Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s3: 5.3 Origin of writing in Tamil: earlier theories

Early Tamil Epigraphy: From the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. c25.s3

Language: English

5.3 Origin of writing in Tamil: earlier theories

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According to tradition, the Tamil language was received by Agastya from Lord Śiva himself.³ There are, however, no traditional accounts in Tamil regarding the origin of writing as such.

³ Cf. e.g., *kaṭavuḷ tanta tamiḻ tantāṉ* 'He (Akattiyan) gave Tamil which he received from the Lord (Śiva)' (*Kampa. Akattiya.* 41). According to the Tamil Buddhist tradition, Agastya received the Tamil language from Avalōkitēśvara (*Vīracōḻiyam, Pāyiram*, 2).

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*Tolkāppiyam*, the earliest extant grammar in Tamil, refers to the alphabet of thirty letters *a* to *ṉa* (*Tol. Eḻu*.1) and the *puḷḷi* (ibid. 15-16), indicating that the inner character of the writing at that time was the same as in the modern Tamil script. *Naṉṉūl*, the Tamil grammar (ca. 12th century *A.D.*) next only to *Tolkāppiyam* in importance, declares that "all letters are of ancient form" (*Naṉṉūl* 97). While linguistic changes with the passage of time are noticed in the grammatical treatises and the commentaries,¹ the original shapes of letters or their evolution with time are not referred to.

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¹ Cf. *e.g.*, *paḻaiyaṉa kaḻitalum putiyaṉa pukutalum ... kāla vakaiyiṉāṉē* 'Old (usages) become obsolete and new ones enter (the language) by efflux of time' (*Naṉṉ*. 461).

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There are some allusions to different types of letters (*eḻuttu*) in medieval commentaries and *nikaṇṭus*. Subramanian who has compiled the references and commented exhaustively on them, identifies the technical expressions occurring in them with successive stages of the evolution of writing from the pictographic to the syllabic and alphabetic.² However, considering the lateness of these literary sources (ca. 8-11 centuries *A.D.*), they are more likely to refer to symbols of various kinds known to have been employed in the medieval inscriptions and palm-leaf manuscripts.

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² T. N. Subramanian 1957: pp. 1576-1586.

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Some Tamil scholars deny that the Tamil scripts are derived from Brāhmī. According to them, the high antiquity of the Tamil language and culture presupposes the existence of writing from very ancient times. I shall cite only one example of this view from the authoritative and highly influential *History of Tamil Literature* by Varadarajan:³

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³ Mu. Varadarajan 1972, *Tamiḻ ilakkiya varalāṟu* (12th edn. 1999): p. 6.

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Some regard incorrectly that the Vaṭṭeḻuttu and the present-day Tamil script are evolved from Brāhmī. The Brāhmī script current in South India, which is different from the North Indian Brāhmī, is known as Southern Brāhmī as it has developed under the influence of Vaṭṭeḻuttu. Even before the origin and spread of Brāhmī, the Tamils had developed a script of their own and employed it for commerce, literature and other purposes.

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The claim has a curious parallel in similar claims based on the high antiquity of Vedic literature for the existence of writing in Sanskrit from the earliest times.⁴ Such claims fail to make a clear distinction between the language and the script. All languages of the world are far older than the scripts devised for recording them.

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⁴ Cf. *e.g.*, Raj Bali Pandey 1952: p. 21: "Thus the traditions of the country, the testimony of foreign writers, literary evidences and positive palaeographic survivals all tend to prove a very high antiquity of the art of writing in India, stretching in the past upto the fourth millennium *B.C.*"

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Subramanian accepts that the Tamil scripts are derived from the Mauryan Brāhmī script, but contends that the latter is, in its turn, derived from a still earlier script devised for a Dravidian language:

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The Brāhmī script was originally devised for the Dravidian language and later on adopted for Prākrit which was evolved as a common language and which was more close to the Dravidian. Later on when Sanskrit elements were introduced into the Prākrit and it became more Sanskritised,

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additional symbols had to be introduced to suit the needs of the new letters and in the course of this process, some symbols not required for the Sanskritised Prākrit got eliminated. And finally when it became the official language it spread throughout the length and breadth of the country with royal authority behind, and displaced the then existing varieties of the script. It should be noted side by side here that no inscription in the other coexisting scripts has been found so far. It is from this Brāhmī script that all the existing scripts of the country including the Dēvanāgarī have been obtained by evolution.¹

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¹ T.N. Subramanian 1957: pp. 1608-1609.

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As Subramanian himself admits candidly, there is no inscriptional evidence to support his claim. Further, his theory that the Prakrit languages were originally 'Dravidian' and later became 'Sanskritised' is not generally accepted. Modern linguistic research in Indo-Aryan and Dravidian has established that the Middle Indo-Aryan (Prakrit) languages are descended from the Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic), but are influenced by substratum languages including Dravidian.²

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² For discussion on the substratum influence of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan, see Asko Parpola 1994: pp. 167-169.

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Krishnan has suggested a different scenario for the origin of the Tamil script. According to him:

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The Tamil Script has a long history almost parallel beginning with the Brāhmī script of the times of Asoka. The script is found originally designed to write inscriptions all over India allowing for modifications in respect of Tamil Nadu and for additions in respect of other areas. The modifications in respect of Tamil Nadu are close to the primary letters of the alphabet. The processes involved in the evolution are along known lines such as the desire for change and economy.³

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³ K.G. Krishnan 1981c: p. 97.

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He amplifies this idea further in another paper:

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In the early times in the history of writing, the Brāhmī script which was current in India had a group of letters consisting of nine vowels (*a*, *ā*, *i*, *ī*, *u*, *ū*, *ē*, *ai* and *ō*) and fourteen consonants (*k*, *ṅ*, *c*, *ñ*, *ṭ*, *ṇ*, *t*, *n*, *p*, *m*, *y*, *r*, *l* and *v*) common to all the areas irrespective of the language for which they were used. The additional letters such as the 15 aspirated letters and 4 letters (*s*, *ś* *sh* and *h*) in the case of the Northern alphabets, and 4 letters (*ḻ*, *ḷ*, *ṟ* and *ṉ*) in the case of the Dravidian alphabets have been specially devised to serve the respective languages that used those alphabets.⁴

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⁴ K.G. Krishnan 1974: pp. 29-30.

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Apart from the fact that there is no evidence for such a 'primary national script' before the time of Asoka, it seems most unlikely that a script could have been devised without reference to the language it records. There is no such instance in the history of the writing systems of the world before the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for modern linguistic research.

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In recent years there have been many attempts to derive the Brāhmī/Tamil-Brāhmī scripts from megalithic and chalcolithic graffiti, and through them, ultimately from the Indus script.⁵ In so far as such research relates to the decipherment of the Indus script on the basis of comparisons with the pottery graffiti, it falls outside the scope of the present study.¹ However, the Tamil-Brāhmī script is unlikely to have been derived from the megalithic graffiti as stratigraphic evidence from the excavations, especially at Uraiyur² and Kodumanal,³ show the coexistence of the two systems (sometimes on the same pottery as at the latter site), though the origin of the graffiti goes back to a much earlier period.

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⁵ A.V. Narasimha Murthy 1992: pp. 57-66. R. Madhivanan 1995: pp. 49-79. S. Gurumurthy 1999: pp. 149-163.

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¹ For my views on the subject, see I. Mahadevan 1995a: pp. 2-8.

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² P. Shanmugam 1983: pp. 31-36.

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³ K. Rajan 1994: pp. 76-83.

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Just as there have been attempts to prove the Brāhmī script to be an artificial creation not derived from any pre-existing source,⁴ there have also been similar attempts in respect of the Tamil script. In 1917, Manickam Naicker, an engineer by profession and learned Tamil scholar, published a monograph⁵ which attempted to prove with the help of detailed diagrams that the letters of the Tamil script and the mystic symbol *aum* (*ōm*) can be derived by cutting and pasting segments of the first letter *a*. The fact that he employs the modern forms of the Tamil letters and of the symbol for *ōm* does not seem to have bothered him.

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⁴ E.g., A. Cunningham 1877: *CII.* I: pp. 53 ff. He follows the acrophonic principle (e.g., *ka* from *kartari* 'dagger', *dha* from *dhanu* 'bow', *sa* from *sarpa* 'snake', etc.).

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⁵ P.V. Manickam Naicker 1917: pp. 1-17.

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Gift Siromoney and Michael Lockwood⁶ claim that "the Brāhmī script was invented at one stroke—possibly by one individual"; they reject "both the theory that it was evolved from the Indus script and also the theory that it was borrowed and developed from some non-Indian script". The point of departure for their demonstration is the pair of symbols found at the end of two Tamil-Brāhmī inscriptions at Kongarpuliyankulam.⁷ They proceed to normalise the symbols into "basic geometric patterns" consisting of a square, a circle, a cross and a vertical line. From segments of these components, they "extract" all the letters of the Brāhmī script.⁸ As Gelb points out, signs of the linear scripts are likely to show some resemblance to one another as these are based in practice on a few simple forms of straight lines, triangles, squares and circles which can be easily remembered.⁹

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⁶ Gift Siromoney and Michael Lockwood 1992: pp. 219-223.

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⁷ Corpus: Nos. *12* & *13*. See also section 5.18 and Fig. 5.11 (A & B).

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⁸ Perhaps the authors of this paper meant it to be a spoof on far out theories.

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⁹ I. J. Gelb 1963: p. 144.

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The literary evidence in Tamil with datable links to the outside world includes the presence of the Jaina and Buddhist creeds in the Tamil country, references to the Nandas and the Mauryas and graphic descriptions of the maritime trade with the *yavanas* (Romans). This evidence does not stretch beyond *ca.* 3rd century B.C. The archaeological data from pottery inscriptions in the Tamil-Brāhmī script also indicate the same date as the upper limit for writing. There is no material evidence for the existence of any indigenous or independent script for Tamil earlier to or contemporaneous with the Tamil-Brāhmī script.¹ Whatever writing has been discovered on inscribed pottery from the excavated sites in Tamil Nadu, is exclusively in the Tamil-Brāhmī script and occurs only from the megalithic and Early Historical levels dated not earlier than the end of the 3rd century B.C.²

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¹ This discussion does not include the Indus script, which has not yet been deciphered, nor the megalithic graffiti. In the present state of our knowledge, it seems best to assume that the megalithic graffiti do not constitute a script with phonetic values, but may be mnemoic or representational devices derived from pictorial art and belonging to the category of forerunners of writing (I.J. Gelb 1963: pp. 24-51). For discussion on the symbols occurring with the inscriptions in the Corpus, see section 5.18.

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² See section 1.13.

Linked texts (2)

Tolkāppiyam — Tolkāppiyar, Tamil
Naṉṉūl — Pavaṇanti, Tamil