South Indian Bronzes: A Historical Survey of South Indian Sculpture with Iconographical Notes Based on Original Sources c6.6

c6.6

The age of Agastya was in reality a new era in the history of Tamil literature and art. Before his time there was in the Tamil countries an alphabetic system and literature, but "he was the first probably to introduce a grammatical system founded on a Sanskrit prototype." At any rate it was during his sojourn to South India, that Sanskrit influence first began to be felt. "Northern religious and social institutions were introduced and the Brahmanical priesthood, and in its train the Buddhists, the Nigranthas and the Ajiwakas and other religious sects began to pour upon the South. It was then that literature exclusively Dravidian was replaced by Northern traditions and legends. The national literature was slowly modified, its legends transformed, its heroes amalgamated with, or lost in the personality of, those of the North, and its gods absorbed with a change of name into the Aryan Pantheon.” Thus the primitive Murugga was afterwards amalgamated and identified with Skanda; the temples of Pidāri and Ayyanār were only the forerunners of those of Siva and Pārvati. Saivaism under the form of the worship of Siva or Skanda, seems to have been originally the religion of the primitive tribes of South India long before the arrival of the Aryans. This process of gradual change and assimilation was a *fait accompli* before the second century A.D., for in Ptolemy and the Periplus of the Red Sea the most southern point of India is known by its Sanskrit name of Kumari.”¹