Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c23.s27.t2.5

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.