Dasyus and PaNis in RV

[Vanbakkam Vijayaraghavan]

On Wed, 8 Nov 2000 06:52:09 -0800, Swaminathan Madhuresan
<smadhuresan at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

>
> Even Greeks were discussing Indians being black: due to the sunlight
>or by birth. Tamil literature routinely praises black skin color,
>mAl, nAL-/naL-/nal-, karu ... When patrons are eulogized, their black
>hand, 'karuGkai' is particularly mentioned.

Then why in popular Tamil usage 'black'is associated with evil? For
example, I have seen posters by political parties about Mr.Pandyan, the ex-
speaker of Tamilnadu Assembly. One poster in Tamil I have seen excoriates
him as "karuppu bhoothamey" i.e. black devil? has such a usage or similar
usages any precedence in Tamil literature