No. 61. — 1908.] TAMIL VELALAS. 



23 



not wholly a Tamil- speaking country, the inhabitants of 

 Shen-Tamil Nadu reckoned it to be a Kodun-Tamil Nadu on 

 account of the prevalence of Tamil in some portions of it. 

 " Venadu " means then, as above explained, " the Vel Nadu," 

 or the Vel country, and not the " Ven " country, as later, or 

 modern usage, would have it. How this error has occurred 

 may be easily explained as follows ; namely, Venadu is a 

 compound Tamil vocable that may be resolved either into 

 Ven and Nadu, or into Vel and Nadu. As later Tamil pundits 

 adopted the former method of resolving the compound word, 

 the use of Ven, in place of Vel, consequently got into Tamil 

 literature. 1 



I now propose to investigate the date when the first ances- 

 tors of the Vels migrated from Velpulam and settled in Dra- 

 vida. If it be true that it was, as indicated in the tradition 

 mentioned by Nachchar, posterior to the age of Sri Krishna, 



district of Mathurai which formed the core and centre of the Shen- 

 Tamil, i.e., the pure-Tamil speaking Nadu or country, was always 

 known as the first and most ancient seat of the Pandiyas in Southern 

 India, and nothing but a reversal of the natural order of things could 

 convert a colony of Sanscrit-speaking men and women into a popu- 

 lation so jealous of the purity of a Mlechcha tongue, hated and despised 

 as it must have been by the other members of their race, that that 

 portion of the peninsula occupied by them came to be known, from 

 very early times, as " the Tamil country " par excellence, and the 

 kings who ruled over them as " the Tamil kings," whose pride it was to 

 cherish the purest dialect of the ancient language of Southern India. 

 But an examination of the facts of the case would clearly indicate that 

 this is not the right solution of the problem. I have already referred 

 to the fact, that Agastiyar himself was a "Vel" by caste. He was also 

 a relative, according to the Sanscrit Puranas,of Ravana, the Yakshaor 

 Rakshasa king of Lanka. Moreover, the Sanscrit records state that 

 " Yadu " was the progenitor of the Yadavas as well as of the Rakshasas. 

 The Shanars of Tinnevely claim, till to-day, an ancient connection with 

 the Rakshasas of Lanka, and as the Dra vidian affinities of these people 

 have never yet been questioned, it may fairly be concluded that the 

 ancient inhabitants of Gurjara were Tamil people whose kings claimed 

 descent from the sun and moon. — V. J, T. 



1 According to the author of "The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years 

 Ago" Venadu meant " the bamboo land," from " Ven," i.e., bamboo, 

 with which it abounded, and lay to the south-west of Pandi-Nadu, 

 between Periyar and Cape Comorin, and bordering on the Arabian Sea. 

 — See chap. IT., on " The geography of Tamil akam. " 



