Arguably, Tolkāppiyam is the earliest theoretical linguistic composition in the combined classical tradition of the world. It also remains the most comprehensive linguistic treatise to this day encompassing as it does the poetic, cultural and environmental functions of language within the linguistic domain, thereby making this magnum opus in classical Tamil a composite text of literary linguistics, cultural linguistics and ecolinguistics besides extending its range and breadth of vision to several areas of applied linguistics.
Be that as it may, Tolkāppiyam also contains several quasilinguistic insights that bear on sociology. These insights are ideas and concepts embedded in language and they for sure become data for the history of ideas in Tamil. It is these ideas that Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, the twentieth century south Indian rationalist icon and social reformer par excellence, assimilated and turned into an integral part of his central agenda for his social reform movement and campaign. The fact that Periyar, Thanthai Periyar as he is endearingly called, came to make them the nucleus of his social philosophy and the first principles of his social reformist doctrine entitles him as it were to be called the ideational heir of Tolkāppiyar and the classical Tamil ethos, although being separated from the latter by more than three millennia. The following are these ideas in brief.
Scientific temper
The key expression that concludes every speech of Periyar as well as every speech on Periyarism is “Use your brains; think it over”,
this idea, central to Periyar’s rationalism, also finds a strong reflection in Tiruvalluvar’s celebrated couplets in the Tirukkural.
Wisdom is to discern the truth in things;
Whatever they are and of whatever kind they be. (355)
Whatever is heard and whosoever it may come from, To discern the truth therein is wisdom known. (423)
These two couplets represent the crystallization of scientific temperament and rationalism. Scientific temperament and rationalism are, in turn, an inheritance from Tolkāppiyar whose composition breathes scientific spirit and scientific temperament through and through. Here is Tolkāppiyar’s vision of composition of the world/universe which he documents at a time when the Egyptians and Sumerians, the Aryans, Greeks and Jews had resorted to the unknown hand of a divine agency to explain the creation of the world:
A structured blend of
Earth, fire, water, air and space As the world is . . . (1581)
The following is another proposition in Tolkāppiyam that embodies an outstandingly futuristic scientific insight into evolution and natural selection with the embedded biological truth of flora breathing life:
Single-sense organisms have the sense of touch; (grass, creepers, trees)
Two-sense organisms are endowed with touch and taste; (snails, shellfish)
Touch, taste and smell go with three-sense organisms; (termites, ants)
Four-sense organisms have sight added to the three; (crabs, bees, beetles)
Five-sense organisms are gifted with hearing in addition; (birds, beasts)
Mind’s faculty is the sixth sense known;
Thus goes the classification by discerning folks. (1518)
Here is yet another postulate from Tolkāppiyar, the pioneer linguist of the world, describing the production and articulation of speech sounds in Tamil in an empirically sustainable statement:
The egressive airstream originating around the diaphragm And worked by the action therein
Moves through the chest, throat and head
And reaches the teeth, lips, tongue, nose and palate, Gets duly modified within these eight organs
And comes out in forms distinctive; Thus are phonemes all produced. (83)
It is precisely this tradition of scientific temperament, and scientific orientation that Thanthai Periyar belongs to.
Deeply entrenched in this tradition of scientism, the Tamil mind nurses no unscientific, speculative assumptions either
about the existence of the universe or about the language being a human creation for human expression and communication. It was this environment that shaped the rationalist and reformer that Periyar was.
Divinity and godhead
With regard to divinity and godhead, Tolkāppiyar’s conceptulization is human centric, rather than a quest for mythological, imaginary sources as the Aryans and Greeks had done. The Tamil concept of divinity is the divinization of deceased men and women of exceptional feats. Says Tolkāppiyar,
Choice of proper stone
For erecting the memorial of the fallen warrior, Commencing the sculpting of the dead warrior’s image,
Giving the stone a ceremonial bathing, Erecting the stone thus sculpted,
Bestowing honours right in accord with tradition
And praise and worship extended to the stone. (1009)
Linguistically also, god is a part of the human system. Look at Tolkāppiyar classifying all nouns of the language into human class nouns and non-human class nouns (484). More importantly, nouns denoting gods have no distinct gender suffixes (487). Again, god is conceived as a part of the physical features of the given landscape (karupporuḷ), not as the primary/first thing (mutalporuḷ).
God, food, animal, tree,
Bird, drum, occupation and the lute And such of these
Constitute the physical features of the given tract of land. (966)
Unfettered love
There is another seminal conceptualization in Tolkāppiyam which has come to define one of the central social reform planks of Periyar. It is the freedom and self-determination of womenfolk. Periyar’s doctrine in this regard is perfectly in line with the akam concept of love between a man and a woman where two adult individuals fall in love with each other naturally (iyaṟkaippuṇarcci) on no other consideration than the desire to be united sexually like all living beings on the earth:
Joy is
The joy of union between the sexes
As they unite in passion with their loving mates. (1165)
A Kuṟuntokai poem wonderfully captures the natural coming together of a man and a woman:
What could my mother be
to yours? What kin is my father to yours anyway? And how
did you and I meet ever?
But in love
our hearts have mingled
like red earth and pouring rain. (46) Trans. A.K. Ramanujan
The most instructive, inescapable implication of this poem, and the akam concept of love is that it transcends the man-made, artificial barriers of caste, creed, religion and colour of skin. It is a conception in which divinity has absolutely no role to play; so are the rites and rituals. This is precisely the Tamil concept of love. Periyar has adopted this akam love in its entirety.
Thus, across questions of divinity, religion, rationalism, and women’s rights, Thanthai Periyar stands as a distinct and original voice that nonetheless converses deeply with the best currents of the Tamil intellectual tradition. His thought does not derive from earlier authorities; rather, the spirit of Tamil critical knowledge — as seen in thinkers like Tolkāppiyar and Tiruvalluvar — finds a fearless, modern expression in him. Periyar strengthens the living continuum of Tamil culture not by inheritance alone, but by creative rupture and renewal. To engage with Periyar, therefore, is not to look backward, but to carry forward a Tamil tradition that opens out to the world through scientism, rationalism, and humanism.
