Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c23.s27.t2: 4.24.2 Popular versus elitist literacy
Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c23.s27.t2
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4.24.2 Popular versus elitist literacy
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Another noteworthy feature of early Tamil literacy was its popular or democratic character, based as it was on the language of the people. Literacy seems to have been widespread in all the regions of the Tamil country, both in urban and rural areas, and encompassing within its reach all strata of the Tamil society. The primary evidence for this situation comes from inscribed pottery, relatively more numerous in Tamil Nadu than elsewhere in the country. As mentioned earlier, excavations or explorations of several ancient Tamil sites have yielded hundreds of inscribed sherds, almost all in Tamil written in the Tamil-Brāhmī script.⁶ The inscribed sherds are found not only in urban and commercial centres like Karur, Kodumanal, Madurai and Uraiyur and ports like Alagankulam, Arikamedu and Koṟkai, but also in obscure hamlets like Alagarai and Poluvampatti, attesting to widespread literacy. The pottery inscriptions are secular in character and the names occurring in them indicate that common people from all strata of Tamil society made these scratchings or scribblings on pottery owned by them. On the other hand, inscribed pottery excavated from Upper South Indian sites are all in Prakrit and mostly associated with religious centres like Amaravati and Salihundam.⁷
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⁶ See section 1.13, Tables 1.4 & 1.5 and Map II for pottery inscriptions.
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⁷ One of the sherds from Salihundam features a unique Tamil inscription. See section 1.13.8.
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Literacy is not merely the acquisition of reading and writing skills. To be meaningful and creative, literacy has to be based on one's mother-tongue. In this sense, the early Tamil society had achieved true literacy with a popular base rooted in the native language. On the other hand, Upper South India had in this period only elitist literacy based on Prakrit and not the native languages of the region.
c23.s27.t2.5
What are the reasons for such contrasting developments between the two adjoining regions of South India? It cannot be that Prakrit was the spoken language of Upper South India at any time. If proof were needed to show that Kannada and Telugu were the spoken languages of the region during the early period, one needs only to study the large number of Kannada and Telugu personal names and place names in the early Prakrit inscriptions on stone and copper in Upper South India.¹ The *Gātha Saptasati*, a Prakrit anthology composed by Hala of the Sātavāhana dynasty in about the 1st century A.D., is said to contain about 30 Telugu words.² Nor can it be said that Kannada and Telugu had not developed into separate languages during the Early Historical Period. Dravidian linguistic studies have established that Kannada and Telugu (belonging to different branches of Dravidian) had emerged as distinct languages long before the period we are dealing with.³ Telugu and Kannada were spoken by relatively large and well-settled populations, living in well-organised states ruled by able dynasties like the Sātavāhanas, with a high degree of civilisation as attested by Prakrit inscriptions and literature of the period, and great architectural monuments like those at Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda. There is, therefore, no reason to believe that these languages had less rich or less expressive oral traditions than Tamil had towards the end of its pre-literate period.
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¹ A list of Old Telugu words occurring in Prakrit inscriptions is given in Salva Krishnamurthy 1994: pp. 101-111.
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² Ibid. pp. 72-76.
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³ K.V. Zvelebil 1990: chapter 3, pp. 46-53.