Panini

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

S Krishna <mahadevasiva at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

...

> I believe that the earliest references to ziva in Tamil literature go
>no earlier than the 6th century C.E. at which time the conflict seems
to
>have already existed elsewhere.As Zvelebil points out, the need for
>having Ziva as the father of the Tamil diety murukan2 itself arose
after
>contact with the north.

But remember that Tamil contacts with the north go back to much, much
earlier times than the 6th century CE. Asoka clearly knew of the Tamil
kingdoms. And if Candragupta Maurya did come down to southern Karnataka,
there is no big barrier for going further south, down to the cape, and
interacting with Tamil natives. All this dates to some eight or nine
centuries earlier than the 6th century CE.

Also remember that skanda/kumAra as Siva's son was a very popular god
among the Guptas, who ruled only in the north. The identification is
primarily between the Tamil Murukan and the Sanskritic Skanda,
necessitating the identification of Siva as the father of Murukan. This
could have happened much earlier than the 6th century CE. One cannot
account for the full-fledged bhakti of the nAyanmArs to Siva in a total
vacuum.

Vidyasankar

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