The Tamil Nadu Factor

By M. S. Thambirajah –

National Peoples Power’s leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s recent visit to India had been the subject of much conjecture and speculation recently. The reason the visit raised eyebrows was that its parent party the JVP was blatantly anti-Indian. Of its infamous five classes to enlighten the masses about the political milieu in Sri Lanka the second one was on Indian expansionism. In fact, his Indian invasion theory was lifted from N. Sanmugathasan’s lectures and writings on the subject. While Sanmugathasan saw Indian intervention as a possibility in the event of an uprising by the Sri Lankan working class, Rohana Wijeweera gave it a communal twist to entice Sinhala youth to his fold. Creating an enemy – even if it be imaginary one – is the surest way to unite people around you. It tapped into the inherent fears of the Sinhalese engendered over the centuries by Indian invasions of the past. Comrade Rohana Wijeweera extended the concept and included the poor estate workers of Indian origin in his conspiracy theory by portraying them as the fifth column. It worked. And we know what happened thereafter.   

Whether we like it or not we cannot escape the fact India is our closest geographical neighbour Here are some facts: Sri Lanka is only 67 kilometres away from India (approximately the same distance between Colombo and Kalutara), its main religions originated from India; the two cultures are broadly similar; most Sri Lankans resemble South Indians in appearance so much so that the Westerns cannot distinguish the two groups by their looks. Yet, for many Sinhalese the word Dravidian conjures up images of Chola conquest of the Anuradhapura Kingdom in the tenth century and King Elara vs. King Dutugamunu –  duel of 161 BCE. Beyond sentimentalism, whether one likes it or not, the geography, history, culture and, dare I say, the politics of Sri Lanka, are inseparably linked with those of India (witness AKD’s recent visit to the Big Brother). One of the main sources for the feeling of insecurity of the Sinhalese is the imagined vision of hordes of Dravidians invading and occupying Sri Lanka.

But who are these Dravidians?

The word Dravidian is not a Tamil word, it is derived from the Pali word Damila (or maybe the Sanskrit word Dravidah) which means people of South India. In fact, the word Dravidian does not refer to a racial group but to the group of languages spoken in  South India. The main Dravidian languages are  (in order of population) Telegu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. For centuries it was believed that all Indian languages originated from Sanskrit. Sanskrit was said to the Devabasha (language of the Gods) that was considered to be the source of all Indian languages including Tamil. This view was fostered mainly by the Brahmins. That was until 1856, when Robert Caldwell, a missionary for London Missionary Society published his famous study Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages that established beyond doubt that Tamil and other Dravidian language were different and distinct from Indo-Aryan languages such as Sanskrit, Bengali and Hindi.

Robert Caldwell was a remarkable scholar. Born in Ireland to Scottish parents, Caldwell graduated from the university of Glasgow where he came under the influence of Daniel Keyte Sandford, a professor of Greek whose innovative research encouraged Caldwell to take an interest in comparative philology. It is said that Caldwell was proficient in seven languages. At the age of 24 Caldwell arrived in Madras  as a missionary of the London Missionary Society.  He walked from Madras to Tirunelveli, a distance of more than 500 kilometres where he would later serve as Bishop. He settled down in the little village of Idaiyangudi south of Tirunelveli, established a church and worked among the poor of the village. He is said to have converted thousands of Tamils of the area to Christianity. But, it is his research into South Indian languages that has immortalised him.

Caldwell realised that he had to be proficient in Tamil to preach to the masses and he began a systematic study of Indian languages. Having been trained as a linguist he did much original research on Tamil language and history of Tirunelveli. He is best known for his work on languages of India. His thesis, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856; revised edition 1875. Available online) was a seminal piece of work that demonstrated for the first time that the Dravidian languages were not genetically related to Sanskrit, thus disproving a view that had been held by Indian scholars for more than two millennia. Drawing on his research he proved that the South Indian languages of Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada formed a separate language family, which he named the Dravidian languages.

In his book, Caldwell wrote that Vedic Hinduism had been imposed on the indigenous culture of the Dravidians – a view that has been validated by subsequent research. He claimed that the Brahmins were of Indo-European stock who had colonised South India and installed a harsh caste ridden social hierarchy upon the society, making sure they were on the top. Indians have never been good at writing down their history. Even the edicts of Emperor Ashoka were deciphered by James Prinsep (1799-1840) a colonial administrator, with the help of Sri Lankan Buddhist monks. The point is this: it was the scholars in service of the colonial government who initiated a fact-based approach to writing Indian history. Until then most Indians made no distinction between mythology and history. Parenthetically, it must be noted that present day Barathya Janatha Party (BJP) and its parent body Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) equates Hinduism and India and calling it Hindu Rashtra insists that Mahabharata and Ramayana are historical documents.

Bishop Caldwell could not have foreseen the impact his work would have in Tamil Nadu. His assertions about the Dravidian languages provided  one of the impetus for the formation of the Dravidian movement that swept through the South Indian political scene in the 1930s and 1950s. The movement known as Dravidar Kazhagam was led by EV Ramasami, an iconoclast, rationalist social reformer  popularly known as Periyar, whose party demanded an independent Dravidian State which included all four Dravidian speaking states of South India. The movement failed to find support among other Dravidian states and was limited to Tamil Nadu. Dravidian nationalism was  based on three ideologies: dismantling of Brahmin hegemony, social reform by abolition of the caste systems, religious practices  and gender equality and renaissance of the Tamil language.

In the late 1960s, the political parties advocating Dravidian ideology gained power in the state of Tamil Nadu. Irked by the demand for secession Jawaharlal Nehru set about amending the constitution to ban any party with sectarian policies from participating in elections.Known as the Anti-Secessionist Amendment, it debarred any party that espoused sectarian principles from participating in elections. Faced with the new constitutional change, the Dravidian party under the leadership of CN Annadurai (popularly called Anna) did a U turn and decided to give up the demand for an independent Dravida Nadu in 1962 and decided to advocate for better allocation of resources from the central government and co-operation between the federal states of the South. Thus, the present day Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and other Dravidian parties was born. His movement changed the face of contemporary Tamil politics forever.

A grateful Tamil Nadu, erected a bronze statue of Bishop Caldwell 1968 on the Marina beach, Chennai. It is one of eight statues of distinguished Tamil scholars commissioned by the DMK. In its commemoration plaque Caldwell is described as “the pioneer Dravidian linguist”.

CN Annathurai, the first DMK chief minister made the following declaration in the first speech he made at the Rajya Sabha in April 1962: “I claim Sir, to come from a country, a part in India now, but which I think is of a different stock, not necessarily antagonistic. I belong to the Dravidian stock. I am proud to call myself a Dravidian. That does not mean that I am against a Bengali or a Maharashtrian or a Gujarati. As Robert Burns has stated, ‘A man is a man for all that’. I say that I belong to the Dravidian stock and that is only because I consider that the Dravidians have got something concrete, something distinct, something different to offer to the nation at large. Therefore, it is that we want self-determination”.

Dravidian parties have been in power in Tamil Nadu for the last 57 years and the signs are that together with its allies it will win overwhelmingly in the next election scheduled for  2024. Incidentally, the saffron party (BJP) has never won an election in Tamil Nadu on its own, and its vote share has not touched the double-digit mark. In the 2019 general elections   the BJP did not win any Lok Sabha seat out of the 39 seats in Tamil Nadu. Despite Tamil Nadu chief Mr. Annamalai’s grandiose assertions it is highly unlikely that in the upcoming assembly elections the BJP could win more than one seat out of 234 constituencies in the Tamil Nadu. The best the BJP could hope for in the state is to forge an alliance with other minor parties and increase its vote share. Tamil Nadu has been in the forefront in rejecting the Hindutva policies of BJP and the chances are that the BJP will not gain foothold in Tamil Nadu in the near future.

Away from elections, it is a fact that of all the Indian states in terms of development Southern states have consistently outperformed the Northern states. In the human developmental index (HDI, a widely accepted measure of development based on indices of health, education and a decent standard of living) for the year 2022 Kerala came first, Tamil Nadu comes 6th and other Southern states outpaced most of the Northern ones. In some of the North Indian states the HDI is closer to those of Congo. Incidentally, the HDI of Sri Lanka over the years has always been better than those of India. In 2022 India’s rank was 134 while Sri Lanka came 78th.

Another myth that needs to be dispelled is the “Indian invasion theory’ that some Sinhalese subscribe to. It is true that living close to a massive continent such as India evokes many anxieties. The same is true of Cuba and the US, Hong Kong and China. But, in the case of India and Sri Lanka it would be wrong to fall a prey to such paranoia. Remember that even at the height of the quarter century long civil war no army from Tamil Nadu came to the help of the LTTE. The reason for this is simple: Tamil Nadu is a federal state in India and it has no army. It is true that some Tamil nationalists in Tamil Nadu have been vociferous supporters of LTTE but they had no teeth. It is the central government that decides on matters of external affairs. Although the population of TN looks massive (81.5 million) compared to that of Sri Lanka (22 million). But in India, Tamils are in a minority and constitute 5.8% of the Indian population which now stands at 1.4 billion. Compare this with the populations in Sri Lanka where the Tamil speaking population (Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamils of Indian origin and Muslims) constitutes 17.5% of the total population. Thus, in proportional terms  Sri Lanka has more Tamil speaking population than India! General (now Field Mrshall) Sarath Fonseka understood this well. In an interview in an Indian television channel when he was asked about Tamil nationalist politicians and the possibility of Tamil Nadu intervening in the war he quipped, “They are jokers”! Also note that when India did intervene Premadasa and Pirabaharan got together to fight it to the end.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Periyar, the founder of Dravidian movement. It is said that SJV Chelvanayagkm, the then leader of the Federal Party visited Periyar, the founder of the Dravidian movement and asked for his support, Periyar said quixotically, “How can one beggar help another beggar”!

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