World Classical Tamil Conference

Tamil is a rich language outside the Indo-Latin family of languages, and with a lengthy history that makes it the oldest "living" language with that kind of a long history in literature.

I suppose it is more for theatre and politics that a World Classical Tamil Conference is underway in the town where I did my undergraduate studies--Coimbatore.  (the photo here is from The Hindu, which had the following caption: A woman sells snacks at the venue of the World Classical Tamil conference. Photo: S.Siva Saravanan)

Professor Parpola said Sanskrit, with its 3,000-year-old tradition, had produced an unrivalled number of literary works. It went back to Proto-Indo-Aryan [which was] attested in a few names and words related to the Mitanni kingdom of Syria between 1500 and 1300 BCE, and earlier forms of Indo-Iranian, known only from a few loanwords in Finno-Ugric languages as spoken in central Russia around 2000 BCE.

“But, none of these very earliest few traces is older than the roots of Tamil. Tamil goes back to Proto-Dravidian, which, in my opinion, can be identified as the language of the thousands of short texts in the Indus script, written during 2600-1700 BCE. There are, of course, different opinions, but many critical scholars agree that even the Rigveda, collected in the Indus Valley about 1000 BCE, has at least half a dozen Dravidian loanwords,” he told a large gathering. 

 So, on this occasion, here is a song/dance clip from an old Tamil movie.  The song is, well, actually a poem by Subramanya Bharathi (ignore the words that pop up in the video with that song--it does great disservice to the poetry.  Click here for translation(s))