Page:Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture.djvu/28

 person of that name, whose boyhood was spent in the pastoral country round Brindāvanam and who, later, as the king of Dvārakā, played a great part in the war of the Mahābhārata, was   and after his death, the Krishṇa cult spread throughout India. In opposition to this theory I hold that the cult of Krṣhņa, the boy-cowherd, comes down from the early pastoral stage of Indian life; it is impossible to believe that the later worship of Krishna, associated with the study of his Bhagavad Gitā, than which no grander philosophic work has been published to the world, spread to only one caste of South India-the cowherd caste-and became a cult of primitive ritual song and dance. It is much more reasonable to conclude that the primitive song and dance and merry-making which is the Krşhņa-worship of the cowherds is directly descended from the rites of very ancient pastoral times. The name Kannan is supposed to be derived from Prākrit Kanha, itself a degenerate form of Krşhņa. This kind of etymology is opposed to the fundamental principles of linguistic science, for it makes the absurd assumption that the literary dialect of a language precedes the common spoken dialect, whereas the spoken dialect must have existed for thousands of years before the literary dialect was developed.

To proceed from Mullai to Marudam; in the lowermost reaches of the rivers lived the farmers, of whom there were two classes, (1) the Veḷḷālar, the controllers of the flood, who irrigated their fields when the rivers were in flood, and raised the rice-crop on damp rice-fields with the extraordinary patience and industry which only the Indian peasant is capable of; (2) the Kārāḷar, controllers of the rain, who looked up to the sky for watering their fields. who stored the rain water in tanks and ponds and dug wells and lifted the water by means of water-lifts of different kinds, ēṛṛam, kabilai, piḻā, iḍā, and raised the millets, the pulses and other legumes, which along with the rice of the river valleys and the milk and the milk products (tyre and buttermilk and ghi, tayir, mōr, and ney ) of the Mullai region, form, even according to the latest scientific teaching, a perfect food for man containing the muscle-building, heat-generating, and vitamine requisites of a perfect dietary. The Veḷḷālar lived in the Marudam region, the river-valleys and just outside it lived the Kārāḷar. Beyond these regions where foodstuffs were raised, existed the black cotton-soil developed from the detritus of trap-rock charged with decaying vegetation, and fit for retaining moisture for a long time, and hence suited for the growth of cotton. Here cotton was raised and cotton cloth was woven; Indian people of the Stone Age possessed an abundance of cotton cloth, as weaving implements of stone testify, when the rest of the world was either sparsely clad in hides, or woven linen or wool, or revelled in primitive nakedness. Hundreds of finds of Neolithic tools required for these industries of the lower river valleys testify to their great development in these regions. These industries of the plains required the subsidiary one of woodwork. The people lived in wood-built houses; their granaries were made of wood; they used wooden carts, not different in build from the creaking ones now used for transport and numerous household utensils made of wood like tubs, mortars, pestles, etc.; and all the tools now used by the