colonization of Southern India will be obtained from the two great Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The evidence furnished by them on minute details is, however, extremely questionable. Neither of them has come down to us in its original form. Additions, interpolations and alterations seem to have been made from time to time to the Mahabharata till the tenth or eleventh century A.D., and to the Ramayana at least up to the second or third century, which have given rise to many contradictory statements and anachronisms. It would, therefore, be hazardous to start any iheories from incoherent statements, or to cite them in support of one's preconceived theories concerning the civilisation of the aboriginal tribes and the geography of the tracts they inhabited, as has been done recently by the members of the New School of Tamil Research whose love of their language is more than their regard for historic truth.
The present writer cannot pretend to have the boldness or the requisite scholarship in Sanskrit to derive the name 'Rama' from Tam. Irul, darkness, to say that the Rakshasas and Vanaras were more civilized than the Aryans, to call the ancient Tamilians Asuras, to assert that Svayamvaram was the form of marriage prevalent among the aborigines, and to proclaim from the house-tops that 'the Rakshasas were monotheists' and worshipped Siva and Siva only with incense and flowers ; while 'the Aryan worship of natural phenomena and their unmeaning sacrifices
