Latest news with #Proto-Dravidian
The Hindu
09-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Writers, intellectuals condemn Kamal Haasan's Kannada remark
Scores of writers, artists, linguists, intellectuals and Kannada activists staged a day-long protest in Dharwad on Monday in protest against the recent remark made by veteran multi-lingual actor Kamal Haasan on the origin of Kannada language. During the protest spearheaded by Karnatak Vidyavardhakh Sangha, the protestors staged a sit-in in front of the office of the Deputy Commissioner in Dharwad and condemned in strong words the remark and the subsequent statement of the actor. The protest was in pursuance of the decisions taken during the recent consultative meeting of the sangha after the actor refused to apologise for his remark. Addressing the protestors, president of the sangha Chandrakanth Bellad, general secretary Shankar Halagatti and others, including writers and intellectuals, strongly condemned the adamant behaviour of the actor, despite the strong criticism and a series of protest across the State against him on the issue. They said that the veteran actor is behaving in an irresponsible manner even after a court gave him an option to apologise for his remark. The speakers clarified that the sangha has no opposition either to Tamil language or Tamil-speaking people as it is a known fact that languages originating from Proto-Dravidian language evolved into different languages. They also further clarified that their protest is not against Tamil language or Tamils but against an irresponsible statement by Kamal Haasan and his subsequent conduct. The protestors demanded that he withdraw his baseless statement on Kannada language, express regret and apologise to Kannadigas. If he failed to do so, the sangha will be compelled to launch an intense State-wide agitation, they said.
The Hindu
08-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Decoding the Kamal-Kannada episode
Actor Kamal Haasan's remark that 'Kannada was born from Tamil' has sparked several debates. But this is not a new idea; it has existed within the Tamil discourse for two centuries. Robert Caldwell and other linguists have said Dravidian languages branched off from a shared language, termed Proto-Dravidian. However, Tamil nationalists have never accepted this view. They have claimed that all Dravidian languages are offshoots of Tamil. At its peak, this belief extended to proclaiming that Tamil is the world's first language and that all other world languages were born from it. The more acceptable idea Even today, these two schools of thought continue to thrive in the Tamil intellectual space. The idea of a Proto-Dravidian language has gained traction beyond Tamil Nadu. In contrast, the notion that Tamil is the source of all languages has little traction or acceptance outside. We now live at a time when awareness around linguistic dominance has grown politically in India's multilingual context. Every national group tends to hold its language as the primary marker of its identity. Any idea or action that is perceived as one that diminishes their linguistic pride often invites a fierce backlash. In such a climate, it is more appropriate on public platforms to affirm the idea that all Dravidian languages emerged from a common Proto-Dravidian root. Culturally and politically, this view fosters harmony and equality. To say other languages came from Tamil can easily be perceived by others as demeaning to their language and identity. They may see such a claim as a form of dominance imposed on them. For Tamil nationalists, who mix ancestral pride with political messaging, such assertions may help construct a narrative of ancient greatness. But beyond that, in contemporary politics, this view only serves to isolate Tamil Nadu. Without strong, widely accepted academic evidence, there is no need to insist that Tamil is the source of all languages. "I won't apologize if I am not wrong" Kamal Haasan on Kannada-Tamil controversy The classical attributes of Tamil — its antiquity, literary richness, and unbroken literary tradition — are well known to other language communities and to the world at large. Merely presenting these strengths is enough to bring honour to Tamil. Even when compared with modern literature of any Indian language, Tamil literature stands equal, if not superior. What we need are conscious efforts to take this richness of Tamil to a wider world. In 2022, Hindi writer Geetanjali Shree won the International Booker Prize. This year, Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq received the same honour. Tamil, too, deserves to be taken to such global heights. What we need is a sustained cultural effort in that direction — not the unproductive habit of making provocative statements that alienate speakers of other languages. When Mr. Haasan said 'Kannada was born from Tamil,' his intent was not to insult that language. Kannada actor Shivarajkumar was on stage, and Mr. Haasan was speaking with pride about his warm relationship with that family. He was pointing to the kinship between Tamil and Kannada and was trying to say 'we are family; ours are sibling languages'. It is likely that in that moment, the idea that 'Tamil is the origin' — an idea long held by a section of Tamil thinkers — came to his mind. But there is no reason to doubt his intentions. He has the freedom to express such a view in public. Those who hold opposing views can disagree, and speak or write in response. But to issue threats to him is a violation of his right to express an opinion. The court's view When a case regarding the release of his film Thug Life came before the court in Karnataka, the judge almost compelled Mr. Haasan to apologise. While linguistic fundamentalists are prepared to turn this into a conflict between two regional nationalities, should the court be approaching it in a way that favours them? The police may treat this as a law-and-order issue, but the court cannot view it that way. Should the court function like a kattapanchayat (extrajudicial body) enforcing commercial compromise? The court should have treated this as an issue of freedom of expression. Anyone can say they are hurt by a particular view, but what is the measure of being hurt? Anyone can deliberately create social tension. The court cannot consider such people as a party to compromise. The court should have said that it will carefully examine whether Mr. Haasan has the right to express such a view; that this has no relation to the release of the film; and that it will allow the film's release with police protection. Whatever way the case came before the court, it should have been approached from the standpoint of freedom of expression. In a democracy, the court is the final refuge that safeguards that right. Mr. Haasan did not apologise. He explained that 'the opinion was not wrong; it was misunderstood.' Normally, if any issue arises around a film, the standard response is to issue an immediate apology, remove scenes, and make compromises to facilitate the film's release. For the first time, someone from the film industry has said, 'I will not apologise.' 'Thug Life' premieres amid fan frenzy & tight security in Tamil Nadu Whatever commercial calculations may lie behind that stance, the courage to make such a statement must be acknowledged. As the court itself said, this is not a matter of arrogance, but of self-respect. A person has every right to express an opinion and to stand by it if they believe it is right. Democratic opposition to such views can certainly be voiced. But issuing violent threats or denying someone their right to live must be treated as punishable crimes. Perumal Murugan, scholar and literary chronicler who writes in the Tamil language
The Hindu
08-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Protest in Dharwad today by writers, linguists, activists against actor's remark
Taking strong exception to the recent remark by veteran actor Kamal Haasan on the origin of Kannada language, several writers, artistes, linguists, intellectuals and Kannada activists will stage a day-long protest in Dharwad on Monday. The protest spearheaded by Karnatak Vidyavardhakh Sangha, a century-old representative body of Kannadigas, will be staged in front of the office of the Deputy Commissioner of Dharwad. The protest will begin at 11 a.m. Taking exception to Kamal Haasan's remark on the origin of Kannada, Karnatak Vidyavardhak Sangha held a consultative meeting on June 2 in which senior Kannada scholars, artistes and intellectuals took part. After due deliberations during the meeting, the sangha passed several resolutions. They are: Despite having stated that 'Tamil is the mother of Kannada and that Kannada originated from Tamil', actor Kamal Haasan has neither apologised to Kannadigas nor expressed regret. He has also not complied with the High Court's directive to tender an apology. The Karnatak Vidyavardhak Sangha has no opposition either towards Tamil language or Tamil-speaking people as it is known fact that languages originating from Proto-Dravidian language evolved into different languages. Despite this being the truth, Kamal Haasan has reportedly stated that he still intends to speak about Tamil supremacy. He has the right to speak about his language, but belittling or demeaning another language is strongly condemned by the sangha. 'By June 25, Kamal Haasan must withdraw his baseless statement about Kannada language, express regret and apologise to Kannadigas. If he fails to do so, the Karnatak Vidyavardhak Sangha will be compelled to launch a State-wide intense agitation,' says the resolution passed by the sangha. In pursuance of the decision taken during the consultative meeting, the sangha will stage a dharna on Monday and submit a memorandum registering its protest against the actor's remark.
New Indian Express
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
When the sound of silence is prized
The Kamal Haasan starrer Thug Life is in trouble in Karnataka because of the star's remark that Kannada came out of Tamil. The film industry in Karnataka has demanded an apology from him before clearing the film for release, but Kamal has refused to do so. A court in Bengaluru, too, has indicated in a statement that includes local language phrases that the sentiments of the masses cannot be hurt so casually and has thought that an apology would be required. Without that apology, the film may find it difficult to be released in Karnataka. All South Indian languages came out of a common source that resembles them to different degrees. But if someone says that one of them came out of another, it is like equating a language as it is spoken today with that source. It has been found, for instance, that Proto-Dravidian, a reconstructed source for South Indian languages, has commonalities with a language spoken near the Zagros mountains in Iran—since the Harappans are supposed to have been a mixture of early Indians and migrants from that region. In any case, all these are academic exercises and cannot have much bearing on the controversy, because that stems from political loyalties and beliefs. The creation of linguistic states was a rational decision, but it had major repercussions that were not anticipated. It created language loyalties in pockets where Hindi was not widely spoken, like South India. The Devanagari script is associated with Sanskrit, which has Brahminical associations, and language in South India has also become connected to caste issues.
The Print
05-06-2025
- Politics
- The Print
Which is the oldest Dravidian language—Kannada or Tamil? Listen to scientists, not celebrities
The term 'Dravidian' today is often associated with India's southern states, linked to ideas of ethnicity, culture and politics. Here I use it only in the linguistic sense. In The Dravidian Languages (2003), linguist Bhadriraju Krishnamurti writes that Dravidian languages are spoken from the tip of the peninsula deep into Central India; one isolated Dravidian language, Brahui, is spoken as far west as Balochistan in present-day Pakistan. From the lost Gangetic 'Language X', to the possible origins of Southeast Asian languages, to the homeland of Proto-Dravidian speakers, it turns out prehistoric Indian languages were as diverse as today's. Last week, veteran actor Kamal Haasan courted controversy by declaring that 'Kannada was born out of Tamil.' The question of which Indian language is oldest—and, by extension, most native to the soil—has been a political hot topic since the mid-20th century. Some say Sanskrit, others say Tamil. But beneath the nationalist furore, paleobotanists, historical linguists, and archaeologists have made stunning discoveries about the linguistic heritage of all Indians. Anthropologist and historian Thomas Trautmann, in Dravidian Kinship (1981), also found a Dravidian substrate in many place-names in Maharashtra, and pointed out that Dravidian cultural practices—such as first-cousin and maternal uncle-niece marriages—are practiced by a few castes in Sindh and even Gujarat. Speakers of Dravidian languages, and their descendants, are extremely widespread. Given this vast geographic range, it's natural to ask: who were the 'original' Dravidian speakers? How did they spread and why? By looking at the earliest shared features of all Dravidian languages, we can assemble a hypothetical Proto-Dravidian language from which all modern Dravidian languages descend. We can figure out what plants and animals they saw, what their climate was like, and what their politics and settlements were like. Then we can look at the ecology of the subcontinent, archaeological digs, and we can see what matches. Distinguished linguist Franklin C Southworth, in his paper 'Proto-Dravidian Agriculture' (2005), made the most rigorous attempt yet to reconstruct this lost world. Proto-Dravidian speakers had a word for 'king'. They used a similar word for 'hut' and 'village', suggesting small populations of related families. They knew of various agricultural and hunting tools, and a wide variety of wild animals. Around the 3rd millennium BCE—when the Harappan civilisation was thriving on the Indus Valley—the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were also aware of many crops, such as sorghum and various types of millet and gram. They also had terms for cattle pens and domesticated sheep and goats. Finally, as archaeobotanist Dorian Q Fuller writes in 'Non-Human Genetics, Agricultural Origins and Historical Linguistics in South Asia' (2007), Proto-Dravidian speakers seem to have lived in a dry, deciduous forest environment. One region seems a good match for all these criteria. It is a region where the ranges of the modern Dravidian language families—Northern, Central, South-Central and South—overlap, and possibly where they radiated from. This is supported by extensive archaeological findings of a 'Southern Neolithic' period, with evidence of small mud homes, remains of domesticated and wild animals, and crops. There is a 73 per cent match between Southworth's Proto-Dravidian vocabulary of plants and those found in Southern Neolithic sites. Surprisingly, these sites are rather distant from the hotbeds of South Indian linguistic nationalism today. They are neither in south Karnataka nor in Tamil Nadu. Rather, the speakers of Proto-Dravidian, according to archaeological and linguistic streams of evidence, lived in the Krishna-Godavari valley in present-day north Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Also read: Sanskrit didn't always drive innovation in ancient India. There are two reasons The archaeology of languages To be clear, this is not to say that all Dravidian speakers originated from the Krishna-Godavari valley. (If we are being cheeky, no human being truly 'originated' anywhere except Eastern Africa.) The fact is, even the Proto-Dravidian language has some words borrowed from other language families, namely Austro-Asiatic—spoken mostly in Southeast Asia today, with the Munda families of Odisha and Chhattisgarh being the Indian representatives. This may suggest that the speakers of even earlier stages of Dravidian migrated to the Krishna-Godavari valley from elsewhere, picking up influences from other languages on the way. Some genetic and linguistic theories link early Dravidian speakers to the Iranian Plateau and the Harappan civilisation, but that's a matter for another day. Interestingly, the Proto-Dravidian language is not a perfect match for Southern Neolithic excavations: the peoples of the Southern Neolithic practised urn burials, but there's no vocabulary for it in Proto-Dravidian. It also doesn't match other archaeological candidates, such as the Harappan civilisation. If their cities are anything to go by, Harappans must have had a vocabulary for engineering and geometry, but it's practically nonexistent in Proto-Dravidian. Proto-Dravidian also doesn't have a word for 'rhinoceros', which are often depicted on Harappan seals. This doesn't mean that no Dravidian speakers lived in Harappan cities—such a vast civilisation must have been multilingual. It just means there may have been another, now-extinct early branch of Dravidian languages, which could have evolved separately from Proto-Dravidian. Proto-Dravidian has words for some crops—especially wheat—which may be of Harappan origin, suggesting, at the very least, agricultural exchanges. The true 'homeland' of the Dravidians, then, is still unclear. All we can say for certain is that around 3000 BCE, Proto-Dravidian speakers deep in the South Indian peninsula harnessed agriculture and, as their population exploded around 1100 BCE, they spread out in waves across the Indian Subcontinent. 'Broadly, the default Proto-Dravidian agricultural practice was dry farming of millets, pulses and tubers. Irrigated rice farming (alongside cash crops like cotton and sugarcane) became more important in the late 1st millennium BCE,' Dr Sureshkumar Muthukumaran, a historian, curator and lecturer at the National University of Singapore, told me. Over the centuries, Dravidian speakers traded words, animals and crops not only with North India but also with Southeast Asia. A particularly influential branch headed south, giving rise to the South Dravidian languages. Some groups, relatively isolated on the Nilgiri hills, developed languages such as Irula and Toda. Others, settling into the expansive coasts and plains, spoke the ancestors of Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam. The language that became Tamil, according to Krishnamurti (Dravidian Languages), branched off around 600 BCE, roughly when the first cities were growing on the Gangetic Plains far to the North. Three centuries later, it had developed into Old Tamil, the first Dravidian language to have a written culture, composed in thriving new trading towns with rice-farms. Old Tamil itself was composed of many dialects, which evolved into Middle Tamil and eventually modern Tamil centuries later. Between 800–1200 CE, some Middle Tamil dialects branched off into Malayalam. We can say with confidence that the ancestor of Kannada is not Tamil: it is a lost South Dravidian language related both to the languages of the Nilgiris and to Old Tamil. Unfortunately, the earliest written examples of Kannada date to c. 450 CE, so we don't have a clear picture of how the language evolved in the centuries prior. Thereafter, though, many dialects of Kannada evolved, through Old Kannada into Middle and thence modern Kannada. In North Karnataka, Kannada dialects had a fertile exchange with Indo-Aryan languages such as Marathi, which in turn had a Dravidian substrate. The mosaic of Indian languages It is becoming increasingly clear that this complex mosaic of linguistic borrowings, evolutions, migrations, and shifts is the story of all Indians, indeed of all humanity. Rig Vedic Sanskrit provides another early example. Prof Michael Witzel, a linguist and scholar of the Vedas, writes in 'Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan' (1999) that already by 1500 BCE, the earliest Indo-Aryan languages had absorbed a chunk of vocabulary from now-lost Austro-Asiatic languages in Punjab—a hypothetical Harappan language called 'Meluhhan' in Sindh, and a language called 'Language X', probably spoken by the earliest Neolithic farmers in the Gangetic plains. A few centuries later, c. 800 BCE, Dravidian words suddenly appear in the Vedas, possibly hinting at now-lost North Dravidian languages. As noted above, Tamil literature and writing appeared around 300 BCE. The earliest Tamil literature is called the Sangam poetry, after assemblies of poets who compiled it. Linguists, however, generally agree that the word 'Sangam' itself is borrowed from Indo-Aryan languages, while Old Tamil poets were clearly aware of Vedic mythology. Meanwhile, around the same time in North India, Prakrit literatures blossomed, overpowering the dominance of Sanskrit in religion and ritual. Krishnamurti (Dravidian Languages) argues that Prakrits probably developed from the integration of the speakers of now-lost regional Dravidian languages into the North Indian mainstream. And, in the medieval period, starting around 600 CE, all the major Southern Dravidian languages, including both Kannada and Tamil, borrowed extensive political, grammatical, and religious terms from a revitalised Classical Sanskrit. So, what is indigenous and what is foreign? Which language is 'oldest' when all have branched off from already-diverse origins, and borrowed from or lent to each other across centuries? India's modern linguistic diversity didn't appear out of nowhere: all the evidence is telling us that we are the inheritors of a complex, multidimensional mixing of genes, words, technologies, and ideas across timescales of truly mind-boggling proportions. Banal statements that language A is older than language B might set social media aflame and rally nationalists to a cause. But, as is increasingly clear, patriotic oversimplifications always trample on the histories and dignities they claim to protect. This article is a part of the 'Thinking Medieval' series that takes a deep dive into India's medieval culture, politics, and history. (Edited by Ratan Priya)
