Dravidian Peoples

Robert Caldwell, a missionary and philologist working in south India, published his comparative grammar in 1856 and established that Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and their relatives form a family unrelated to Sanskrit. He needed a name for it and took Dravida, a Sanskrit term for the southern country. The demonstration was sound and the word stuck. What Caldwell cannot have foreseen is what happened to it next. In the twentieth century the label was picked up in Tamil Nadu by a political movement that used it against Brahminical and northern claims to precedence, and the Dravidian parties that came out of that movement have governed the state for most of the period since 1967. So the word now does two jobs. It names a language family whose membership is a technical question, and it names a modern political identity with its own history, its own arguments and its own opponents.

A reader meeting it has to work out which is meant, and the two are not always separable, since the political use rests on the linguistic claim being true. Caldwell's own position complicates the story further. He was a missionary, and part of his motive in separating the southern languages from Sanskrit was to argue that southern peoples owed nothing to Brahminical culture, an argument later used by people who had no interest at all in his church.

The religious significance of this grouping is that it holds a devotional literature composed outside Sanskrit and never dependent on it. From around the sixth century, Tamil poets sang to Shiva and to Vishnu in Tamil: the Nayanars on one side, the Alvars on the other, and their hymns were later gathered into the Tirumurai and the Divya Prabandham. Both collections are treated as scripture in the south, recited in temple worship and commented on by named teachers in an unbroken line, and the Prabandham is called the Tamil Veda by the tradition that uses it. This is where the bhakti impulse that later spread across northern India in local languages has its earliest sustained expression.

The Lingayat or Virashaiva tradition of Karnataka made the point explicitly in the twelfth century, composing its vachanas in Kannada and rejecting the priestly monopoly on access to God along with the language that carried it. A picture of Hinduism assembled only from Sanskrit sources will miss all of this, and will also miss how much of what it does describe was shaped by contact with it. The temples themselves are part of the record. The great southern temple complexes, with their gopurams and their endowed festivals, were built and maintained by dynasties who recorded their gifts in Tamil, Telugu and Kannada inscriptions on the walls, so the epigraphy is a religious archive as well as an administrative one.

Sources The Tamil Veda: Pillan's Interpretation of the TiruvaymoliJohn Carman and Vasudha Narayanan with Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil SaintsIndira Viswanathan Peterson