NO. 46—1895.] ANCIENT TAMIL LITERATURE. 



37 



confirmed by the Sinhalese authorities cited by Mr. Rana- 

 sinha in his Paper entitled "Which Gaja Bahu visited 

 India ? " When this visit took place Senkuttuvan had been 

 on the throne of the Cheras for upwards of fifty years. * 

 Senkuttuvan's reign must therefore have begun about the 

 70th year of the Christian era. f 



5. Mr. E. S. W. Senathi Raja said : — 



The Paper that has just been read is one of special interest, I need 

 hardly say, to Tamils. The long list of poets and the long series of 

 years during which the Sangam lasted, as given in the Paper, are no 

 doubt based on tradition. But the antiquity of Tamil literature does 

 not depend on tradition alone. It may be inferred from the evidence 

 furnished by the Tamil literature itself, as well as from evidence 

 derived from other sources. Not to be tedious, I will give only one 

 instance of each. 



It is well known that the classical literature of the Tamils has been 

 written in a dialect called Sentamil, which is almost unintelligible to an 

 illiterate Tamil mac. The oldest grammar that has come down to the 

 present day in that dialect is called Tolhappiyam. Tolhappiyam 

 itself is not the most ancient work of its kind, for it appeals to the 

 authority of still older writers. Two books of Tolhappiyam have 

 come down to us, and there are four different classical commentaries 

 on it. Tolhappiyam on the face of it purports to be modelled on the 

 Aindra Vydharana, or the grammar of Indra, the oldest of the eight 

 schools of Sanskrit grammarians. How ancient the system of Aindra 

 Vydharana is may be gathered from the fact that it is the system 

 which is adopted in the Prdtichdhhyas of the Rig-Veda. The division 

 of letters into uyir (vowels) and mey (consonants), literally "life" and 

 " body," and the division of vowels into huril (short) and nedil (long) in 

 the Tolhappiyam, corresponds to the division into svra, sparca, hrasva, 

 and dirgha, respectively, of the Rig -Veda Prdtichdhhyas. The classifi- 

 cation of parts of speech into four, in the Tolhappiyam, as peyar 

 (noun), vinai (verb), idai (middle word), and uri (qualifying word), 

 is identical with the terms ndman, dhhydta, upasarga, and nipdta of the 

 Vedic grammarian. Similarly, the division of words into pagupadam 

 (divisible) and pagdppadam (indivisible) in the Tolhappiyam is 

 equivalent to the ingyapada and aningyapada of the Rig -Veda 

 Prdtichdhhyas. Again, the distribution of tenses into nigal-poludu 

 (present), iranda-poludu (past), and edir-poludu (future) corresponds 

 to the vartamdna hdla, paroxa hdla, and bhdvishyat hdla of the Yedic 

 grammarian. In fact, the whole grammatical arrangement is that of 

 the Rig- Veda Prdtichdhhyas, and the terminology is a literal translation 

 from Sanskrit. Now, if we turn from the Rig- Veda Prdtichdhhyas and 

 the Aindra Vydharana to the work of Panini, the prince of Sanskrit 



* Chilappatikaram, Nadukatkatai. The passage may perhaps also mean 

 that he had lived fifty years. 



f Cf. Journal, R. A. S., Ceylon, vol. XIII., p. 81 et seq. ; Mr. Ranasinha's 

 Paper, p. 144 et seq. ; also page 191, where the age of Karikala, Senkuttu- 

 van's grandfather, is discussed. 



