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54 Perum-Devanar, the celebrated compiler of the Eight Tamil anthologies. The Ramayana was translated for the first time in A. D. 1185 by the immorta} Kamban.

Now the Ramayana is a quasi-historical epic poem which describes the migration of the Aryans to Southern India prior to the fifteenth century B.C. It gives an account of the tribes that were living in the various regions of the Indian Peninsula. The description of the Pandya and other countries given in the modern recensions of that epic are only later interpolations. The Tamil kingdoms did not come into existence during Rama's time. These provinces were then dense forests inhabited by wild and savage tribes, whom Valmiki called Rakshasas, Yakshas and Vanaras (monkeys) on account of their strange, unfamiliar non-Aryan physical features and customs. In later Sanskrit works the Asuras are sometimes confounded with the Rakshasas; but it is not correct, as the Asuras were a section of the fair-skinned Aryans, now represented by the Parsis, while the Rakshasas were a dark-complexioned cannibal race of hunters and fisherman like the modern Andamaners and the Australian aborigines. The Yakshas of Ceylon and the Rakshasas of Southern India belonged to the same race of people called Yatudanas in the Vedas and Nagas in the later Buddhistic and other literatures. They might have been the ancestors of the modern Paraiyas, Pallas, Idaiyas, Maravas and Kallas. It will be interesting to note that one of the