Page:Pre-Aryan Tamil Culture.djvu/63

 tēn and tinai ma being a favourite combination; vellam, akkāram jaggery, was substituted for honey in Marudam, sugar was not freely used, it being originally a product imported from China; there is no iḍukuṛi name for it in Sanskrit or Tamil; Sanskrit sarkkarā (whence European names of sugar are derived) as well as Tamil ayir, sugar, originally meant sand and were, by metonymy, extended to jaggery refined into a powdery form. Jaggery was manufactured by boiling down the juice of the sugar-cane, karumbu, also called kaḻai , kannal , vēḻal , to molasses, tēṛal , tēnpāgu , kuḻambu , āṇam, and cooled in pots or wooden moulds, achchu.

Milk and milk products were used largely. The chief milk products were ēḍu, cream, ṭayir , perugu , musaru , curdled milk, mōr , arumbam , aḷai , machchigai , muśar , curdled milk from which butter has been churned out, veṇṇey , veṇkaṭṭi , butter, and ney , ghi. It is curious that though ghi is clarified butter, the name for the latter is derived from the former, for veṇṇey is but white ghi. The cause of this order of naming the original article from the derived one is not quite clear; probably as butter cannot keep without getting rancid in tropical climates, it was never stored, but immediately after it was churned out, it was turned into ghi and the necessity for a name for the intermediate product was not felt for a long time.

That in the matter of food Aryan India and Tamil India had absolutely the same customs is proved by the fact that meat of all kinds was eaten both in the North and the South and by the following account of Arya food, other than meat. 'Of the animal food derived from the living animal, milk sometimes mixed with honey brought by toiling bees, ghi , butter and curds were consumed. Yava is frequently mentioned in the sense of corn in general or barley, (Wheat and barley were the grains used by the Aryas in addition to the South Indian ones). Rice, barley, beans and sesamum were the chief vegetable foodstuffs of the day. Grain was eaten parched and made into cakes or boiled in water or in milk. Meal boiled with curd into Karambha and gruel, i.e., parched meal boiled in milk were other forms of food As now hot freshly cooked food was preferred to cold food. Fruits were also eaten. Food was served on leaf-platters, the lotus leaf being commonly used for the purpose. Skins filled with honey or curds, jars of honey, rice husked by servant-girls and stored in earthern vessels and flour obtained by grinding corn in mill stones, were stocked in houses. This shows that the difference between Arya and Dasyu was neither racial nor cultural but only one of cult.