* தமிழர் மதம்
17
The original Brahmin community, in proportion to its admixture with the non-vegetarian classes of the Tamils, underwent considerable changes not only in its physical characteristics but in its creeds, customs and manners also, that, in later times, its descendants could not but live in innumerable separate groups so that each group never interdined with the other nor intermarried. To this spliting up of the Dravido-Aryan community were added many others converted from the various classes of the Tamils from the time of Ramanuja of the Vaishnava sect up to our own. In view of the high rank to which mere mention of the name ‘Brahmin' raises one in this country, many a shrewd person of the Dravidian stock is daily assuming the title of a Brahmin, and is becoming an enthusiastic convert to Brahminism. In this state of unbridled racial commixture, is it not quite unsafe and unreasonable to call anyone an Aryan against all ethnological facts? And so the section nine closes with the conclusion that, except in the case of the scanty few who dwell in the north-west corner of India, in the veins of almost all the people of India it is the Dravidian blood that courses round from time immemorial up to the present.
Then the section ten takes to tracing the origin of the term 'madam' and the time when it came to signify religion in the Tamil country. Before the second century of the Christian era no word is met with in Tamil literature to denote religion. Even in the works of the second century it is the term 'Samayam' that comes to be used as the name of religion. The very first mention of the word ‘madam' occurs in the Thiruvachakam of St. Manickavachakar who existed in the first half of the third century A.D. And it must be noted that both these terms ‘madam' and ‘samayam' are coined Tamil words though they are claimed now to belong to Sanscrit. Long anterior to the times of the Sankhya, the Yoga and other systems of philosophy, long before the rise of such humanitarian religions as Buddhism and Jainism, people do not seem to have engaged themselves either in religious speculations or in religious discussions. Neither did the Aryans whose whole mind was absorbed in performing animal sacrifices, nor the Tamils who were paying their
