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number of them were collected in later times into anthologies called Aganānūṛu,[1] Puṛanānūṛu,[2] Naṛṛinai,[3] Kuṛundogai,[4] etc. These poems, though their vocabulary shows a very slight admixture of Sanskrit and Prakrit words, due to the intercourse of South India with North India ever since the beginning of the Vedic Age, notwithstanding the rivalries between the fire cult of the latter with the fireless cults of the former, are yet entirely free from the influence of Sanskrit literature in the subject matter of poetry and in literary form. These poems undoubtedly reflect the conditions of life peculiar to the ages when they were composed. Unlike the artificial epics of post-Christian Sanskrit literature, these early Tamil poems, which it is now usual to call śaṅgachcheyyuḷ[5] are a mirror of the ages when the poets lived. Catastrophic changes occur in the life of a nation only when there is a violent contact with foreign people of a different stage of culture. As no such event occurred in South India, it is certain that the life-conditions reflected in these old poems are at least partial echoes of those of the previous far off ages which we are now discussing. But at the same time it must be remembered that the evidence of this literature should be pressed into service very cautiously, when we are sure that the customs and manners referred to therein are not later developments but evidently come down from early times.
Besides these anthologies there exists the wonderful grammar called Tolkāppiyam,[6] one book of which, called Poruḷadigāram,[7] is the grammar of ancient Tamil poetry. This book belongs to the period when Ārya influence had fully penetrated South India; it was composed by Tṛnadhumāgni, a Brāhmana of the Kāppiya (Kāvya) clan, a branch of the Bhārgava Gotra, members of which began to migrate into South India under the leadership of Paraśurāma when he retired from North India after his quarrels with the sons of Arjuna Kārttavīrya (about 2500 b.c.). Tolkāppiyar studied pre-existing grammars written by several previous Tamil Pulavar[8] (scholars), and then composed the Tolkāppiyam. But wherever possible he tries to impose the Ārya canon law on the Tamils and to equate Tamil customs, social and literary, to Ārya ones; yet his attempts to mix up Arya and Tamil culture is not much of a success, for the two cultures, one based on the fire cult and the other on the fireless cult, one, the product of a religious aristocracy and the other, of a social democracy, could blend as little as oil and water.
Hence it is easy to separate the Tamil culture embodied in ancient Tamil poetry and in the Poruḷadigāram from the well-known Ārya culture of the Ārya law-books first imported into Tamil country by the early Brāhmaṇa settlers. From these several sources of information it is possible to construct a picture of the life which the Tamil people led from the later Stone Epoch onwards in the ages that may be called Pre-Aryan, of the life that they led and the culture they had evolved independently of any other people, till the large incursions of the Jainas, the Buddhas and the Brāhmaṇas in the first millennium before Christ caused the final blending of the Ārya culture and the
