Tamil
Sivaite

hymno-
logies.

Tamil

Vishnuite hymnology.

The Sittar Tamil poets.

theism.

Between that period and the 16th century, two encyclopædic collections of Tamil hymns in praise of Siva were gradually formed. They breathe a deeply religious spirit, and the earlier collection (post 1200 A.D.) still holds its place in the affections of the Tamil-speaking people. The later collection was the work of a Sivaite devotee and his disciples, who devoted themselves to uprooting Jainism (circ. 1500 A.D.). During the same centuries, the Vishnuite apostles were equally prolific in Tamil religious song. Their Great Book of the Four Thousand Psalms constitutes a huge hymnology dating from the 12th century onwards. After a period of literary inactivity, the Tamil genius again blossomed forth in the 16th and 17th centuries with a poet-king as the leader of the literary revival.

In the 17th century arose an anti-Bráhmanical Tamil literature known as the Sittar school. The Sittars or sages were a Tamil sect who, while retaining Siva as the name of the One God, rejected everything in Siva-worship inconsistent with Their pure pure theism. They were quietists in religion, and alchemists in science. They professed to base their creed upon the true original teaching of the Rishís, and indeed assumed to themselves the names of these ancient inspired teachers of mankind. They thus obtained for their poems, although written in a modern colloquial style, the sanction of a venerable antiquity. Some scholars believe that they detect Christian influences in works of the Sittar school. But it must be remembered that the doctrines and even the phraseology of ancient Indian theism and of Indian Buddhism approach closely to the subsequent teaching and, in some instances, to the very language of Christ.1

1 The following specimens of the Sittar school of Tamil poetry are taken from Bishop Caldwell's Comparative Grammar, p. 148. The first is a version of a poem of Siva-vákya, given by Mr. R. C. Caldwell, the Bishop's son, in the Indian Antiquary for 1872. He unconsciously approximates the verses to Christian ideas, for example, by the title, 'The Shepherd of the Worlds,' which Bishop Caldwell states may have meant to the poet only 'King of the Gods.'

THE SHEPHERD OF THE Worlds.

How many various flowers

Did I, in bygone hours,

Cull for the gods, and in their honour strew;
In vain how many a prayer

I breathed into the air,

And made, with many forms, obeisance due.

MODERN TAMIL WRITERS.

writers.

333 The Tamil writers of the 18th and 19th centuries are Modern classified as modern. The honours of this period are divided Tamil between a pious Sivaite and the Italian Jesuit, Beschi. This missionary of genius and learning not only wrote Tamil prose Beschi. of the highest excellence, but he composed a great religious epic in classical Tamil, which has won for him a conspicuous rank among Dravidian poets. His work, the Tembávani, gives a Tamil adaptation of the narrative and even of the geography of the Bible, suited to the Hindu taste of the 18th century.

Since the introduction of printing, the Tamil press has Recent been prolific. A catalogue of Tamil printed books, issued in Statistics. Madras up to 1865, enumerated 1409 works. In the single year 1882, no fewer than 558 works were printed in the vernaculars in Madras, the great proportion of them being in Tamil.

While the non-Aryans of Southern India had thus evolved

Beating my breast, aloud

How oft I called the crowd

To drag the village car; how oft I stray'd,
In manhood's prime, to lave

Sunwards the flowing wave,

And, circling Saiva fanes, my homage paid.

But they, the truly wise,

Who know and realize

Where dwells the Shepherd of the Worlds, will ne'er

To any visible shrine,

As if it were divine,

Deign to raise hands of worship or of prayer.

THE UNITY OF GOD AND OF TRUTH.

God is one, and the Veda is one;

The disinterested, true Guru is one, and his initiatory rite one;

When this is obtained his heaven is one;

There is but one birth of men upon the earth,

And only one way for all men to walk in:

But as for those who hold four Vedas and six shastras,

And different customs for different people,

And believe in a plurality of gods,

Down they will go to the fire of hell!

GOD IS LOVE.

The ignorant think that God and love are different.

None knows that God and love are the same.

Did all men know that God and love are the same,

They would dwell together in peace, considering love as God.

Aryan a copious literature and cultivated spoken dialects out of languages their isolated fragments of prehistoric speech, a more stately ern India; linguistic development was going on in the Aryan north.

of North

Sanskrit.

Was Sanskrit ever

a vernacu

lar?

Dr. John Muir's affirmative

answer.

Professor

Benfey's view;

affirma

tive.

The achievements of Sanskrit as a literary vehicle in the various departments of poetry, philosophy, and science, have been described in chapter iv. at such length as the scope of this work permits. But Sanskrit was only the most famous of several Aryan dialects in the north. One of its eminent modern teachers defines it as 'that dialect which, regulated and established by the labours of the native grammarians, has led for the last 2000 years or more an artificial life, like that of the Latin during most of the same period in Europe.' The Aryan vernaculars of modern India are the descendants not of Sanskrit, but of the spoken languages of the Aryan immigrants into the north. The Brahmanical theory is that these ancient spoken dialects, or Prákrits, were corruptions of the purer Sanskrit. European philology has disproved this view, and the question has arisen whether Sanskrit was ever a spoken language at all.

1

This question has a deep significance in the history of the Indian vernaculars, and it is necessary to present, with the utmost brevity, the views of the leading authorities on the subject. Dr. John Muir, that clarum et venerabile nomen in Anglo-Indian scholarship, devotes many pages to 'reasons for supposing that the Sanskrit was criginally a spoken language.'2 He traces the Sanskrit of the philosophical period to the earlier forms in the Vedic hymns, and concludes that the old spoken language of India and the Sanskrit of the Vedas were at one time identical.' 3

Professor Benfey gives the results of his long study of the question in even greater detail. He believes that Sanskrit-speaking migrations from beyond the Himalayas continued to follow one another into India down to perhaps the 9th century B.C. That Sanskrit became the prevailing Indian vernacular dialect throughout Hindustán, and as far as the southern borders of the Maráthá country. That it began to die out as a spoken language from the 9th century B.C., and had become extinct as a vernacular in the 6th century B.C.; its place being taken by derivative dialects or Prákrits. But that it still lingered in the schools of the Brahmans; and that, about the 3rd century 1 Professor Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar, p. ix. Leipzig, 1879. Muir's Sanskrit Texts, vol. ii. pp. 144-160, ed. 1874.

3 Idem, p. 160, and Dr. Muir's long footnote, No. 181.

SANSKRIT AND PRAKRITS.

335 B.C., it was brought back into public life as a sacred language with a view to refuting the Buddhistic teachers who wrote in the vernacular or Prákrit dialects. Professor Benfey also holds that about the 5th century A.D. Sanskrit had diffused itself over the whole of India as a literary language. We know that a subsequent revival of Sanskrit for the Puranic or orthodox treatises of the Bráhmans, as opposed to the new doctrines of the reformers who used the vernacular, actually took place about the 10th century A.D.

Lassen inclines to the same general view. He thinks that, Lassen's in the time of Asoka, the main body of Aryans of Northern view. India spoke local dialects; while Sanskrit still remained the speech of Brahmans, and of dignitaries of State.

Sanskrit scholars of not less eminence have come to the Sanskrit conclusion that Sanskrit was not at any time a vernacular never a spoken tongue. Professor Weber assigns it to the learned alone. He language. thinks that the Prákrits, or Aryan vernaculars of Northern Weber's India, were derived directly from the more ancient Vedic view. dialects; while Sanskrit was 'the sum of the Vedic dialects constructed by the labour and zeal of grammarians, and polished by the skill of learned men.' Professor Aufrecht Aufrecht's agrees 'in believing that Sanskrit proper (ie. the language view. of the epic poems, the law books, nay, even that of the Brahmanas) was never actually spoken, except in schools or by the learned.'

present

The question has been finally decided, however, not by Evidence Sanskrit scholars in Europe, but by students of the modern from Aryan vernaculars in India. During the past fourteen years, a Indian bright light has been brought to bear upon the language and speech. literature of ancient India, by an examination of the actual speech of the people at the present day.

Two learned Indian civilians, Mr. Salmon Growse and Mr. John Beames, led the way from not always concurrent points of view. In 1872, Mr. Beames' Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India1 opened up a new field of human knowledge, and began to effect for the Aryan dialects of the North, what Bishop Caldwell's great work accomplished The new for non-Aryan speech in Southern India. Dr. Ernest Trumpp's study of Grammar of the Sindhi Language followed, and would probably naculars, have modified some of Mr. Beames' views. Another learned 1872-1885. German officer of the Indian Government, Professor Rudolf

1 Three volumes, Trübner & Co. The first volume was published in 1872; the last in 1879.

the ver

Results

Diver

gence of

Hærnle, further specialized the research by his Comparative Grammar of the Gaudian Languages (1880), with particular reference to the Hindí. The same scholar and Mr. George Grierson, of the Civil Service, have, during the present year (1885), jointly brought out the first part of a Comparative Dictionary of the Bihari Language, which will enable every European inquirer to study the structure and framework of a modern Aryan vernacular for himself. These and other cognate works have accumulated a mass of new evidence, which settles the relationship of the present Aryan vernaculars to the languages of ancient India.

They prove that those vernaculars do not descend directly disclosed from Sanskrit. They indicate the existence of an Aryan speech by the vernaculars. older than Sanskrit, older, perhaps, than the Vedic hymns; from which the Sanskrit, the Prákrits or ancient spoken dialects of India, and the modern vernaculars were alike derived. Passing beyond the Vedic period, they show that ancient Aryan speech diverged into two channels. The one channel poured its stream into the ocean of Sanskrit, a language 'at once archaic and artificial,' elaborated by the Brahmanical schools.1 The other channel branched out into the Prakrits or ancient spoken vernaculars. vernaculars. The artificial Sanskrit (Samskrita, i.e. the perfected language) attained its complete development in the grammar of Pánini (circ. 350 B.C.).2 The Prákrits (¿.e. naturally evolved dialects) found their earliest extant exposition in the Pánini and grammar of Vararuchi, about the 1st century B.C.3 But the 4000 algebraic aphorisms of Pánini mark the climax of the labours of probably a long antecedent series of Sanskrit elaborators, while Vararuchi stands at the head of a long series of subsequent Prákrit grammarians.

Sanskrit and Prákrit.

Vararuchi.

The
Prakrits

spread
south.

The spread of the Aryans from Northern India is best marked by the southern advance of their languages. The three great routes of Prákrit speech to the southward were— down the Indus valley on the west; along the Ganges valley to the east; and through certain historical passes of the

1 Hornle and Grierson's Comparative Dictionary of the Bihárí Language, pp. 33 and 34. Secretariat Press, Calcutta, 1885. It should be remembered that Indian grammarians, when speaking of the Vedic language technically, do not call it Sanskrit, but Chhandas. They restrict the technical application of Sanskrit to the scholastic language of the Bráhmans, elaborated on the lines of the earlier Vedic.

2 Vide ante, pp. 100 et seq.

3 Hærnle's Comparative Grammar of the Gaudian Languages, p. xviii. et seq., ed. 1880.