A Comical Book on “Presence of Ancient Tamil Words In Other Indian Languages”

 

A Comical Book on “Presence of Ancient Tamil Words In Other Indian Languages”

Shrikant G Talageri 

 

Someone gave me a book “Presence of Ancient Tamil Words In Other Indian Languages” by a writer named R Madhivanan, pubished by Central Institute of Classical Tamil, Chennai, 2023, which he had apparently picked up on a recent visit to Chennai.

About the writer of the book (priced at Rs. 300), the back cover gives the following information:

“Dr. R. Madhivanan specializes in Tamil etymological studies and formerly served as the Chief Editor of the Tamil Etymological Dictionary project initiated by the Government of Tamil nadu. He has authored four books on the decipherment of the Indus script., with his latest work titled “Indus Script among Dravidian Speakers published in 1995.

Madhivanan’s approach to deciphering the Indus script is based on several fundfamental principles. He posits that the Indus civilization originated in Kumari Kandam, an ancient Tamil land, and that the people inhabiting the Indus Valley were Tamils. He also asserts that the language of the Indus civilization was Tamil. Madhivanan suggests that the Indus script is syllabic and written from left to right, similar to the Tamil script. He applies the grammatical rules of Tolkāpiyam to the Indus language”.

 

I gave a quick glance through the book as soon as I took it, and even that cursory glance showed me that the writer was very evidently a super-hyper-P.N.Oak, whose etymological claims would completely put in the shade the original P.N.Oak, and would replace the name of P.N.Oak with his own name as the King of Comical Etymologies. P.N.Oak, of course, did not have behind him the power of government Ministries and agencies to give an official stamp to his comical claims, but this writer, as we can see from the above description of his position and career, very clearly does.

Although I immediately realized what the intellectual level of the book was likely to be, I was still in the hope that I would perhaps get (hidden within the piles of rubbish) at least a few inadvertent clues to some genuine Dravidian borrowings into Vedic, Classical Sanskrit and modern Indo-Aryan languages which would be useful in any historical study of inter-language influences in India. Alas! The book is indeed pure rubbish, and I realized that going through the entire over-170-pages of lists of alleged “ancient Tamil” borrowings into other Indian languages would be a totally fruitless task absolutely not worth the trouble.

Nevertheless, a short picture of what the book has to say will be interesting and useful.

The book gives lists of allegedly “ancient Tamil” words in various “other Indian” languages as follows:

Hindi (pp.1-5)

Sindhi (pp. 6-10)

Marathi (pp. 11-13)

Gujarati (pp. 14-17)

Punjabi (pp. 18-22)

Santali (pp. 23-29)

Malayalam (pp. 30-33)

Kannada (pp. 34-37)

Telugu (pp. 38-41)

Tulu (pp. 42-43)

South Dravidian - Non Litrary (sic) Tribal Languages (pp. 44-59)

Central Dravidian - Non Litrary (sic) Tribal Languages (pp. 60-99)  

North Dravidian - Non Litrary (sic) Tribal Languages (pp. 100-110)

Dogri (pp. 111-115)

Bengali (pp. 116-118)

Odia (pp. 119-121)

Sanskrit (pp. 122-128)

Prakrit (pp. 129-134)

Pali (pp. 135- 139)

Kashmiri (pp. 140-154)

Assamese (pp. 156-158)

Angami Naga (pp. 159-162)

There follow a few pages of mixed multi-lingual lists (pp. 164-174) followed by alleged non-lexical (i.e. phonological, grammatical, etc.) borrowings from Tamil (pp. 174-180).

That someone can sit down and write so many pages of utter piffle and publish them as books, and occupy important positions in academic bodies, is testimony to the low level of academic research and study in such fields in India, especially when they have the backing of half-baked political ideologies and parties.

To go to the actual content of his “ancient Tamil words”:

1. He devotes 81 pages (pp. 30-110) to giving lists of words in other Dravidian languages, and instead of recognizing that such words must be native words in those languages (since they are also Dravidian languages sharing the same common proto-Dravidian ancestry with Tamil, so that these words are cognate words and not borrowed words) he treats them as borrowings from Tamil.

[Incidentally, it is even possible, since I did not look too deeply into these lists (in these other Dravidian languages), that the lists may also include not just Dravidian words native to these languages but also all kinds of Sanskrit words borrowed into these Dravidian languages].

2. He also devotes 55 pages (pp. 6-10, 14-29, 111-121, 140-162) to words in other Indian languages (Indo-Aryan as well as Santali and Angami Naga) that I do not know and cannot comment specifically on.

Likewise, another 11 pages deal with Prakrits (129-139), and while it is perfectly possible that Prakrits (like various modern Indo-Aryan languages) must have borrowed from Dravidian languages (as distinct from “Tamil” as a specific source), I cannot sift through the chaff: again, because I do not know the Prakrits concerned or sources to check the claims.

3. That leaves 8 pages of Hindi and Marathi words, and 7 pages of Sanskrit words that I could have gone into if this book had represented a serious intellectual, academic and scientific study into the subject.

There are indeed very many words in Marathi (being a border-language with the Dravidian languages) that are borrowed from neighboring Kannada: off-hand, and without going into detailed studies at the moment, one word that immediately comes to my mind is the word huḍuk (“search out”). Strangely, this word is missing in the 3-page list.

But (along with some possible genuine borrowings) the list includes a whole lot of purely Indo-Aryan words with cognates in Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages as well. To take a few of the most blatant examples:

a) tēthē/tithē “there” (Sanskrit tatra, English there/thither, Greek tê), weirdly spelt as de:te, is claimed to be borrowed from Tamil avviḍam!

b) śāḷā “school/room” (Sanskrit śālā , Latin cella, Greek kella/kalia, English hall, etc.), spelt as sa:la, is claimed to be borrowed from Tamil ca:lai (actually borrowed by Tamil from Sanskrit)!

c) ghar “house” (Sanskrit gṛha, Avestan gərədō, Russian gorod, Lithuanian gardas, etc.), spelt as gar, is claimed to be derived from Tamil nagar!

d) śēt “field, cultivable land” (Sanskrit kṣetra, Hindi khēt, Old Iranian forms kšaθra, shōithra) spelt as ce:t, is claimed to be derived from Tamil cey! 

Likewise zā (spelt ja:) “go”, yē (spelt e:) “come”, dalit (translated as “worker”), magar (spelt mahara) “crocodile”, darwāzā (spelt darwa:ja) “door”, jahāz (spelt jaha:j) “ship”, and many other clearly Indo-Aryan (one or two even in Persian-Urdu forms) words are given as borrowings from extremely unlikely Tamil words.

To illustrate the utter incongruity, extreme unlikeliness and inanity of the connections sought to be drawn, Marathi hāk mār “call out” (in which the word hāk means “call”, and mār “beat” makes it a compound verb “call out”) is wrongly reduced to ma:r translated as “to call”, and this is claimed to be borrowed from Tamil viḷi “to call” (through a mysterious intermediate form mili – mi:r)!!

Likewise, it is perfectly possible that there are countless words in later Sanskrit and also in modern North Indian Indo-Aryan languages borrowed (either via Sanskrit or through some other via media) from Dravidian languages. There are many studies on this subject, and I have referred to many of these words in my articles, including certain Dravidian words borrowed even into the New Rigveda (brought by rishis originating in the Dravidian south who became part of the New Rigvedic/Late Harappan culture of the northwest by migration).

But any hopes, that this book will prove useful in searching out, or preparing lists of, these words, get destroyed by a glance at the very first page (page one) of the book which starts to list the “Tamil” words borrowed into Hindi. This list freely includes Hindi words of pure Sanskrit or other Indo-Aryan (and even Persian-Urdu) origin as borrowings into Hindi from extremely unlikely Tamil words and forms.

Some gems from page one (I will not bother to proceed further beyond page one): akēlā (spelt ake:la:)  acchā (spelt achcha)  adhik (spelt adik), āgē (spelt a:ge), idhar (spelt idar), āj (spelt a:j), lēkin (spelt le:kin), udhar (spelt udar), ūpar (spelt u:par), rūpa (spelt ru:pa), lē (spelt le:), mat (spelt math).

I cannot go on!

Sorry, P.N.Oak, you are no more the King of Comical Etymologies. Already you were facing very stiff competition from western academicians (like Witzel to name just one) who were churning out lists of Dravidian and Austric origin words in the Rigveda. Who knows, you may already have lost the title to some of them already. But now you have been beaten hollow by this book.