The (re)discovery of Tamil and other roots of tradition

The debate between the Anglicists and the Orientalists was not ended by the Minute of 1835, because their goals and their constituencies were different. The study of indigenous languages was not suspended with the advent of English education; it continued under the care of traditional pundits and missionary-grammarians alike, and led in fact to a polarization of language policy that then had to be resolved in post-Independence India.

In the case of Tamil, it was the missionary gramarians such as Caldwell who helped establish the notion that Tamil and the Dravidian languages were separate genetically from Sanskrit, but it was Tamil `orientalists' such as U. Ve. Cuvaminataiyar who `rediscovered' ancient Tamil literature and made it available to a wide audience. Before 1881, when U. Ve. Cu. first laid eyes on manuscripts written in a kind of Tamil he had never seen before, few in the Tamil tradition knew of any pre-Aryan Tamil culture. The subsequent development of the Pure Tamil Movement ( tanit-tamir iyakkam), the renaissance of Tamil literature, and the development of a Dravidian political movement (Justice Party, DK, DMK) must be seen both as stimulated by and reactions against the rise of English education and the work of `orientalist' missionary-grammarians. We deal with this in more detail in the next Chapter, that devoted to Tamilnadu.