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village carpenter, but made of stone, as well as tools for stone-work, have been picket up from neolithic settienients. The chief god of the low country was the cloud-compelling lord of the atmosphere, who, as Indra, became also the chief recipient of the offerings made in the Vedic fire-sacrifices throughout North India; but in South India Ịndiran was the god only of the ploughland. Besides he was worshipped by the people with the fireless rites detested by the Āryas. Here 'he was the God residing in the land where, with toddy and garlands as offerings, the straight-horned and hanging eared goat is led to him'.[1] In Aryan India Indra was but the most prominent of the many gods worshipped by Brāhmaņa priests, for their own benefit and the benefit of others, by means of fire-rites in sacrificial halls specially built for the purpose, Rājas and Vaiśyas having but the privilege of paying for the rites without officiating at them; but in South India Indiran was the sole god of the Marudam region and his worship was conducted without fire-rites and in it participated men of all castes and occupations, even men of the lower classes who would not be admitted even for menial service in yajña śālās and women of all ranks. Indra worship in South India was accompanied by merrymaking and love-making of all kinds. Moreover the festival of Indiran was specially associated with lovers' quarrels and reconciliations, ūḍal[2] and kūḍal[3] and with special varieties of dancing. The modern Pongal feast is a relic of the harvest-festival associated with Indiran, as the name bōgi paṇḍigai,[4] Indiran-feast shows,[5] bōgi being a name of Indiran.
So great is the prejudice in favour of the North Indian origin of everything connected with religion that to claim the Indiran of Marudam as a Tamil God independent of the Indra of the Āryas is sure to raise as violent a burst of opposition as Indra's own burst of the thunder-cloud. To support the claim here made I offer the following considerations: (1) The people of the marudam regions of South India must have had an atmospheric god from about the end of the old Stone Age when they learnt to till the ground and sow seeds for raising foodstuffs, for their existence depended on such a god manifesting himself in the hot weather and striking the clouds with his thunderbolt so as to pour the life-giving rain on their thirsty fields. (2) To deny them an Indiran of their own would be to say that they had from time inmemorial another god of the same functions till about 2,000 years ago, when they borrowed the name of the chief God of the Ārya fire-rite, and that, after that fire-rite had almost become extinguished in Āryāvartta and after Indra had been superseded in popular estimation by Siva, Viṣhṇu, and Ambā. One is tempted to vary the joke about the author of the Iliad, that it was not composed by Homer but by another poet of the same name, and say that
- ↑
கள்ளும் கண்ணியும் கையுறையாக
நிலைக்கோட்டு வெள்ளை நால்செவிக் கடாஅய்
நிலத்துறைக் கடவுள்.Agam, 156. - ↑ ஊடல்
- ↑ கூடல்
- ↑ போகிபண்டிகை
- ↑ The utter difference between Indra-worship in North India and the இந்திர விழவு of South India can be realized by a study of canto v of Śilappadigāram இந்திர விழவு ரெடுத்த காதை, which is too long to be quoted here.
