The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c5.4

c5.4

We have no need to concern ourselves with general questions of the origin of the Dravidians and their culture.² The student of Pāndyan history is not directly Concerned with the answers to questions like the following—who were the Tamils? Were they indigenous or foreign to the land where we find them in historical times? Did they come by land from the north or the south, or by sea? But it is necessary for us to be clear in our minds about the relation in which Tamil culture stands to the culture of the rest of India. The question relates not so much to the extent of culture among the Tamils before the advent of Sanskrit influences as to whether the blending of Aryan with pre-Aryan culture was in essence a different process in the South from what it was in Northern India. The persistent independence of the Tamil idiom (and to a less degree of other Dravidian languages) in the face of Sanskrit, is in striking contrast with the almost total disappearance of non-Sanskritic vernaculars in the north of India. On the other hand we have at present no traces of any literary work in the Tamil language, however ancient, which does not betray Sanskrit influence to some extent. We may conclude that the results of Aryan penetration into the south were more cultural than racial and the pre-Aryan inhabitants survived the ‘conquest’ in sufficient strength to retain their own language and many of their old habits and methods of life, with the consequence, that the resulting culture was a real blend of the Aryan and Dravidian elements which shows several points of difference from the culture of the remaining parts of India which were more thoroughly Aryanized.¹