Tamil Nadu.
Capital. Chennai.
Area. 50215 square miles.
Population. 65 million.
Revenue Districts. 32.
Thousands of temples with lofty towers dot the skyline of the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu in India. These temples are torchbearers of the glorious heritage of the Tamil speaking region, and are repositories of the magnificent art forms that evolved over several centuries. Several of these temples have been glorified by the ancient Tamil hymns of the 1st millennium.
It is located in the extreme south of the subcontinent. The state has an area of 50,215 square miles. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the east and south and by the states of Kerala to the west, Karnataka, to the northwest, and Andhra Pradesh to the north. The capital is Madras. Tamil Nadu represents the Tamil-speaking area of what was formerly the Madras Presidency. The Tamils are proud of their Dravidian language and culture, and they have resisted attempts by the union government to make Hindi the national language. While it has an industrial core in Madras, the state is essentially agricultural.
The history of Tamil Nadu begins with the establishment of a trinity of Tamil powers in the region--namely, the Cera, Chola, and Pandya kingdoms. By about AD 200 the influence of northern Aryan powers had progressed, and the Aryan sage Agasatya had established himself as a cultural hero. The use of Roman gold and lamps and the consumption of Italian wine testify to the extensive foreign trade of the period.
From the mid-6th century until the 9th century, the Chalukyas of Badami, the Pallavas of Kañchi, and the Pandyas of Madurai fought a long series of wars in the region. The period, nonetheless, was marked by a revival of Hinduism and the advance of the fine arts. From about AD 850, Tamil Nadu was dominated by the Colas, of whom Rajendra I was the most distinguished ruler. In the mid-14th century the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, which included all of Tamil Nadu, came into prominence. During the 300 years of Vijayanagar rule, Telugu-speaking governors and officials were introduced in the administration.
In 1640 the English East India Company opened a trading post at the fishing village of Madras with the permission of the local ruler. The history of Tamil Nadu from the mid-17th century to 1946 is the story of the Madras Presidency in relationship to the rise and fall of British power in India. After 1946 the Madras Presidency was able to make steady progress, as it had a stable government. In 1953 the Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh was formed, and in 1956 the presidency was further divided into the states of Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu.
The area's population has changed little over the centuries, largely representing the ancient Dravidian ancestry indigenous to southern India. Most of the hill tribes exhibit affinities with certain Southeast Asian peoples. In Tamil Nadu, as in the rest of the country, the caste system is still strong, even though discrimination has been banned by the constitution of India.
Tamil, the official state language, is spoken by most of the people. For a considerable number of the population that have long resided in the state, Tamil has almost become a mother tongue. Telugu is spoken by almost 10 percent of the population; Kannada, Urdu, and Malayalam are spoken by much smaller percentages.
In the Nilgiri district in the west, Kannada and Malayalam are stronger. English is spoken as a subsidiary language. The main religions in the state are Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Jainism. Followers of the first three religions are found in all districts, but Jainas are confined to North and South Arcot and Madras city.
Although Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized states of India, it is still a rural land. Most of the people live in more than 64,000 nucleated villages. The Madras metropolitan conurbation, covering the industrial areas, townships, and villages surrounding Madras city, has the largest population, but there are other conurbations, of which those around Madurai, Coimbatore, and Tiruchchirappalli are the most important.
Cholera, malaria, and filariasis (disease caused by infestation of the blood and tissues by parasitic worms) are the chief endemic diseases. Urban sanitation and drainage are sub-standard. There are a large number of public and private hospitals, dispensaries, and primary health centres in the state.
Education in Tamil Nadu the literacy rate is about 45 percent. There are primary and middle schools, high schools, and arts and science colleges, as well as medical colleges, engineering colleges, polytechnic institutes, and industrial training institutes. There are universities located at Madras, Chidambaram, Coimbatore, and Madurai. The Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha (1918) at Madras and the Gandhigram Rural Institute (1956) at Gandhigram are the two institutes of national importance that are engaged in popularizing the Hindi language and Mahatma Gandhi's concept of rural higher education, respectively. A vigorous effort has been made to make Tamil instead of English the medium of instruction at the university level.
Improved port facilities and the effective use of electric power resources have helped industrial development. The state is one of the most industrialized of the Indian states. The important minerals are limestone, bauxite, gypsum, lignite, magnetite, and iron ore. Cotton ginning, spinning, and weaving continue to be the major industries, followed by the production of automobiles, motorcycles, transformers, sugar, agricultural implements, fertilizers, cement, paper, chemicals, and electric motors.
The railway-coach factory at Perambur is one of the largest in Asia; the Heavy Vehicles Factory, producing tanks, is at Avadi, near Madras. There is an oil refinery at Madras and a larger thermal-power project at Neyveli; both are public-sector ventures. The state ranks second only to Kerala in the production of fish.
Tamil Nadu is rich in handicrafts; notable among them are handloomed silk, metal icons, leather work, kalam-kari, hand-painted fabric, using natural dyes, brass, bronze, and copper wares, and carved wood, palm leaf, and cane articles.
The governor, the Legislative Assembly, the Legislative Council, and the chief minister and his Council of Ministers together constitute the legislative and executive branches of the state government. The ministries are housed in Fort St. George in Madras, though the offices of several heads of departments are located in multi-storied buildings outside the fort.
The state has 32 administrative districts, each administered by a district collector. Lower administrative units are divisions called talukas, firkas, and villages. All these units are responsible to the Revenue Department and the Board of Revenue. After independence, new units--pañcayats (village councils)--were established for purposes of local self-government and rural development. Above the pañcayat there are pañcayat unions and development councils.The state's judiciary is headed by the High Court at Madras; there are district judges and magistrates at the lower levels.
Chidambaram is situated in the fertile Coleroon River valley, on the Madras-Thanjavur (Tanjore) road and rail system. The city supports silk and cotton handloom weaving and garment industries but is primarily a food-processing centre. Its name is derived from the Tamil words citt ("wisdom") and ampalam ("atmosphere") and refers to the Hindu temple dedicated to the god Shiva as Nataraja, the cosmic dancer. The temple contains the famous early Chola bronzes. It is entered by lofty tower gates, and its hall is supported by more than 1,000 pillars. The city is the seat of Annamalai University and is a centre of Hindu religious education.
In the second half of the 19th century two tendencies were present in Tamil literature. One was the old traditional prose style of the Patinen-kilkkanakku, or "Eighteen Ethical Works, learned and severely scholastic; among others, V.V. Svaminatha Iyer and Arumuga Navalar wrote in this style.
Another tendency, begun by Arunacala Kavirayar in the 18th century, sought to bring the spoken and written languages together. This tendency developed on one side into such works as the operatic play Nantanar Carittarak Kirttanai by Gopalakrishna, and on the other into ballads, often based on the lore of the Sanskrit Puranas.
Despite attempts to effect a synthesis between the two languages, however, the scholastic style has continued to have a profound influence on modern Tamil literature; the normal spoken language, in fact, never became a literary medium.
The first novel in Tamil appeared in 1879, the Piratapamutaliyar Carittiram, by Vetanayakam Pillai, who was inspired by English and French novels. In important respects Pillai's work is typical of all early modern Tamil fiction: his subject matter is Tamil life as he observed it, the language is scholastic, and the inspiration comes from foreign sources.
Not strictly a novel, his work, which has a predominantly moral tone, is a loosely gathered string of narratives centred around an innocent hero.Quite different is the Kamalampal Carittiram ("The Fatal Rumor"), by Rajam Aiyar, whom many judge to be the most important prose writer of 19th-century Tamil literature. In this work, the author created a series of characters that appear to have become classics; the story is a romance, yet life in rural Tamil country is treated very realistically, with humour, irony, and social satire. In language Aiyar follows the classical style, which he intermixes with informal conversation, a style that has been imitated by modern authors.
The turn of the century saw the development of the centamil style, which in many respects is a continuation of the medieval commentarial style. The best representative is V.V. Swaminathan, who also is responsible for the rediscovery of the Tamil classical legacy, usually called "Tamil Renaissance," which tended to direct the mood of writers back to the glorious past. The pride in Tamil subsequently gave rise to a purist tradition and a second style, called tuyattamil, or "pure Tamil." With exaggerated Tamilian self-consciousness, the language was purged of all non-Tamil loanwords, particularly Sanskrit, which removed the literary language even further from the spoken one. This style was not ineffective in verse but led easily to rhetoric.
The purist trend brought forth a reaction in putumanipravala natai, "the new manipravala" (see above Dravidian literature: 1st-19th century), which was Sanskritized with a vengeance and is of little literary interest.
The scholastic and formalist character of Tamil prose was predominant in the literature until the advent, in the early 20th century, of the poet and prose writer Subrahmanya Bharati. Bharati sought to synthesize the popular and the scholastic traditions of Tamil literature, and he created thereby a Tamil that was amenable to all literary expression. This synthesis, however, did not extend to the literary language itself, which in grammar continued the formal language, though for syntax, vocabulary, etc., he drew upon colloquial speech. In doing so he saved the language from the Sanskrit tradition of Purana writing. His style is the marumalarcci natai, the "renaissance style."
In the first half of the 20th century, R. Krishnamurthy was an immensely popular writer. Under the pseudonym Kalki, he was an influential journalist who wrote voluminous historical romances.In the 1930s there was a literary movement inspired by a journal called Manikkoti. Writers in this movement contributed extremely important new works, both in verse and prose, to Tamil letters. Among them was Putumaippittan, who wrote realistically, critically, and even bitterly about the failings of society.
Contemporary literature is represented by T. Janakiraman, who writes novels, short stories, and plays with themes from urban Tamil middle-class family life; Jayakanthan, a sharp and passionate writer, with a tendency to shock his readers; and L.S. Ramatirthan, probably the finest stylist at work in Tamil today, who started by writing in English.
