Tamil Hindus 2000 Years Ago

This book is a sequel to my earlier publication Hinduism in Sangam Literature. I am continuing the topic ‘Tamil Hindu Encyclopedia’ from part 16. Hinduism was practiced in day-to-day life with great enthusiasm. It is very visible in the 2000 year old Sangam poems. According to historians, the Puranas took the current shape in the Gupta Age. But Sangam poems are earlier than that. If it is the correct dating, then the first evidence for several Puranic anecdotes come from Sangam literature. It is amazing to see that the southern most part of India had practiced Hinduism in minute detail with great enthusiasm.

Here in this book, I have dealt with Tamil belief in tree nymphs, water nymphs and ghost and ghouls. We must understand that we are reading about a civilization that lived 2000 years before our time. But the amazing virtues of hospitality, helping the poor, equality in delivering justice and respect for truth and honesty are seen. Like every ancient society there were brutal wars; and Tamils were the only society in the world where we see internal fights between Chera, Choza and Pandyas for over 1500 years. But they united when Rajasuya Yajnam was performed by a Choza king. That shows their respect for Hinduism. All the three parts written by me show the Hindu religion or Sanatan Dharma was practised at that time in the southernmost part of India.

Sangam Tamil books are at least 2000-year-old; chronologically Tamil stands next to Sanskrit in India; though 6000 year old Vedas are still available and recited in all the temples and Vedic Schools, Tamils have lost many of their ancient works. But fortunately, we see the continuity of Vedic thoughts in Tamil Sangam books; they are 18 in number. There is another grammatical treatise Tolkappiam which is considered older than the 18 books. We see full-fledged Hinduism in it. The book mentioned Vedic Gods as the Gods of the Tamils. I have been writing about it from 2011. This book has some of the articles on this topic.

The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems - both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series.

Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.

This is a Book of Quotations with a difference. I have selected over one thousand quotations mainly from Hindu scriptures. I have included books from Sanskrit and Tamil languages. Most of the quotation books have more foreign quotations than Hindu quotes. It is very rare to see Kalidasa or Tamil Tiruvalluvar in such books. I have given quotations from Dr. Radhakrishnan, Vedas, Upanishads and Tamil ethical works.

This book contains articles on various subjects. If you look at the contents page, you will get an idea of the range of subjects I have dealt with. But the main focus is on two books Amarakosa, the Sanskrit dictionary cum thesaurus and Brihat Samhita of Varahamihira, an encyclopaedia in Sanskrit. The commentaries on Amarakosa give us enormous information. But not all the commentaries are available in English. I have collected as much information as possible through a Sanskrit scholar.

This is the third part of my collection of anecdotes from an old book of anecdotes. I have not written anything. I have only compiled them. It will be very useful for party goers. The beauty of the book is that the anecdotes are arranged topic wise. Students may use this book for essay writing. Anecdotes regarding doctors, salesmen, sportsmen, politicians, authors, producers and other people from various walks of life are covered in this part.