... to the Tamil of today

The only problem that I have with David Shulman's biography of Tamil is that for a book authored by a person of his caliber, and for a book published by Harvard University Press, there are quite a few inconsistent spellings throughout.  Even Tenkasi is spelled as Tenkaci in one context.  In the opening pages, the pallavi of the Carnatic music is written as pallava.

But, otherwise, what an awesome learning experience it has been for me!

Shulman writes that the Tamil world had changed almost beyond recognition by the middle of the nineteenth century.  Manonmaniyam Sundaram Pillai played an integral role in the revival and revitalization of Tamil.  I recall his Tamil Thai Vazhthu from the school days.  Shulman lists many more who worked on recovering the old Sangam texts and providing commentaries about them.

In the early 20th century, the struggle to get rid of the bastard raj also became a struggle to re-establish Tamil.  Unfortunately, this became entangled with anti-Brahmin and anti-caste issues, which were also extremely important, and are important even today.  But, the co-mingling of these issues led to a political movement to also get rid of the Sanskrit--associated with Brahmins--words from the Tamil language.

Shulman writes that "the very intensity of anti-Sanskrit feeling that we see in the Pure Tamil fanatics is itself a sure sign of the deep interdependence of the two languages."  But, politics does not care for such nuances.  And despite the maniacal efforts of the fanatics, "Tamil today, like the Tamil of yesterday, indeed like nearly all major living languages, remains saturated with borrowed vocabulary."  The language lives on.

Shulman ends the book with a contemporary Tamil poem, by Manushya Puthiran.

Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #5

So, back to Wendy Doniger after that brief diversion to appreciate the world ;)

All we know is that the Indus Valley Civilization people vanished into thin air, and there were the people of the Vedas.

What was the relationship between the people who composed the Vedas (the ancient Sanskrit texts beginning with the Rig Veda, in around 1500 BCE) and the people who lived in the Indus River Valley?  Where were the people of the Indus Valley Civilization after the end of the IVC?

I would assume that one awesome, awesome prize awaits the person who successfully and convincingly answers those questions.

I wonder if it is also built into the old tradition not to get preoccupied with the origins. There is a Tamil saying that I often heard expressed back in the old country: "ரிஷி மூலம் நதி மூலம் ஆராயக்கூடாது" (do not try to trace the origins of sages and rivers.)  Thus, there was no systematic effort to dig up the past?  And now we are stuck with the best guesses that we can possibly come up with in order to sort out what happened to the IVC people, and where the Vedic people came from?

Doniger walks us through the guesses:

The Aryans invaded India from Indo-Europe
The Caucasians strolled in from the Caucasus
The Vedic people originated in India
The Vedic people lived in the Indus Valley

I am tempted to write "no dice" but cannot because Doniger writes that the six-sided dice that we use now traces its origin back to, yep, you are thinking correctly:

Archaeological evidence suggests that the use of the cubical dice began in South Asia and indeed in the IVC.

Some gamblers they were, it seems. It is high time India and Pakistan collected royalties from the trillions and trillions that have been gambled since that invention ;)

Grabbing the evidence from the horse's mouth--yes, horses are evidence here--Doniger writes:

Knowing how important horses are in the Vedas, we may deduce that there was little or no Vedic input into the civilization of the Indus Valley or, correspondingly, that there was little input from the IVC into the civilization of the Rig Veda.  

So, what's the answer?  Forget trying to solve the IVC/Vedic people puzzle.  Where and how did Hinduism originate?  There are at least five cultures that have made Hinduism "a bricoleur, a rag-and-bones man, building new things out of the scraps of other things."

(1) Stone age cultures in India long before the Indus are the foundation on which all later cultures are built.
(2) At some point, impossible to fit into the chronology or even an archaeology, come the Adivasis, the "Original Inhabitants" of India, who spoke a variety of languages and contributed words and practices to various strands of Hinduism. ...
Next come (3) the Indus civilization and (4) the village traditions that preceded, accompanied, and followed it, and after that (5) the culture of the Vedic people. Along the way, other language groups too, such as (6) the Tamils and other Dravidian speakers, who may or may not have been a part of the IVC, added pieces to the puzzle.

So, there, you have it.

Or, if you prefer a shorter answer: we have no freaking clue!