Tamils

The name "Tamil" denotes native speakers of the Tamil language, mainly residing since antiquity in the southernmost region of India and in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, but found today also as immigrants in Southeast Asia, Africa, Guyana and the Caribbean, the United States, Canada, and England.

The Tamil language, of the Dravidian family, appears in third-century BCE inscriptions, and Dravidian influences noted in Sanskrit suggest that an ancestor of Tamil was widely spoken in India as early as 1000 BCE. Today it is the official language of the state of Tamil Nadu in India and one of the national languages of Sri Lanka; related languages are spoken in neighboring states.

Tamils were prominent in sea trade, and there is evidence of Tamil commerce with Greece and Rome and with Southeast Asia from around the first century BCE. Areas of the Tamil region were ruled from about the early third century BCE to the fifth century CE by the Chera, Chola, and Pandya dynasties and from about the sixth to the ninth centuries CE by the Pallava dynasty. These and other dynasties were displaced by the Vijayanagara empire at its peak (fourteenth century) and then by the Telugu-speaking Nayaka rulers (sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries CE).

The Tamil region has figured prominently in India's cultural history. Tamil literature dates from as early as around the second century BCE; it includes the Sangam (Acadamy) poetry and the Tolkappiyam (Ancient Poem), a grammar. Even in these works, there are signs of the influence of Sanskrit from the north. The gradual process of Sanskritization was driven by Brahman priests and scholars, whom local rulers settled on donated lands. Nevertheless, Tamil poetry retained a personal voice and a vivid immediacy that contrasted with the impersonal and stylized character of Sanskrit works.

From around the sixth century CE, a new Tamil literature of devotional poems began to be composed by traveling bards, who applied the conventions of the Sangam poetry to poems praising the gods of famous temples. During this period, local deities were assimilated to pan-Indian deities of the Brahmanical Sanskrit sources. This sparked a wave of vernacular religious expression throughout India over the next several centuries. Jainism and Buddhism vied with devotion to the gods Vishnu and Siva for royal patronage in the region. Meanwhile, Brahmans integrated Tamil devotional texts with their Sanskrit liturgies, creating the distinctive Saiva Siddhanta and Shrivaishnava traditions, Tamil religious movements teaching devotion to the deities Siva and Vishnu, respectively.

In postcolonial India, the linguistic and ethnic rivalry between south and north has continued. In South India, Tamil was touted as the original language and culture of India, with the carriers of Old Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) represented as the first imperialist invaders, warlike barbarians who drove the peace-loving Tamils toward the south. An analogous situation was perceived in the dominance of North Indians in national politics and the adoption of Hindi (the language of a broad swath of North India) as the principal national language. Hence, South Indians (and Tamils in particular) have fiercely resisted using Hindi.

In Sri Lanka, where Tamils have often been treated as foreigners by the Sinhalese-speaking majority, Tamil nationalist guerrillas called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Nation) (LTTE) seek an independent Tamil homeland in the Jaffna Peninsula in the north and along the northeast coast. Many Indian Tamils have provided support to this insurgency, and the Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) was assassinated by an LTTE suicide bomber protesting India's intervention in Sri Lanka.

Meanwhile, regional parties claiming to represent the interests of Dravidian culture have long dominated the politics of the state of Tamil Nadu, often promoting Tamil chauvinism. During British rule and immediately after independence, Tamil-speaking regions were subsumed within Madras state, but in the 1950s Telegu-, Kannada-, and Malayalam-speaking regions were hived off as separate states, and in 1969 the Madras state's name was officially changed to Tamil Nadu (Tamil Country). Under chief minister Jayalalitha (b. 1948), Tamil Nadu in 1996 discarded the British colonial name of the capital (Madras) to adopt the older Tamil name Chennai. Yet opposition to Hindi has receded somewhat as English gets entrenched as the language of national affairs.

Nilakanta Sastri, K. A. (1964) The Culture and History of the Tamils. Calcutta, India: K. L. Mukhopadhyay. Vira Raghavan, C. (1973) Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

Zvelebil, Kamil Veith. (1974) Tamil Literature. Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz.

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