A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c9.24

c9.24

The affirmation and denial of Agastya's fathership of Tamil and of his work being the source of the Tolkāppiyam are both symbolic of an attitude to the incoming northern Sanskritic influences. As a matter of fact there is no mention of Agastya either in the Tolkāppiyam or in the preface to it by Panambāraṇār. The earliest reference to the Agattiyam occurs only in the eighth or ninth century A.D., as we have seen, and that is also the time when the Pāndyan charters begin to proclaim the preceptorship of Agastya to the Pāndyas, the patrons of Tamil literature and the Śangam, and the first genuine Tamil power to achieve political expansion and establish an empire in the full light of history. Almost all the stories meant to support Agastya's connexion with Tamil and Tolkāppiyan must have been elaborated in subsequent ages; but the attempt to give Agastya the dominant position in the evolution of Tamil culture evoked a challenge. Things went on smoothly so long as Aryan influence, the influence of the ‘Northern’ speech and culture, was content to penetrate the Tamil land quietly and by imperceptible stages, and effect a silent transformation of the native elements. This process began very early and was accepted by the Tamils to an extent that has rendered it all but impossible to differentiate the elements that have gone to make up the composite culture. But when a theory was put forward, that is when a legend was invented to show that Tamil as a spoken language and with it the entire culture of the Tamil country was derived from a Vedic seer, this was met, naturally, by a counter-assertion and the elaboration of legends in the opposite sense. And then, as with some even now, legends were arguments.