Coromandel: A Personal History of South India

by Charles Allen

‘It was the civilization in which the invisible prevailed over the visible,’

Instead, they built a Parthenon of words: the Sanskrit language, since saṃ skṛta means ‘perfect’.15

Vishnu and Shiva, so dominant in later centuries, are all but insignificant to the early Arya.

Vishnu merits six hymns in the R-V while Shiva is entirely absent under that name, although part of his multifarious character lurks there as Rudra, ‘the howler’, god of wind. What is also apparent is that the composers of the R-V had no time for the worship of Shiva in his prime form, the linga, since linga-worship is unequivocally condemned in the R-V.16 This injunction points to linga-worship already being an established local practice, seemingly as shocking to the

‘Vedic Brahmins had fattened upon a steady diet of sacrificed beef’.

Robert Caldwell

Ellis

Francis Ellis deserves his due as the first European to suggest in print that the South Indian languages had a common root that was not Sanskrit, and the first to name that common source ‘Dravidian’. His death at the age of forty-two meant that the credit went to the missionary scholar Robert Caldwell.

Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought ‘Let me glorify my own religion’, only harms his own religion. Therefore contact (between religions) is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others.

When the Bengali social reformer and highly respected Sanskritist Rajendralal Mitra – the first Indian scholar to state publicly in writing that cow-worship and beef-eating had gone hand in hand in the Vedic era10 –

Chola queen: Sembiyan Mahadevi. Each of the Chola kings gave themselves grandiose and identifiable names and titles, but their royal wives had to be content with the single generic title of Sembiyan Mahadevi,

By triangulating these three titles, we can identify this exceptional lady as the queen of the Chola ruler who conquered Lanka in 925 CE and the grandmother of the formidable and formidably named Rajaraja (‘king of kings’), which places her as living from about 900 to 980.

One of the finest surviving examples of tenth-century Chola copper alloy casting in its first phase is now in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington (see page 243

But these were hard times, partly as a consequence of the Tambora volcanic eruption of 1815, east of Java, which disrupted weather patterns for some five years and had a devastating impact on much of Asia, leading to droughts, floods and widespread famines accompanied by cholera.15 Travancore was as badly affected as anywhere, while the

‘A Nair can approach but not touch a Namboodiri Brahmin: a Chovan [Ezhava] must remain thirty-six paces off, and a Pulayan slave ninety-six steps distant. A Chovan must remain twelve steps away from a Nair, and a Pulayan sixty-six steps off, and a Parayan some distance farther still. A Syrian Christian may touch a Nair (though this is not allowed in some parts of the country) but the latter may not eat with each other. Pulayans and Parayars,

led that remarkable Bengali reformer and intellectual Swami Vivekananda to declare in exasperation in 1897, ‘Was there ever a sillier thing before in the world than what I saw in Malabar country? The poor Pariah is not allowed to pass through the same street as the high-caste man, but if he changes his name to a hodge-podge English name, it is all right; or to a Mohammedan name, it is all right. What inference would you draw except that these Malabaris are all lunatics, their homes so many lunatic asylums, and they are to be treated with derision by every race in India until they mend their manners.’17

In 1881 Dayananda published a pamphlet entitled Gokarunanidhi, or ‘Ocean of mercy to the cow’, in which he declared the killing of cows to be anti-Hindu, leading to the formation of numerous cow-protection societies that increasingly assumed anti-Muslim, anti-British and Hindu nationalist overtones.

Savarkar now set out to wage his own war of independence, based on a vision of India as a Hindu nation made up of a Hindu race and a Hindu culture, as set out in his Essentials of Hindutva – written in 1923 in the penal colony of the Andaman Islands while serving out one of his many extended jail sentences

In the 1930s this university-educated sanyasi rose to become head of the pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim political party Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or ‘National Volunteer Organisation’, better known as the RSS.

That this sectarian view of Indian history did not catch on is largely because of the determination of two secularist politicians at opposite ends of the social scale: the Old Harrovian Kashmiri Brahmin patrician Jawaharlal Nehru and the outcaste-born Maharashtrian Bhimrao Ambedkar, the first ever ‘untouchable’ to gain a university education. Both men found themselves increasingly at odds with M. K. Gandhi’s vision of a Ramrajya, a model of government which harked back to a golden age as celebrated in the Ramayana when Lord Rama returns from exile to rule over Ayodhya.