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that on a careful study conducted according to the fundamental principles of modern etymological science, many Sanskrit words will be found to be borrowed from those of the languages which prevailed in India in the early Iron Age. At any rate the idea that the gods who were worshipped before the rise to popularity of the Ārya cult were borrowed and ennobled and idealized by the Rishis is not quite so absurd as people imagine.
Now Indra has become extinct in the marudam region. Ever since the worship of Siva and Vishṇu rose to mighty proportions from the sixth century a.d. onwards, under the inspiration of the singers of the Śaiva Tevāram and Vaishṇava Pirabandam, Indra disappeared. His place of popularity in the minds of the common people, especially of the river-valleys, has been usurped by a non-vedic God, who has no Tamil name but whose worship is most wide-spread in the Tamil country, viz., Gaṇeśa or Viṣhvaksēna, the generalissimo and the remover of difficulties. How this came about I cannot at all explain. I can only note in passing that while Indra was a constant rider on elephants, Gaṇeṣa combines in his person human and elephantine features.
From marudam I shall now turn to Neydal, the littoral region. Here were evolved the occupations of fishing, salt-scraping, salt-manufacture, and the selling of salt, of fresh fish and salted fish; they made canoes, dug-outs and wicker work boats; the Paradavar men sailed on the sea, at first hugging the coast, and, later, boldly struck across the black sea, Karuṅgaḍal,[1] and reached far off countries where they exchanged the cotton cloth and timber of South India for scented gums, sugar and other products of foreign lands. Their God was Varuṇan, another deity also invoked in the Ārva rites; but the worship of Varuṇan by the Valaiñar,[2] the men who plied the net, the lowest of the low, was of course very different from the fire-worship of the same deity. 'It is the new moon and the red-haired Paradavar[3] men have not gone along to fish in the broad, black, cold sea; with their dark-skinned women clad in green-leaf garments, in the midst of their huts, which were built on the sea-beach whose sands smell of fish and which had low roofs on which were placed the long angling rods, on the sands of the front yard on which the nets were spread like a patch of darkness on a moon lit-floor, they planted the horn of the gravid swordfish and invoked on it their God. They wore (round their neck) garlands made of the cool flowers of the white Kūdāḷam[4] (a kind of Solanum), which grows at the foot of the Tāḻai[5] (screw-pine), and (on their heads) the flowers of the tāḻai, which has long petals; they drank the toddy from the palmyra which has a rough skin, and also the liquor brewed from rice, and danced. In the noisy part of Pugār,[6] where appearing like a red cloud on a black hill, and like a (red-haired) child at the mother's (black) breast, the Kāviri mixes with the clear and dark waters of the ocean-wave, they bathed to get rid of their sins, and, then, bathed in the river to get rid of the salt on their skins; they hunted for crabs and played in the spreading waves; they made
