Thamil culture of Jaffna

"The present day Thamils in Jaffna are mainly the descendants of the Vellalas who were brought by the Dutch for their tobacco cultivation and of those who were absorbed into the Vellala culture in the process and hence the deviation would not have begun before the seventeenth century. This is a hypothesis that could be tested in the western scientific tradition and linguists should be encouraged to submit proposals to study this problem."
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By Nalin de Silva

(August 12, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Soon after the article on "More on Vellalas" appeared in "The Island" I received an e mail drawing my attention to an interesting saying among the Vanni Thamils according to Prof. Sivathamby as given in his book "Sri Lankan Tamil Society and Politics". It goes as "Kallar Maravar Kanatta Akampatiyar mella mellap pallarkalum vellalar anarkal, (Not only) the Kallar the Maravar and the weighty Akampatiyar even the Pallar gradually became Vellalar."

Though I cannot agree with most of what Prof. Sivathamby states in his book I find that this saying among the Vanni Thamils confirms what I had to say of the Vellalas and the Thamil society in the north. The above, of course says that some castes or groups of people identified themselves with the Vellalas with the passage of time but it also points to the fact that the Vellala culture had become the dominant culture not only in Jaffna but among those who are called Vanni Thamils. What prevails in Jaffna is the culture of the Vellalas with the other castes either being absorbed into the Vellala caste or following the culture of the Vellalas and other ethnic groups and Sinhalas who were living in Jaffna at the time of the arrival of the Portuguese becoming Thamils grouped into new castes like "koviar" under the domination of the Vellalas. When there is clear evidence that the Vellalas were agricultural labourers taken by the Dutch to Jaffna in Sri Lanka and Natal in South Africa it is useless to pretend that the Vellalas have a history going back to Kalinga Magha.

If there are any cultural differences between the Jaffna Thamils and the Thamils in various parts of Tamil Nadu in areas including management of Temples it is due to the following. (i) The Vellalas are the dominant caste in Jaffna due to the mass influx of them and thus the Brahmin dominated Hindu culture cannot be found in Jaffna. (ii) The absorption of the Sinhalas and the Malayalam speaking people who were in the Jaffna "district" at the time of the arrival of the Portuguese into the Vellala dominated Thamil population would have changed the Thamil culture and the language to a certain degree though not very significant.

There is no way to establish that the Arya Chhakravarthi kingdom very often referred to as the Jaffna kingdom following the Sinhala tradition of naming the kingdom by the city, was a Tamil kingdom. The Arya Chakravartins were originally sea pirates who established a Vansa state subordinate to the Sinhala Kingdom in either in Gampola or some other city and the rulers of the Arya Vhakravarthi Kingdom had to obtain permission from the Sinhala king to use the title king. The Arya Chakravarthins were not Thamils and the population did not entirely consist of Thamils. The only king that could be called Thamil was Sankili who was apparently the son of a concubine of the Arya Chakravarthi king, and who grabbed the kingdom while the king had gone on his annual journey to Sinhale to obtain permission to use the title of king. Sankili not only massacred the Thamils who had been converted to Catholicism but the Buddhists as well. There have been not many Thamil Buddhists (refer W. Chandrakeerthi on "Demala Bauddhaya" in www.kalaya.org ) and these Buddhists were Sinhalas who were living in Jaffna at the time the Portuguese arrived in Sri Lanka. Sankili was eventually defeated and the Arya Chakravarthi kingdom fell to the Portuguese. When the Dutch captured Jaffna those Sinhalas who had escaped the "genocide" of the Sinhalas by Sankili and were living in Jaffna had no alternative but to allow themselves to be absorbed into the Vellala culture after the Dutch imported them for their tobacco cultivation.

When I mentioned that the Thamil spoken by the Thamils in Jaffna is not much different from the Thamil spoken in Chennai what I meant was that the Thamil spoken in Jaffna is not much different from the Thamil spoken in any city in Tamil Nadu. I am sorry if it did not convey what I had in mind and I would modify the statement the following way. The Thamil spoken in different parts of Tamil Nadu while differing from each other without any significant deviation are also not much different from Thamil spoken in Jaffna. The Thamil spoken in Madurai is different from the Thamil spoken in Chennai as Thelegu speaking people including the Nayakkar princes who subsequently became kings in the Sinhala Kingdom had fled from Andra Pradesh to Madurai and had added Telegu words to Thamil. During a recent visit to India I met some of these people who had fled from Andra Pradesh and they told me that they belonged to the eighth or ninth generation of those who had come from Andra Pradesh but in Madurai they had been completely absorbed into the Thamil culture and hence the Thamil ethnic community. I was not surprised when one of them told me that he was a Nayakkar.

Similarly the Thamil spoken in Jaffna is different from Thamil spoken in Chennai or any other place due to the presence of Malayalam words but it is not a significant deviation from the Thamil spoken in Chennai or any other place in Tamil Nadu. This could be due to the Malayalam people living in Jaffna at the time of arrival of the Portuguese, and the Thamil culture in Jaffna is somewhat different from the Thamil culture in different parts of Tamil Nadu for the reasons given above. If Thamils in Jaffna use more coconut milk than those in Thamil Nadu then it is due to the influence of the Malayalam speaking people who were originally from Kerala the coconut garden and of the Sinhala people, and also of course due to the coconut cultivation in Sri Lanka though not in Jaffna.

If Thamils in Sri Lanka had an evolution going back to Anuradhapura period and if the present day Thamils in Jaffna are descendants of those Thamils who migrated to Sri Lanka during that period then the Thamil spoken in Sri Lanka would have evolved independently from Tamil Nadu, whether Chennai, Madurai or Kanchipuram (incidentally Kanchipuram is not a good example as it belonged to the Telegu Desha before the British pushed it into Thamil speaking Tamil Nadu) and any linguist would have been able to tell us that the original Thamil migrants had come to Sri Lanka more than ten centuries ago. However, though I am not a linguist I would challenge anybody with a good knowledge of linguistics to study the differences between Thamil spoken in Jaffna and Thamil spoken along Koramandel coast and show that the two dialects began deviating from each other so many centuries ago. The present day Thamils in Jaffna are mainly the descendants of the Vellalas who were brought by the Dutch for their tobacco cultivation and of those who were absorbed into the Vellala culture in the process and hence the deviation would not have begun before the seventeenth century. This is a hypothesis that could be tested in the western scientific tradition and linguists should be encouraged to submit proposals to study this problem. I am not trying to demean the Thamils in Jaffna but all that I am trying to say is that the present day Jaffna Thamils do not have a continuous history going beyond the seventeenth century.

-Sri Lanka Guardian