Tamil: One of the World's Oldest Living Languages

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Tamil is spoken by roughly eighty million people as a first language, chiefly in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the union territory of Puducherry, in the north and east of Sri Lanka, and in long-established communities in Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius, South Africa, Fiji, the Gulf, Britain, Canada and Australia. It holds official status in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, which is a rare distinction. It belongs to the Dravidian family, a group of some two dozen languages concentrated in southern India and unrelated to the Indo-Aryan languages of the north, a fact that has shaped politics as much as linguistics.

The claim in its usual form, that Tamil is one of the world's oldest living languages, needs care. Every living language is exactly as old as every other, since all descend from earlier speech in unbroken chains. What is defensible, and remarkable, is that Tamil has one of the longest continuous literary traditions of any language still in everyday use. A modern Tamil reader can approach poetry composed two thousand years ago with the aid of a commentary, in a way that an English speaker cannot approach Beowulf. In 2004 the Government of India declared Tamil a classical language, the first to be so recognised, on criteria including a documented history of over a millennium and a body of ancient literature not borrowed from another tradition.

Sangam poetry and the classical inheritance

The oldest surviving Tamil literature is the corpus known as Sangam, named for legendary academies of poets said to have met at Madurai. It consists of eight anthologies and ten longer poems, together with the grammatical treatise Tolkappiyam, and is generally dated between roughly the third century BCE and the third century CE, though individual datings are argued over. What is startling about this poetry is its secularity and its precision. It is organised around a scheme of landscapes, each associated with a mood: the mountains with union, the forest with waiting, the seashore with separation and grief, the arid tract with elopement and hardship, and the cultivated plain with quarrelling and infidelity. A poem can convey an entire emotional situation by naming a flower, a bird and a time of day. A parallel body of puram poetry addresses war, kingship, generosity and public life, praising and sometimes rebuking the chieftains of the Chera, Chola and Pandya lines.

The other pillar is the Thirukkural of Thiruvalluvar, one thousand three hundred and thirty couplets in one hundred and thirty three chapters, on virtue, wealth and love. Its aphorisms are short, memorable and almost entirely free of sectarian reference, which is why Tamils of every religion claim it and why it has been translated into dozens of languages. A colossal statue of Thiruvalluvar stands on a rock off Kanniyakumari at the southern tip of the peninsula, facing the Vivekananda memorial. Later came the twin epics Silappadikaram, the story of the anklet, and Manimekalai, and then the great devotional outpouring of the bhakti movement, in which the Nayanar poets sang to Shiva and the Alvar poets to Vishnu in Tamil rather than Sanskrit, an assertion that the vernacular could carry the highest religious expression. The Tevaram hymns are still sung daily in Tamil temples.

The material record is being pushed steadily backwards. Short inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi have been found in cave shelters near Madurai and elsewhere, dated by most epigraphists to around the third or second century BCE. Since 2013 excavations at Keezhadi on the Vaigai river near Madurai, conducted first by the Archaeological Survey of India and then by the Tamil Nadu state department, have uncovered brick structures, drainage, industrial activity and inscribed potsherds indicating a substantial urban settlement. The dating of the site and the significance claimed for it have become entangled with politics, with state authorities emphasising very early dates and central agencies more cautious, so the findings should be followed rather than settled.

A language people have died for

Tamil exhibits pronounced diglossia: a formal literary register used in writing, news broadcasting and oratory, and a colloquial spoken form differing substantially in pronunciation, verb endings and vocabulary. Nobody speaks the literary form at home. There has also been a sustained purist movement. The Tanittamil Iyakkam, the pure Tamil movement, launched by Maraimalai Adigal in the early twentieth century, sought to replace Sanskrit-derived vocabulary with Tamil formations, and it succeeded to a degree unusual among Indian languages, so that Tamil scientific and administrative vocabulary is far less Sanskritised than Hindi or Bengali.

That purism was inseparable from politics. The Dravidian movement, associated above all with E V Ramasamy, known as Periyar, and his Self-Respect Movement, argued that brahminical Sanskritic culture was an imposition on a Dravidian south, and attacked caste hierarchy, religious ritual and northern dominance together. When Hindi was promoted in Madras Presidency schools in the late 1930s, protests followed and people died in police custody. The confrontation returned far more violently in 1965, as the constitutional deadline approached for Hindi to become the sole official language of the Union. Students across Tamil Nadu protested, several set themselves alight, dozens died in the unrest, and the central government retreated, guaranteeing the continued use of English. The consequence endures: Tamil Nadu alone among major states refuses the three-language formula in its schools, teaching Tamil and English only, and any proposal touching Hindi in the state remains politically explosive. Both major Dravidian parties trace their descent from this movement.

Tamil is also a language of long-distance diaspora, and of two very different kinds. From the mid nineteenth century large numbers of Tamils, many of them from oppressed castes, were carried under indenture and kangani recruitment to the plantations of Ceylon, Malaya, Burma, Mauritius, Natal and Fiji, and their descendants sustain Tamil temples and schools in those places today. From 1983 onwards the civil war in Sri Lanka drove a second, refugee diaspora into Canada, Britain, France, Australia and India, whose politics remain intense and whose memory of the war's end in 2009 is raw. Meanwhile Tamil cinema, television and music, produced in the Chennai studios collectively known as Kollywood, carry the spoken language daily to every one of these communities, which is as good an argument as any that a two-thousand-year-old literary language is in no danger at all.

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