Dandin, the bestselling Pallava author

I had always wondered about the Sanskrit in the names of the big time Tamil kings of the past.  Like Mahendravarman and Narasmimha among the Pallavas, and Raja Raja and Rajendra Cholans.  I mean, these figures loom large among the Tamil imagination and yet they have Sanskrit names?  In comparison, the great Tamil poet and grammarian had a "real" Tamil name--Nakkiran.

David Shulman writes that "modern spoken Tamil is astonishingly rich in Sanskrit loan words.  Indeed, there may well be more straight Sanskrit in Tamil than in the Sanskrit-derived north Indian vernaculars."

The usage of "modern" does not answer the question about Mahendravarman, who lived 1,400 years ago.

Even as I think about all these, Shulman throws me a curve ball.  A googly, to use a cricket equivalent.  He offers an interesting theory, which perhaps the Indologists and Tamil scholars have been arguing it out.  As this reviewer in NYRB notes:

Likely to ruffle some scholars is Shulman’s insistence that this remarkable literary culture was, since its inception, deeply in dialogue with Sanskrit, and that a great many (perhaps most) of its poets partook of the Brahmanical culture that already spanned all of South Asia by the Common Era’s early centuries.

I am willing to buy into this idea.  Shulman writes:

What we can say with confidence is that speakers of Vedic Sanskrit were in contact, from very ancient times, with speakers of Dravidian languages, and that the two language families profoundly influenced one another."

Dandin helps me understand such a possibility.

I had no idea about a historical character named Dandin until I read this book.  Seriously, how did a fellow who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, who immigrated to Israel, manage to understand all these, and then write in a delightfully simple prose so that even idiots like me--born a Tamil--can understand and appreciate the richness of the language and the people going back centuries?

Shulman writes:

Dandin, a native Tamil speaker, chose to compose his work on poetics in Sanskrit, the cosmopolitan language accessible to scholars throughout India and beyond--and indeed, the Kavyadarsa became one of India's bestsellers, known throughout Asia and eventually translated/adapted into Tamil (Tantiyalankaram, possibly twelfth century), Tibetan, and other languages.  The Pallava court was clearly open to the pan-Indian world of erudition and artistic production couched in Sanskrit and also eager to contribute to that world.

There is only one way to respond to this: Mouth wide open!

Now, when I look at the photos like the one above that I have from my visits to Kanchipuram, I wonder about the backstory is of this person who could very well be a scholar from China visiting the highly cosmopolitan Pallava capital!

In terms of political and social dynamics, a northern-oriented, highly Sanskritic state centered in Kancipuram and the Tondai plain complemented the southern kingdom of Pandya Madurai with its Tamil-centric ideology.  Powerful literary works in Tamil appeared a little later in the Pallava north than in the Pandya south, though we should not forget a great narrative poem such as the Perumpanatrupatai, from the Ten Songs.

They never even hinted about any of these in my high school history!

Verse 72 from
The Tiruviruttam of Nammāḻvār
Source