejores para bien y provecho d’acuella christiandad,
Y antes que este libro se imprimiesse fue examinado y aprovado por cl R.™°Obispo de Cochi’n? y de los senores Inquisidores,
De treinta y siete anos a esta parte que la sancta obediencia me embio’ con otros Padres de la Compani/a, para doctrinar y sacramentar Ja dicha christiandad, hize muy grande studio en esta lengua con cl desseo que teni’a de ayudar los dichos chrislianos, y con mucho trabajo, por gracia de N.Senor, llegue’ a saberla muy bien, de manera que hize una arte en esta lengua. Y por parecer de} P.* Provincial de la India? se procuro’ que se hisiesse la imprensa malavar por un Hermano de la Compani‘a* que antes de entrar en ella era muy grande official, la
1D. Mateus de Medina, consecrated bishop of Cochin in 1S77,
2A. Valignano, Provincial de Goa, 1583-1587, qual el hizo toda de su mano con mucho trabajo y diligencia. Y assi’ por orden del mismo Provincial me ocupe’ en componer algunos libros, los quales despues de aprobados se imprimieron en la dicha lengue. Agora nuevamente en este ano de 86 se imprimio este libro de la Vida de los Sanctos, las quales communique con algunos naturales que saben y entienden bien esta lengua. Y para que estas vidas saliessen bien apuradas gastc’ en las tresladar en esta lengua mas de tres anos, y assi por Jo que yo entiendo desta lengua, como por lo que disen los natu~ rales, y también otros Padres de la Compani‘a que hisieron grande studio en ella, creo que van sin yerro en la lengua y muy bien apuradas, de Jo qual sca gloria a N.Senor, como, en el imprimir este libro se pretacnde provecho para la misma christiandad,
Con esto se ha de advertir que e! alfabeto desta lengua malavar cs muy differente de] nuestro y por esso la tabla de los dichos Sanctos y fiestas van en Ja imprencio’n malavar differente desta neustra.
Vale
Enrrique Enrriquez de la Compani’a de Jes’us. en lenguas malavar por cl P.* Enrrique Enrri- Libro de las vidasde algunos Sanctostransladadas quez de Ja Compani’a de Jesus en que van las vidus de los seguientes Sanctos. A Cc Advicnto de N. Senor Cathalina Andre’ apo’sto] Christina Augustino Christo’val. Adriano Cecilia Antonio Circuncicio’n de N. Senor Apolonia Comemoracio’n de }os defuncto Alexo Compacion de N.® Senora en la Angeles pasion de Christo Agatha D Acencio’n de N. Senor Asumpcio’n de N.* Senora Domingo E B Eustachio Blas Estevan Benito Eugenia Bernardo Epiphani‘a Bartholome’ apo’stol Encarnacio’n de N. Senor
Felippe apo’stol Pedro apo’stol Francisco Pablo apo’stol Feli’citas con los siete hijos Paulino Purificacio’n de N.* Senora G Pacio’n de N. Senor Gero’nymo Q I Quaresma Juan apo’sto] y vangelista R Juan Baptista Invencio’n de la cruz Resurrectio’‘n de N, Senor Juizio final Santo Sacramento Ignatio Santiago mayor L s Lusi’a Lorenco Santo Sacramento Santiago mayor M Santiago menor Simonis y Judas Marti‘n Silvestre Mari’a Magdelena Spiritu Sancto Mari‘a egipsiaca Sebastia’n con sus hijas Margarita Siete Dormientes Mathi’as apo’stol Matheo apo’stol T Migucl Archa‘ngel Todolos Sanctos N Trinidad Nascimiento de N, Senor Saag: — Nascimiento de Ja Virgen N.* Senora Vv Nuestra Senora de las Nieves Nicola’s Vicente

Notes ## Earliest Jain and Buddhist Teaching in the Tamil Country

Synced from re-OCR’d `earliest-jain-buddhist-teaching` (IA leaves 2989–3001).

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, pp. 337–349

While the Tirukkural maintains, to a large extent, the poetic tradition of education and its development along humanistic lines, the Silappatikāram and the Manimékalai represent the religious education of the philosophic stage of development. But even in these two books there are indications that there were poets and other scholars who were not monks. The Manimékalai speaks of “teachers of philosophy, politics, logic and religion”, of “ knowers of tradition”, of “those learned in hoary sciences”.’ The word “pulavar”, which once meant mostly a poet, now undergoes a semantic expansion to include a philosopher, and the Buddha is apostrophised as the “Great Pulavar” meaning the Great Philosopher, in the same manner Mahavira is termed the Great Knower.’?

During this period represented by the epics, the education of the ideal man envisaged in the Tirukkural, and the education of the men of affairs, ministers, councillors, army chiefs, tax-gatherers, customs’ officials, who had to be trained for the Tamil State, was probably undertaken in a secular system of education. Unfortunately our sources for this period are mainly religious, and even the Tirukkural, which takes for granted secular education, gives hardly any indication of the methods and the content of the then prevailing system of secular education.

Of the religions which existed in the Tamil country, the religions of North Indian origin were “ founded ” and “TY Mant, 1, 10-14, 42, 59-60; XXVI, 74-75.

a Mant., V, 68; XXV, 45; Silap., X, 57; XT; 4.

organised religions.’ Even Vedic Brahminism, though not a founded religion, was an organised and institutionalised one. The traditional Tamil religions like Saivaism and Vaishnavism and the cults of Murugan, of Kali and the numerous other cults were “natural” religions; nor were they organised during this period.‘ Hence of their systems of religious education, we know only that through worship and through their priests and ascetics they transmitted religious knowledge. Of Saivaism and Vaishnavaism the Silappatikāram and the Manimékalai do not furnish much data. Both these classics show that a great measure of friendliness existed between the votaries of the Tamil religions and cults and the adherents of Vedism, Jainism, Buddhism and Ajivikism; that the same family might include adherents of different religions, and that ordinary people often worshipped or paid homage at the numerous shrines of different religions. The encouragement given to religious discussion in public, in the market place and on the occasion of festivals, and the opportunities afforded for learning about other faiths, were many. However, a polemical rancour was beginning to develop among the teachers of the religions of North Indian origin since they were extraneous faiths contending among themselves to win adherents in the Tamil kingdoms. The earliest religious polemics in the Tamil country occur among the Vedic Brahmins, the Jains, the Buddhists and the Ajivikas.§ VEDIC EDUCATION Vedic education in the Tamil country followed minutely the pattern which had been evolved in Northern India. It was uncompromising in its caste restrictions and admitted only Brahmin boys to its teaching. The centre = ol 24 RAMACHANDRA DIKSHITAR, The Silappadikaram, = 5 ve ». GG AMAMIKEAM, Saivaism in the Pre-Pallava Pertod, © See Puram,, 161 and its commentary,

of its development was the sacrifice, the ritual and the recitation of the Vedic texts. Boys were taught the Vedas from their young years, and there is an episode in the Silappatikāram which mentions that of a group of boys in a Brahmin village the one who was best in reciting them faultlessly was given gifts of gold by a Brahmin who had himself obtained the gifts from a Tamil king as a reward for his dialectical skill. Those who were most learned in the Vedas and had been taught by teachers of repute were those preferred for the performance of sacrifice.’

Many of the Brahmins were distinguished at Tamil courts of this period as officiating priests. Some of them so identified themselves with the culture of the country as to become distinguished poets. The descriptive terms used about the Vedic Brahmins show that they were held in respect in the Tamil country and that they were distinguished by their sacred thread, by the Sanskrit language which they used, by their recitation of the Vedas, by the sacrifices which they offered, and the exclusive quarters of villages and towns in which they lived.

Asceticism too developed under Vedic sponsorship. It might have been an ascetic movement which first inaugurated the migration of Vedic Brahmins into the south of India, and the legend of Agastya, shorn of his literary and grammatical parentage of Tamil, may probably be due to some such migration. In a poem on Murugan, the god of the hills, which was composed later than 300 a.p., but is included among the Ten Idylls (Pattupattu), the type - of the ascetic as a type of intellectual and moral ideal is described thus:

“They are clad in barks of trees. Their bright, white locks Are knotted in the shape of right-whorled shells. Their figures are radiant with purity. 7 Siap, XXaM, 61 #; XXVIM, 187 ff. See also Mant, X11, 23-26; XXVII, 100 ff,

Many are the days they have known no food. Their minds are free from hatred and revenge. They know truths unknown to the learned And of learning they are themselves the limit. They have conquered Passion and Anger” ® As a system striving after human perfection and final deliverance, Vedic education, like the Saivite and Vaishnavite religions and other theistic and animistic cults prevalent in the Tamil country and in Northern India, postulated the dependence of man on preternatural and supernatural beings to attain his perfection and to alter the conditions of his existence and of his moral and spiritual life. This disposition in theistic religions was in sharp Opposition to the educational possibilities envisaged by the non-theistic schools of thought, by Jainism, Buddhism, by Ajivikism and by the materialistic and hedonistic schools. The Jain and Buddhist Tamil classics constantly reiterate that it is not the gods, that it is not sacrifice or recitation of the Vedas which obtain deliverance, but one’s own conquest over passion and desire achieved by mortification and ethical conduct. “No one can escape the inexorable result of deeds” is the chief burden of the Jain and Buddhist didactic literature in Tamil. JAIN TEACHINGS The Jains during this period had their monasteries (palji) established in Puhar, Uraiyar and Maturai. There Was one or more Jain nunneries as well in Puhar, and frequent instruction of the laity in doctrine was part of their evangelical work. When we are told of the Caranas, who ® See VEN. PANDIT DEHIGASPE PANNASARA, Contribution of Buddhism to Philosophy, in Vesak Sirisara, Panadura (Ceylon), 1957, p. 9: “A Buddhist has to seek his own salvation — ‘ Attadipa Bhikkhame Viharatha' tnd ‘live like a light unto yourself’, He has no Saviour, gifted with miraculous powers of rescuing him from misery and elevating him 16 a state of bliss. Buddhism has no secret doctrines ; rather it sets forth a way of living which leads to happiness in this life and to individual perfection in this world itself, its keynote being that a man can gain individual freedom by his own efforts as exemplified by the Buddha himself”,

course through the heavens and who descending to earth at will, instruct human beings, we are probably to understand that there were numerous peripatetic instructors of doctrine who criss-crossed the country with no other purpose than to teach the doctrine as revealed in the life of Mahavira and in the Jain sacred books. A public preaching Jain rostrum, probably set up by Jain merchants, was a prominent monument in Puhar,”®

The mode of life of Kavunti, the Jain nun, in the Silappatikāram, illustrates to some extent the exercise of a nun’s incidental teaching functions within the Jain Church in the Tamil country. She lives in a nunnery amidst a grove, and accompanies Kévalan and Kannagi on their journey from Puhar in order to listen to great Jain preachers in Maturai. At Srirangam, she listens with pious awe to the words of the Caranar and repeats them to the Jain ascetics in Uraiydr. She worships at the shrine of Mahavira whose figure is placed under a triple umbrella of sovereignty. When a Brahmin on the way expounds Vedic beliefs to her and to her two companions she demonstrates to him and to her companions, how, in her estimation, the Jain doctrines, as contained in the Jain sacred books, are superior to the Vedic beliefs. On the way to Maturai she inculcates the Jain doctrine of ahimsa to her lay companions, avoids travel by darkness lest any living being should be hurt and loses no opportunity to instruct her companions in Jain doctrine. At an opportune moment, when Kévalan is distressed and apprehensive, she teaches the Jain view of renunciation saying :

Because the effect,of your good deeds are exhausted, your wife and you experience great distress. Though preachers of the doctrine should proclaim ever so loudly like a drum, ‘ Avoid the path of evil for the law of Karma is inexorable °, those who are not on the path of virtue listen not. But when

“an evil deed brings its own reaction they suffer greatly because 10 On Jain monasteries, seo Silap,, X, 15 ff; XI, 1 ff, On Jain cavex ace, M, S, VENKATASAMY, Jatnism and Tamil (Tamil) op, cit. . came Silap,, X, 64 ff, with Acaranga Sutra, Book I; Lecture 3;

of ignorance. On the other hand the learned do not grieve at the inevitable consequences of past Karma.

“The sufferings of partings and unions and those created by the god of passion (Kama) affect only those that get involved in the love of curly-haired maidens and not ascetics who live in single blessedness. The ascetics have seen all down the ages the dire distress caused by women and by food and hence have relinquished the desire for both ”.!2 And finally, in true Jain style, she undertakes a fast

unto death after hearing of the fate which has overtaken K6évalan and Kannagi and the Pandyan king and queen. BUDDHIST DHARMA The Manimeékalai is uncompromisingly Buddhist and offers more data concerning the content and methods of Buddhist religious adult education than does the Silappatikaram about Jain education. It is manifestly an epic of the Hinayana doctrine, but it may be disputed as to which of the Hinayana schools it belongs. There is no reference in it to the Mahasanghika school which prevailed in the Andhra country north of the Tamil border. Nor are there references to Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika school, or to Aryadeva or to any of the Mahayanist Yogacara teachers like Dinnaga and Dharmapala who subsequently taught in Kanchi. The Manimékalai probably belongs to the Sautrantika school of the Theravada and represents the Buddhism prevailing in the Tamil country at the time of its composition (circa a.p. 200 ?).% The Buddhists, according to the two ‘ epics ”, had established their monasteries and nungeries in Puhar, Kanchi and 12 Silap,, XIV, 25-43. The Jainism prevalent in the Tamil country was of the Dighambara school, P, B. DESAI, Jainism in South India and some Jaina epigraphs, Sholapur, 1957, 13S, KRISHNASWAMY AIYENGAR, Manimekhalat in its historical setting, op, cit 1D, The Buddhism of Manimekalui, in (Ed B C LAW) Buddhwshe studteés, op. cit, pp, 1-25 In the same book see, V_ R. RAMACHANDRA DIKSHITAR, Buddhism wm Tamil Leterature, pp. 673-698. The book contains useful essays on other aspects of Buddhist education,

Vanci, and the archaeological evidence shows that Buddhist monks occupied in the pre-Christian era caves in the southern districts of Maturai and Tirunelveli. The Indravihara, consisting of seven pagodas in Puhar, included a sacred bodhi tree and may have had three hundred monks living there ;** a similar monastic structure existed in Vanci, the capital of the Tamil Céra kingdom in the western part of Southern India. The monastic system and monastic preaching appear to have been long established in the Tamil country. The Buddhists too seem to have had a great number of teachers traversing the Tamil country. Pilgrimages to Manipallavam,-an island off the coast of Ceylon, and to Samanoli in Ratnadipa (Adam’s peak in Ceylon) were frequent as were also pilgrimages to sacred Buddhist places in Northern India.

Two itinerant teachers are prominent in the Manimékalai. One is Manimékalai herself, a Buddhist novice who before her final entry into the Sisterhood both by precept and example inculcates the basic ethics of Buddhism, and Aravana Adigal, an aged and persevering teacher and philosopher of Buddhism, who retains his clarity of thought and his eloquence in spite of his advanced years, his wornout body and his grey hairs. The discourses made by these two teachers show that the Vinaya, the Dhamma and the - Abidhamma were known and were part of Buddhism in the Tami] country, and that the Tripitakas were the sources of the teaching. The Manimékalai itself has drawn from the Jatakas for its main narrative and for its concept of karmic casualty and rebirth. The fundamentals taught to those who embrace the path of the Buddha are summarised in the lines: iP CG ALEXANDER, Asoka and the spread of Buddhism in Che-

ranadu, TC, Vol,, I (1952), no, 2, pp. 125-131. seas ttl PA Tne ey lnso) a, 2, PP. 175-105. M. S. VENKATASAMY, Buddhism and Tamil (Tamil), op. cit, p. 19 ff.

8 Silap,, XXVIT, 93,

“ Birth is Suffering ; The Ending of Birth is Supreme Bliss ; Birth is born of Desire ; Nirvana is attained by ending Desire. Understand and accept the Panca-sila. This is the way to attain Life,.”"® Karmic suffering and casualty due to passion and desire, abstention from aesthetic and emotional pleasures such as are provided by music, dance and the drama, and the philosophy of impermanence are constantly reiterated through direct teaching, and exemplified in the life-stories of the characters of the poent : “Youth is fleeting ; Beauty is fleeting ; Sky-high wealth is equally fleeting ; Nor do children ever confer heaven." The twenty-ninth canto of Manimékalai shows the study which Buddhist teachers made of the other philosophical and religious systems and of their logical bases, and the thirtieth canto summarises the Four Truths, the Twelve Nidanas and causal nexus. “Examine separately and understand that everything is impermanent, full of suffering, without a soul and unclean, and therefore end Desire... . . By listening to Dhamma (Sruti), by meditation, by mental bhavana and mental darsana, end all Illusion. By these four means end the darkness of the mind "8 SCRIPTURES IN TAMIL Both Jainism and Buddhism in their methods of religious teaching inculcated a great reverence for the personality of their founders. They drew lessons from the contemporary scene. from the nature of life and from their sacred books. Did these sacred books exist in Tamil ? And SR Sen re ee rte oer ame 17 Mant, XXII, 135-137, 18 Mani,, XXX, 254 ff,

how far was writing an aid to study and teaching in the pre-Pallava age ?

In the Tamil classics, which we have examined here as belonging to the pre-Pallava period of Tamil history, there is no apodictic proof that the anthologies and the “epics” were already ‘written down and that formal education included the study from manuscripts. There is evidence that writing was used and formed part of instruction.’* Writing was used for detailed sepulchral inscriptions, for commercial purposes and for epistolary communication,’ but did the édu or leaf-book exist in the pre-Pallava period or was all this literature retained orally and transmitted orally ? In the Sangam period the word nil (sutra) occurs in the sense of a technical treatise and the cumulative evidence would point tothe existence of books ; 24 however, the printipal means of conserving and teaching literature, both secular and religious, was oral (kélvi).

Whether the Jain and the Buddhist literature was translated into Tamil from their North-Indian originals in the pre-Pallava period is not known. But the Tamil terminology used in the Jain and Buddhist “ epics ” and their literary excellence point to a long period of Jain and Buddhist literary culture in the Tamil country as to render Jain and Buddhist works bear little or no traces of foreign origin except the technical terms of their religious philosophy.”

CONFLICTS AND SYNTHESIS

The sources which describe the philosophic period of Sangam literature are also evidence of the conflicts and the synthesis which ensued as a result of the different schools of religious and philosophic thought achieving

19 E.g., Tolkappiyam, Elutu, 6, 14, 15. . ue ture, TG, Vol, IIT (1954), nos, 3 and 4, p. 332. 22 See Ibid, pp. 348 f.

maturity of articulation and organisation in urban and city culture. The religions which were founded in the sixth century B.C., in India were probably introduced into the Tamil country during the Mauryan Empire. Chandragupta Maurya and Bhadrabahu may have been responsible for the spread of Jainism in Southern India, and A§oka’s patronage may have contributed to the introduction of Buddhism into the Tamil country at about the same time that it was introduced into Ceylon. It may be surmised that the Vedic cults too were introduced into the Tamil country during this period of North Indian migrations into Southern India. There are faint and rare traces of Buddhist and Jain thought in the Sangam anthologies, and very tangible and solid evidence for the influence of Vedic thought.* However, it is in the sources of the philosophic period that the religions and philosophies of Northern Indian origin assume full development and maturity in the South making the Tamil scene appear almost as animated from an intellectual and philosophical point of view as the North Indian scene in the sixth century B.c.

The Silappatikaram represents the result of a fusion and synthesis of cultures originating in Northern and Southern India. In the Jain epic there is a preponderant and overpowering love for the Tamil country, its language, its literature, its music, and respect for its regional worship and shrines and its hoary institutions. The epic uses all the previous Tamil literary heritage and conventions, and reduces (o a basic unity the triple political division of the Tamil kingdoms in the best traditions df the poetic age. The prowess and military exploits of the Tamil kings against Northern India are extolled and the territorial integrity and political “ union within division ” of the Tamil kingdoms are vehemently defended. The introduction of the Jain doctrines of ahimsa and renunciation, and asser- ,. 2 Some Sangam poets bear Buddhist names — Ilambodhiyan, Thera: daran, Siruventheraiyar, Jain mythology is said to be found in Puram, 175 and Aham, 59, For Vedic thought, the evidence is to be had in nearly all the anthologies

tions of Mahavira’s supremacy as a teacher of the path of Release and Salvation are made gently and unobtrusively. To a Brahmin who recommends ablutions in three lakes which procure a knowledge of Indra’s grammar, a knowledge of former births and the power to realise one’s wishes, Kavunti, the Jain nun, replies that all these and more means of fulfilment are found in the Jain scriptures (Paragamam) and that Truth and regard for all living beings confer unlimited power. “In the third part of the epic, which is rather Vedic in spirit, Madalan, the Brahmin, makes a strong plea regarding the value of Vedic sacrifices to a victorious Tamil king who has neglected them for fifty years#* .

The territory of ideological, political and military interest too has definitely in the epic period extended further than Vénkadam hill in the north and Cape Comorin in the south to include the North Indian kingdoms and the Himalayas and the Sinhalese kingdom of Gajabahu.

Similarly the Tirukkural is a synthesis of the ideals and precepts recommended to the Perfect and Complete Man outlined in previous poetry. But the precepts of abstention from meat and from alcoholic drink and the ascetic renunciation and life eulogised in certain verses are departures from previous Tamil thought and practice and are best explained as introductions due to the influence of Vedic, Jain and Buddhist thought. The ascetic ideal was probably always cherished in the Tamil country since Siva is its ideal prototype. However, it is in the poetic and especially in the philosophic stage that both Vedic and non-Vedic ascetics are mostly found as solitaries in lonely places and in the midst of forests where elephants are said to fetch the wood for their sacrificial fires. They are also found congregated in large numbers performing the penances of their respective ascetic schools outside the city walls or in cemeteries and groves. But even where the Tirukkural speaks of asceticism, or of Brahminic sacrifice oF 34 Sitap, XI, 150 ff,

caste, it does so often from a humanistic, critical angle demanding rather the spirit of these religious professions than a spiritless following of conventional rules. The true Brahmins are those who observe Aram (Righteousness) Because they show benevolence to all life. (30) It is the life of the Householder which is true Aram. (49) The Man who lives in the World as he ought Is fit to be classed among the Gods of Heaven. (50) A Brahmin may re-learn the Vedas he forgets But he can never regain a name lost by bad conduct. ’ ~(134) More renounced than hermits is the householder Who forgives the words of the wicked. © (159) Those who perform fasts are great indeed ; but only next to those (householders) who forgive the evil words of neighbours. (160) Better than a thousand Vedic sacrifices Is the saving of one single (animal) life. (259) Many are the impure of heart who pose as great ascetics And seek ritual purity by ablutions. (278) Neither the shaving of the head nor the growth of long hair is necessary to ascetics If in their conduct they be true to their calling. (280) Throughout these and similar verses there is the sound of either a reformer of present conduct or a defendant of past ideals who resents the introduction of new values. On ‘the one hand these verses seem to insist, as in the Jain and Buddhist books, that self-control is the true asceticism, that purity of heart is greater than ritualistic ablutions, that forgiveness of injuries and non-killing comprise the true sacrifice, that becoming conduct is more meritorious than Vedic recitation. On the other hand verses which profess that family life is the greatest aram (dhamma), hospitality the greatest sacrifice, children the greatest joy,

and altruistic love the Great Commandment, and many other verses entirely humanist in their inspiration justify the view that the Tirukkural is by and large a humanist codex.”

The Manimékalai is pre-eminently a book of Buddhist polemics and doctrines woven into a chain of narratives in which the chief character finds her haven in the Threefold Refuge. The Buddhist “ epic” too shows a great love for the Tamil country and its traditions, While it passes no value judgments about the cults of Siva and Vishnu and the worship of Kali, the Manimékalai is critical of both Jain compassion and the Brahmin doctrine of sacrifice, as well as of the intercessory power of the gods to avert fhe consequence of deeds, and of the moral conduct of some of the gods themselves. The story of Sutamati and her discovery of the absence of compassion among Jain ascetics, and the cruelty shown by the Brahmins to Aputra because of his compassion for a cow destined for sacrifice, and the conversion of these two to Buddhism, is part of the scope of the poem to show the acceptability of the Buddhist religion as superior to the others. Manimékalai is exhorted by Kannagi in a vision to interview the teachers of different religions, after which she would realise for herself that the other systems did not contain the truth. Thus she would come to tread the “ path of the Pitakas of the Great One ”.7 The conversion of a renowned and accomplished danseuse and courtesan as Matavi, the Tamil Ambapali, and of her beautiful daughter Manimékalai, to Buddhism, and ascribing interest in Buddhism to Kévalan and Kannagi in a previous birth and predicting their attainment of Nirvana through Buddhism in a future birth are part of the same plan of the poet to preach Buddhism as superior to Jain and Vedic beliefs.

25 Whether the humanism of the Tirukkural is theistic is controverted, particularly because the first verses, among which occur verses of theistic import, are said to be interpolations or are claimed by some scholars to refer to the Buddha or to Mahavira,

26 Mani,, XXVI, 66,

Doctor R. P. Sethu Pillai

Synced from re-OCR’d `doctor-r-p-sethu-pillai` (IA leaves 3250–3262).

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, pp. 217–229

The passing of Dr. R. P. Sethupillai on the Twenty-fifth of April, 1961, is an event which continues to be greatly mourned by all those acquainted with Tamil and Tamil scholarship. The tributes which were paid to his memory by the press and the public of South . India, Ceylon and Malaya are evidence, if evidence were necessary, of the esteem in which he was held, and the high appreciation and recognition which his scholarship has won for him wherever Tamil people read Tamil or about Tamil. The tributes déalt pointedly with his gifts as a speaker and writer, with his pioneer work for the Tamil Renaissance, his services as Lecturer at the Annamalai University, and later as Senior Lecturer and Professor ai the University of Madras. They dwelt on the generous endowments he made for the Sornammal Lectures at the Annamalai University and the University of Madras, and his philanthropy in bequeathing most of his estate 10 the maintenance of a maternity hospital in an area which sorely needed an institution of this kind. But, above all, the tributes dealt with Doctor R. P. Sethupillai as a man, his great kindness and urbanity, his sense of humour and his humility, and the love and altruism he brought to bear in his. dealings with his friends, his students and the public.

It was fortunate that the Academy of Tamil Culture — at a tea-party and meeting presided over by the former Chief Justice of the Madras High Court, Mr. P. V. Rajamannar, a few days before Dr. Sethupillai’s demise. was able to’ congratulate Dr. Sethupillai in absentia at his entering a period of retirement at the age of 65 after

such a long period of service to Tamil-speaking people and to Universities with Tamil Departments all over the world. The speakers at the function paid tributes to his work for the Academy of Tamil Culture and the interest he took in the founding and development of the Academy and of its journal. It was but a day earlier that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Madras had recalled in the Senate Hall at a Felicitation celebration attended by representatives of all sections of the city’s. population, his tribute to the retiring Professor of Tamil. As if in anticipation and with a presentiment of what _was to come, a printed volume of tributes and learned papers was presented to Dr. Sethupillai from his friends, admirers, students, and the great men of the Tamil country. In his Foreword, with characteristic felicity of expression, included Dr. Mudaliyar the memorable phrases of what might be a funeral oration and the sculptural words of an epitaph:

“Dr, R. P. Sethupillai has been an ideal University Professor and perhaps no one can speak of him with more intimate knowledge than myself. I have heard of him when he was in the Annamalai Uni-

‘versity but ever since he came over to the Madras University it has been my pleasure and privilege to have had a more intimate touch with him and to admire the manner in which he conducted himself as Professor, and the decency and decorum which he showed at all times and on all occasions.

Dr. R. P. Sethupillai is an unique example of high scholarship, extreme modesty, simplicity of behaviour and unostentatious charitable nature. Of him it may be truly said that his right hand did not ‘know what his left hand gave. He is retiring from the University of Madras with full of honours and full of years. His memory will be long cherished and the University is proud that his name will adorn the roll of the recipients of honorary degrees of this University ”.1

1See R, P, Sethupillai Silver Jubilee Commemoration Volume,

1961, Pslaniappa Brothers, Madras, 1961,

No further tribute is needed for the memory of R. P. Sethupillai, the embodiment of Tamil Culture, and the embodiment of the cherished ideals of our people which he himself expounded so clearly and so often as the ideals of the poets of old. First BEGINNINGS |

Dr. R. P. Sethupillai came of a line of Tamil lovers and Tamil Patrons. Vadamalayappan Pillai of the 16th century who was the ruler of the area around Tirunelveli is a notable figure in his ancestry.2 Sethupillai was born at Rasavallipuram in the Tirunelveli District, South India, the last of a family of twelve children, eleven of whom died before he was born. The late Professor’s bequest to a maternity hospital becomes intelligible when aware of the high rate of infantile mortality of the time of which his own family was a : victim. He was educated at St. Xavier’s High School, and later did his collegiate studies at the M.D.T. Hindu College, Tirunelveli and Pachayappa’s College, Madras. He so distinguished himself in Tamil that he was invited to be an Assistant Lecturer at Pachayappa’s. A young man with such speaking and debating abilities could not resist the lure of the law, and Sethupillai qualified for the Madras Bar to practise for a few years in his home district of Tirunelveli.

R. P. Sethupillai became a member also of the local municipality. He distinguished himself so well by his speeches that his political rivals finding his eloquence devastating persuaded the late Rajah Sir Annamalai Chettiar to invite Sethupillai 1o accept a lecturer’s post at the Annamalai University. This is one of the rare occasions when local rivalries contributed to Tamil scholarship. At the Annamalai seat of Tamil learning

2 Ibid., p. 20, Article by S; Maharajan, 3 Ibid., p. 42 ff, article by N, Sanjeevi,

where he went in 1930, began Sethupillai’s career of academic contribution. The Annamalai University with its residential facilities provided the opportunity for Sethupillai to come into familiar contact with scholars of other disciplines, and the new courses opened for Tamil in that University gave his studies direction and purpose, and the occasion to inspire many a future teacher of Tamil with enthusiasm for poetic enjoyment. His Tamil oratory was a match for the English oratory of the then Vice-Chancellor, Right Hon. Srinivasa Sastri, and won for Tamil a new recognition among undergraduates who until then generally thought of English alone as a dignified medium for University audiences and addresses.

From the Annamalai University, Sethupillai became Senior Lecturer of Tamil at the University of Madras in 1936. And when provisions were available for a

- Chair of Tamil, at the University of Madras, thanks to the endowment made in the name of the Rev. Lazarus, R. P. Sethupillai was chosen the first occupant of the Chair of Tamil named after the Rev. Lazarus himself. Dr. R. P. Sethupillai adorned that Chair for the last twenty-five years and retired from the University “full of years and full of glory ”.

At the University of Madras, Professor R. P. Sethupillai had occasion not only to do research work himself, but also guided the research work of more than forty graduates preparing theses for the M.Litt., and Ph.D., degrees. Among those who did research work under him, were M. Andronov of Moscow University, John Marr of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, Adilakshmi Anjaneyulu, now at the University of Leningrad, Dr. Shankar Raj Naidu, Professor of Hindi at the University of Madras. And the subjects of the theses covered a whole range of Dravidian Literatures and languages. The twenty-five years at the University

of Madras was the period when he endeared himself to the public of Tamil Nad and delighted millions with his eloquence and his mellifluous prose.

TAMIL FOR THE MILLIONS

A University Professor engaged in Scholarship in a state in which the majority of people had had no opportunities to appreciate the characteristics and beauties of their literature must have mental conflicts as to whether he should bury himself in research or carry the fruits of his learning to the people. Professor R. P. Sethupillai chose a middle way when faced with this dilemma and carried the University ivory tower to the public hall and the forum, and through his speeches and writings was the most important pioneer of the Renaissance which took the Tamil classics, from a coterie of exclusive scholars and delivered them in the hands of the common people. It is said that Sethupillai while a student at Tirunelveli in 1912 acted as a volunteer for a Saiva Siddhanta Conference and there heard Maraimalai Adigal make an address in Tamil. The boy was so impressed by the discourse that he resolved to make a special study of Tamil Language and Literature.‘ Sethupillai became a disciple of Sivagnana Desigar of Tirunelveli, and it was under him that he acquired his first orientations in Tamil Studies.5

The works of R. P. Sethupillai are popular in the sense they are widely appreciated by the people, but they are not popular in the sense that they are superficial or lack profundity. R.P.S. carried his scholarship lightly and had none of the pedantry which characterised certain Tamil scholars. Any one who peruses “earpb Cub” or “Sounepuy gre wwid ?» or “Words and their significance” will realise how much

4 Marai Tirunavukkarasu, Maraimalai Adigal Varalaru, p, 162, Saiva Siddhanta Publishing Works, Madras, 1959. ; 5R. P. S, Commemoration Volume, op. cit., p. 18. .

of labour and research and thought has entered into these works. To be successful as a populariser chiefly in the domain of literature, and to maintain that popularity over a period of about fifty years, one should have learning and profundity, and these R.P.S. possessed. Occasionally, his use of alliteration and rhyme might have sacrificed rigid accuracy and precision, but these instances are not of great moment in his works. Behind the easy, popular and dramatic style of narrative which R.P.S. developed, is the precise and thorough knowledge of the Tamil classics which comes by constant enjoyment of favourite authors and favourite pieces of _ literature. And with sure taste.R.P.S. singled out the » finest lines of Tamil poetry and introduced them to his readers so that they might become part of their heritage. Readers “experiencing ” these quotable lines naturally go to the originals to experience them in a fuller context. . Sethupillai realised as few Tamil scholars at that period had realised that the purpose of poetry is not to be didactic, not to teach morals, biography or religion, but primarily to provide poetic enjoyment. Sethupillai had a phenomenal literary memory. The mellifiluous lines of the Silappatikdram, and the Kamba Ramayanam as well as the devotional language of the Periapurdnam and the Alwars and Nayanmars became by constant enjoyment and‘ constant repetition a part of his own language and style. The rhymes and alliterations of his prose are reminescent of his favourite pieces of poetry or are haunting epithets and phrases from the classical works. The prose of his other senior contemporaries like Maraimalai Adigal and Thiru Vi. Ka. is reminiscent of the style of the old commentators, but not the style of R.P.S. His sentences are never involved or complex, ‘but flow with a staccato rhythm. Where another writer might build up a great complex structure R. P.S. breaks’ his thought into several even statements :

Arésaor wrwgons Ahurs Fos, wOIWSH — SHO SOW & corms SOS crest mecsreso cows AipSrer ; nasser OeNgssrer, sovor2soor Grow Heoer. Aspe Aipbs wey Cured QUT. Fi (HSOOT LITEM 5 THA CHS; BEUBAEHST ; “Gum! shar! cresrEHHD 2m1sG OQsgHerub assCgr! werers werearEpw WFfsEnupm 6, Apsasr uregHD Hawi_G orerbiphs cult amipse MeGur! Quevsrasvorts Qupp uTags sre QUQuHd upPleows Qupmw. sresr Flam pujtd eer Aemmujid BGaurs srusmpujtd srevorA GaGeor!” stra) gmA BMapsrsr. Qarurgy ser Shogsilor guy soorGb wernbh HAflurgs Fenguileor Bormnmuds sor. ApsajCarcr Md crw wert Ascmpult vsrMssresr. SOT FOS Quer aps wnugibd,. QArsanpm Brraicvorgpud Lops Nero, Fos Amb whey Bi SS TET 5 SEOFSEEG CHIKS wreorssmg srovorsvohl -eor(ipsnt_ 5 SITET; GVA FHOMFYLD FOTEHV HM fF UMS eMIUULd LPenuuyLd Hash op bSreT; Ab Hesvuilev Sflemr HJwHwser AsrCurG Corsa Qoruvlay Bleu Qerhaerire, * SesreorGio! earlearsGr -mm! (LPeOT AHFA Lor Fbos Bevossr; Bmgerer AgsaOzeveurtd wrenwuled Ws avoayt; Ha are BHT HGUEHW LoUGsHseOr crotruaGer iwrsmuwirev ecmaub nh) Hse wossrerGerer a bsiresr 5 ASUTY 2 oT FHS woreorop~PHSresr crest DI) weored UH bSTCS” crest oH Hl nwsaebd Ogee ssrerr.® In his bringing Tamil poetry to the millions, R. P.S. appears to have had a plan spread over his life time. He first introduced the great classics to the people, and commenced with Tirukkural as would a person of his religious and conservative nature, giving due regard and reverence to tradition. This was followed by introducing the Tamil epic par excellence, the Silappatikdram and reproducing its inimitable lyrics and quotable lines. Then -came his description of the story of 6 Prureed’’ | S, R, Subramaniapillai, Tirunelveli, 1957, p, 91 f.

Rama as portrayed in Kamban. Episodes from the Manimékalai and the Periyapurāṇam followed in “ ship GG paosoflacr*?. Having presented his understanding and his enjoyment of what should be the classics shared by people whatever their religious affiliation might be, R.P.S. with a catholicity of outlook, spoke and wrote on the literary works of different religious groups within the Tamil Country so that all Tamils might become aware of the literary heritage they should share in common. He had already expounded for the benefit of the Tamil Country, the Kamba Ramayanam which was believed to be a Vaishnava work and therefore not meriting the attention of a Saivaite like Sethupillai.” He wrote a magnificent study and book on the Italian Catholic priest Beschi, and his work Tirukkadvalir Kalambagam and thereby introduced Beschi to those not of his faith. Another book appeared on the SHSygreorib entitled “Gacier Gah” Once again he wrote of the contribution made by Christians, both foreigners and Tamils, and included such names as Rhenius, Vedanayagam Pillai, Krishna Pillai and Vethanayagam Sastri.

The bakthi poetry of the Alwars and Nayanmars he cited in his essays dealing with the places and temples associated with them. Throughout his many books but especially in s_pampuiGe, in “AhmuasesulGe, ” and in “ sari Gucib,” he worked out the literary association of the cities, towns, rivers, valleys, hills and other land marks in the Tamil country. He was not a historian nor did he see the Tamil country in a historical dimension. His is the perspective of literature, and the Tamil Nad he portrays is the Tamil Nad of literary associations. Of episodes from the Sangam Age and other periods of Tamil history he did remind his readers, but they were again known to him and explained by = = wi — cian Volume, op. cit., p, 13 ff, article by

him as episodes from literary pieces. He was himself aware of his vision of the Tamil landscape for he wrote in his Preface to “ jpiisamsuIGa”: @eat_GenraaiiGe SO pas Hear Aeipenouyid, Cert emntouyed, LICDLPEMLDUYLD, LIEGOT urGb Anbs) Nerhiss srevoreuri.

His character is written all over his works. His

_. choice of words and epithets were always delicate and

_ never coarse. The language of the bakthi literature in Tamil is another factor to be counted in the study of his style. Certain words not usually common with modern writers occur over and over in Sethupillai, and these are an index to his urbanity and gentlemanliness. He reintroduced and made current in speech and writing a great many words which previous centuries had forgotten, and these words occur with a morning freshness in the pages of R.P.S. He treated religious themes of other religionists with greater respect and religious sensitivity than their own critics writing on their own religious themes. In his Anthology of Tamil Poetry, with a great universality of taste and outlook, he included representative poetry from every section of Tamil poetry, from every period, and from poets belonging to different religions. The sarne outlook is clear also from the personages like Marco Polo, Umaru Pulavar and Caldweil, who are featured in his Apostrophes to the ocean.

In his narrative style, R. P.S. was influenced by the Tamil epics. The writer has often pointed to the following passage as characteristic of one aspect of Sethupillai’s style.

“ero DsGbgroibd OeesrmiDesr SCwWaT HM Morurs Sré aHCosd a6As Hare Qu. (Pusan Criws ascpmarcDed sraeud QwCar

honss Ara Hs wwusguors QHEESS. SLO

Carpsoss wrsausanga SOM DS HANGL eresr

DDSS sud gear BAurw Hevenw ARIE

Trees AHNASSror. WMsQuraps) svucshed Q55s Borsa s0aG MHud arab apsdsermy IDbS, Appar Hor ps osnwds Asrap Srfser, FrgHagpyid srveurid ave pipiypsp SL qgars sor Qosrmanmawb Osrnapgs Bflors STOOL TUS AADnsses Sroor ews Sonioeow Cusirsn ghds acironit Qugeaenesr. Apis Cprs Speer atid sled STISSSH. SLod pips Sip Auycppsaupd stiued jppsecip sanyfs STO Gump psaip Cure pFsasmge CarGSs Sh SLgyer Ass wees ust Ffled uapapa bisa orf. Avs AIGA 6569S sss as sGorpo uw SImeraciiand AsHhs ABS wre SLOLetrujid, wmrisiwopmeeearuyed Ups Oar coor BG Avec Corh OorgsgyewG Hveomurenjpaer. FTAUT Feoorcoi fied AiphS Hd Hass WGC Hwy UTULOT Lh AS baIDEM svar 9 HES SHOOT LITT. Hevor ovo fle sssofiuagmaeee An gpibyb Agscvomb Taeid wpCorPeAorms Mo wurmuog songs upp Agearbs USSHs Qe recor rear. eTEBone wd Ce AN5IG5S AGG, sqns_Aer Brarsupi, SG ywslesr cuppsaup BqgCurenruud Cae Qurips! ergacr sors Surw Hevenw AD) 5S) SASS HAO. SHYSq eenmelt_worAw Sor argu Heorssrest. ‘Gwr! ureumis! presr euISTTHG SSD 2 reqs HOTUCH Oewi@seir. Qpbsb emagegs geruGw OedwiGurCmerr. Uru YNUUGbQuTrCps escrow HOw Qemed aul dereveurine) abCSCoor ; Deol o_csr&or crear asovor sorte ereinGuCey? er saps Oerpacer sresr SErSepo CaCuCGe? £ 6T ET CED (HS GOUT UPS Q& 4699 caréeG agerarsn 7? eTETM) LyeviDil& surTaar Aya OursgHSsOarerG uTrwiug &Hesr 6a As bs Oaerevsrig¢m bs or. ummiorpih Sev soflr ayflGw Crcsray Curing yorpsgubd we BIL gd Harors QasreorG Ceti s5g.” ®

8 sUpsr_@ mawefiscsr, Ottrumai Office, Madras,

1956, p, 2-3,

Throughout Sethupillai’s works, one hears the undertone of deep religiousness, a reverence for tradition and the love of Tamil and the Tamil country. Alliteration and rhyme is a marked feature of his style, partly because I think he was spontaneously given to alliteration as some other persons are spontaneously. given to punning. He thought in poetic language and his thought was not disassociated from the poetry he knew so well. Alliteration more recently has become a fad with a certain school of platform oratory and consequently of Tamil writing, often sacrificing the exigencies of thought and compelling the sense to follow the sound. Sethupillai’s alliteration and rhyme make no such sacrifices and are subservient to no such compulsions, except for a few lapses where rigid accuracy and precision may have been overlooked in his alliterative patterns of thought. Others have attempted to imitate R.P.S. but with very little success. THE ScHOLAR The contribution which Dr. Sethupillai made to Tamil research was that of a pioneer. His works were _ necessary preliminary works to more detailed and more profound research in Tamil Studies. Connoisseur of ‘words that he was, he was attracted by their history and by their significance. When Tamil courses were organized on the basis of modern languages, courses in Linguistics and Semantics were introduced. .Sethupillai’s investigation gave us a first work in the field of semantics — “Words and their significance”. One is not aware if this work has been superseded since its publication in 1953. The author’s knowledge of Tamil Literature is again evident in this work since he has been able to trace the changes in the meaning of words through different epochs. His English style is also simple, straight-forward and dignified.

‘The extent of the study and investigation which has gone into “eermbd Cugid” is not easily gauged. It is not a book which one reads continuously, and hence. has to be used asa work of reference to estimate its importance and its erudition. His book on Tiruvalluvar was again shies work of its kind, and R.P.S. did not hesitate to expound his views and analyse the work and its commentary with a critical attitude. Referring to translations of Tirukkural, R.P.S. writes: . “Airaid a Cuor Pur ABfwsSand Disyrev Quon PAu satu Gerar Oger AHAcsrGauw. Ba aD) ETUC SF Mensucm puller) eveorjeQaevevrtd Q6 sm From pry gre MeruGaicns jeer SH HS DH yous, ‘custepacsr gore 2 vAgmaCa SHH) UTsrys.p Canes gibliperG? eresray weor WED HS UT PFSIEOT. Bui gpird Cur POuw je &Aesr m CuprAfiugasnt Bigrd wardgsrv sd QumrpPupd GulbuUL. CassrGOnsiranid ap iu Cpréed gsr SOS) usvflows CeuiwCas1rGud. Mdeurper is SU PETS Fd Gorppuled Cor PlOuws Somos Hs Carre GibFAsct uv Meiig, Dred Av arog Ho 5b OoryMICGeGu Qsero apse Groce Quy DUI OAS Hid, HAfus Hqaustepagcyj, 1520r Cor AOuuts5s sieges sharQrergy HoAOsrcst gH eu aripd FHS scromw FM Se) HOICOHESC sSeoUiuGumier sider BSOWSS — Coorg ereorw BTGSEGLW sw01Ld 2 mb,” 9 R.P.S. was keenly aware of the negligible work done in India in the field of Comparative Dravidian Philology since the publication of Caldwell’s great book a hundred years ago. Hence he organised with the aid of the other Dravidian language Departments of the University of Madras, the publication of a Comparative Vocabulary of Dravidian Languages. The first volume Soucresat gre wud, Saiva Siddhanta Publishing Works, Madras, 1956, p, 23-24.

of that work has been issued, and its production is itself a tribute to R.P.S.”

Doctor R. P. Sethupillai as a scholar, critic, and writer wielded a great influence in the Tamil country. during the years he was associated with the Universities of Tamil Nad. He was not an original thinker and Philosopher like Thiru Vi.Ka. He was not a controversialist and commentator and pioneer of Tamil prose like Maraimalai Adigal, nor a research scholar like T. P. Meenatchisundaram. Nor did he possess the creative versatility of his successor to the Chair of Tamil, Dr. M. Varadarajan. Above all R.P.S. was a fountain of Tamil learning. He was a brilliant conversationalist with an inexhaustible fund of narrative and episodes. He was the University Professor who chose to take his learning to the market place, and to imbue the Tamil country with a love for the land and for its literature. His memory will be long cherished by those who have known and loved him, by those who have heard his inimitable Tamil eloquence, and by all those who read his mellifluous prose. |

10 For a list of his works see Article by N. Sanjeevi in R. P. S. Commemoration Volume,

Indian Thought and Roman Stoicism

Re-OCR’d from Internet Archive page images (*Tamil Culture*, Vol. X No. 3, July–Sept. 1963, pp. 1–36; IA leaves 3717–3752) and lightly edited for readability. Hyphenation rejoined; obvious character errors corrected against the scan. Prefer the scan for disputed footnotes.
## Contents
1. Introduction
2. Synthesis in Education
3. Stoicism and Later Times
4. Tamil–Roman Trade
5. Cosmopolitanism
6. Human Brotherhood
7. The Wise Man
8. Conclusion
## Introduction
Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. X No. 3 (July–September 1963), pp. 1–36
When Indian thought is compared with early Western philosophy, the Orphic and Pythagorean schools, Platonism, Epicureanism, neo-Platonism, and Stoicism, are those most mentioned.? In these comparisons it is not the metaphysical speculations of Indian philosophy, but the religious mysticism, the belief in metempsychosis, the ethical codes, the ascetic discipline, and vegetarianism, which were commonly stated as offering similarities and as worthy of notice. Lately, however, the mass of Indian metaphysical speculation and even significant legends have received from a widening circle of Western critics a more accurate and comparative interpretation than they used to receive, say, at the time of Lord Macaulay or John Ruskin.
It is hardly necessary to remind you of Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education (1835), in which with characteristic rhetoric, he asserted, in opposition to those who would favour the continuation of the traditional learning of India, that
“a single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”, and asked facetiously
1 RADHAKRISHNAN S., (Ed.) History of Philosophy Eastern and Western, 2 vols, London, 1953., RADHAKRISHNAN S., East and West, Some Reflections, London, 1955; Eastern Religions and Western Thought, 2nd ed. Oxford, 1940. ZIMMER HEINRICH, Philosophies of India, London, 1952.
“whether when we can patronise sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance at public expense medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns 30,000 years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.”? John Ruskin, in an inaugural lecture delivered at the Kensington museum a hundred years ago (1858), said that Indian Art, in spite of its delicacy und refinement, never represented a natural fact, but dealt in distorted and monstrous forms: “1¢ will not draw a man but an eight-armed monster; it will not draw a flower, but only a spiral or a zig-zag.’’® Today the statements of Macaulay regarding Indian Science and thought, and of Ruskin regarding Indian Art, are statements which are recalled merely to show the change which has occurred among cultured persons in the West regarding things Indian. There is no great need any more even for the spirited and eloquent presentations of the foundations of Indian culture which Sri Aurobindo made in the twenties of this century.* This change has been brought about gradually by the persevering labour of Western Indologists during the last hundred years and more. and by the popularisers who have made use of their research. Max Miiller, Hermann Oldenberg, * THOMSON EDWARD and GARRAT, G.T, Rise und fulfilment of British Rule im Indw, London, 1934. ’ The Two Paths. * Sri) AUROBINDO, Foundations of Indian Culture, Pondicherry, 1959.
W. E. Hopkins, Berriedale Keith, Julien Vinson, Rhys Davids, Heinrich Zimmer, Louis de la Vallée Poussin, Jean Filliozat, Pierre Meile, Louis Renou, J. Gonda, Giuseppe Tucci, M. B. Emeneau, Thomas Burrow, A. L. Basham, and Kamil Zvelebil are representative names of western scholars, both dead and living, whose works continue to present Indian culture and Indian thought in reasonable perspective. Several other names too could be mentioned; and yet Henry Maine and his “nothing moves in the world which is not Greek in origin”, still continues to be quoted; and Werner Jaeger in the last decade stated, in spite of so much literature on India, that one does wrong to ascribe the word “cuiture” to the Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians and Chinese, because while these do not have a single word for real culture as an ideal to be striven after, it is only the Hellenocentric world which possesses it.® There is greater evidence available today to illustrate that the development of cultures, howsoever ancient, was hardly achieved in isolation, or by cultural mutation. The Greek genius did not bloom suddenly in the Eastern Mediterranean according to an Aristotelian concept of creation, ex mthilo sut et subjecti. The Greek phenomenon of the pre-Christian era is explained in part as the Indo-Aryan phenomenon of the pre-Christian era in the Indo-Gangetic plain is explained in part, by anterior migrations, existing religious cults and oral literatures, and by the influences exerted on incoming groups by civilised peoples _already in possession of the land. 5 JAEGER WERNER, Puideia, Ideals of Greek Culture, Translated from the German, Vol. I. p. xvii, Oxford, 1946.
## Synthesis in Education
Because of new and expanding lines of communication which have been opened, our mid-century tends more towards synthesis than analysis and modern educational objectives and methods seem to promote the tendency to find interrelationships and interdependence. The fragmentation of History like the fragmentation of the other Arts and Sciences, necessary, perhaps, because of the time-space limitations of the human mind, promotes an uneven emphasis and an imbalance which only synoptic and synthesising surveys may rectify. It was Alfred North Whitehead who observed.
“a\ well-planned university course is a
study of the wide sweep of generality”, a generality which draws principles and power from a variety of concrete details.®
The thinkers, creative writers and poets of this mid-century represent this synoptic and synthesising trend, a trend already desired twentyfour centuries ago by Alexander ‘the Great in founding Alexandria. In an historic address at a banquet of reconciliation which took place at Opis, after his -Macedonian troops had mutinied because of the favour he had shown his Persian troops, Alexander called for a union of hearts (homonoia) and a joint commonwealth of peoples of the world. Alexandria which he founded became a commercial and intellectual centre of the Hellenic world where the East and the West met.’
® Aims of Education.
7 BARKER ERNEST, Art. “ Stoicism” in Ency. of Soial Sciences,
Since then, the idea of a synthesis of world thought came into prominence now and then; it was prominent especially in the writings of a great educational thinker and pedagogue, John Amos Komensky (Comenius) (1592—1671), who outlined the plans for a University of the world to be located in England, where instruction undertaken in an artificially constructed international language would include pan-sophia, pandogmatica, and pan history. Pandogmatica was to contain the ‘quintessence of authors” from age to age and from Jand to land.*
Today, it should be hardly considered scholar. ship to compile the history of University education and ignore Taksasila, Nalanda and Kancipuram; to discuss the nature of epic poetry and ignore the Mahabharata the Ramayana, and the Silappatikaram; to write on the history of the scientific study of politics beginning with Machiavelli and yet not to mention the older Arthaégastra, to analyse mysticism and forget the Tamil bhakti poets; to explain methods of Scholasticism and fail to mention altogether Samkara and Raméanuja; to teach of architecture and by pass the Moghuls; to teach the history of sculpture and ignore the Nataraja bronze which in spite of its four arms, pace Ruskin, or was it because of them, Auguste Rodin and Ananda Coomaraswamy were convinced, synthesised the highest achievement and total exploitation of sculptural possibilities °
8 CURTIS, 8.3. and BOULTWOOD,. M.EA., A Short Mistory of Educational Ideas. p. 186 ff London, 1953.
*See ZIMMER HEINRICH Pazilosophies of India, p. 28 ff. op. cit.
## Stoicism and Later Times
Stoicism in our times is a name given to an attitude of mind as well as to a system of Philosophy which originated in Greece and was later expounded in Rome. As an attitude of mind denoting patient endurance it may be met anywhere. As a system of philosophy, some of its principal tenets seem similar to beliefs also obtaining in. antiquity both in China and India. These similarities do not argue any identity of origin, or even identical sources of influence, but only demonstrate that the solutions to the problems of the practical aspects of life are limited in number and range, that philosophers are fairly well distributed in the civilized world and that similar social conditions in widely. distant areas may create similarity in thought. Within India itself, the isolated life of ascetiés, the control and extinction of desire, the indifference to pain and pleasure, the search for mental calm or ataraxy, the theistic and monistic order and harmony verified in the universe, and the human participation of divinity,
buddhir buddhimatam asmi tejas tejasvinam aham I am the intelligence of the intelligent, I am splendour of the splendid,}° are possible fields of comparison with Roman Stoicism.
Roman or later Stoicism is claimed to be the greatest system of organised thought which the mind of man built up for itself in the GraecoRoman world. Because of its way of looking at
” BG. VII.
the world and at the problems of life it is still said to possess a permanent interest for the human race, and a permanent power of inspiration. Stoicism influenced the evolution of Roman jurisprudence, especially of the lex naturalis and the lex gentium and contained in germ the origins of international law. It furnished considerable proof and expression to the growth of natural theology and the thesis of the anima nuturaliter christiana. Stoic ideas influenced Grotius (1583— 1645) and Pufendorf (1632—1694) in the seventeenth century to formulate principles of international law, and it humanised the thinking of Erasmus and Montaigne as well as of the French Enlightenment.?? In the Arab world thinkers like Al Farabi (c. A.D. 870—950) and Ibn-Sina (980—1037) profitted by concepts they found in Stoic theology and ethics.2% Such Stoic ideas of permanent interest need to be known wherever they may exist, and therefore, I propose to discuss two or three elements which may be termed “Stoic” as they are found in the Latin and Greek literature of Rome, and in the classical literature in Tamil, ascribed to the same first two centuries of the Christian era. The comparison between these two literatures is made more resourceful and apperceptive because of similar political and commercial factors which contributed to the widening of horizons in the two areas and because of the two-way trade
GILBERT MURRAY, Stoic, Christian and Humanist, p. 89 ff. 2nd ed. London, 1950.
19 SVARLIEN OSCAR, An Introduction to the Law of — Nations, Mcgraw-Hill, New York, 1955.
18 See R. WALZER, Islumic Philosophy in History of Philosophy Eastern and Western, op. cit. ;
then obtaining between the Tamil country and the Roman empire.

Tamil–Roman Trade

Of the countries and peoples mentioned in the Tamil classics of this period as being engaged in active commerce with the Tamil country, there is mention either explicit or implied of North Indian kingdoms, of Ceylon, of Burma, and of Kedah in Malaya, but the Yavanar a general term used for peoples from the Mediterranean seaboard, occurs oftener than the names of other non-Indian foreign peoples. The wealthy quarters of the Yavunar to be found in Tamil harbour cities are explicitly mentioned in the Tamil classics while other foreigners are classed together as “multilingual groups.” Valiant and hardlooking Yavanar clothed in leathern jackets .are found as bodyguards in palaces and war-camps of Tamil kings; they also guard the city of Maturai and are employed as engineers operating defence, machinery. Impressive Yavana ships, very large ones even as the classical geographers observe, and the “Greek ships from Egypt” as the Periplus notes, arrive churning the waters of the harbour of Musiri on the west coast, unload their cargoes especially of gold and silver, and return westwards with the pepper which brought excessive profits to Roman traders. Bronze Roman lamps bearing the figure of a swan or of a woman burn in the palaces of royalty; and
14 See E.H. WARMINGTON, The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, Cambridge, 1928.
WHEELER MORTIMER, R.E., Rome beyond the Imperial frontiers, London, 1954.
FILLIOZAT JEAN, Les Relations Extérieures de l'Inde, Pondicherry, 1956. -
Yavana wine is drunk from Yavana goblets of gold, refilled by bangled damsels. Yavana contingents are stationed to protect Yavana trade. One such contingent is located near a harbour in which the Peutinger tables have marked a temple dedicated to Augustus-templum Augusti.*5
The number of ships sailing to Southern India from Alexandria and the Red Sea ports increased appreciably during this period.
Archaeology. the insignificant tiny areas which have been dug. takes the evidence further and confirms the literary evidence. Sherds of wine amphorae made in Arezzo or in Puteoli near Naples found among the basement ruins of an ancient storehouse near Pondicherry, on chemical analysis were found to contain the residue of a popular Grecian resin wine, the inferior quality meant for export.. The gold of Rome mentioned in the Tamil poem has been found in abundance in hoards and in single specimens in the South of India and in coastal Ceylon and of these impressive finds, all first-century coins which are of Augustus (B.C. 63—A.D. 14) and Trajan (A.D. 53—117) not associated with later coinage, have been found only in the South. Sufficient Roman coinage found in the Tamil areas is preserved in museums, but an equal amount or more of the finds has also gone into the jewellery of women living near the ancient harbours of the Southern coast. Fragments of Roman lamps, a great attraction to the Tamil
% THOMSON J. OLIVER, History of Ancient Geography p. 298 ff. Cambridge. 1948
MEILE PIERRE, Les Yavanas dans l'Inde Tamoule in Journal Asiatrque, 1940, pp. 85—123.
T. 21—2
poets, have also been found along with Roman and native pottery.’®
The literary evidence for this flourishing trade from the Roman side is remarkably revealing. The classical geographers have known the harbours of these three kingdoms as their knowledge has been continually increasing since the time of Megasthenes, (fl. 305 B.C.). The Naturalist, Pliny (A.D. 23—79), the Periplus Maris Erythraci (1st cent. A.D.) and Ptolemy (2nd c. A.D.) mention at least forty harbours, towns, rivers and emporia along this southern coast, names most of which can he identified as those mentioned also in contemporary Tamil literature. Some of these prosperous towns and harbour cities are compared in beauty and resource to the heroines of love poetry.
“You are as rich and resourceful as Kuala Lumpur and Penang” might sound strange in love poetry today, but that is how the Tamil poet looked on his beloved drawing his comparisons from the pleasures: and comforts that cities like Musiris and Tyndis and Khaberts emporion could provide.?’
The classical geographers know of the three Tamil kingdoms (Pandyan, Céran, Colan), their capital cities, and the source of their wealth ; they know other smaller dynasties and clans, Atoi, Batoi, Kareoi, Toringoi; they know of
1% FILLLOZAT J&AN, Les relations extericures de l'Inde op. cit. ° WHEELER MORTIMER, Rome beyond the Imperial frontiers, op. cit. 17 THANL NAYAGAM, XAVIER. S., Nature in Tamil Poetry, Singapore, 1963. :
Ceylon and the sailings from Ceylon to the South Indian coast, and mention in detail the merchandise which the Romans sought from the Tamil emporia such as fine textiles, pearls, beryls, pepper, cinnamon and other spices and perfumes.?®
Tamil trade appears to have been even more voluminous with the Orient, with the Gangetic regions, the Malayan Archipelago and with China. The Romans and Arabs headed directly to the Tamil ports using the trade winds, and the Southern harbours were emporia from which Roman goods were transhipped to further East, and SouthEastern and Eastern goods, such as silk from China and tortoise-shell from Malaya, transhipped to the West. The Periplus is emphatic in assigning an important role to these emporia in the trade with the Ganges region and the Golden Chersonese or the Malay peninsula:
“There are imported into these places everything made in Damirica; what is brought at any time from Egypt comes here, together with most kinds of all the things that are brought from Damirica and of those that are carried through Paralia.”'®
WA close analysis of the information available from the classical geographers and writers shows that they knew more of the Tamil country than has been conceded hitherto by those who have interpreted them without examining the evidence of the Tamil sources. See Mc. CRINDLE. J W. Ancient India as described by Ptolemy, London, 1885 and The Commerce and Navigation of the Erythraean sea, Calcutta, 1879; VINCENT, W. The Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients in the Indian Ocean, 2 vols., London, 1807; VINCENT, W: The Voyage of Nearchus and the nertplus of the Erythraean Sea, Oxford, 1809; R.C. MAJUMDAR, The Classical accounts of India, Calcutta, 1960.
. % W.H. SCHOFF, The Perrplus of the Erythraean Sea
p. 46, New York, 1912. See PAUL WHEATLEY, The Golden Chersonese, University of Malaya Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1961.
Later sources, Chinese, Arabic and European, point to the .continuity of this centralised trade which developed because of a favourable geographical position, and the availability of merchandise coveted in East and West.
The trade in spices left certain Tamil names in Greek and Latin such as zingibert, zinpiberi for ginger from incivér, and piper for pepper from pippali. Another Tamil word for pepper used at this period, Aav7. once the chief ingredient of Tamil culinary art, is left with us in curry and rice said to be according to one school of modern philosophers India’s greatest contribution to world civilization} Huge barns along the Tiber erected in A.D. 92 stored this pepper, and the problem of exchange and the drain of Roman gold and silver into India worried Pliny who with Stoic austerity wishes to know who was the first to introduce this pungent spice to augment an already existing appetite, obtaining an unsavoury condiment all the way from India. The derivation of the Latin word for pear] (margarites) is not certain but the pearls of the Gulf of Mannar and of Korkai (Kolkhoi) were put to most extraordinary uses around the Mediterranean. , You will remember the pearl which Cleopatra dissolved in vinegar in order to drink, as well as the dinner of a certain Clodius who gave each guest a pearl to swallow, and Nero throwing precious stones and pearls to the people and hanging his first beard "oe with pearls for veneration at the Capitol. / Lollia Paulina, wife of the Emperor Gaius had 30 million of ses RENOU, L. La Geographie de Ptolomee, l’Inde, Paris,
sesterces worth of pearl ornaments; and Roman ladies had pearls on their fingers, toes, ears, sandals and shoes so that the rattling of pearls could be heard as they walked.?°
The Tamil kingdoms provided the bulk of luxury articles the use of which the Roman Stoics and the early Christian writers deprecate with vigour. In examining Roman relations with India one is surprised at the association famous Roman Stoics have with the Greek and Latin evidence concerning [ndia. Seneca (4 B.C.—A.D. 65), the best representative of Roman Stoicism of the first century, whose furniture included five hundred tripod tables embellished with legs of ivory imported most probably from India, wrote a book on India which has not reached us; and Flavius Arrianus (circ. 90—175) the most eminent Stoic of the first half of the second century, who has preserved the discourses of Epictetus, is also the one who wrote the Jndika, and preserved the fragments of Megasthenes, Eratosthenes and Nearchus. Eratosthenes, the: librarian in Alexandria from about 234 to 196 B.C. who preferred to divide men rather into good and bad than into Greeks and barbarians, is the earliest of the classical geographers of India. Posidonius (about 135—51 B.C.) who instructed Cicero and the Roman circles in a modified Stoicism who was a geographer as well, suggested, anticipating Columbus by sixteen centuries, that sailing from Spain one might strike India.??
% WARMINGTON, E.H. The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India, op. cit. 167 ff.
THOMSON, OLIVER, J; History of Ancient Geography op. cit. See also TARN, W.W. The Greeks in Baciria and India, 2nd ed, Cambridge, 1951. .
The outline of mutual trade given above is a useful background to understand the sense of universality which is a dominant and characteristic element in Roman Stoicism and the Tamil thought of this era. It is of interest to note that while Grecian contacts with India occur through the overland route and are confined most to Northern India, the Roman contacts occur mainly by the sea route and during these first two centuries of the Christian era are predominantly with Southern India.
## Cosmopolitanism

One of the contributions made by the Stoics to Western thought, significant for our century, is the inclusion of all men within an ethic of universal brotherhood, and within the bonds of a direct altruistic relationship of man to man. Near Plato’s ideal and actual states, and Aristotle’s reports of Hellenic attitudes, the idea of a city-republic (the polis), isolated in its setting, rigorous in its maintenance of a ruling class, exclusive and selective in its citizenship and expressive of Hellenic or Athenian superiority in respect of the barbaroi, governed political thought and government. The ideal city of Plato was to be located about ten miles from the sea and away from the highroads so that its citizens might not suffer ideologically by contact with foreigners, and the government of the city might not become corrupt by the preference of foreign settlers for their own laws.?2 The inferior classes set
% PLATO, The Laws, 704—707, ARISTOTLE, Politics, VII, 4—6. On Stoic reactions see BARKER EARNEST, Greek Political Theory, 4th ed. London, 1960; SINCLAIR, T. A. A History of Greek Political Thought, Londan, 1959.
permanently apart for crafts and agriculture were denied the rights of full citizenship and of education; there were those born to rule and others born to obey; slaves were denied the capacity for virtue, and women were denied even academic equality with men; and the foreigner was generally looked upon as unequal in culture and refinement compared with the Greek. Aristotle whose views of the barbaroi are only in partial agreement with Plato’s, says:
“ The Hellenes regard themselves as noble everywhere, and not only in their own country; but they deem the barbarians noble only when at home, thereby, implying that there are two sorts of nobility and of freedom, the one absolute, the other relative” (Politics, I, 6).
In the Greek world there was another trend less exclusivistic, and that was traced to the Sophists, but assumed a supreme importance with the decline of the city-state and as Alexander’s concepts of empire gained adherents. As early as the fifth century B.C. Antiphon, the sophist, repudiated the distinction between nobleman and slave and between Greek and barbarian as unnatural. This was the attitude of: the Cynics as well, but the philosophers of the Porch, whose most important exponents were not Athenians and who had no loyalty to Attica, made it a fundamental principle of their system. Zeno had the same attitude as the Cynics, and said: ‘“ why should I be proud of Attica with its worms and its slugs?” In his Ideal State, a book lost to us, Zeno is said to have visualised the world as
TARN, WILLIAM and GRIFFITH, G.T. Hellenistic Civilization, London, 1959.
one great city where all were citizens bound together by a law of love. This concept of the cosmopolis has received more tributes than any other Hellenistic concept, and has formed the foundation of the Stoic sense of universality. The temper of these foreign Stoic teachers who came from the periphery of the Hellenistic world, was the same as that of Meleager, the father of the Greek anthology, a Syrian from Gadara educated in Tyre:
“What is the wonder if [ am a Syrian? There is one motherland, stranger, in which we all dwell, and that is the Cosmos: there is one Father of whom we are all begotten, and He is the void.”
The Stoics were prepared to overlook differences of race, of colour and of class in one great osmic unity, and these equalising principles acbsire great practical import. within the Roman
mpire, comprising as it did a wide range of ethnic and culture groups over a distended geog-. raphical area, and a wider world made familiar to it through commerce. The Latin poets of the Empire .at the same time that they are patriotic and crown Rome with their tributes and laurels as the goddess of the earth, are yet sensitive to this new universal outlook and introduce new sentiments of solidarity and unity in mankind and in the cosmos. Slavery becomes so mitigated that manumission and _ self-purchase cMeates a new wealthy class of those who had once been slaves.?2 The statesmen-philosophers like Seneca
% Very few books were available in Malaya on the Romans, their culture and civilisation, at the time of the composition of this lecture.
and Marcus Aurelius are very explicit on the dual citizenship which they professed, one of Rome and the Roman Empire, and the other of the world at large. Seneca (4 BC—AD. 65) says in words which seem deliberately chosen to contradict the earlier views of Plato and Aristotle:
“no man is nobler than his fellow, even if it happen that his spiritual nature is better constituted and he is more capable of higher learning. The world is the mother of us,. all, and the ultimate origin of each one of us can be traced back to her, whether the steps in the ladder of descent be noble or humble. To no one is virtue forbidden; she is accessible to all; she admits everyone, she invites everyone in; free men and freedmen, slaves, kings and exiles. She regards neither birth nor fortune; the man alone is, all she wants.”
Epictetus, (c. 90) the lame slave and philosopher says: ,
“Nature is wonderful and full of love
for aJl creatures.” And Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121—180):
“My nature is rational and social, and my city and my country, so far as I am Antonious is Rome, but so far as I am a man, is the world.”?4
These Stoic teachings caused the recognition of the equality of all men, gave equal legal status to men and women, conferred human
% These and similar texts may be found in SCHWEITZER ALBERT, £thics and Civilizution. See ARNOLD VERNON, Roman Stowcism, London, 1911; BEVAN EDWYN, Stoics and Sceptics, ZELLER D., The Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, Oxford, 1892; BARROW, R.H. The Romans, (Penguin).
I. 2l—3
is TAMIL CULTURE
rights on the slave and humanised the institution of slavery though not abolishing it. The Christian writer, Lactantius, finds it worth stating that the Stoics mode if possible for ‘‘women and slaves to become philosophers.”
During the comparable period, there were different systems of thought within India providing their own answers to the problems concerning which the Stoics speculated or provided practical answers. Of these systems, the best known is the stream of Brahminic thought, the recorded literature of whichis the earliest which India has to offer. By this time, Brahminism had developed a literature which was very exclusivistic in its concept of group life. Though Vedic and post-Vedic Monism should have developed into an all-embracing ethic of love, the Arthasastras and Dhurmasastras basing their stratification of society on colour and _ caste imposed limits on the education of the masses, denied Vedic learning to the éudras. and were in theory less flexible in their laws than the ideal and actual states contemplated by Plato and Aristotle. Brahminie law literature also defined the area between the Himalayas and the Vindhyas, “where the black antelope roams” as the sacred land of the Aryas, the karmabhumi, within which one would have to be born or teborn to be saved. 75 ,
‘ 9% See MANU, 156. MANU, X, 102, 103; APASTAMBA, 1, 2, 7, 20, 21; MANU, IL, 22. Vusisthadharma, I, 12—13.
“Some (declare the .country of the Aryas to be situated) between the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, Others (state as) an alternative that spiritual pre-eminence (is found) as far as the black antelope grazes.’ See HOPKINS E. W.., Ethics of India, p 52 ff., Yale University Press, New Haven, 1924. R.C. MAJUMDAR, Hinduism, a retrospect and a re-
While Brahminie social thought bears some resemblance to the excluvism of the city republics of Greece, the social thought of the ascetic schools bears resemblance to the cosmopolitanism of the Stoics. Jainism, Buddhism and Ajivikism seem to be older in their traditions than the age of their known founders, and point to the existence of non-Vedic systems and _ ascetic schools which developed contemporaneously with Brahminic thought. The ascetic religions were missionary religions, especially Buddhism, which embarked on a missionary programme, one of the most thorough and intelligent in the history of religions in Asia. ' Brahminic and Buddhist social thought is contained in priestly or monastic religious literatures. But the earliest Tamil literature is a secular literature, and Tamil society is one in which the poets and thinkers have the prestige which the Brahmins have in Aryanised society and the monks have in states which foster Jainism and Buddhism.?* There is no monism or mysticism of identity with the Primal origin - of Being or ethical pluralism evident in this literature; the reasons for universal brotherhood are drawn merely from the nature of man (the phusis and natura of the Stoics), and from a rationalistic and humanistic unity to be found in Nature and the Cosmos. For a Tamil poet in the first or second century A.D. to have said almost like Seneca or Marcus Aurelius: view, in Group prejudices tn Indw, a sympostum, Vora and Company, Bombay, 1931, p. 72. KANE P.V., History of Dharmugastra, Vol. {f, Part II, p. 110 ff. Poona, 1946. *% See MEILLE PIERRE, Littérature Tumoule in , Hist. des littératures I, Ency. de la Vléiade.
“Every country is my country and every
man is my kinsman,” seems remarkable indeed.?7 The motive to embark on a life-long education of the self, a process so clearly outlined-in Confucius and in Plato and revived in our times under the total concept of Adult Education is stated in this literature to be man’s citizenship of the world. Since every country and every city is his own, he ought therefore to continue to learn about them all his life. A more suitable motto for education for membership in the world community would be hard to find in antiquity than the verse:
“Yatanum nadamal uramal en oruvan
santunayum kallatavaru.” *° The broader solidarity in cosmopolitanism is generally strengthened by the loyalty to a particularistic national society, and in Tamil thought a triple loyalty is implied, one to a particular Tamil kingdom, the second to a citizenship in the pan-Tamilism of three kingdoms; and a third, the citizenship of the word.
There is no slighting of the foreigner ; foreign countries are merely those where the language differs, and the multilingual foreign groups of the harbour cities are mentioned with deference. The references to the few and small vedic communities in different parts of the country are always courteous even when their peculiarities are mentioned. One cannot help concluding that
37 THANI NAYAGAM. XAVIER S. Ideal of the Expanding self in Annals of Oriental Research of the University of Madras, Vol. XVII (1960—61).
% Tirukkural. 397.
the political and commercial importance of the Tamil states and their harbour cities and capitals during the first two centuries of the Christian era, and urbanisation and frequent travel have developed this sense of universality.
## Human Brotherhood
Human Brotherhood is a concomitant concept of universality, either as its cause or as its result. The stratification of society, the institution of slavery and the total dedication to the city-state, were the main obstacles to the notion of human brotherhood in Greece in the same manner that particularistic racial and religious sentiments and laws governing Sudras and foreigners were the main obstacles to the development of human brotherhood in the society where ‘Aryan law was paramount. It has been the tendency among some scholars to rationalise the caste system of India and justify it by a great number of arguments and after-thoughts which do not bear scrutiny, as it has been the fashion for certain classical scholars to mitigate the . nature of slavery in Greece. Those of us who are unable to be so romantically inclined towards these institutions, accept slavery in Greece as slavery and caste in India as caste. ?°
There was always in India a current of opinion which was hostile to caste restrictions. Of this antagonism we have adequate evidence in the Buddhist books as well as in Vaisnava and Saiva literature. The Buddhist books, however, are those most eloquent in repudiating
** See SHARMA, RAM SHARAN, Sudras in Ancient India, Delhi, 1958.
22 TAMIL CULTURE
colour and caste prejudices, and these prejudices must have been insupportable to those discriminated against judging from the trend of the argument in the Nikayas. The Buddhist books consider caste prerogative based on birth and colour as the greatest social evil with which they have to contend, and open the doors of asceticism to men and women and lay following to all groups without distinction.
Rhys Davids has considerable evidence to support him when in one of his erudite and searching introductions to the Suttas, he says,
‘‘Had the Buddha’s views on the whole question won the day and widely shared as they were by others, they very nearly prevailed—the evolution of social grades and distinctions would have gone on in India on lines similar to those it followed in the West. and the caste-system of India would never have been built up.” #°
Some of the arguments used in the Nikayas against caste prerogatives are most amusing as when it is said oxen are not classified by their colour but by their strength and activity, and so, too should honours be conferred on men according to ability, and if a sudra were wealthy, the brahmins would be there to serve him. *: It all sounds so much like the arguments used in this twentieth century by platform orators in India in the reform and self-respect movements.
The concept of human brotherhood gained adherence in India not so much on account of
% RHYS-DAVIDS, Dialogues of the Buddha, Vol. I, p. 141.
1 Anqgutlara, I, 162, See MALALASEKARA GP. and K.N. JAYATILLEKE, Buddhism and the Race Question, Unesco, 1958.
the--universalistic. implications of. metaphysical postulates, but because faced with the doctrine of varna both those who suffered its disabilities as well as those who rebelled at its deficiencies as a social doctrine were compelled to define human rights and human equality. This situation seems to have arisen in Tamil society for its thirikers-to reiterate human equality and state that birth equalises all men and that social differences are due to occupations. Jainism and Buddhism which were gaining adherents and the -inter-religious tolerance of a Hyde-Park corner kind then obtaining in the Tamil country, were additional factors in the increase of the sense of cosmopolitanism.
The structure of Tamil society was very different from what the brahminic books on politics and ethics were advocating in other territories. There were no _ distinctions and disabilities arising from caste divisions, and education and perfectibility were open to all groups. No one was considered a “ moving burial ground”, and no occupation was considered too low or too manual as to deny to those engaged in it the possibility of advancement in virtue. The poets and poetesses and bards of both sexes who move with kings without losing the common touch, as moralists, counsellors, royal messengers and teachers, come from a great many occupational groups; kings, queens, ministers, landlords, chieftains, astronomers, teachers, arithmeticians, merchants, and actors and blacksmiths. And their literature is a literature of the people, not of an aristocracy or of an élite. There is a unity seen in the cosmos of sentient
and non-sentient being, but that unity is of a naturalistic kind and not the theistic or panth-
eistic unity of Stoicism.
## The Wise Man
Stoicism is again noted for hypostatising its ideals of life in the ideal of a Wise Man—the sapiens. Various moral and political philosophers, have portrayed the ideal who embodies in himself the spirit and the qualities which they hold desirable for their particular society and age. Thus Plato draws the picture of the philosopher—statesmen in ‘his various dialogues, Aristotle, the picture of the ideal ruler and the ideal citizen, and Confucius the qualities of the chün-tzu. 32, The Stoics more than any other school of western ethics pointed to their ideal, the Wise Man, an ideal, which precisely because it was ideal, embodied a great many virtues, attitudes and dispositions hardly ever to be realised in the one and the same person, an 2 WALEY ARTHOR, The Analects of Confucius, p. 34 ff.
London, 1956.
The Wise Man from India in the person of the yogi has been an attraction in the West ever since the days of Alexander and the ten Yogis whom he interviewed because they had incited a rebellion against him. Plutarch recounts how ten of these gymnosophists gave their characteristic short and pithy answers. The first was asked whether he thought the living or the dead to be the more numerous. He answered “ The living for the dead are not.” The second was asked “which breeds the largest animals, the sea or the land?”. He answered “the land for the sea is only a part of it.” The following eight too gave similar answers, and Alexander sent them away with gifts instead of putting them to death. Gymnosophists seem to have been included in the embassies sent to Rome, and the Christian writers like Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria know a little about Brahmins and Gymnosophists and their doctrines and mode of life.
anomaly of which their critics did not hesitate to ridicule them. Though it was held by them that the Wise Man was rare, and Seneca even describes. him as rare as the phoenix and honestly disclaims any corresponding character as being verified in his own self, the Stoics of the Roman principate generally affirm the existence of many Wise Men.
The Stoic sapiens was to foster a mental calm even in the face of trouble and disaster and crush desires; was generally supposed to be aloof and remote so as not to become immersed in public affairs or civic strife, and instead devote his time to the cultivation of his mind and his virtues. Cicero who is far more precise concerning public and private duties, belongs to an earlier age, and though influenced by Stoicism and had Stoic teachers, does not identify himself as a Stoic.
To Tamil thought more than to any other section of contemporary Indian thought, the ideal of a Wise Man of human proportions with human qualities was fundamental. He may not have any of the thirty-two great marks, or the numerous smaller marks which designate the superman or Mahapurusa of other traditions. He may not be endowed with the physical qualities of the magnanious man of Aristotle. In fact, there is an explicit warning not to confound physical appearance with personality or wisdom though pleasant looks and family upbringing are useful. He was the sanr6n, a word - derived from a root signifying fullness and completeness, so that he was not merely the Wise Man or desirable man as implied in the
T. 21—4
etymon of sapiens, but the Complete or Perfect man, well made and full of those qualities, intellectual, moral, emotional and aesthetic which signify all-round robust goodness. It is because these complete men exist that the world becomes a livable place; if their greatness were to diminish, the world would cease to exist. One does not acquire grey hairs in a hurry when several such wise men live in one’s vicinity.
The Tamil Wise Man is not to be an anchorite or a recluse or a muni like the ideal of the ascetic schools, or live in the world in splendid isolation or in magnificent detachment. He is to live fully his days of courtship and of married life rejoicing in the laughter and the love of his children and of friends. His aim should be the development of individual excellence by a complete dedication to his social and civic duties. In no section of Indian thought does life with a social reference obtain such measured consideration.
Any attempt to describe in brief a personality profile of the Wise or Complete Man of the Tamil books must seem as despairing as summarising the features of the Wise Man of the Stoics, because of the numerous virtues which the Tamil is called upon to exercise’ in the complex situations of his daily life as a lover, a husband, a parent, a citizen and a friend. The almost unattainable character of the Wise Man could make the Stoics as well as the Tamil philosophers persistent in refusing to accept in concrete anything short of the Ideal in every character placed before them: “No, not that, not that; the one we have dreamed of is fairer
far than that, more magnificent and wonderful. Earth has never seen him, or at best it saw him but for a moment, and he was gone.”23
ALTRUISM AND CULTURE
Certain individuating characteristics of the Tamil Wise Man refute the pessimism, negativism, and fatalism sometimes attributed to Indian thought in general. The basis of his life should be altruism, that is, informed by the ideal to live not for self but for others. He is one who would not consume selfishly and alone even the nectar of immortality. His acquisition of wealth is merely to serve as a means to provide for social and educational opportunities for the less fortunate, to be philanthropic and to acquire the pleasure which comes from hospitality. Even marriage is conceived primarily as a joint partnership which facilitates the joint provision of entertaining friends and strangers and offering a limitless hospitality. His altruistic life is not motivated by “mercenary motives” of rewards possible in another life; even if there were no other life he would have to be benevolent, for it is the right life and the humanism proper to a Wise Man. He must find his “good” and the right in the performance of his duty, and in the concept of justice. Humanism and optimism are
two of his important characteristics. The Stoic and the Tamil agree that in the service of his fellow men they must be prepared to sacrifice their health, their possessions, their lives; to be forgiving to enemies. But there is one thing that the Stoic should never sacrifice, S BEVAN EDWYN, Stoics and Sceptics, op. cit, p. 57 ff.
his own eternal calm. Therefore, pity to the Stoic in the sense of a painful. emotion caused by the sight of others suffering is actually a vice. The most a Stoic may do is to feign pathy, but he must take care not feel it. /He may sigh, says Epictetus, provided the sigh does not come from his heart./ The Tamil Wise Man’s philosophy of ‘indifference to pain and pleasure and the cultivation of tranquillity in the face of. disaster is for personal discipline, but his equanimity is reconciled with sympathy for the sufferer in the Greek and derivative sense. Pity is not only encouraged, but positive and expansive love and benevolence as the fountain of all service is prescribed, and a sincere moistening of the eyes is explained as the indication of true and overwhelming sympathy within. There is a difference between Epictetus and Tiruvalluvar in their ideals of the Ideal Man.
Albert Schweitzer in surveying the world’s ancient literatures for ethical values, was quick to perceive the contribution which Tamil thought had to make by emphasising this ethic of love. Of the Tirukkural, a codex of gnomic verse which epitomises the ethical Tamil thought of this period, he says that its ethics is more advanced than that of Brahminism, Buddhism, and Bhagvadgita) Hinduism.
' “Tike the Buddha and the Bhagavad-
Gita, the Kural desires inner freedom from
the world and a mind free from hatred.
Like them it stands for the commandment
not to kill and not to damage. It has ap-
propriated all the valuable ethical results of the thought of world and life negation. But in addition to this ethic of inwardness there
appears in the Kural the living ethic of rn
“With sure strokes the Kural draws the ideal of simple ethical humanity. On the most varied questions concerning the conduct of man to himself and to the world its utterances are characterised by nobility and sense. There hardly exists in the literature of the world a collection of maxims in which we find so much lofty wisdom.”>¢
% Indian thought and its Development p. 203, London 1991. The following are some of the books which will be found helpful in studying the Indian religions and ethics of the period and in the interpretation of the pertinent texts. ADIKARAM, E.W. Eurly history of Buddhism in
- Ceylon, Ceylon, 1946 APTE, V.M. Soctal and religious life in the Grhyasutras, Bombay, 1954. BASHAM, A.L The Wonder that was Ind1a, London, 1961.; BHANDARKAR, R.C. Vatshnavism, Satvism and other minor religious systems, Strassburg, 1913, Poona 1928; DUTT, NK. Origin and growth of caste in India, Vol. I (C. B.C. 2000—300) London. 1931; DUTT, Sukumar, FHurly Buddhist monachism, 600 B.C.—100 B.C, London, 1924; ELIOT, C. Hinduism and Buddhism, re-issue 3 vols. London, 1957, (first published 1921); FICK, Die sociale Ghederung im Nordéstlichen Indien zu Buddhas zeit, Kiel, 1897 (English translation by S. MAITRA, The Social organisation 1n North-East India in Buddha's time, University of Calcutta, 1920); FORMICHI, C. JI penstero reliqioso nell’ India prima del Buddha, Bologna, 1925 (French translation by F. HAYWARD revised by author, Paris, 1930); GHURYE, G.S. Caste and class in India, Popular Book Depot, Bombay, 1950; GUERINOT, A. La religion Djaina, histoire, culte, coutumes, institutions. Paris, 1926; HOPKINS, Washburn E. The religions of India, Yale, 1895; JOLLY, J. Hindu law and custom. Translated by S.K. Das from the German edition of 1896, Calcutta. 1928; OLDENBERG, H. Ancient India, Second ed. Chicago, 1898; OLDENBERG, H. Buddha: Seine Leben, Seine Lehre, Seine Gemeinde Berlin, 1890. English translation Buddha: his life, his doctrine His order., London, 1892; RENOU, Louis, Religions of Ancient India, University of London, 1953; RHYS DAVIDS, T.W. Buddhism, London, 1917; RHYS DAVIDS, T.W. Buddhist India, London, 1903 (reprint) Bombay, 1955; RHYS DAVIDS, T.W. Early Buddhism, London, 1908; SCHUBRING, W. Die lehre der Jatnas, Leipzig, 1935; trans. The doctrine of the Jainas, Banaras, 1962 ; TUCCI, G.
What the Tirukkural embodies is the rationalisation and synthesis of the wisdom and ideals of the earlier Tamil literatur¢é which is contemporary with the writings of “eee of Epictetus, of Pliny, of Arrian and of Marcus Aurelius. The Stoics agree far more with the Buddhist ideal of ataraxy than with that of the Tamil. The former two tend to a detached intellectualism at the expense of the emotional and the aesthetic life, but in the third, the emotional and aesthetic aspects of personality are important means of self-realisation.
Though altruism is his great ethical characteristic, it is his culture which enables the Tamil Wise Man to develop the marks of gracious living and the sentiments and attitudes which make him a pleasant member of society. While the word sanr6n denotes completeness, tHe world for culture (panpu) denotes quality or the effort to obtain quality by constant striving and fertilising, and has the same sense as when Cicero derives culture from agriculture, the cultores agri. Culture in Tamil thought is a quality which should be found in the sovereign, in the lover, in the parent and in the child. It includes in its code a humaneness towards all human beings and towards all life, including animals and even plants. Persons endowed even with the sharpest intellects are not cultured but just timber if they Il Buddhismo, Foligno, 1926. VALLEE POUSSIN Louis de la, Le dogme et la philosophie du Buddhisme. Paris, 1930 (with bibliography); VALLEE POUSSIN Louis de la, La morale Bouddhique, Paris, 1927; WILLIAMS, W. Monier, Buddhism and its connection with Brahminism and Hinduism and tts contrast with Christianity, John Murray, London, 1890; WILLIAMS, W. Monier, Religious thought and life in India, John Murray, London, 1883; ZAEHNER, R.C. Hindu and Muslim Mysticism, London, 1960. ,
possess not the humane feelings common to common humanity. Familiarity with persons of culture produces increasing joy like that which familiarity with the classics engenders. Culture includes the humanism of interest in man; it includes the tolerance and forbearance of dissentient views with the patience of Mother Earth who sustains and supports, and harms not those who dig, and scope and tunnel her.
To forgive enemies is culture, but to forgive friends is a higher culture. To return good to those who have been bad to you is culture. To be accessible and friendly with the lowly is culture. Culture includes the learning which considers itself inadequate, the service which expects no reward, the greatness which ever is humble, the largeness which forgives, the gentlemanliness which never inflicts pain, the purity of intention and the spotlessness of mind which are born of truth and justice, and the expansiveness which comes of not harbouring petty thoughts resulting in the shrivelling of personality. Culture is fostered by learning, by the critical search for knowledge in books, by association with the learned, by the art of conversation which includes as well the art of listening, by the eloquence which should be able to express lucidly one’s subtlest thoughts, and by friendships which provide the opportunity to give and to receive. Culture includes the humanism which enjoys humour and laughter. “To those who are unable to laugh it is pitch dark even amidst the blaze of noon.”35 Culture is fed on ideals—
36 Tirukkural 999. The following books give accounts of Tamil Literature and its characteristics :
the man without ideals is a corpse. Culture, cannot be an ideal which “ only a Hellenocentric world possesses.”
In this comparable period, there is a literature in Tamil on friendship which bears comparison with Cicero, on eloquence with Cicero and Quintilian, on morality with the writings of Seneca, and a love poetry not less interesting than Catullus but much more impersonal and universal in its appeal.
## Conclusion
These comparisons of Indian thought with Roman Stoicism may be made not only in the domain of ethics but also in several other fields. Three great books of Indian ethical thought illustrate three great traditions, and point to a certain unity as well as diversity within the complex systems which come under Indian thought. They are the Bhaguvad Gita, the Dhammapada, and the Tirukkural; the first theistic and incorporating several traditions, the second representing the “sramanic” tradition of asceticism and Buddhist in inspiration, and the third humanistic, representative of a poetic tradition, and of a society in which priests and monks have as yet no traditional social functions. These three books are in three different languages,
CASIE-CHITTY, SIMON, Tamil Plutarch, Colombo, 1946; JESUDASON, C. & H., History of Tamil Literature, Calcutta, 1961; KANAGASABAI PILLAI, V. The Tamils Erghteen hundred years ago, Madras, 1904 (reprinted Madras, 1959); SESHA IYENGAR, T.R. Dravidian India, Madras, 1925; SIVARAJA PILLAI, K.N. Chronology of the, early Tamils, Madras, 1982; SRINIVASA IYENGAR, P.T., Htstory of the Tamils from the earliest times to 600 A.D., Madras, 1929; TAMBYAH ISAAO, T. Psalms of a Sativa Satnt, Luzac, London, 1926.
Sanskrit ‘and Pali and Tamil, and while the two are representative of the Northern traditions in religion and ethics, the third is representative of the Southern tradition.?®
I believe that what I have said will also indicate that it would be hardly valid to generalize on Indian thought on the basis of any single Indian literature, classical or modern, or on the basis of one single tradition, or region or religion. Literary evidence, both classical and modern, elements Dravidian and Aryan, philosophies of the North and of the South, and the beliefs and values of the masses preserved in popular cults and folk literature, all contribute to our study of Indian thought. This lecture has been mainly concerned with one tradition, and that tradition links up the past and the present through a living language and literature which have maintained an unbroken recorded continuity at least for the last twenty-three centuries, a continuity not verified in the fortunes of many of Tamil’s ancient contemporaries. That recorded tradition opens up new perspectives of relevance when connected, as it seems most reasonable to do, with earlier oral traditions and with the Indus Valley Culture and its monuments of the second and third millenia before the Christian era. a + Spe ey ee See eer eee
36 The attempt to trace all Indian thought to Sanskritic sources still persists even among a section of scholars whose knowledge of the Tamil language might suggest a more accurate interpretation. What grounds might Prof. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri have for the following statement made in his mature years: “ All these literatures owed a great deal to Sanskrit, the magic wand whose touch alone raised each of the Dravidian languages from the level of a patois to that of aed idiom" (A History of South India, 2nd ed. p. ;
During its long history, the Tamil tradition has come to include the main currents of Indian religious and philosophical thought, while preserving its identity unchanged by the political upheavals which occurred in the territory north of the Tamil borders. Saivaism, Vaisnavism, Buddhism, Jainism, [slam, Christianity and Roman Catholicism have all of them great literary works in Tamil. Throughout the larger portion of its history, it has had the advantage of contact with a great classical dead language and a great classical literature in Sanskrit, as Latin had in Greek. Unless the evidence of the Indus Valley, of the TZolkappiyam, of the love and bhakti poetry in Tamil, of the siddhanta philosophy, of the ethical verse, of the epic poetry and of the fine arts and crafts of the South, enter into the syllabuses and studies of Indological research, a more accurate and balanced presentation of Indian thought than that which obtains now will not be possible. It would be true to say, that since the last war, there is a marked decrease in the tendency to build Indological interests on IndoKuropean language and racial affinities as the sole or main determinants or as inspirational motives. Nor is an indefinable attitude of selfefficiency or an esoteric Boston Brahminhood now assumed by those who study the Vedas and the Upanisads. But “the too exclusive examination of India from the Indo-European standpoint” still continues.
The term “Indian Studies” is itself so comprehensive that hardly any University would be able in its teaching and research to cover every field of study which may be included in
: \ the term. Consequently certain fields have necessarily to be selected for special study taking into consideration such facts as the needs of the country and of society, the availability of funds, the demand for such studies, and the contribution that has to be made along with other departments to the implementation of the declared policy of sustaining and fostering the cultures and languages of the component groups of the nation. To scatter energies over a wide field is no help in the slow building up of ordered knowledge, and in the establishing of our own traditions which should supplement and dovetail the work of similar departments in South East Asia and in the world.
In Departments of studies of this kind, there is a tendency to a static antiquarianism and to a conservatism which have to be counterbalanced by a consciousness of the importance of the present and by a vision of the future. Modernization of courses should maintain teaching continually revised; and creative teaching should beware of “inert ideas”, that is “ideas which are not tested or utilised or thrown into fresh combinations.” Extending the frontiers of knowledge, a phrase which reveals the adventure and the joy of discovery incidental to University research in an atmosphere of academic freedom, is a vital function of a University. A Department of Indian Studies with specialist courses in Tamil Studies, (and Tamil studies to include courses in Dravidology and Sanskrit), should be able to restore to Indology some of the equipoise it needs, and exploit the possibilities of new discoveries and approaches available to Indian
Studies in South East Asia. We cannot just afford to continue repeating what Coedès and Krom and Stutterheim and Winstedt have stated. There are considerable new areas which remain to be studied, and these require in a Department both the energy and enthusiasm of youth as well as the breadth and depth and the richness and ripeness which comes with experience and the years.
New areas exist in the interpretation available to Indian Studies by the close collaboration possible in this University with Malay, Islamic and Chinese Studies. New areas exist for Indian Studies as defined in this University, in the history and culture of Malaya, in Sumatra, in the Dieng Plateau of Java and in Bali, amid the ruins of Mison and Po-Nagar and in Oc-eo in Vietnam, in Angkor Vat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia, and in the speech and literature and the monuments of Thailand. We might even go further in this adventure and study Chinese thought and literature and uncover sources and similarities yet unknown, or travel further North to find resemblances with the tanka in Japanese poetry and with Zen Buddhism. The scope is great and the opportunities are many. Let us hope and trust that this University will be rich in the utilisation of these opportunities while fulfilling its role as a centre of learning in South East Asia.*
* Inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Malaya on Dec. 14, 1962.

Antao De Proenca’s Tamil-Portuguese Dictionary

Synced from re-OCR’d `antao-de-proenca-dictionary` (intro IA 4091–4101; preface translation IA 4102–4108).

Companion Knowlton article (*Vocabulario Tamulico Lusitano: Indo-Portuguese Elements*, TC XI.2 pp. 135–163) is hosted at [/en/archive/documents/antao-de-proenca-dictionary/](/en/archive/documents/antao-de-proenca-dictionary/) (not reprinted in this Collected Papers volume).

Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. XI No. 2 (1964), pp. 117–127 · An Introduction

01. The first Tamil dictionary to be printed, in all likelihood, is the Tamil-Portuguese dictionary, compiled by the Jesuit Antao de Proenca who died in the Ramnad District of Southern India in the year 1666 at the comparatively early age of 42. He was born at Ramella in Portugal in 1625, entered the Society in 1643, and went to the Madura Mission in 1647. Earlier missionaries speak of Tamil-Portuguese dictionaries which they had compiled and hoped to see in print, but as far as evidence goes, none of those earlier dictionaries seems to have been printed.

02. Henrique Henriquez, s.J., (1520-1600) in his letter dated 27th January, 1552 speaks of a Tamil-Portuguese dictionary compiled by him which he hoped to augment later.* Though copies of three of his works have now been traced, no trace has been found of his dictionary, nor do later writers make any reference to any printed dictionary of his as they do to his other printed works, the Doctrina Christam, and the Flos Sanctorum. ‘Though his manuscript grammar was traced in the National Library in Lisbon, his Mss, vocabulary has not been found.t ‘The title page of Proenca’s dictionary reads ;

VOCABVLARIO | TAMVLICO ; COM A SIGNIFICACAM PORTVG

VEZA. | COMPOSTO PELLO P. ANTAM DE PROENCA | DA COM.

PANHIA DE IESV ) MISSIONARIO DA MISSAM DE MADVREY |

Com todas us licencas necessarias da santa Inquizicao | E dos Superiores |

Na imprensa ‘Tamulica da Provincia do Malabur , por Ignacio |

Aichamoni impressor della, Ambalacatta em 30, de Julho, | 1679 annos,

Counting from the title page, there are altogether 541 pages.

03. Ignacio Bruno (1576-1659), an Italian Jesuit who worked over thirty years on the Southern coast of India, and in the kingdom of Jaffna, compiled a dictionary which contained several words also of the poetic language as well as words from the Jaffna and the pearl fishery coast dialects. Manuscript copies of his dictionaries were very popular among the missionaries. The work scems to have been of considerable merit since Proenca refers to it in his preface as a work of vast endeavour and a work deserving of everlasting remembrance. Among its merits was that i

WICKI JOSEPH, Documenta Indica, Vol. Il, Document 64, 16. Rome, 1960—in series Monuments, Historica Societatis Iesa.

+ See THANI NAYAGAM, XAVIER S., The First Books printed in Tamil, in Tamil Culture, Vol. VII, (1958) pp. 288-308.

it contained many words current in poetic usage, as well as words in colloquial usage within the kingdom of Jaffna.t

04. Proenca’s dictionary was published posthumously by the Jesuit press in Ambalacat on 30th July, 1679, thirteen years after the death of the compiler, It seems obvious that the Dictionary was published in this particular year in order to celebrate the centenary of the publication of the first substantial book in Tamil, the translation of the catechism of Marcos Jorge. which was also the first work to be undertaken by the newly established ‘Tamil Press in Malabar. A booklet of 16 pages was printed in 1578 in Quilon, but it was not important enough to serve as a landmark.

Copies of Proenca’s dictionary seem to have been available in the last century in India itself. The present writer found in 1954 a copy of this dictionary in the Vatican Library, a copy which originally belonged to the Library of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide, The editors of the Madras Tamil Lexicon were unable to trace a copy, and though mentioning this work, had no possibility of utilising it in the composition of the lexicon.

05. VProenca’s introduction is of very great interest to the historian of Tamil lexicography, and is therefore given as an appendix to this article. ‘The compiler was far from feeling that he was undertaking a definitive work in Tamil-Portuguese lexicography. He was aware of his limitations, since he had begun the study of Tami] only in 1653, that is, thirteen years before his death, and having not had the opportunity to work in places like Tuticorin and Jaffna, where local usages were many and of particular interest to Catholic missionaries since these places had flourishing Catholic communities.

06. The dictionary was revised by other missionaries. The Censors who went through the work prior to publication are said to have been familiar with the Tamil language and worked in the Tamil districts for soveral years. Those who revised the Dictionary are said to be Fathers Anthony Pereira, Velerian Cataneo, John de Maya and “other missionaries “.*

07. The method followed by Proenca, in his compilation of the Dictionary, are stated by him in his introduction. He collected the words from all previous manuscript dictionaries, presumably Tamil-Latin and ‘Tamil-Portuguese. To these he added other words found by analysing the works of Robert de Nobili (A. 1620) and Manuel Martins (A. 1634). He en ne ani mea So a

+ Brief sketches of the litera w issi i hed in PERERA, S.C. The Jeauile in Ceylon, Nota Pisionaries, may. be »: — D. The Jesuits in Malabar, Vol. Y. Bangalore City, 1939, pp. Ey ee of Madras, 1936. Introduction pe yer a Non Teese £4. Translated by the Rev. L. Cardon, 8 31

“"TAMIL-PORTUGUESE DICTIONARY, 1679 119 read also many books written by the natives, elucidated meanings by consulting natives learned in Tamil, and added words collected by conversing with them in Tamil.

He deliberately included in his dictionary only a limited number of words pertaining to literary Tamil but many words of colloquial Tamil. including words peculiar to the usage popular among “ inferior” social classes and the rural population. The words peculiar to the Jaffna kingdom. he was able to collect from the manuscript dictionary of Ignacio Bruno, and the words peculiar to the pearl fishery coast of South India, he collected by analysing the work Flos Sanctorum of Henriquez which abounded in the dialectal peculiarities of that area.

08. For words of more standardised usage, he relied on the purity of the Janguage as spoken in the Pandyan kingdom and in the Marawa country. Since Brahmin usage was considered respectable by the society with which he came in contact, he included words used by them and the pronunciation affected by them. But he did not include many words of poetic usage since these could be learned by those who desired greater proficiency or wished to compose poetry, from the manuscript dictionaries of poetic usage or “ high” Tamil. Proenca’s was a more practical approach, to provide a handy dictionary to Portuguese missionaries learning Tamil for purposes of ordinary, evangelical ministration. A difficulty in giving precise meanings to words was, says Proenca, not only his insufficient knowledge of the Janguage but also the conflicting opinions among natives regarding meanings of specific words.

09. Proenca did not choose the easier way of transliterating Tamil words into Roman, but he did follow to a certain extent the order of the Roman alphabet in listing his Tamil words, partly for easier reference hy the foreign missionaries, and partly since one Tamil grapheme might stand for a plural number of Jatin ae expressed in Portuguese pronunciation, eg. # as in srw (#7) might stand for !ca, | cha. | ja. | In these instances of plural phonemic valud given to one Tamil grapheme, the dictionary designates which of the corresponding Portuguese phonemes ig the equivalent. Portugueso phones corresponding to the Tamil ones had been noted by Portuguese speakers since the beginning of the 16th century. and therefore it is not surprising that Proenca reaches a fair measure of accuracy regarding tongue position in the pronunciation of phonemes peculiar to Tamil. (See preface)

1.0 Proenca’s introduction enumerates the Tamil symbols and gives the Roman letter or syllable which corresponds to the Tamil sounds. The author points out the manner in which Tamil sounds unfamiliar to Europeans are produced, the location of the tongue with regard to the palate for the retroflex J, d and the alveolar land n. He notes there are no distinctive symbols for the long ¢ (7) and the long 0. (sp)

1.1 The movement to preserve Tamil sounds and Tamil words free of Sanskritic influence is not a movement born in the present century, but hag been a trend throughout the history of Tamil Nad’s contact with Sanskrit. ‘There is evidence for the 17th century from Proenca’s reference

to purists or pure Tamils (os Tamuls puros) who avoid the vocabulary and the phonology of Granta. He also provides evidence for the same century of the trend towards Sanskritisation among learned Tamils who affected imitation of Brahmin diction and Brahmin enunciation.

1.2 There are altogether 16,546 separate main entries against which meanings are given in Portuguese words. What some lexicographers might not treat as separate entries, Proenca does. Words which are given as subsidiary entries under one main entry, have not been counted as separate entries. f

Therefore the total of nominal, verbal, participial, adjectival and compound forms and idioms in the dictionary, if counted single and separately, would make a total vocabulary much larger than the figure 16,546.

18 The number of entries under letters corresponding to the Tamil vowels and consonants are as follows with the corresponding pagination. The order given below is the alphabetical order followed in the Dictionary, and the pagination is the one introduced by considering the title page a3 page 1. Pages 1 to 8 contain the title page, the approval of the Censors, of the Jesuit Provincial, and of the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, Goa. Pages 9 to 19 contain the Introduction.

LETTERS PAGES MAIN ENTRIES oS A 20— 68 1888 % A 68 — 15 867 u B 75 — 19 114 Cc 719 — 80 25 sb D 80 — 84 168 or E 84— 96 408 s G 96 — 99 69 a I 99 — 116 530 I 16 — 117 62 aw ¥Y 117 — 192 59 I 122 — 195 108 bd L 125 — 198 89 » M 128 — 170 1280 sb N 170 — 197 869 o - 197 — 198 7 E 0) 200 — 208 306 6 208 — 275 2125 « Q 9715 — 850 2888 & 850 — 856 115 2 > 29 Ss 856 — 867 874 T 867 — 414 SW 414 — 435 yo — 685

LETTERS PAGES MAIN ENTRIES a Vv 485 — 488 1499 € x 488 — 541 1866 16546

1.4 The words are listed under each Tamil and Portuguese as given above. But under the particular letter, the Portuguese alphabetical order is found. Thus under A, words-with ab sounds come first, then ach sound initials, then ag, al, am initials etc.

15 As a sample of early Tamil typography this dictionary is inferior to the-Flos Sanctorum of 1584. The type is not as clear and the quality of the paper gives it a smudgy appearance; the paper is very transparent. Photostats obtained from a microfilm have not been as clear or as easy to read as those obtained from a microfilm of the Flos Sanctorum. The Tamil portions were engraved on wooden blocks while the Tortuguese wus printed in movable tvpe. The wooden blocks al worn oul by use,

1.6 The dictionary was printed in the press set up by the Jesuit Fathers at the College Madre de Deus, in Ambelacat, Malabar, now Kerala. The printer was a native Indian, Ignacio Aichamoni probably Accamani, .¢srweef. The press is called the Tamil Press of the Province of Malabar—‘‘Na imprensa Tamulica da Provincia do Malabar, por Ignacio Aichamani impressor della, Ambalacatta em 30. de Lulho 1679 annos”. There appears to have been a separate press for Syriac and Malayalam at Vaipicota.

1.7 The orthography of the dictionary represents the Tamil and Portuguese orthography of the seventeenth century. The consonants have no pulli or dot; the r has no elongation and looks liks 7; the long e and © are not distinct from the short e and o; the double looped kombu has not been introduced; the cacuminal r has only one loop instead of the double loop as at present. The orthography is substantially of the same pattern as that used in the Tamil books printed a hundred years earlier in the sixteenth century. The orthographic reforms introduced by BHeschi were yet to come about fifty years later.

The spelling varies, and the compiler and the sources which he used, seem io have been dependent to a large extent on reproducing sounds as heard in the speech of rural districts. Therefore there are several examples of substitution of ¢ for m, and er and sr or vice versa, and of violations of the rules of sandhi.

1.8 Note on the Portuguese orthography, hy Prof. Edgar C. Knowlton.

If we compare Proenca's spelling with Portuguese orthography as presented by Ecwin B. Williams, From Latin to Portuguese (2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1962), pp. 19-28, we see & number of features particularly mentioned by Williams, and others as well. Chronologically, Proenca comes in the “ etymological period”, but in general words are spelled in

accordance with their sound rather than in accordance with real or supposed Greek or Latin etyma. Common sense characterizes Proenca’s orthography, which is fairly consistent, and free from exaggeration.

The use of a long f-like s, the appearance of the til over the second vowel of a diphthong (for which occasionally two accents or a diseresis may be found), and the introduction of numerous T.atin words are features especially noteworthy.

Examples of Proenca’s spelling differing from modern Portuguese new orthography which illustrate features dealt with by Williams are as follows : : ;

(A) Confusion of Graphs (Williams, pp. 20-21) 1. Use of qu for ¢ or ¢ for qu quoalho (426) as well as coalho (426) for coalho. 2. Confusion of i, y, and j cysne (37) for cisne, ianeiro (258) for janciro, iornal (346) for jornal, meyo (888) for meio, 3. Confusion of u and v pouoacao (46) for povoacao, vza (211) for usa, chaue (409) for chave, insensiuel for insensivel and reuerencia for reverencia on sample page. 4. Confusion of m, n, and til or diaeresis gran (45) for grao, dize (45) for dizem, hu (47) for um. birreto (52) for birrento, co for com on sainple page. (B) The Use of A (Williams, pp. 21-24) 1, Use of h before initial vowels: hum (24) for um, he for e on sample page, 2. Other examples of h athe (114) and a@ the (114) for ate (C) The Use of Double Consonants (Williams, pp. 25-26) aquillo (22) for aquilo, estrella (62) for estrela, applicado (119) for aplicado but aplica (180) for aplica, collo (126) for colo, capello (171) for eapelo, delle (211) for dele, peccados (217) for pecados. sacrifficio (363) fo sacrificio. Further interesting graphic features include : (D) Interchange of Graphs 1, Use of z for g indulzencia (45) for indulgencia, found also as indulgencia (47). sd Use of « for z and z for s pezo (112) for peso, disem (126) for dizem, Cosinha (142) for cozinha, bueina (160) for buzina, vza (211) for usa, arais (472) for a raiz,

3. Use of s for c, ss for ¢

serta (46) for certa, sincouenia (192) for cincocnta, sinco (426) for cinco, passo for paco on sample page.

4. Use of g for j

sogeito for sujeito on sample page. 5. Use of r for rr guera (64) for guerra. 6. Division and Non-division of Words athe and a the (114) for ate; a inda (331) for ainda, denoite (352) for de noite; de pois (373) for depois; arais (472) for a raiz.

7. Metathesis or Shift of Position of r

perterito (211) for preterito; treceira (457) for terceira.

8, Examples of Non-Standard Spelling of Vowel or Diphthong

may (41) for mae, Aonerijico (62) for honorificu; friuta

(146) for fruta, pera (192) para, oitubro (309) for outubro,

doirado (338) for dourado, sogeito for sujeito on sample page.

9, Use of Til in Abbreviation

q (128, 334) for que.

This list makes no attempt at completeness. It perhaps should be said that some of these spellings as well as those which are transliterations of ‘Tamil words could be studied for the light they might shed on details of seventeenth-century Indo-Portuguese.

1.9 Here is the reprint in modern type of a page of the Dictionary, page 74 in our numbering. Entries are in double column. 9e2p gi —Desejir. (To desire) .% #e7 er er —Proximo, presente, assistente. (Next, present, in at- 4965 05—0 desejar (The desir- tendance}. in, 8) gerer—Quod geedwer mestre. <a—Vaca. (Cow) (Because) (master) Ax. <7 er—Veneracao. (Veneration) «58—Tumba, ou charola dos defuntos. (Tomb, or litter for grortr—Quod @eareruo—vt the dead) supra. (Because) (as above) <p forw —Assento aliquando tras- <gedwer—Quod. —peedwer meseiro, modeste (Seat Sometimes tre. (Master) (Because) rump modestly) , «gepu—C. de sogeito. (T)hing of << #07 er w—Presenca, assistencia, a subject, (Presence, attendance). 7 yrpurprew—Sogeito. (Subject)

er puu—jdem. The Same weeta@p g—Celebrar, guarder os costumes, ou festas, item tratar co erUr ew—Desejo, quasi (Desire, cortesia, honrar. (To celebrates as it were) preserve customs, or feasts /ikedesiderij vnio. (Unity of wise to treat with courtesy, to desire) honour) PT pero—Quod .arerserw 4e26ma4—0 tal celebrar. (Because) (Such celebrating) @¢r76@mp—Falta moral —@*74—Carpenter (moral fault (lack) : erfwer——Quod »serhtwer e707 w—Costume politico, ou poli- (which) cia, Com que se trata, item porta Oe gerw—Idem: subst. ou templo, item cortesia, co (The same: subst (antive). uen gp ® p g fazer cortesia, reuerencia. —wfees—C. desejada. (Desired (Political custom, or policy, with t(hing), which one deals, /ikewise gate, or temple, /:ksewise courtesy, with <% #1 4ug@9—Falta moral (mora ues gySpg to make a bow, fault (lack), reverence. <e77a7ee@—Porta principal do passo (Principal gate of the pas- @edee—C. que celebrou, ou celeb- sage/palace) rada, festejada. (Thing) which took place, or was ‘celebrated, ¢r7er—H, bem acostumado, polifeasted over.) tico cortczao. M(an) well accustomed, politician, courtier. tu9 «© p gi—Fazer celebrar, & c. (To cause to celebrate, etc.) me Desejo, co u@@pg descjar (Desire, with To Desire) <4 fut) —Celcbridade (Celebration) <%9#ser—C, insensiuel, que naon- 4862 9—C, que celebra. (Thing) ne viuente, como pao, & c. (Inswhich celebrates) ensible t(hing) which is not living, like wood, etc. — words translated are underlined in the English Translation. Compare with photographic reproduction of this page to note the Orthographic peculiarities of the period —« for g. @ for G, absence of pulli etc,

2.0 The following 113 words are a random sampling from the 44 pages which contain the 1383 entries beginning with the short ‘A’. They are reproduced in modern orthography. The spelling also indicates that the compiler has had to rely sometimes exclusively on the spoken language of people in the Coastal districts. The numbers within brackets indicate the page in the serial numbering D7 a (24) HUST gy ser Mar (43) svar (25) syuIGww (43) ANSbuy wert (25) yuGewb (43) TC) (26) yu G@ Bar (43) airy tb (26) ayoub (43) HNOEGWM (29) Asuuer (43) S68 (29) og hued (43) SOT tb (30) gyturue (43) pear (30) quuréshwer (43) MpDusist ons sr (30) gydures (44) BUT... ROAD H (32) gy Gorid (44) gourds (33) HOI pwd (44) Hibuaw (33) gyUGpurefés (44) gqbulim (34) gy (44) TT: (34) ap fleuren (48) aby é (34) yf (48) Sbweir (34) Gor bs (48) Sy tb ip swsr tb 84) 1G MsEOewbp a (48) Sy tdi (35) iby (49) Stbwon Bar (35) G58 (49) HD (35) sam (49) MDE ; (35) gyn (49) Ahsan (35) sper (49) Mt fb BT td (36) Sp Uses (49) HOD (36) sjpGa (50) are (36) a iDureaw (50) 18m ou tb (37) ay Déms (60) 4 it Barr (37) S| Deura (50) MATL wir sir (87) oH Dedcy (50) AD Sruw (39) aDuA (51) DUS Bio (37) yu Pourgs (57) AMua id ; (37) sgieer (52) ADIGUST 4 ove th (39) HOYT CHT over (52) soar 40) gap (62) AT BEE (40) gy Bp (62) sierr ey sf (40) jo pido (52) pestis (41) yu busir (62) Ole (42) yt Gus (53) AGELESS} 41) gmLasww (54) HET (41) Hor Carter (54) pic hehe . (42) ye (55) Am wefluse a (42) HQSS (55) Heese (42) tie (56) AwEry . (43) HUY (58)

NOSaSr (56) _ yeGeoured (60) SOU Sor arid (56) Hear (61) SHY BH GF th 67) Hey (61) ASS (67) ger pub (61) HSS OT (87) aoe Hk (62) MSHvog (57) gjaeus (62) au shy (57) gar Goh (62) Se Brel (68) =sgyager (63) HOI BT gy wd (58) jag (63) aug (58) jig th (63) HU poisms (58) pager nGwarb (63) RBS (69) The above sampling of words indicate that the dictionary is valuable to several branches of Tamil Studies related to the seventeenth century.

Proencas dictionary is the great landmark for the 17th century. This dictionary was followed in the 18th century by the manuscript dictionary of ‘Father Bourges, 8.J., and the manuscript dictionaries of Joseph Constantine Beschi, the Sathur Akarati in Tamil, and the Vulgaris Tamulicae linguae dictionarium Tamulico-Latinum which contains 8541 main entries and 10,628 subsidiary entries, a tolal of 19,16 words and idioms. This dictionary is an excellent collection of colloquial Tamil words, phrases and idioms and contains several references to dialectical peculiarities of different regions of the ‘Tamil Country.

The printing press in Tranquebar offered to print Beschi's colloquial dictionary, but for some reason did not do so. The dictionary was not printed until, 1882. John Philip Fabricius and John Christopher Breithaupt published in 1779 their dictionary: “A Malabar and English Dictionary wherein the words and phrases of the Tamulian language, commonly called by Europeans the Malabar language are explained in English”, (pp, 185). It contained 9000 main entries. This was enlarged to 37,000 entries by Rottler, and to 67,000 entries by Winslow, both of whom referred to Fabricius Dictionary as the “old dictionary " “4 Dictionary of the English and Malabar languages” of 280 pages followed in 1786.¢ een

+ LEHMANN ARNO. It Began in Tranqueber, Christian Literature Society, Bombay, 1956, page 160.

Preface to the Tamil–Portuguese Dictionary, 1679

Translation by Edgar C. Knowlton Jr. and Xavier S. Thani Nayagam · *Tamil Culture*, Vol. XI No. 2 (1964), pp. 128–134

Dedicated to the Fathers Preachers of the Gospel, who speak to Tamilians, by Fr. Antao de Proenca, of the Company of Jesus, Missionary of the Mission of Madura.

To the Pious and Zealous Reader :

I undertake the work, which all those wish to see published, who, inspired by zeal for the salvation of souls, apply themselves to the study of the Tamil language, without which little or no apostolate can be achieved in the various Kingdoms of this East, where it is current. And in as much as the vocabulary of a language is the primary help in knowing it, all wish to have one of the Tamil language, and many have even attempted to compile one. With the special desire to encompass the rich abundance of this language, and also to satisfy the wish of many and to serve all, I have made up my mind to begin this work, which I hope with God’s favour to see completed in some way or other. This work will be more complete than other dictionaries, more precise as regards the equivalents of the words and their definitions and purer in the choice of words.

I promise to list a greater number of words, because of additions to those found in other vocabularies, principally in the one composed with tireless endeavour in the course of more than thirty years by Fr. Ignacio Bruno (who later twice governed this Province). This I have read over and over again despite its vastness,—a work that would deserve everlasting remembrance even if either the Portuguese or the Tamil language were native to the author. In addition to including the words of this vocabulary, in comparison with which some others in circulation (and I have seen them ulso) ave like pools compared to the sea, I have entered all those found in the works of Fr. Robert Nobili and of Fr. Manuel Martins, books through which we, who work in this mission, learn the best speech. For this — 1 have also read many books of the natives ; finally, I have added me mage = ss acquired or am acquiring by talking and dealing

nanves. Because of taking them from books, I promise more exact equivalents, for herein can be seen better their vigour and force ; iowa ail gaan T have profited by consulting with learned men. F purity of the words because I am writi thi i Fegan — ad ~ best chosen and purest; aca aay tas rom i i only well-chosen words, which —Enoe spi Ulepplinotence sation, y sort of serious conver-

But I caution that I do not promise such a copious vocabulary as to exhaust the Tamil language (since the books in prose, wherefrom alone one can take those words which serve for practical use, are so rare). Only by the study and labour of many years and by many research-workers can they be completely included. Neither do I promise such precision ot meaning as to eliminate the need for maturer consideration, for as regards many words, it is very difficult to give the exact meaning, and only one very well versed in both languages can do it well; and I, having started this vocabulary in the very firat year when I began to learn the language, which was in 1963, do not even to-day have such a fund of knowledge of Tamil as to be able to give definite decisions about ell the words, especially when after consulting the natives themselves, I have found them in disagreement and with conflicting opinions. I do not doubt that there will be found here many words, the meaning of which will have to be changed or made clearer later on. Regarding the purity and dignity of the words (pureza e alteza de palavras), I well understand that it would be better to include both high and low, pure and corrupt, in accordance with the usage of the various classes of people, so as thus to meet better the range of the langvage, with particular indication of words used by humble and rural people, and those current only on the Coast* and in the Kingdom of Jaffanapatam, especially since this vocabulary is intended for the use of priests in that Kingdom and on the Coast. But in as much as to include words current only in those places would require a few years of residence there, I leave this research for another occasion. Nevertheless, I shall include those I can collect from the Flos Sanctorum printed on the Fishery Coast and from the vocabulary of Fr. Ignacio Bruno prepared in Jaffanapatam, and finally those which are current in this Kingdom of Madura among the lower classes, as far as I have been able to collect them. I shall leave out also poetic words (of which the vocabulary of Fr. Ignacio Bruno is full) because they are useless for practical purposes or for prose, and the Tamil poets have their own vocabularies for them. in which those who are interested and might wish to compose verses may find them. But I include many Sanskritie words, both for the sake of those who read the books of Fr. Robert (Nobili) in which they are numerous, and also because they commonly occur in the ordinary conversation of the Brahmins, whose language is more clevated, and whom TTamilians, who consider themselves learned and wish to speak seriously and with care, try to imitate. All these varieties of words we shall differentiate by their signs. Order followed in this vocabulary ] thought of writing this entire work in Portuguese characters, inserting the Tamil ones wherever ours cannot indicate the sounds. It seemed to me that by using the former, I would facilitate reading and looking up words, and by using the latter I would further correctness of pronunciation, convincing myself that thereby it would be more pleasing chiefly to those _ who do not wish to take a little trouble to learn to read Tamil characters. is * Coast is the Pearly Fishery Coast, or the South Eastern Coast of South India.

But as I would in this way be yielding to the lazy and would not be encouraging the interest of those who wish to know how to write any words with the correct letters, I did not give in to these thoughts. Moreover, for those who will be reading Tamil books only, this method will prove useful. But I neither fully rejected nor altogether adopted this idea, because while writing everything in Tamil characters I follow the order of the corresponding letters of the Portuguese alphabet, and so, although the letters are Tamil, the (order of) arrangement is Portuguese. The first reason that prompted me to follow this order was the ease it afforded in looking up words, because vocabularies arranged in alphabetical order were devised so that words looked for might more easily be found. And the better arrangement the vocabulary hes, the easier it is to achieve its purpose. It seems evident that the order which I follow will aid in the searching for words; since I am preparing this vocabulary only for priests, it is clear that in as much they know by heart and ‘as natural (to them) the Portuguese alphabet and the Latin, it will be easier for them to look up the words in the order of their own alphabet, thereby dispensing with the need of committing to memory the Tamil alphabet and the order of its letters so perplexing and contrary to our own with the variety of n’s, r’s and I's (the knowledge of the value of each of them being enough). Against this reason there is one instance, namely, that the other vocabularies, even when written for Latins, always follow the order of the alphabet of the language in which they are written, as can be seen in Greek or Hebrew ; wherefor it would scem better that, following the example of the others I should not leave the natural order demanded by the language and characters in which I write, just tu avoid a little work in learning by heart a foreign alphabet, which those who want to use the Greek or Hebrew vocabulary do study. And all the more 8o, because by continually searching, the order of the Tamil letters will easily become familiar, and this having been attained, there will not be any difficulty in looking up words. To this question, which I confess made me waver many times, I reply that in the other alphabets there are not the perplexity and variety of letters, so contrary and barbarous to our pronunciation, as there are in Tamil (as we shall see in the second reason) ; therefore, I have decided not to follow the example of the others. As for my deviating from the natural Tamil order, I answer that I am not writing this for Tamilians, but for the Portuguese, for whom the natural order is the one that I follow, all the more since the order which is most natural for the vocabulary is the one that is easiest.

The second reason that prompted me to follow this order is the variety and barbarity of the letters of the Tamilians, who for want of enough nora an g several pronunciations for the same letter, as one may see

e letter, i : ie 06, Heme wes bp oe ee Seckaiee sank this letter, you can well see the confusion that would arise regarding Pronunciation, which is avoided by placing the words that are to be Pronounced as cha under our C; those that will be pronounced und our X, etc. All the above may be seen i Ae “a

in the word &rw* which can be 0 ea eaeeeeeeenaeteaiavnhoreenees

read in four ways, i.e. churam, xuram, juram and suram; the first two pronunciations mean nothing, the third name “fever”, and the fourth “voice”. The same is seen in the letters s, s, WU for the word sruub may be read as cayam or gayam, the first meaning “ body” and the second “wound”. The word genr@ may be read as tandu or dandu, the first meaning “stalk” and the second “army”. The word u7mgs may be read padey or badey; the first means “road”, the second “ torment”. One sees at a glance that to teach in order to distinguish these various ways ‘of pronouncing the letters, the method I use should be adopted.

_ But this second reason also has one thing against it, namely, that the * division indicated above is all right for those who know the correct pronunciation ; those who know that it is pronounced x will look up the word under X, and what is pronounced / will be looked for under L, etc. But those who read books and come upon a word beginning with any of the aforesaid letters and do“not know their value, e.g. whether » is xa or cha, whether % is ¢ or d, and so forth, will have to search under all these letters in the vocabulary in order to discover the meaning of the word in question. It is clear that this impedes facility in searching. It would be easier to put in one place all the words according to the Tamil order, with special dots, or signs to meet the confusion and variety of pronunciation. We answer that if we wished to differentiate these letters by new signs, it would amount to forming new characters, and so for the letter « alone, which has four different pronunciations, we should need to insert four kinds of dots, lines, or other signs, in addition to some general ones, about which we shall explain later on. To avoid confusion in searching, we shal! put all words beginning with # under our X, because this is the most universal pronunciation, and shall refer to their respective places those which should be pronounced as & or j or ch; those that begin with @ we shail put under the letter, Q for reasons which we shall state in that place; those beginning with % under 7; those beginning with u under P, referring to G, D and B, those words having such-pronunciation ; thus, while providing ease in looking up the words, without the confusion of so many signs, the words remain separated in their respective places. Let not anyone say to me that this implies many references and repetitions, for it is better to repeat than to perplex, and better to find one word in two places rather than not to know its correct pronounciation, all the more so since the definition, phrase, and erudition, which in many instances are inserted, are not repeated but are referred to the proper place; moreover, not all words need be repeated, but only the principal ones, which ere listed in their correct places accompanied by their derivatives. Besides this, what words are placed under the letters C, S, I, (J), B, and D, are so few that their repetition under

the letters X, Q, T and P does not take up much more space.

Concerning the form, value, and pronunciation of the Tamil characters VOWELS a & Oo me 7 BB HM a a i i ou wu e6 ay oO au

Explanation of these vowels presents no difficulty, because they correspond to ours, but have as their peculiarity the differentiation between long and short values, especially as regards the vowels a and i, and u; with e and o the same figure is used for the long and the short values. The language also has the diphthong ay formed from short a and i, although the sound tends more toward the e than the a. And the characters gp and gar are seldom used, because there are few words which begin with these diphthongs; moreover, these diphthongs sssuszne other forms when they occur in the middle of a word, as we shall soon sce; gs is made up of short a and x, but it is not so common as the first diphthong even in the medial position. When the diphthong does occur, in writing it they use another form, as is also the caso with 97 in the initial position. All the characters of the vowels mentioned above are not used except at the beginning of the word, when it begins with a vowel; for the medial vowels we have signs and distinctions, which we shall explain later.

CONSONANTS Sse Oh t- wr sg Fuww FT VU p wT YP OF q ch nh nhtnPmMmy fF F ¥ id it sea The letter « corresponds to our g or c. Sometimes it is used as g, especially when it is written singly in the middle of a word.

. The pronunciation of the letter w is in itself very difficult. To explain it in some way or other, let us take our word manga and pronounce it up to the n, which, as I think, is not produced with the tip of the tongue, but (because it is before g) only by touching the palate with the base of the tongue, near the throat, keeping the tongue in that position without striking or pronouncing the g. If we strike that position of the tongue with a or with any other vowel, we shall produce the full value of them, But if anyone should not understand the pronunciation, let him disregard it, for this particular sound is of little consequence since this letter is rarely found Preceding a vowel, but always occurs before & and then its Pronunciation is very easy and natural for us, og seen in the word manga, which if we wish to write in Tamil letters will be wo, mm, & Vithout having any other pronunciation but our usual one.

The letter & by itself is called ch, but in writing sometimes serves as s, also sometimes as x, and other times as j, for want of characters which Grandam and Badaga have differentiated completely. Although some pure * peaione do not want to or do not know how to Pronounce it as s or j, ©y Pronounce x not exactly but as mixture of x and » or of ¢ and j. Inssmouch as the four sounds that this letter can have are all natural to us, it presents no difficulty. age gees ly ue to our sound nh in the words unha or . in the mi of a word i + ‘ Ge iA Melero. oe holes coe Bal ing occurs without n vowel}, it will The letter u ig completely for. toat sbeolutely necessary to understand tags Atlee oe but it is the pronunciation of our r, but i i i ie pany gal . it occupies a higher position and is made

PREFACE TO TAMIL—PORTUGUESE DICTIONARY, 1679 133 by striking with the tip of the tongue turned up slightly a spot where the plain and smooth surface of the palate begins. And whenever this letter is found doubled, 1 the force with which it is struck is also double? and it becomes like the sound of our ¢ at the point described above, 80 that if one wants to reproduce these two sounds exactly, he must pronounce naturally our single r and our ¢ and continue to raise the tongue and striking; if he strikes the rough surface extending upward from the teeth, then he will produce the correct sounds of t. and of .+., the first single and the second double.

Tho letter sxr, which we call n of three oyes, is pronounced in the same position as 1, so that above our r we take the « and above our ! the it. So starting on our n and raising the tongue let us pronounce am. If it occurs medially without a consonant, it is always written before i or before another ow.

The letter % corresponds to our f, although sometimes it stands for d, especially when it is single in the middle of a word.

The letter » corresponds to our n, but is used only at the beginning of a word, or when in the middle of the word the n comes before g, in which case this 5 is always used.

The letter u corresponds to our p, protracted, although sometimes it ig pronounced , especially when it occurs alone in the middle of a word.

The letter w corresponds to our m without any difference.

The letter w is our y and is considered a consonant, and rightly so, such as we pronounce in the words Mayo, Maya, and in the Spanisn ya, yd.

The letter 2 (7) is our single r, as in Vara, Vira, etc.

The letter w is our /.

The letter o is our v consonant, as in Vanios, cava, ctc.

The letter ip which we call thick | is pronounced by turning the tongue completely, as far as it can go, and by touching it slightly to the palate; if the tongue does not touch the palate but remains, as it were, in the air, by folding it well and immediately turning it, all the better.

The letter ar which we call curved | is pronounced as J, in the position which we have indicated to use when pronouncing ct. This letter (and the following ones) is never written at the beginning of a word; neither is there any word beginning with this letter or with those which follow.

The letter » corresponds to our double 7, as in torre, morra, etc, If this letter is doubled (pp) it produces a different sound, which we can supply very well with the simple end natural sound of our double t (tt), even though the pure Tamilians give to it a particular inflection, which the Brahmins dispense with ; sleo there is another sound which they produce when this letter occurs after ar 98 erérgy, which the Brahmins pronounce as our double n (nn): Ennu, and so there is ne need to bother about the

Tc—3

special inflection which the pure Tamilians give to these two pronunciations; in the first case they pronounce it as double t, and in the second as double n.

Finally, the letter et corresponds to our n, but it occurs only in the middie or at the end of a word, and in this respect it differs from—.

Here ends the explanation of the simple letters, which when school children name them, they say them as vowels: @, a8 Gna, avana, i as ina, jana, etc., and the consonants are named as ca ana, ch ana pa—ana, etc. Avoiding this method, we may designate than strictly by their sounds alone, eg. a i, 1 i, etc., and the consonants, ca, cha, ta, ma, etc. But we may wish to speak in a more polished manner, like the Brahmins, in which case we might say agdram, dedram, igram, igaram and for the consonants chogaram, tagaram, etc. Similarly with the compounds, eg. Tigdram for the syllable ¢j, pugaram for the syllable pu, etc.