The Reconstruction of the Early History of Tamil-Speaking Southern India

In Old Tamil Sangam poetry we hear villagers complaining about their unhappy love lives and poor bards in search of royal patrons who would support them in exchange for poems praising their heroic deeds. The scenes are set in Tamil-speaking southern India from before the appearance of the Pallava dynasty in the sixth and seventh centuries. On the assumption that the poets describe a contemporary society and in the absence of few other, material, sources, this corpus of lyrical poetry has become an all-important source for the reconstruction of the history of Tamilnadu and Kerala between the 3rd c. BCE and the arrival of the Pallavas. It will be argued, though, that the poets did not describe a contemporary society and that Sangam poetry was developed only in the 8th c. CE under the aegis of the Pandya kings. These later Pandyas presented themselves as rightful successors of the rulers of that same name of the earlier period and as carrying on a literary tradition that we are made to believe goes back to these earlier rulers. In Sangam poetry, we have to do with fiction, fiction about life in the countryside, and fiction about the past. While it is an unreliable source for the early history of Southern India, it does provide an interesting example of a process taking place around the same time all over the subcontinent, namely the use of the regional languages for fictional literature, which before that was the exclusive domain of Sanskrit. Tamil is not only slightly earlier than the other regional languages but also provides insight into the ideas and successive steps involved in this process of vernacularization.