The Dravidian Cause

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Bandhs, college closures, demonstrations, violent speeches of politicians and celebrities alike, arrests following the demonstrations, arrests followed by speech: read the news from Tamil Nadu few weeks back. Though the frequency has reduced, there is still more to come. I was able to imagine Tamil Nadu embroiled due to the ongoing war Sri Lanka. But, today, the question in the mind of a common man is, “All these are another nation’s internal politics and these whips cracking on stone was for some cheap mileage.” I define a common man as any individual who thinks a lot about himself and little about the world. He has never been in any kind of trouble. This was my attitude too. This was what I believed in till now. And now I realized, it’s time, when reality shatters your beliefs, you have to look out in to the open, in to the wider spectrum of truth.

The ties between Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu goes way back than many of us know right now. May be the politicians or activists who are fighting for the cause or any other analysts interested in that region know what can be a dust compared to the knowing and the suffering of the affected people themselves. Though I have been hearing a number of versions about the historical account of the Sri Lankan past, I am yet to fix my mind on any of those versions.
Version 1: Singhalese ill-treating Tamils who migrated to Ceylon.
Version 2: Earlier Tamil migrants ill-treating the Later Tamil migrants.
Version 3: Singhalese are oriya people who migrated to Sri Lanka.
The first version is the one widely known. My conversations and a lot reading have confirmed that this is the effect of the same divide and rule policy employed by the British Raj. Many sources say that the problem had its root when the British favored and recruited mostly Tamils who had migrated there over the native Sinhala people. This enraged the Sinhalese and so they started avenging the Tamils by stripping them off their rights. The Tamils in turn had to fight the crime of an organized and widely recognized government structure. And the rest is “Rolling stone gathers momentum”.
There was constant exchange of man and material between the two nations such that some even quote that these two were under the same rule many times. So, during the chola and pandya incursions during the early 9th and 10th centuries caused a migration that resulted in the Tamils settling down at Jaffna. But, I am not sure of the conditions during the reign of Tamil king Elara over Jaffna (2nd century BCE). There was a second major wave of settlement as tea plantation workers during the British reign. The second version is that the earlier settlers dominated over the later settlers.
Mahendra, the son of Ashoka , the great carried Buddhism to Sri Lanka. The kingdom of Kalinga is the region of modern Orissa. It is obvious that he carried with him his language and the language of the religion of his purpose. I am not really sure if there was mixing of people or just words. Some sources claim that Sinhala is about 80-85 % similar to adivasi oriya dialects spoken in Andhra Pradesh. However, the history of Ceylon is very interesting. They say that they are the exiles from one of the kingdoms of Kerala. However, the truth and authenticity of the claims are not going to win over the aspirations of the powerful and crazy people.
Sinhala belongs to the indo-aryan language group. But Tamil is a Dravidian language. There are about twenty three Dravidian languages. Major ones are Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu spoken in the four southern states of India while Brahui is also a Dravidian language spoken in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan while the other languages are spoken in bits and pieces in other parts of India. Tamil is spoken by the Tamils in Ceylon too. It is interesting to note the claims of some of the philologists on how Tamil and dravida are the same. The word Dravida got corrupted to Dramila which again got corrupted to Tamila and hence today’s Tamil. The imagination is crude but I am not sure about the reasoning. Though most of the major languages of today can be traced back to the Indo-aryan languages, the Dravidians languages cannot be. The Dravidian languages remain as a separate group. However the experts were able to find some commonalities between the Dravidian languages and the Finno-Ugric languages. Well, the result was no different; the discussion was again about migration. The uniqueness of the Dravidian languages as against the other languages was that these languages were not derived from the same source as the other major languages of the world. I am not trying to disparage the other languages but just trying to highlight the beauty of the Dravidian languages. They should be revered to the same extent as the mother of Indo-aryan languages, Sanskrit.
Well, coming back to Dravidians, though significant contributions towards the early scriptures were in Tamil and majority of the works cite and revolve around places from the four states, the lost scriptures or perhaps the forgotten works were resurfaced by many Sri Lankan Tamils. It was in 1860 that a person by name Arumuganalvar published Tirukkural, Thamotharapillai, also from Jaffna published a commentary on Tholkaappiam from palm leaf writings. Another writing, “Tamil 1800 years ago“by Kanagasabapillai , a Jaffna Tamil cited the various aspects Tamil society. I laud their efforts though I may or may not agree with their writings or ideology. Swaminatha Iyer from Tanjore and Nallaswami Pillai from Trichy have resurfaces a lot of Tamil scriptures and writings based on the works of the aforementioned gentlemen. These explain the ties which hold the Tamils together.
The sympathy towards the Sri Lankan Tamils is still unshaken in TamilNadu from 1980s but the perspective has changed at least a little if not completely. The purpose of freedom movements and tigers were praised by a lot of people prior to the ghastly assassination of our Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. It was a shame for our country. The Common Tamil people in Sri Lanka are the ones caught in the tussle between the Sri Lankan government and the tigers.
It is high time, that these two groups realize the necessity of a peaceful coexistence. As of now, a third party intervention is not an amicable solution and not until the ocean around Ceylon becomes oil or when USDA finalizes that the best source of bio-diesel is the Lankan tea. The words of some of the upcoming kollywood directors/actors seem more meaningful than any politician’s votebank words.The link below directs to the comments of Professor P. Radhakrishnan to rediff:
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/oct/24inter.htm
Though I do not like the ideals of Mohandas.K.Gandhi, I still admire his eternal quote,
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”