Tamilnadu and India - timeline comparison

I recently delivered a talk on Sangam Era in Tamilnadu for a Delhi based forum. Most of the attendees knew very little about Tamilnadu history, either literary or political. I prepared this general timeline chart comparing India's major ruling dynasties along their co-eval Tamilnadu's major dynasties. This is not very accurate, only approximate.

Along with this I prepared an even rougher timeline chart of the kinds of Tamil literature composed in Tamilnadu co-eval with the political eras. I have included both here.

Related Posts

My Blogs on History 

Bharat Mata statue of Subrahmanya Bharathi

Bharata Matha terracotta image

Bharatha Matha Terracota figure of composite unit of India, as visualized by Mahakavi Subramanya Bharathi and his close associates, Mandayam Brothers S Thirumalachari, S Srinivasa Chari and S Parthasarathy Iyengar in the year 1916 during their exile at Pondicherry.  This idol was discreetly smuggled to Madras and taken in procession during Anti British movements. It has lost the Ceylon part which was in the form of a lotus bud at the feet,  during an encounter with British police.

Vande mataram.

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This text above, along with this picture, was shared by VK Srinivasan in our Tamil Heritage Trust Whatsapp group.

The Mandyam brothers owned a Tamil newspaper called Swadesa Mitran, in Madras (Chennai) and they hired Subrahmanya Bharati, the poet, as its deputy editor. Bharati today is primarily known throughout the Tamil speaking world as poet extraordinaire, a Mahakavi, whose patriotic poems about India, the Tamil language, are well known. But he did not earn much from his poetry; his primary income was as a journalist. He is considered THE pioneering journalist of the Tamil language - he wrote political essays advocating the expulsion of British rule (inspired by Bala Gangadhara Tilak), he introduced the first cartoons in Tamil newspapers, he wrote essays on science and technology, translated essays and poems from various languages of India like Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and English. He was considered an extremist in those days, a follower of Bala Gangadhara Tilak, as opposed to the moderates led by the lawyers of Madras, led by the indomitable V Krishnaswami Aiyar. He introduced the Bengali phrase Vande Mataram into Tamil, without modifying the words, and made it popular. He also published an English newspaper, for years.

A cartoon published by Subramania Bharati
Gandhi as a cow, the British as tigers

He formed a patriotic group with VO Chidamaram Pillai, Subramania Siva, Aurobindo Ghosh and VaVeSu Iyer. VO Chidambaram a lawyer of Thoothukkudi (Tuticorin), an old harbour city near Kanyakumari, is famous for starting a shipping company. He was later arrested and sentenced to jail, where he was also sentenced to be yoked (Literally a wooden yoke, like a plough) to an oil-press (instead of a bull) and forced to pull the oil-press.

Bharathi and others condemned this arrest and cruel sentence. The British issued an arrest order for Bharati for one of his essays, and he escaped to Puducheri (Pondicheri) which was under French rule, taking the advise of his friends. He spent nearly ten years in Pondicheri, in self-exile. At some point he was exhausted with his exhile and came back to British India - that is Madras province. He was arrested in Kadaloor (Cuddalore) and sentenced to jail, but was released after promising not to write against British government policies. Sadly he died a few years later. 

The Mandayam family, which ran the SwadesaMitran newspaper, and had hired Bharati as a writer and assistant editor, somehow inherited the terracotta idol of Bharata Matha. Decades later, after independence, N Balasubramanian, a mathematician and cryptologist, and an avid lover of Tamil literature and especially Subramaniya Bharati, was an active membre of Delhi Tamil Sangam. By the 1960s, a significant number of Tamils had moved to Delhi, a vast number of them employed as bureaucrats in the Government of India, and quite a few in academic circles also. The Delhi Tamil Sangam, regularly held meetings in which they discussed literature, hosted visiting writers, speakers, artists, etc; conducted music concerts (mostly Carnatic music) and Tamil plays and so on. Balasubramanian, who wrote under the Tamil pseudonym Nagupoliyan was one of the very active members of this group. On one of his travels, a member of the Mandayam family gave him the Bharatha matha statue for safekeeping. From then on, every monthly meeting of the Delhi Tamil Sangam started with a prayer and puja to this Bharata Matha statue. In 1982 the centenary year of Subramaniya Bharathi, year long celebration called Bharati 200 was conducted. It was called Bharathi 200 rather than 100, in the hope that Bharathi would be remembered for at least another hundred years. 

When Balasubramanian retired and settled down in Madras (Chennai), he brought back this image with him and somewhere along the way, the Bharata Matha statue returned to the Mandyam family. During the condolence meeting of R A Padmanabhan in 2014, who wrote a biography of Subramaniya Bharati, I met one of the stalwarts of the Mandayam family - Mandayam Parthasarathy Iyengar, then around 96 years old; he was one of the speakers.

Mandayam Parthasarathi Iyengar at 
condolence meeting of RA Padmanabhan, 2014

I met "Nagupoliyan" Balasubramanian around 2010. We called him Balu sir and learned about the various aspects of his life only later. He announced a weekly Sanskrit class then, and I began to attend it regularly until 2015 or so. I didn't learn much Sanskrit, but learnt a lot about sanskrit and also learnt a lot about Bharati and a many fascinating aspects of Tamil literature from him. At this point he only had a photo of this Bharata Matha statue with him. In December 2010, he decided to donate a collection of his books on Bharati and his Bharati memorabilia, including clippings from several newspapers and magazines to the Mahakavi Bharati School in Kasuva village, near Thiruninravur, run by Sevalaya. I accompanied Balu sir and several of his writer friends, where stalwarts like writers Ja Ra Sundaresan, and Rani Maindan spoke. Balu sir had already donated some of his collection to the Bharati Illam, a memorial house in Tiruvallikeni near the Parthasarathi temple, and they are on display there.

Sevalaya founder Muralidharan speaking
Balasubramanian, Ja Ra Sundaresan, Prof Va Ve Su on stage
Mahakavi Bharati school, Kasuva

Memorabilia from Balasubramanian collection 
Mahakavi Bharati school, Kasuva

Cryptography class in Balu sir's residence, Kotturpuram

Balu sir passed away in 2019. He told the story of this Bharata Matha idol several times. Once during the performance of an experimental play titled, Chennaiyin Gnanaratham, compered by Vallabha Srinivasan, wife of VK Srinivasan, Balu sir simply walked on to the stage and narrated this story. It became a hit

A few years later, I visited Bharathiyar Illam in Tiruvallikeni with Balu sir, and just outside, we were pleasantly surprised to meet Mandayam Parthasarathy Iyengar, the aged gentleman at the RA Padmanbhan condolence meeting in the front row. He was a then a resident of Tiruvallikeni. A few years back, at the age of 102, he featured in several news channels as the oldest persons to vote in the election (2019 elections, I think). He has since passed away.

VK Srinivasan's whatsapp photos brought back some memories, and hence this blog. It may be some interest that one of the pillars in a mandapam of the Mylapore Kapalishvara temple, has an image of Bharatha matha, which looks very much like this one. This mandapam was constructed in the 20th century.

Bharatha Matha sculpture
Mylapore Kapalishvara temple, Madras

Related blog essays

• Condolence meeting for RA Padmanabhan ரா அ பத்மநாபன் அஞ்சலி (notes in Tamil)
• Subrahmanya Bharathi’s Essays and Short Stories - notes from KRA Narasiah lecture
• மழநாட்டு மகுடம் Tamil Short Story by Nagupoliyan

History - three perspectives

Here are three quotes about history, in particular Indian and Tamil history, that I find quite insightful and fascinating, all the more because they seem somwhat orthogonal to each other.

The first is by Bishop Robert Caldwell, famous for writing a book titled “Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages,” which ushered in a new era in linguistics. This particular quote is from his book “The History of Tinnevelly.” Tinnevelly is the British spelling of Tirunelveli, a town and district in the far south of Tamilnadu.

        “It is singular fact, that the Hindus, though fond of philosophy and poetry, of law, mathematics and architecture, of music and the drama, and especially of religious or theosophical speculations, seem never to have cared anything for History.”

This is a very common observation, by most historians. The contrast between the voluminous histories of ancient civilizations like China, Egypt, Rome, Persia and even Sumeria, stands in stark contrast to the lack of a historical sense among the Indian literati.

But here’s a very different opinion, from a contemporary of Caldwell, the American novelist Mark Twain, who visited India in the later 19^th century. Obviously, Twain was no historian, but he had a sense of India as a culture that seems to transcend the dry series of events, that often constitute history.

      “India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grand mother of tradition.”

 A little hyperbolic, no doubt, but some of Caldwell’s British predecessors, like Sir William “Oriental” Jones, who founded and ran the Asiatic Society, and his remarkable successors like Horace Hayman Wilson, Henry Colebroke, James Prinsep and Alexander Cunningham and Lord Curzon would have wholeheartedly agreed. So would have the stalwarts of the Madras school of Orientalism, like Colin Mackenzie, FW Ellis and Walter Eliot. But the more lastingly famous Brits, like John Mill, Lord Thomas Macaulay and that irrepressible colonialist Winston Churchill would have and vehemently contest this. And it is their legacy that fills our history books, while the legacy of the Orientalists decorate the land and its musuems and the hearts of Indologists.

I give the final word on a sense of history, to one of my favorite historians, PT Srinivasa Iyengar, who begins his book “A History of the Tamils: From the earliest times to the sixth century AD,” thus:

“If by history is meant the story of rise and fall of royal dynasties, on the slaughter of an immense number of human beings on the fields of battle in the name of heroism, the tale of the displacement on the map of the world of large masses of humanity, eager to plunder the wealth accumulated by the patient toil of peaceful people, the narrative of rape of royal maidens and shedding innocent blood in revenge for the outrage, then Tamil India is the happy country, which has had no history to recount upto 600 A.D.

“On the other hand, if history means the slow evolution of the social and religious life of a people, under the stimulus of geographical conditions of the environment and the influence of contact with peoples who have developed different kinds of culture, the description of the slow change in the ways they ate and drank, played and loved, sang and danced, paid court to kings and gods, the relation of the story of development of their internal trade and commerce with foreign countries, far and near, the narration of the evolution of their literature from humble beginnings till a complicated scheme of literary convention was established, there are ample materials for reconstruction of the history of the Tamils from the earliest times upto 600 A.D. This story is attempted to be recounted in this book.”

On September 25^th, I gave a lecture on the History of the Early Tamils, for the Southern India Cultural Series, conducted by Ramu Endowments and its founder RT Chari, at Tag Center Alwarpet. And I used Srinivasa Iyengar’s book as a major source for that lecture and my understanding of Tamil history.

If you liked this essay, you might enjoy these too

1. Caldwell's discovery of the Munda Language Family
2. The Keezhadi excavation near Madurai
3. What did Brahmagupta do?
4. Macaulay Sanskrit and English
5. The Origin of Modern Chemistry
6. Madras - India's first modern city

‎World Cup‬ ‪Cricket‬ - my suggestions

‎World Cup‬ ‪Cricket‬ 

Some strategy suggestions: the 200 barrier

Keep Chris ‪Gayle‬ under 200 - runs scored
Keep Brendon ‪McCullum‬ under 200 - batting run rate
Keep Australia under 200 - team total
Keep AB ‪deVilliers‬ under 200 - degrees of batting angles
Raise ticket prices to $200 - to avoid 40000 Indian fans in the stadium

கிரிக்கட் உலகக்கோப்பை - சில யோசனைகள்

இருநூறுக்கு மேல் இப்போது வேண்டாம்

1. கிரிஸ் கெய்ல் - 200 ரன் அடிக்க விடாதே

2. பிரண்டன் மெக்கல்லம் - 200 ஸ்ட்ரைக்ரேட் தாண்ட விடாதே

3. ஆஸ்திரேலியா - 200 ரன் எடுக்க விடாதே

4. ஏபி டிவில்லியர்ஸ் - 200 டிகிரிக்கு மேல் சுத்தி சுத்தி அடிக்க விடாதே

5. இந்தியா ஆடும் போட்டிகள் - டிக்கட் விலை 200 டாலராக்கு குறைய விடாதே - இல்லையேல் 40,000 இந்திய ரசிகர்கள் காதை பிளந்துவிடுவார்கள்