civilizational ardour

[nanda chandran]

Swaminathan M writes :

>Too much is claimed for the hypothesis of how "civilization"
>was brought to Tamils, etc., The scholarly consensus is that Aryan
>homeland is not India itself. Also, classical sangam texts have no
>contemporaneous counterpart in sanskrit.

If classical Sangam age is between anywhere 500 BC to 500 AD, it is the age
of the most vigorous philosophical development in Samskrutam literature. It
was the age of the later Upanishads, the Buddha, Mahavira, the Astika and
the nAstika schools. Where is the basis for your claim?

Some poor folk in Tamil Nadu still sacrifice animals to Gods, drink liquor
when somebody dies and dance and sing on the streets following the corpse to
the graveyard.

Do 'upper caste' Tamils do that? I don't think racially they're different
from the poor Tamils and have a lot in common in culture and language with
the poor Tamils.

So why are they different? And whose is the original culture?

Did the poor folk descend in terms of culture or did the richer folk ascend?
And how so? And given the claims of the "secular" nature of
dravidian culture why is there such a discrepancy in the culture between the
same people, at all?









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