Studies in Cola History and Administration c10.51

c10.51

The education of the people was recognised as important. We have no direct information on the arrangements that obtained for imparting instruction in the more elementary stages of the pupils' course, or on the extent to which the people were generally eager to secure the benefits of schooling to their children. It is hardly to be expected that inscriptions can tell us everything, especially on routine matters of life about which there was nothing striking. But considering that Uttaramērūr was a dominantly Brahman village, and taking into account the number of special schools for higher study that are mentioned by the inscriptions, it appears legitimate to infer that educational facilities must have been more general, and more generally availed of than we are apt to imagine on a *priori* grounds. We must not also imagine that all education was Sanskritic in character and that no attention was paid to Tamil. The facts that inscriptions were engraved in prominent public places where people could read them, that the language of most of them was Tamil though with a large mixture of Sanskrit terms, that the inscriptions often reflected features of the *patois* of the time and were engraved by artisans of the village—these point to the conclusion that there was no wide gap between the language of the people and the education and administration of the land. Higher education was necessarily Sanskritic in character especially in places where, as in Uttaramerūr, it was in the hands of the *Sabhā*. The *Sabhā* of Uttaramerūr, endowed at different times* a *Vyākaraṇa-śāstra-vyākhyā-vṛtti* for the study of grammar and language, a *Bhaviṣya-kiḍaippuram* for instruction perhaps in the *Bhaviṣya Purāṇa*, if not in a *Bhaviṣya Śākhā*, being imparted by a teacher resident in the village, and a *Taittirīya-kiḍaippuram* obviously for the study of the Black Yajur-Veda, as well as a *Vājasanēya-kiḍaippuram* for the White Yajur-Veda. Another very interesting record which, though it bears no date, may be assigned with confidence to the tenth or the eleventh century, registers an important educational endowment by a lady. The inscription† is unfortunately partly built in, and some words are thus lost at the beginning of every line. The general drift of the record is, however, very clear. A lady by name Saṇṇaicāni‡ alias Uttaramēruṅgai created a *Bhaṭṭavṛtti* (teaching-endowment),