Page:Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture.djvu/53

 Indian art did not aim at producing specimens for the drawing room, but the æsthetic sense was correlated with other senses, so that every object, big or small, was decorated with art work, the only undecorated objects being the head and neck of a widow who wants to observe life-long mourning. Hence our ladies love to decorate their persons with jewels and silks and it will be an unhappy day for India if their æsthetic sense is blunted by the modern virtue of possessing a bank-balance and they should sell their personal decorations, their 'barbaric pearl and gold' for developing the habit of depositing their wealth in banks. The Tamil ladies of ancient times were decorated in various ways. Their kūndal was dressed in various artistic ways, one of which was in imitation of suṛavu vāy, shark's mouth. Other ways of mayirmudi or binding the hair into knots were uchchi, koṇḍai, koppu, sigaḻigai, tammilam, and muchchi. The different kinds of garlands with which the head and neck were adorned have already been referred to. The body was painted with pastes and powders of various kinds. The chief of the pastes were manjal, turmeric or saffron made into a paste, śandaṇakkuḻambu also called tēyvai, śāndu, toyil, toyyil, sandal paste mixed with various scents. The latter was spread on the chest, the mammæ and the abdomen and beautiful designs in line-drawing drawn thereon. A variety of paste for the hair was called tagaram. On the paste was strewn powders of several kinds. One such was poṛchuṇṇam, powdered gems, gold, sandal wood, and camphor.

The Tamils were exceedingly fond of decoration; so there are many words meaning to decorate, e.g., aṇi, ār, śūḍu, puṇai, pūṇ, malai, miḷai, vēy, milai, ey, vari.

So, too, there are numerous words which mean an ornament, of which some are aṇi, aṇikalam, āram, iḻai, nagai, paṇi, pūn, mañju, madāṇi, vaḷḷi. The lobes of the ears were pierced to receive the tōḍu or kūḻai; poorer people wore the ōlai, which was at first a bit of tender palmyra leaf, sometime coloured, rolled into a circle; then the same was made of gold plate rolled into various shapes, including the shapes of mythological monsters; the same, set with gems, became the ear-ornament of the rich, tāḷuruvi, kaḍukkan, kaḍippam, kuṇukku, koṭṭai, tūkkam, toṅgal, veḍam, were other ear-ornaments. The jewel symbolic of a married woman was the tāli now made of gold and of a peculiar shape. Probably the original tāli was made of the teeth or claws of the bear or the tiger killed by the husband in the chase. It may be noted that