Tolkāppiyam

"It is unfortunate that the most ancient Sangam compositions are probably lost for ever ; we only know of them through brief quotations in later works. An early text, the Tamil grammar Tolkàppiyam, dated by most scholars to the first or second century AD,35 is “said to have been modelled on the Sanskrit grammar of the Aindra school.”"

"Its content, says N. Raghunathan, shows that “the great literature of Sanskrit and the work of its grammarians and rhetoricians were well known and provided stimulus to creative writers in Tamil.... The Tolkàppiyam adopts the entire Rasa theory as worked out in the Nàtya øàstra of Bharata.”"

"It also refers to rituals and customs coming from the “Aryans,” a word which in Sangam literature simply means North Indians of Vedic culture ; for instance, the Tolkàppiyam “states definitely that marriage as a sacrament attended with ritual was established in the Tamil country by the Aryas,”"

"The Tolkàppiyam also formulates the captivating division of the Tamil land into five regions (tiõai ), each associated with one particular aspect of love, one poetical expression, and also one deity : thus the hills (kuriji ) with union and with Cheyon (Murugan) ; the desert (pàlai ) with separation and Koççavai (Durga) ; the forests (mullai ) with awaiting and Mayon (Vishnu-Krishna) ; the seashore (neytal ) with wailing and Varuna ; and the cultivated lands (marutam) with quarrel and Ventan (Indra). Thus from the beginning we have a fusion of non-Vedic deities (Murugan or Koççavai), Vedic gods (Indra, Varuna) and later Puranic deities such as Vishnu (Màl or Tirumàl). Such a synthesis is quite typical of the Hindu temperament and cannot be the result of an overnight or superficial influence ; it is also as remote as possible from the separateness we are told is at the root of so-called “Dravidian culture.”"