Passions of the Tongue "s2.2.4"

The Contest with Sanskrit

Classicism, too, was concerned, like neo-Shaivism, with demonstrating the antiquity (toṉmai) and primordiality (muṉmai) of Tamil, as well as its uniqueness (taṉimai) and purity (tūymai). These were not established, however, by linking Tamil to the world of the gods, as in neo-Shaivism. Instead, it was argued that Tamil is the first language of the first humans to flourish on the face of this earth, prior to the emergence of any other language or people (Devaneyan 1966; Maraimalai Adigal 1948). Indeed, classicism drew upon the secular science of comparative philology to dispute ancient religious stories (which neo-Shaivism had revived) about the divine origins of Tamil, insisting instead that the language was not bestowed upon the world by Shiva, but emerged to fulfill the need for human communication (P. T. Srinivasa Aiyangar 1985: 13-15; Suryanarayana Sastri 1903: 51-57).^[7]

In all such matters, classicism, too, of course contended with the hegemonic influence of Sanskrit, not so much as a “divine” language but as India’s paradigmatic classical tongue. A century of colonial linguistic practice had only reinforced the ancient Sanskritic dogma that all languages (of India) are corruptions of a primordial, eternal Sanskrit. British scholar administrators and their Brahman teacher-assistants based in Calcutta’s Asiatic Society and College of Fort William had declared Sanskrit as the fount of Indian “vernaculars,” the sole generator of high Hindu civilization, and the only language worthy of comparison with the lofty Greek and Latin. This is a story that has been already told many times (Kejariwal 1988; Kopf 1969).

What has been less noted is the resistance to such formulations that arose almost from the beginning of colonial rule among British administrators and missionaries based in South India. Skeptical about the clubbing together of the languages spoken in “their” part of the subcontinent with the northern tongues, these men were especially critical of the characterizations of Tamil or Telugu as “vulgar derivatives” of Sanskrit. This skepticism was first voiced in Alexander Campbell’s Grammar of the Teloogoo Language (1816) and in Francis Ellis’s introduction to that grammar. Tamil and Telugu, it was argued, form “a distinct family of languages, with which the Sanscrit has, in latter times especially, intermixed, but with which it has no radical connection” (Ellis 1816: 2). In the 1840s and 1850s, other philological analyses reinforced such assertions, frequently referring to Tamil in this process as “copious,” “elegant,” “refined,” and “cultivated” (Asher 1968; Singh 1969: 78-88). In 1855, Tamil was even declared “a rival of the ancient Sanskrit” (Bower 1855: 158). All such scattered observations were consolidated in 1856 in Robert Caldwell’s Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages, which used the word “classical” to characterize centamiḻ, “correct Tamil” (Caldwell 1856: 31); authorized the name “Dravidian” to refer to the “family of languages” of South India, distinct from Sanskrit and its Indo-European family of tongues (28-37); insisted that Tamil “can dispense with its Sanscrit altogether if need be, and not only stand alone but flourish without its aid” (31); and suggested that prior to the arrival of Aryan Brahmans, the “elements of civilization” already existed among the Dravidians (77-79).

Tamil’s devout found much that was flattering in Caldwell’s Grammar, which lent the authority of comparative philology (and the West) to the claims of autonomy and distinctiveness of Tamil made in its pre-colonial texts that tamiḻppaṟṟu resurrected. Yet Caldwell’s hallowed status notwithstanding, all his ideas were not wholeheartedly embraced, pace recent scholarly evaluations of the missionary’s impact on Tamil cultural politics (Dirks 1995, 1996; Ravindiran 1996). Indeed, many devotees resented his claim that the term tamiḻ had derived from the Sanskrit words draviḍa or drāviḍa (Chelvakesavaroya Mudaliar 1929: 9; Damodaram Pillai 1971: 3-6, 34-35; R. Raghava Aiyangar 1979: 4-13). Others objected to his attempts to establish affinity between the Dravidian and “Scythian” families of languages, insisting instead that the former was completely distinctive and autonomous (T. Chidambaranar 1938: 5; Devasikhamani 1919: 26). Many also set aside his suggestion that Dravidians had migrated into India, proposing instead an autochthonous origin which placed them in the subcontinent from the beginning of time (T. Chidambaranar 1938: 10). Finally, there were even those who resisted Caldwell’s classification of Tamil as a “Dravidian” language, insisting that the word draviḍa had been used in the past for Tamil-speaking Brahmans alone (Damodaram Pillai 1971: 34-39; Devasikhamani 1919: 9; Somasundara Bharati 1912:1). Their resistance is not surprising, for in spite of some eulogistic portrayals of Dravidian culture in the writings of some colonials (like C. D. Maclean and Gilbert Slater), which the devotees found useful to invoke, the dominant colonial image of the Dravidian, as created through census records, administrative manuals, and district gazetteers, is captured in this unflattering picture of the 1891 Census:

This was a race black in skin, low in stature, and with matted locks; in war treacherous and cunning; in choice of food, disgusting, and in ceremonial, absolutely deficient. The superior civilisation of the foreigner [the Aryan] soon asserted itself, and the lower race had to give way.…The newcomers had to deal with opponents far inferior to themselves in civilisation, and with only a very rudimentary political organisation, so that the opposition to be overcome before the Arya could take possession of the soil was of the feeblest.

In such statements, which were also picked up by many a metropolitan nationalist narrative to pursue the agenda of salvaging Indian pride by taking refuge in Aryanism, the white, virile, civilized, energetic, and superior Aryan is starkly contrasted with the dark, feminine, menial, and aboriginal Dravidian. Correspondingly, the latter’s language, too, is “aboriginal,” uncivilized, and inferior. So the 1901 Census of India observed: “In India, the Indo-Aryan languages—the tongues of civilization…—are continually superseding what may, for shortness, be called the aboriginal languages such as those belonging to the Dravidian, the Munda, or the Tibeto-Burman families.…[I]t may be added that nowhere do we see the reverse process of a non-Aryan language superseding an Aryan one” (Government of India 1903: 248-49). This particular statement in the Census was authored by George Grierson, who headed the ambitious Linguistic Survey of India project for the colonial state (published 1903-28). It is telling that the underlying premise of this authoritative survey was that the “civilized” Aryan languages are inherently superior to the “aboriginal” non-Aryan. So, commenting on the progressive shrinkage in the spread of Dravidian languages, Grierson noted, “Aryan civilization and influence have been too much for [them]” (Government of India 1903: 279). And in the Linguistic Survey, although the “importance” of Tamil is recognized, and the antiquity of its literature noted, it is not unambiguously adorned with the mantle of classicality and civilization, as is Sanskrit (Grierson 1906: 298-302).

All the same, slowly but cautiously from the 1920s on, the colonial state began to concede the antiquity and “copiousness” of Tamil, and its status as a “cultivated” language. Dravidian speakers of today, the Census of 1931 admitted, have “a culture of very great antiquity[;]…speakers of Dravidian languages [were] the ancient inhabitants of Mohenjadaro and perhaps the givers of culture to India” (Government of India 1933: 454-55). The Census was here alluding to the recently discovered archaeological remains of the Indus Valley in Mohenjadaro and Harappa, which pointed to a sprawling prehistoric urban civilization rivalling Mesopotamia and Egypt. To the delight of many a Tamil devotee, this prehistoric civilization was declared to have been possibly Dravidian by some colonial archaeologists. Thus Maraimalai Adigal quoted John Marshall in 1941:

They (the orientalists) pictured the pre-Aryans as little more than untutored savages (whom it could have been grotesque to credit with any reasoned scheme of religion or philosophy). Now that our knowledge of them has been revolutionized and we are constrained to recognize them as no less highly civilized—in some respects, indeed, more highly civilized—than the contemporary Sumerians or Egyptians, it behoves [sic] us to re-draw the picture afresh and revise existing misconceptions regarding their religion as well as their material culture.…The Indus Civilisation was Pre-Aryan and the Indus language or languages must have been Pre-Aryan also. Possibly, one or other of them…was Dravidic.

Maraimalai then proceeded to overwrite Marshall’s tentative conclusion with the following sweeping pronouncement:

If Sir John Marshall had had a first hand knowledge of the Tholkappiam and some other ancient classics of Tamil, he would have easily shown in corroboration of what he stated as regards the pre-Aryan antiquity of one of the Dravidian languages, that Tamil, alone, and not any other, as he vaguely affirmed, must have been the language spoken and cultivated by the pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Indus Valley.

Maraimalai Adigal was not alone in making such a bold assertion. More than a decade earlier, in the late 1920s, soon after Marshall’s report on the Indus Valley excavations was first published, fellow devotees T. R. Sesha Iyengar and M. S. Purnalingam Pillai had already insisted that “future discoveries and dispassionate researches” would confirm Dravidian authorship of the Indus civilization and “the remote antiquity” of Tamil culture (Purnalingam Pillai 1945: 26; Sesha Iyengar 1989: 32-61). They were able to make such assertions confidently, emboldened as they were by the many claims of classicism which challenged the dominant Orientalist wisdom about Tamil’s place in India’s past, and which proceeded to write an alternate script in which history began not in the North with the Aryans, but in the South with the Dravidians.