New discovery in Tamil Nadu

[Dipak Bhattacharya]

<the notion that the Dravidians had no advanced culture and that the development of civilization in the South was entirely inspired by and imported from the North.  Surely this is part of a colonial narrative>
Reading any such thing in my submission is artificial and proceeds from observation of other cases. The difference is visible in the preservation of the languages and the inability of IA languages to replace them as in the North. But that the Mauryan did make expeditions is a proved fact. Hence there is nothing wrong in looking into possible connections. I stand by my views.
DB

--- On Sun, 28/6/09, George Hart <glhart at BERKELEY.EDU> wrote:


From: George Hart <glhart at BERKELEY.EDU>
Subject: Re: New discovery in Tamil Nadu
To: INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk
Date: Sunday, 28 June, 2009, 9:36 AM


There is, to my mind, a serious problem with the notion that the Dravidians had no advanced culture and that the development of civilization in the South was entirely inspired by and imported from the North.  Surely this is part of a colonial narrative that has, one hopes, been discredited.  The vocabulary of old Tamil evidences a highly developed, intricate culture, especially regarding music, performance, and the like.  Old Tamil also possesses an considerable native vocabulary describing multi-storied houses and buildings.  (The word nakar meaning "many-storied house" is native; the Dravidian word is probably the source of Sanskrit nagaram). To my mind much of Indian culture developed symbiotically both in the South and North, with both areas influencing one another from at least the first century BCE (and probably earlier) to produce a hybrid culture in both areas.  I don't know how many historians of Britain would buy the argument that
 everything advanced or noteworthy in old English culture came from the Romans, but there is little likelihood that the great cities of the Sangam era -- all of which had Tamil names -- were built as outposts by invaders as London was.  What is true is that from at least the Mauryan period, travelers and merchants went between north and south pretty much as they do today.  They carried ideas and cultural themes back and forth all the time, so that by the first century BCE the Aryan north and Dravidian south had much in common and owed a great deal to one another. The process was (and continues to be) an extremely complex one, and whether a feature of Indian culture is ultimately "Dravidian" or "Aryan" is often determined by the cultural inclination of the person writing about it rather than by solid evidence.  There are, however, areas in which old Tamil sheds important light on Indian culture: it suggests, for example, that the existence of caste
 (jaati, including Dalits) was pre-Aryan and that many literary conventions made their way from a Southern folk literature through Maharashtrian Prakrit into the Sanskrit canon.  Palani is the site of one of the most famous (and second richest) temples in India.  It is near Madurai and has been a site of Murugan worship for almost 2000 years -- see http://palani.org/.  G. Hart

On Jun 27, 2009, at 7:04 PM, Dipak Bhattacharya wrote:

> 
> The report is hardly realistic in its socio-cultural assessment but the findings are interesting. I tried Palani in the map without success.Has anybody any idea about its location?. The dating, if correct, might place it within the lifetime of or as linked to Arikamedu whose modus vevendi, according to the first reports (quite old now and may be outdated),  was limked to the urban centres of the North.. Its cultural-economic independence, too, was as much as that of Britain during Roman occupation and the few years that followed. The follow up of excavations is often not very encouraging. But link to proved Mauryan expeditions must be sought.
> DB
>> 
> --- On Sun, 28/6/09, George Hart <glhart at BERKELEY.EDU> wrote:
> 
> 
> From: George Hart <glhart at BERKELEY.EDU>
> Subject: New discovery in Tamil Nadu
> To: INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk
> Date: Sunday, 28 June, 2009, 6:12 AM
> 
> 
> See http://www.hindu.com/2009/06/28/stories/2009062854701600.htm
> 
> This is quite interesting, because it suggests that writing followed commerce into a rather remote area of Tamil Nadu around the 1st century BCE.  (It should also be noted that there is some dispute about whether the symbols are actually writing -- a disagreement quite familiar to most of us who have been following the IV "writing").  In any event, writing or not, this find is consistent with what is described in Sangam literature. Also notable is the word for "diamond" (if the writing decipherment is correct) as vayra < vajra, through Prakrit.  But the most interesting part of this is something no one mentions in the article -- the discovery of stirrups.  I'm hardly an expert on this, but Wikipedia says that stirrups are depicted about the 1st century BCE in Sanchi, and that is 500 years before anywhere else.  G. Hart
> 
> 
> 
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