Black and Bright and Beautiful

[Venkatraman Iyer]

On Sun, 12 Nov 2000 04:44:16 -0800, Ven. Tantra <troyoga at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

 >BTW, I for one have personally witnessed people of
 >both African and Southern Indian origin that had
 >complexions so black that they were blue. I would add
 >that I found these remarkable countenances to be
 >equally radiant and beautiful


Thanks for your nice observation. In Tamil, 'karuppu' and
'nalla' are used in common names for people. DEDR lists
'al' (=night) from 'nalla'. Iravatham Mahadevan has an
article describing how 'nalla' means 'black' in many
situations.

When Tamils refer to African people as "karuppar",
it just means Blacks, and they do not assign any
negative cannotations to it. Otherwise, will they
themselves name their children as karuppu-/nalla-?

Best wishes,
V. Iyer
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