* தமிழர் மதம்
21
From the antique past up to the present no country except India can claim so many millions of pure vegetarians that this fact alone will suffice to place this country as the only earliest home of vegetarianism.
Then, the thirteenth section treats of the lifelong union of the opposite sexes which was based in the early stages of the Tamilian society solely on pure love to the exclusion of all other considerations. Chastity of women formed so prominent a factor in the social life of the ancient Tamilians of higher classes that they permitted not any other consideration to interfere with the marriage union and mar its purity. The natural law of sexual union is expressly stated often and often in the very old Tamil work Tholkappiam that any other form of union, as it is at present arranged, seems to have been devised by an intrusive hand bent upon filling its own pocket. The pairs who at first chose each other out of pure love were afterwards openly wedded by their own elderly relations and the wedding ceremony was solemnized without courting the assistance of a priest.
It is further shown that the early Aryan settlers had no idea of celebrating the union of sexes by a ceremony such as we find among them, rather among their followers, in later ages when they came into close contact with the Tamils and learnt it. The marriage hymn which is found not in the nine early books of the Rig Veda but only in its tenth book besides bearing indisputable evidence to its later introduction, shows what a mean and undignified view the Aryans took of their women's character by making them the wives of three Deva husbands previous to their marriage. From this and many other references made to their women's character, for instance to the incestuous passion of the woman yami, it is quite clear that the Aryans cared little for the chastity of their woman. For a fuller treatment of the institution of marriage, the difference that obtained in the observance of its rites between the ancient Tamils and the Aryan followers and the relative significance that came to be attached to them by the two people, the reader is referred to the sections twentyeight, twentynine, and thirty.
