* தமிழர் மதம்
9
and that langauge could have been no other than Tamil which still lives among twenty million people in all its literary glory and usefulness. Except Tamil no other Dravidian language possess such vast, antique varied, original, valuable literature, the literatures of the other few cultivated Dravidian tongues such as Kanarese. Telugu and Malayalam being not more than seven or eight hundred years old at most and even these consist of works either translated from Sanscrit or written in imitation of some Sanscrit works. It is an admitted fact that, that language alone which possesses grammer and literature that forms the only criterion to estimate the height of civilization to which the people who owned them had attained.
If in India of Pre-Aryan times, there had existed no literary work that could be brought forward from any of the existing Dravidian languages except Tamil, then it is as certain as two and two makes four, that langauge did not exist at that time or if it could be assumed that it did exist, it was not cultivated by a civilized people in any way. For the life of a civilized nation cannot get on without the cultivation of its language and the production of a varied literatures. If Sir John Marshall had a first hand knowledge of the Tholkappiam and some other ancient classics of Tamil he would have easily shown in corroboration of what he stated as regards the pre-Aryan antiquity of one of the Dravidian languages, that Tamil alone, and not any other as he vaguely affirmed, must have been the language spoken and cultivated by the pre-Aryan inhabitants of the Indus valley. Still, he has benefited the historians of the antique past by producing solid and substantial evidence in proof of the Tamilian civilization which was contemporaneous with the civilizations of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Sumerians and other ancient nations of the west. Fortunately, we are now in a position strong and unshakable to correlate with the above archaeological evidence, the proofs afforded by the ancient and genuine literary works of the Tamil language.
And this I believe has been amply done in the following Tamil treatise which is but an expansion of my Presidential Address partly read and partly delivered in "The All India Tamil Religious
