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Among the enduring myths in which the Dravidianists repose unshakeable faith, the story of the Evil Kalabhras stands foremost. So, who were the Kalabhras? The answer from the pristine-pure Dravidian scholarship says that they were a race who robbed everything that belonged to the Tamils including their very Tamil-ness (Tamil identity), and plunged the Tamil Country into a Dark Age. But when Dr. B G L Swamy asked the “pure Tamils” and the “...
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The previous episode recounted Dr. BGL Swamy’s firsthand experience of the nature and contours of an “official” Tamil history complete with concocted names for “pure Tamil” flora. If this was the state of affairs in the science department, it was taken to an entirely different level in the History department.
Dr. Swamy narrates how his university had endowments that allowed it to conduct annual memorial lectures on different subjects. The...
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An Advisory Committee was formed by the Government to document and publish “The Official History of the Tamils” in ten volumes. It doesn’t need to be explicitly stated that the Government exercised utmost care in selecting the members. Dr. BGL Swamy recalls that Tamil writers like Cheeni Venkataswami, Pandit Natesan and others were part of the committee. The history lecturer of Presidency College and two or three lecturers teaching other...
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Note: This essay and the ones that follow it are translated adaptations from the corpus of writings on the Dravidian movement authored by the late Dr. B G L Swamy. These essays are not literal translations.
To understand the Dravidianists of today, it is absolutely essential to understand the history and mythology of the ancient Tamil country.
According to this history and mythology, in really really really ancient times (nobody has told us how...
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Backgrounder
The Tamil country stands tallest among all Indian regions that swallowed the missionary and colonial propaganda of the Aryan Invasion Theory in the closing decades of the 19th Century onwards. More specifically, sections of the Tamil country uncritically swallowed the “Dravidian” propaganda, internalized it, gave it an ideological shape premised basically on the linguistic separateness of Tamil.
This essay marks the beginning of a...