honour to disregard, and even to destroy the literary and artistic treasures of the conquered people. Such was the attitude of the Mohammadan invaders when they first came to South India. So we find in the early part of the fourteenth century, when the Musalman hordes poured down into South India, the Tamils had to lament the loss of almost all their literature. All the libraries were ransacked in the country, and all that the Tamil genius had reared for ages were committed to flames. On the contrary the Brahmans, the Jains and the Buddhists actively worked to found universities, literary academies and libraries, and added refinement and stability to the Tamil language and literature. And it was through the deep interest and tender care of those people that Tamilians were inspired with new thoughts and ideas, and their literature enriched with new forms of expressions. Again, during modern times, the Musalmans who had le arnt to live on friendly terms with the Hindus, and the Christian Missionaries who had come into South India as harbingers of western civilization have also in a way affected, though in an imperceptible degree, the Dravidian life and thought. Thus, the influence of the Aryans—both Indian and European—was essentially religious and philosophical. All these will be explained later on in their proper places.
Indian grammarians have divided Tamil literature into three classes, namely—Iyal (belles letters), Isai (Music) and Nataka (Drama). As this essay is concerned mainly with the literature of the
