Did IVC have low-intensity wars?

[Vanbakkam Vijayaraghavan]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001 01:49:07 +0000, Venkatraman Iyer
<venkatraman_iyer at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

><vijay at VOSSNET.CO.UK> wrote:
>>[...] in pre-Pallava times, it was "indigenous priests" in
>>contradistinction to Brahmins were the mainstay of priesthood.
>[...]
>>So if Vaiyapuri Pillai is to be belived, it looks like brahmins had become
>>well established by CT time. Any comments?
>
>Kamil Zvelebil in "Companion Studies to The History of
>Tamil Literature", 1992, p. 29:
>"Finally, there was the level representing the elite strata: the
>rulers, their minstrels and bards, priesthood, administrative
>apparatus, warriors. Fundamentally, they were closely connected
>with the land-owning ‘middle’ section of the national culture.
>‘Sanskritization’ and ‘Brahminization’ of the ruling elite must
>have been rather thin, not at all very strong at that period;
>however, even our earliest textual evidence shows that it was
>never quite absent, although there was, too, a strong influence
>of Jainism/Buddhism."
>
>George L. Hart begins his "Woman and the Sacred in Ancient
>Tamilnad", JAS, XXXII, 2 with the statement:
>"We possess in ancient Tamil a large body poetry which antedates
>for all intents and purposes the incursion of Sanskrit culture
>into Tamilnad."
>
>Best wishes,
>V. Iyer


To some extent, the statements of these kind does not tell us much. For every
statement of this  kind, so many counter examples can be brought which can render
any statemnent meaningless. For example, if you take the statement "Tamil  ...
poetry...antedates.. Sanskrit culture", we know from the earliest days Indra and
Varuna were worshipped as 'Thinai' gods. Indra is a quintessentially vedic aryan
god and so is Varuna. Even Thirumal is  Vishnu . Even at popular level, vedic
deities held sway


Vaiyapuri Pillai, without bringing in the words "sanskrtization" and
"brahminization" has brought in enough evidence to show that the change was not
that radical from Sangam to Pallavan times as suggested by Dr.Ganesan. Ganesan's
words like 'state sponsorship' gives an impresion a state on the model of model
western theories, while the social fact may only be powerful land owners .