Sanatana Dharma and the Dravidian Movement: A response to J. Sai Deepak— 3

The third part of this four part series unearths the development of Sanskrit and Tamil, particularly through the disputed contribution of Agastya to the Tamil language.

—

Read Part 1 here.

Read Part 2 here.

AS the interview progresses with its own universe of 'facts' and 'information', the anchor Smita Prakash says, "The ancient texts were Sanskrit and they were there in Tamil Nadu." To which Deepak proceeds to substantiate yet again with his beliefs rather than scientifically backed factual evidence.

He wisely chooses his words and says that the "belief" of the practitioners of the Vedic knowledge claims that two grammarians, i.e, Panini and Agastya were responsible for the development of Sanskrit and Tamil respectively.

He also says that the structure of the Tamil language is based on Akatthiam (Agastyam) by Agastya, a north Indian who came down from the Vindhyas to the South for the purposes of civilisation.

Akatthiar, a history

Since Akatthiar or Agastya is the focal point of this argument, it is necessary to trace his existence. According to the Vedic texts, he is one of the seven most revered sages (rishis) of Hinduism.

Though the earliest mentions of Agastya are found in the Rig Veda, his mythical origin can be traced back to the Srimad Bhagavatam, one of the eighteen great Puranas of Hinduism, composed by Veda Vyasa, who is better known as the author of the Mahabharata.

According to this text, Urvashi, a celestial nymph (apsara) appears in front of the Vedic deities Mitra and Varuna while performing a yajna. Upon looking at her beauty, the gods discharged their male gametes into an earthen pitcher and that pot gave birth to the sages Vashishta and Agastya.

Since the pitcher became the womb that carried the foetus of Agastya, he is also called as Kumbhayoni (born out of a pitcher) in Hindu scriptures. The birth of Agastya can be traced back to the Vedic scriptures and it has been adequately established in Part 2 of this series that the Vedic religion belonged to the Aryans, so there can remain no doubt that the sage Agastya was an Aryan.

Also read: Is the era of the 'WhatsApp judiciary' here?

According to Deepak, Agastya crossed the Vindhyas and reached South India for the purpose of civilisation. He derives this from another one of the eighteen Mahapuranas by Vyasa, the Skanda Purana named after Skanda or Lord Kartikeya, the son of deities Shiva and Parvati.

According to this text, during the wedding of the deities Shiva and Parvati, all the living beings on the planet started assembling in the Himalayas to witness the event, causing the Himalayas to slant, resulting in the Earth losing its equilibrium and tilting towards the north.

In order to restore the Earthly balance, Lord Shiva requests the sage Agastya to move towards the South. Heeding the words of Shiva, Agastya crosses the Vindhyas and moves to the southern part of India, stabilising the Earth in the process.

The earliest mentions of Akatthiar in Tamil literature are found in Nakkiranar's commentary to the Iraiyanar Akapporul, a theoretical treatise on the literary conventions of Tamil love poetry.

According to the commentary, the Iraiyanar Akapporul treatise was found inscribed on copper plates on the altar of Lord Shiva in Madurai by the temple priests and it credits Shiva himself as the author of the treatise.

The time-loops of the Sangam Age

The commentary describes the timeline of the Sangam Age of Tamil Nadu which purportedly saw poets gathering in institutions or assemblies, aided by the Pandya kings to grow and develop Tamil literature through their works.

As per this text, the Sangam Age was classified into three Sangams that lasted for a vast period of 9,990 years. The First Sangam (Muthaṟchangam) was held in Old Madurai for 4,450 years and saw the works of 4,449 poets including gods such as Shiva, Kubera, Muruga under 89 Pandya kings.

The Second Sangam (Iṭaicangam) comprised the works of 1,700 poets under the patronage of 59 Pandya kings in the city of Kapadapuram for 3,700 years.

The commentary says that both cities of Old Madurai and Kapadapuram were destroyed in a sea deluge and none of the works of the First and Second Sangam poets survived except for the Tolkappiyam by Tolkappiyar, who according to the commentary was a pupil of Akatthiar.

The text also says that Akatthiar was the chairman of the First Sangam and he also took part in the Second Sangam.

The Third Sangam (Kaṭaicankam) was located in the present-day city of Madurai and it saw 449 participating poets with 49 Pandya kings across 1,850 years. The surviving works of Sangam literature that are in existence majorly belong to this period.

When collaborated with the information and data provided by historians, academicians and archeological evidence, glaring inconsistencies that are hard to refute emerge from within the narratives of the existence of Akatthiar.

Also read: If only the Indian communists emulate the path of 'Gaddar'!

The first problem arises in the authorship of the Iraiyanar Akapporul which lays the foundation for the timeline of the vast Sangam Age and the existence of Akatthiar.

As per the story narrated by the commentary of the treatise by Nakkiranar, the priests 'found' the copper plates of the treatise on the altars of the Shiva temple in Madurai after the Pandya King Ukkiraperuvazhuthi prayed to Shiva to aid him in finding the missing components of Tamil Porul (content) grammar to complete his work of compiling the five types of Tamil grammar.

The authorship of the treatise is a disputed topic and the commentary attributes it to Lord Shiva himself, thus, conferring divine sanctity to it.

However, professor of history Dr Karunanthan says that "this story of the copper plates of the Iraiyanar Akapporul and its authorship finds no mention in any of the Sangam literature except for the Nakkiranar's commentary."

He raises doubts on the ambiguity of the authorship of Iraiyanar Akapporul for it is the only Tamil literature that tries to establish the existence of Akatthiar and attributes him for the formulation of grammar for Tamil.

He also says that logically, grammar follows language and not vice versa. So to claim that Akatthiar formulated grammar for the Tamil language through Akatthiam which then led to the formation of the Tamil language is itself nothing but a logical fallacy.

It is also argued that since it was a Brahmin priest who found the Iraiyanar Akapporul copper plates, the text itself is an attempt at appropriating the culture, tradition and antiquity of the Tamil language by a particular group.

Akatthiam's text, which purportedly formulated the grammar for Tamil according to Deepak's narrative, is not in existence now. The oldest piece of the Sangam literature that is still in existence is the Tolkappiyam by Tolkappiyar.

It is to be noted that the Nakkiranar's commentary to the Iraiyanar Akapporul mentions that Tolkappiyar was the pupil of Akatthiar, interestingly, the text of Tolkappiyam has no mentions of Akatthiar.

The Brahmin angle to the Agastya story

Noted historian and author K.N. Sivaraja Pillai is also of the opinion that the Agastya story in the Sangam poems was nothing but a Brahmanical response. He also says that the story of the Sangam traditions as propagated by the Iraiyanar Akapporul and its commentaries should be examined closely for its authenticity and its evidentiary historical value.

Seshagiri Sastri says that the accounts of the first two Sangams are too mythical and fabulous to account any credit to it. P.T. Srinivasa Iyengar, another renowned historian says that the accounts of Agastya living across the first two Sangams for 8,410 years are absurd.

Moreover, the opinions and views of all these scholars concur on the fact that the vast number of years assigned to the Sangam period which purportedly lasted for 9,900 years is nothing but a stretch of imagination that corroborates neither with science nor with established history.

In order to simplify this impossibility, Sivaraja Pillai says that if the 9,990 years of the Sangam Age were distributed amongst the 197 Pandya kings, it would give rise to a figure of fifty-odd years per generation, which is an impossible figure in the history of man.

Also read: The Dravidian remedy to the inequities of Hindutva

However, this does not imply that the entire Sangam period and its surviving literature are merely a product of fiction. The oldest surviving literature of the Sangam period, the Tolkappiyam by Tolkappiyar, dates back to 350 BCE.

This provided a marker to calculate a rough estimate of the Sangam period which was commonly believed to be from the third century based on the literary evidence.

The excavations at Keezhadi by the Department of Archaeology, Tamil Nadu have been unearthing and revealing artefacts that continue to redefine the mainstream narrative of history.

In 2019, unearthed potsherds belonging to the sixth century BCE were excavated, with inscriptions in the Tamil Brahmi script which reflected the high literacy rate of the civilisation. Based on this, it was estimated that the Sangam Age could go back to the sixth century.

However, the excavations in 2023 further pushed the Sangam Age from the sixth century BCE to the eighth century BCE based on the cultural deposits found on the site.

Thus, irrefutable literary and established archeological evidence tells us that the Sangam Age can be traced back to the eighth century BCE as opposed to the tenth millennium BCE as told in the commentaries of the Iraiyanar Akapporul, the authorship of which still remains unclear.

It is also to be noted that the origins of Agastya or Akatthiar in the Sangam Age can also be traced to the very same text of the Iraiyanar Akapporul and its commentaries which clearly give more weightage to fiction than facts and are also coloured with allegations of appropriation of culture.

Tamil and Sanskrit and the question of caste

Deepak also talks about the Maheshwara Sutra according to which the primordial sounds of the damru of Lord Shiva gave birth to the languages of Tamil and Sanskrit.

He also says the Damru of Lord Shiva has 'Om' inscribed on one side of it in Sanskrit and in Tamil on the other side. If this is deemed to be true, then it is puzzling to understand an anecdote shared by a renowned Vedic scholar Agnihotram Ramanujam Thatthachariar according to which the Kanchi Shankaracharya considered talking in Tamil a sin and had the urge to cleanse himself whenever he talked in Tamil.

Deepak also asserts that there was no discrimination based on caste during the period of the Cholas and there are no inscriptions that show the existence of caste discrimination during the Chola rule.

Immediately after which Deepak himself says that during the Chola period, there existed chaturvedi mangalams in which Brahmin priests formed the first circle of inhabitation, also called the agraharams. This in itself refutes the argument that the Chola period was devoid of any caste discrimination.

The chaturvedi mangalams were nothing but duty-free land gifted by the then reigning kings to the Brahmin priests of the land through brahmadeya.

Them pesky British

Further into the podcast, Deepak throws a series of allegations against the British 'missionaries' and particularly targets the likes of Francis Whyte Ellis and Robert Cauldwell.

The regnal years of the East India Company saw the arrival of innumerable British people, including missionaries, but when the allegations are restricted only towards a certain few, it is imperative to dwell a bit into their biographies.

In 1784, Sir William Jones, a philologist and orientalist, established the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He is known for his research and scholarly work in Sanskrit which includes the translation of Kalidasa's epic Sanskrit work Abhijnanasakuntalam to English titled Sacontala.

Jones is also known for his propositions about the connection and relationship of the Sanskrit language to Greek and Latin. In his research, he established with literary evidence that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had common roots and in 1788 he classified them as the Indo-European (Indo-Aryan) family of languages.

Yet another British civil servant and a Tamil scholar in the Madras Presidency, Francis Whyte Ellis had immersed himself in linguistic research and identified in 1816 that the South Indian languages including Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu belonged to the one unique family of languages distinct from the Indo-Aryan languages to which Sanskrit was a part of as established by Jones.

Thus, Ellis was the first scholar to propose that Tamil was a distinct language without any Sanskrit origins and had the potential of functioning independently without the aid of any other language.

Also read: 'Intrinsic dharma' has taken over constitutional values, says Indira Jaising at the sixth Neelabh Mishra lecture

Robert Caldwell, in 1856, furthered linguistic research through his systemic approach of a comparative analysis of the different families of languages and presented his work in a book titled A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or the South-Indian Family of Languages.

Through the above study, he vehemently refuted the Sanskrit origins of the Dravidian languages and called it entirely destitute of any foundation. Thus, a mere conjoint and coherent reading of the paragraph above would reveal the reason behind Deepak's allegations of missionary conversions against a select few British colonialists like White and Caldwell whose names find repetitive mentions throughout the podcast.

Law of evidence

The law of evidence provides us with the liberty to make inferences that are naturally and reasonably drawn based on observations and conditions in the course of basic human conduct, this is called a presumption of facts.

However, Deepak's presumptions of the Tamil language having its origins in Sanskrit and its grammar formulated by a northern sage Agastya holds no ground when juxtaposed with the available evidentiary and scholarly material.

Deepak's assertions based on his beliefs might be facts to him but unfortunately, the liberty provided by the law of the land is limited to the presumption of facts and not fiction.

Read Part 1 here.

Read Part 2 here.