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Because
Sanskrit was identified with the Brahminical religion of the Vedas,
reform movements such as Buddhism and Jainism adopted other literary
languages, e.g., Pali and Ardhamagadhi, respectively. Out of these
and other derivative languages there evolved the modern languages of
northern India. The literature of those languages depended largely
on the ancient Indian background, which includes the Sanskrit epics,
the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Krishna story as told in the
Bhagavata-Purana, the other Puranic legends, and the fable
anthologies. In addition, the Sanskrit philosophies were the source
of philosophical writing in the later literatures, and the Sanskrit
schools of rhetoric were of great importance for the development of
court poetry in many of the modern literatures. The South Indian
language of Tamil is an exception to this pattern of Sanskrit
influence because it had a classical tradition of its own. Urdu and
Sindhi are other exceptions, having arisen out of an Islamic
background.
Of
the four primary Dravidian
literatures--Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam--the oldest and
best-known is Tamil.
The earliest preserved Tamil literature, the so-called Cankam or
Shangam poetry anthologies, dates from the 1st century
BC. These poems are classified by theme into akam
("interior," primarily love poetry) and puram
("exterior," primarily about war, the poverty of poets,
and the deaths of kings). The bhakti
movement has been traced to Tamil poetry, beginning with the poems
of the devotees of Shiva called
Nayanars and the devotees of Vishnu called
Alvars. The Nayanars, who date from about AD 800, composed
intensely personal and devout hymns addressed to the local
manifestations of Shiva.
The
most famous Nayanar lyricists are Appar, Sambandar, and Cuntarar,
whose hymns are collected in the Tevaram (c. 11th
century). More or less contemporary were their Vaishnava
counterparts, the Alvars Poykai, Putan, Peyar, and
Tirumankaiyal-var, and in the 8th century the poetess Andal,
Periyalvar, Kulacekarar, Tiruppanalvar, and notably Nammalvar, who
is held to be the greatest. The devotion of which they sing
exemplifies the new bhakti movement that seeks a more direct contact
between man and God, carried by a passionate love for the deity, who
reciprocates by extending his grace to man.
These
saints also became the inspiration of theistic systematic religion:
the Shaivas for the Shaiva-siddhanta, the Vaishnavas for
Vishistadvaita. In Kannada the same movement was exemplified by
Basava, whose vacanams ("sayings" or
"talks") achieved great popularity. His religion, that of
Virashaivism, was perhaps the most "protestant" of the
bhakti religions.
New
Dravidian genres continued to evolve into the 17th and 18th
centuries, when the Tamil Cittars (from the Sanskrit siddhas,
"perfected ones"), who were eclectic mystics, composed
poems noted for the power of their naturalistic diction. The Tamil
sense and style of these poems belied the Sanskrit-derived title of
their authors, a phenomenon that could stand as a symbol of the
complex relationship between Dravidian and Sanskrit religious texts
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