How Tamil Secessionist Propaganda Can Be Countered Through Cultural Literacy

Tamil Nadu is witnessing an interesting phenomenon. Small groups of secessionists promoted by an influential section of old media are trying to promote the idea that Tamil Nadu has never been part of the mainstream Indian culture, which they identify with ‘Aryan, Brahminical culture’ at one level. At another level, they see India as a colonial artificial construct – a prison house of linguistic and ethnic nations – suppressed again by a Brahminical establishment, a sort of neo-colonial continuity.

For long, Tamil Nadu has been a testing ground for colonial racial conjectures. Professor Kamil Zvelebil (1927-2009), a Czech Indologist, who was himself given to the Aryan-Dravidian binary, conceded the colonial abuse of the linguistic term ‘Dravidian’:

The British concoctions were uncritically internalised by some influential Tamil scholars. V Kanakasabhai Pillai, then an important Tamil writer, wrote in his 1904 book, The Tamils 1800 Years Ago, that Brahmins were responsible for making a conscious attempt to bring the Tamils under the Brahminical caste system. And Pillai zeroed in on Tolkappiyam as that conscious attempt. Pillai then went on to praise the British and asked Tamils to liberate themselves from the “harmful philosophy taught by Bhagavad Gita”.

Zvelebil points out that Pillai's views were accepted by “later scholars, V A Smith, L D Barnett etc.” K N Sivaraja Pillai (The Chronology of the Early Tamils, 1932) repeated the charge against Tolkappiyam. When K P Padmanabha Menon wrote his History of Kerala (1924), he too expressed similar views. (ibid.)

Today, genetic studies have repeatedly disproved the idea that the so-called Aryans or Brahmins introduced the caste system in Tamil Nadu. Yet, the 200 years of drilling of theories like Aryan invasion and Dravidian separateness from the rest of India have been internalised by old-school academicians in Tamil Nadu who refuse to view the history through fresh post-colonial frameworks. This is also true of politicians who have developed a vested interest. Thus, from the 2G spectrum scandal to the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) examination to conspiracy theories about archaeology in Tamil Nadu, the political rhetoric in the state invokes invariably the Aryan-Dravidian rhetoric.

In other words, in Tamil Nadu, secessionist propaganda has become the last refuge of the corrupt. Though the problem is blatantly evident in Tamil Nadu, it is in no way limited to the state. In Karnataka, the Congress Chief Minister demanded a separate state flag. Not stopping at it, he in a surreptitious manner extended political support to the demand among a section of Lingayats, a Saivite sect, for separating themselves from the main body of Hinduism. With this, he was playing the same game the Tamil separatists and previous colonialists were playing. The mechanical response would be to counter such forces by imposing Hindi. But that would be falling into the binary trap of the secessionist forces. The problem has to be dealt in a holistic manner.

When a fringe-secessionist, Thirumurugan Gandhi, makes a statement that the concept of Bharat Mata was alien to Tamil Nadu and should not come south of Andhra borders, a section of media helped it go viral. The statement is a stunning proof of the complete cultural illiteracy of Tamil secessionists. Tamil culture is very much a part of the greater Indic cultural matrix. It has contributed immensely to what is today Indic culture and spirituality and has been nourished from the very early times by Indic cultural protoplasm in which it is situated.

Let us start with Sangam literature. Usually dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE, the literature shows a society in which the Vedic values are part and parcel of everyday life. The poets of that age implicitly understood the cultural unity of India and sang about it. Tamil kings were hailed as descendants of those great unifiers of this land. Praising a Chera king, Sangam poet Kurungkozhiur Kizhar gives the boundaries of the cultural nation:

From southern Kumari to the northern great mountain

With ocean as boundaries in both East and West

Uniting all in between the

Mountains, hillocks, forests and populated areas

They your ancestors ruled this land verily like the

Solar disc of sweet rotation bringing dawns

Removing those harmful and ever setting their sceptre right

In their lineage you come… (PuRanAnooRu. 17: 1-8)

Even more amazing is the land description that Karikizhar, another Sangam poet, gives for Muthukudumi Peruvazhuthi of Pandya dynasty. He sings that his praise of his patron should spread all over the world with his own land as the epicentre. So he gives the boundaries beyond which his praise should travel thus:

Beyond the north of the snow-clad Mountains

Beyond the south of fearsome sea of Kumari

Beyond the east of the dug up eastern sea

Beyond the west of the western ancient sea

Below the three layered earth

Above the celestial land of the cows

May your praise be spread and strength be felt

And may you rule splendidly like the never erring needle of the scales …

(Purananooru. 6:1-10)

It is interesting to note that the poet, while describing the geographical boundaries of the homeland, refers in passing to the puranic-ithihasic account found both in the Mahabharata and the Puranas – of the digging of the east sea by the sons of Sagara, in search of the sacrificial horse. The three-layered Earth mentioned is again part of Vedic cosmology, where the vertical space is divided into three layers, the earth, interspace (antariksha) and the heavens. Celestial cows are again Vedic imagery.

It is not only in the Sangam literature but throughout the course of Tamil cultural history that one finds Tamils expressing a great sense of cultural unity with the rest of India. One can say India as we know today has had a substantial contribution from Tamils.

Let us consider the famous story of the squirrel helping Rama build the bridge. For every generation of Indians, this story has been told and retold. The Indian palm squirrel (Funambulus palmarum) has three dark bands on its back. Throughout India and beyond, wherever the influence of the Ramayana went, the story also went and it became the symbol for how the contribution of everyone to any noble cause is equally important irrespective of the quantum of contribution.

The anecdote not found in the original Valmiki Ramayana is incorporated in Sri Ranganatha Ramayanam (Telugu, eleventh century), Jagamohan Ramayana (Oriya, fifteenth century) and even in the traditions of Laos. The devotional genius of Thyagaraja through the composition Enduku Nirdaya immortalised in music ‘uData bhakti’ – the devotion of the squirrel.

The earliest literary reference to the story is in Tamil. Azhwars, the 12 mystic devotional seers belonging to the period between the sixth century and ninth century CE, had sung extensively on Vishnu and his avatars. Thondaradipodiyazhwar (around the eighth century) speaks of the squirrel episode in his Pasuram:

When the monkeys were moving the mountains

The innocent squirrels rolled in the wet sand

And helped build the Sethu.

Am like neither.

With the heart as hardened as the wood and filled with vice, (leave alone the body)

Even with my heart I am not serving my Lord of Sri Ranga.

In other words, the simile of the squirrel – the quintessential Indic symbol for selfless contribution of ordinary individual to magnificent causes of common good – is the creation of the Tamil mind. This is just one instance of how what we consider as Indic culture is the confluence of many streams each flowing into the other and making a mighty stream of eternal dharma – a phenomenon perhaps unique in the world and Tamils are very proud originators of the process.

It is this understanding of the civilisational process, which secessionists of all hues as well as those who advocate the thesis of India as a colonial construct, have never understood. The secessionists particularly base their conceptions of linguistic nationhood from Stalin while the others cling to Western models.

Well into the freedom struggle, Tamil contribution to the nationalist movement shows a seamless continuation with the dimension of Tamil heritage discussed above.

One of the earliest Indian proponents who insisted on a separate Tamil identity was Maraimalai Adigal (1876-1950). However, he also composed a hymn on Mother India, which is very similar to the Anandamath depiction of the glorious and fallen Mother:

Oh Mother India who gave the world many riches,

Thou art the lamp of light to the entire world!

Thou art dear to me as very life of my life!

How can I with my little knowledge

Elaborate upon the multi-splendored greatness of Thee!

Thou with wealth that can never be lost,

Stand today impoverished by plundering aliens!

That shame shall be wiped out by thy children!

Enlightened they toil to revive thy glory in fields diverse!

May they flourish and succeed in their efforts and

May our minds cease to suffer!

Often, shallow anti-Brahminism, which was more a result of perceived or real Brahmin domination in the colonial administration, was back-mapped to history, which in turn was distortedly viewed through the Aryan-Dravidian race theory. This resulted in a paradoxical situation for Tamil scholars who batted for a separate Tamil identity. For example, in his commentary on ninth-century Tamil Saivaite text Thiruvachagam, Adigal writes:

Yet in the course of the same commentary, he proceeds to prove the primacy of Shiva over other deities on the authority of the very ‘Aryan Vedas’ he despised in the pages of the same book:

The inherent contradiction that an artificial imported framework creates for the indigenous culture and spirituality cannot be more clearly brought out than this. The colonial infrastructure was built on the cultural matrix provided by India. The imposed colonial education was designed to break that very living soul of India. Often, the colonial infrastructure and institutions, built to serve the imperial enterprise, is taken as the very construction of the nation of India by pro-colonialists. In the self-contradictory passage of Adigal, we see the battle between the separatist tendency of imposed colonial education and the innate experience of indigenous cultural knowledge. If India is a nation today, it is in spite of the British and not because of them.

As the freedom movement gathered momentum, the creative genius of Tamil poets contributed substantially to it. Subramaniya Bharati (1882-1921) simply restated the boundaries as mentioned in classical Tamil literature when he asked the children to worship this very land as a deity.

In the north is the mighty Himalayas child dear,

In the south the ever alive Kumari

Both in the east and the west

See the great ocean my child!

This is the land of Vedas;

This is the land of brave-hearts;

The great non-partitioned Hindustan

Worship this as your Deity my child!

Bharati’s lines integrating the grandness of Tamil and India, became so popular in Tamil Nadu that most of the stage dramas in the state used to end with the singing of the following verses of Bharati:

Hail the classical Tamil! Hail the good Tamils!

Hail the great auspicious Bharat land!

Thiru V Kalyanasundranar (1883-1953) was a great Tamil scholar and one of the pioneers of the workers’ movement in Tamil Nadu. Known as ‘Tamil breeze’ for his eloquent scholarly discourses and writing in Tamil, he had composed a ‘litany’ for freedom, in which he wrote:

Bliss is this land Bharat

Just looking at Bharat removes all miseries;

Vande Mataram is the great Mantra;

Chant it and get Freedom!

…

Calm majesty personified is the Himalayas

Abiding by it is a religious state

Behold the flow of Ganga

It is verily the dance of God Himself;

Venkatarama Ramalingam Pillai (1882-1972), very popular in Tamil Nadu as Namakkal Kavingar (poet of Namakkal), saw the rise of the Dravidian secessionist movement making false claims about a separate Tamil identity. In his lyrics, he battled these tendencies:

Between Venkata hills and the ocean bound Kumari

The land being ruled as a separate state is

For the convenience of administration and nothing more!

That which binds us up to Himalayas

As Indians is one unity civilizational !

Anyone who separates themselves from this unity

Can never claim to be True Tamil!

Such examples can be multiplied with no end.

One cannot understand the heartbeat of Tamil language if one’s heart does not beat to the tune of India. One cannot understand the spirit of Sangam literature without a Vedic worldview. One cannot appreciate Tamil without Kambar and Ellango. One cannot despise the Ramayana and admire the genius of Kambar. Without resonating with the goddess traditions throughout India, the grandeur of Ellango’s poetic vision can never be comprehended. It is not by just introducing Hindi alone that the secessionists can be defeated. Hindi is the instrument of the Indian state. Tamil is the essence of the Indian nation. Just improve Tamil curriculum and make it true to the spirit of Tamil language – and you would have defeated the secessionists immediately. A culturally literate Tamil would have no problem in accepting Hindi as a link language and the resistance that comes with the feeling of imposition will go.

If we design our curriculum to make our students understand the classical heartbeat of any Indian literature, then that is the most guaranteed immunisation against all fissiparous tendencies. It requires committed and intelligent curriculum design with a deep knowledge of Indic languages.