EARLIEST TAMIL POETS. 331 of Tamil the Tol-Káppiyam, is assigned to one of his disciples. But the rise of a continuous Tamil literature belongs to a later period. The Sivaite and Vishnuite revival of the Bráhman apostles in Southern India, from the 8th century onwards, stirred up a counter movement on the part of the Jains. Jain cycle Before that period, the Buddhism of the Dravidian kingdoms literature. had modelled itself on the Jain type. We shall see hereafter that early Buddhism in Northern India adopted the Prakrit or vernacular speech for its religious treatises. On the same analogy, Buddhism in Southern India, as the religion of the people, defended itself against the Brahmanical revival of the 8th century by works in the popular dialects. The Dravidian Buddhists or Jains created a cycle of Tamil literature, anti- 9th to 13th Brahmanical in tone, stretching from the 9th to the 13th century century. A.D. Pariah Its first great composition, the Kural of Tiruvalluvar, not later Its great than the 10th century A.D., is said to have been the work of poet, 900 a poet sprung from the Pariah or lowest caste. It enforces the A.D. (?) old Sankya philosophy in 1330 distichs or poetical aphorisms, dealing with the three chief desires of the human heart; wealth, pleasure, and virtue. To the sister of its author, a Pariah poetess, are ascribed many compositions of the highest moral excellence, and of undying popularity in Southern India. The Jain period of Tamil literature includes works on ethics and language; among them the Divákaram, literally the 'Day-making' Dictionary. The period culminated in the Chintámaní, a romantic epic of 15,000 lines by an unknown The Jain Jain author. Indeed, it is worthy of remark that several of the epic. best Indian authors, whether Sanskrit or vernacular, have left no indication of their names. As it was the chief desire of an Indian sage to merge his individual existence in the Universal Existence; so it appears to have been the wish of many Indian men of letters of the highest type to lose their literary individuality in the school or cycle of literature to which they belonged. Rámá yana. Contemporaneous with the Jain cycle of Tamil literature, The Tamil the great adaptation of the Rámáyana was composed by Karabar for the Dravidian races. This work is a Tamil paraphrase or imitation, rather than a translation of the ancient Sanskrit epic. A stanza prefixed to the work states that it was finished in the year corresponding to 886 A.D. But this stanza may itself be a later addition; and Bishop Caldwell, after a careful examination of the whole evidence, places the work after 1100. Tamil hymno- 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 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 ap proximates 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; 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. Statistics. Since the introduction of printing, the Tamil press has Recent been prolific. A catalogue of Tamil printed books, issued in 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, 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. of North Sanskrit. 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. 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.'1 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. Was Sanskrit ever a vernacular? Dr. John Muir's affirmative answer. Professor Benfey's view; affirmative. 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 originally a spoken language.'" 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 Himálayas 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 Puránic 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 Three volumes, Trúbner & Co. The first volume was published in 1872; the last in 1879. the ver |