Nāvalaṃ

🧵 Kampaṉ: Introduction to Irāmāvatāram, the Tamil Rāmāyaṇa From the Caṅkam period anthologies and idylls, it took twelve hundred years to separate the Kuṟuntokai from the Irāmāvatāram. In that interval, Tamil land produced the Tirukkuṟaḷ, the twin epics Cilappatikāram and Maṇimēkalai, the devotional outpourings of the Śaiva Nāyaṉārs and Vaiṣṇava Āḻvārs, and the prosodic refinements of the Yāpparuṅkalakkārikai. None of them abandoned the Caṅkam apparatus. They modulated it, layered it, recombined it, but the tiṇai system, uḷḷuṟai uvamam (உள்ளுறை உவமம்), the choreography of nature-detail and emotional content, persisted as the deep grammar of the language's literary imagination. By Kampaṉ's century, Vaiṣṇava devotion had filled the mullai landscape with Tirumāl's pasture-fields and the kuṟiñci mountains with his lover-god temperament. The descriptions of Sītā as a kuṟiñci heroine, of Daśaratha's Ayōttiyā as a fertile marutam capital, of the Daṇḍaka forest as a pālai country darkening into hostility, these are not Kampaṉ's inventions. They are Kampaṉ's placements of his characters into landscapes that the Tamil ear already knew how to read. Kampaṉ, writing in Tamil, has inherited a poetic system in which landscape is feeling, and he used it. Vālmīki had to describe his characters' interiors, while Kampaṉ just let the karu-poruḷ (கருப்பொருள்) of tiṇai system describe them for him. This will be an active thread with more stanzas from Irāmāvatāram with details, Kampaṉ's Rāmāyaṇa!

The Horn of Consecration type horn altar was later attested in Iron Age Israel, specifically the one from Tel Be'er Sheva. Possibly introduced by the Philistines during the Late Bronze Age collapse.

Similar to the Horns of Consecration from the Minoan civilization, horn alters are attested on Indus seals next to horned deity figures. The first and second seals are from IVC, the rest are from Minoan.

@AgentSaffron @Saatvata @sarvamedha @MRavinderReddi @Nash_Siddiqui @TeluguFilmFile @cobbaltt @Vaangalyappa @naavalam @giac77 Interesting is the name for Tiger in Indian languages. veruku 'wild cat' > vergu > *veggu by consonant assimilation. Sanskritized as vyAghra. Telugu has vEgi (Cf. veggu), and Marathi vAgh- reddit.com/r/IndianHistor…

What first intrigued me was the iconography of Baṛā Dev, the tree of life flanked by animals, strikingly close to the Paśupati seal (M-304) of the IVC. It could very well be the earliest representation of star systems or something completely unrelated. Personally, we are all speculating, trying to connect dots that may or may not belong to the same picture. The way I read it is in layers. Each stratum carries its own semantic charge, its own iconography, its own essence, and the whole evolves with the people who carry it forward. What looks like continuity on the surface can be several different understandings stacked in the same image. It reminds me of how later Greeks, gazing at the colossal Mycenaean walls, decided that no human hand could have set those stones, that giants, the Cyclopes, must have built them. The sobering part is that it was their own ancestors, and that human memory is so fragile that the truth of who built a thing or what a symbol meant can dissolve within a generation or two.

@naavalam Reminds me of Ramasami’s paper on the “Pasupati” seal x.com/Anand_Venkatra…

At the devotional heart of the Pardhān's vocation lies a single ritual image, the great Gond god Baṛā Dev also called Bara Pen/Baṛā Deo/Persā Pen. It literally means "great god," where baṛā "great" and dev is used for god. The Persā Pen is of interest for an inquiry, in the Gondi language, persā means big or great, a Dravidian form DEDR 4411, from Proto-Dravidian *per- "big, great," the same root as Tamil peru/periya, Telugu pedda, Kannada piri/hiri. Decisively, the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary places the deity name itself inside this entry.

Are you suggesting -avan̠ > -ōn̠ a regular morphophonotactics rule influencing it? Old Tamil has both attested forms, i.e., kariyavaṉ, māyavaṉ, etc., while the -ōn̠ form is predominantly attested for denoting deities, i.e., māyōṉ, neṭiyōṉ, maṟaiyōṉ, iṟaiyōṉ, etc. How do we explain this?

@naavalam Tamil -ōn̠ < -avan̠, it has nothing to do with DEDR 4438. It's also irregular for Toda to lose initial *p-.

The idea of a tree-seated lord is attested early in the Dravidian south as ālamar celvaṉ, and that the sāja-dwelling Baṛā Dev belongs recognizably to the same broad type. The iconographic form of Dakṣiṇāmūrti emerged from the later Pallava period onwards and was further developed in southern state temples. The strand connecting the epithet to the later iconography to the Sangam or other earlier attestation is very thin. At the same time, the resemblance of Baṛā Dev and later art forms can't be ignored.

There are references to Śiva in the Sangam corpus, among the theonyms, the one that most nearly anticipates Baṛā Dev is ālamar celvaṉ (ஆலமர் செல்வன்), the lord who abides beneath the banyan. Conventionally read as an early Tamil designation of Śiva as the tree-seated god, the epithet is preserved in all the Sangam poems. They name him without elaborating on his iconography, myth, or worship. The Dakṣiṇāmūrti form has a typological resemblance to the Baṛā Dev, especially the Vīṇādhara Dakṣiṇāmūrti form. The Sāja tree, as a form of Mahādeo/Śiva, or as Gond would see it, "Great God," is an integral part of their lives; to an extent, their lifestyle revolves around the tree.

The semantic split between "god" and "demon" is rather a later development in South Dravidian. My hypothesis is that the pēn, attested as ȫn in Toda, denotes the god of the dead. The same cognate form is attested in Tamil as -ōṉ, denoting an honorific suffix for deities. For instance, māyōṉ, etc.

The second half, Pen, is an interesting twist. In Gondi, pēn literally means "god," as documented in DEDR 4438 and recorded uniformly across the Gondi dialects of Betul, Yavatmal, Durg, Muria, and Seoni as pēn. Gondi pēn is derived from Proto-Dravidian *pē(y)/*pēn. The South-Central Dravidian cognate set is as follows, where all means "god." Gondi pēn/pēnu "god" Konda pēni Kui pēnu Kuvi pēnu Pengo/Manda pen In South Dravidian I, the same root means "devil/demon/ghost." Tamil pēy Malayalam pēy Tulu pēyi In Kannada, pē/pētu means "demon," "madness," or "rage." Kota pēn means possession of a woman by the spirit of a dead person. Bh Krishnamurti reconstructs this as Proto-Dravidian *pē(y)/*pēn and states the meaning split verbatim.

AI Engineer @IdaeanDaktyl's deciphering of Linear A as an extinct Semitic language. Linear A appeared around 1800 BC in Crete and was used until roughly 1450 BC, when Mycenaean Greeks conquered Crete and adapted the symbols into Linear B. Linear B was deciphered as Greek in 1952 by Michael Ventris. Using the Linear A-only sign "*301" as "na," he reconstructed the root "nawaya" ("to dwell"), connecting it to the Semitic triconsonantal root N-W-Y (to dwell/inhabit). He claims to be the first to link Linear A inscriptions specifically to Hebrew prayers, and argues his findings on Linear A logograms also help resolve problems in Linear B translations, which he takes as corroboration. This will be huge if it holds true.

this is *not* an Indus Valley seal from 2000 BC it’s a Pāṇḍya dynasty copper coin from ~200 BC the elephant, symbol sequence, and fish sign on the obverse look so Harappan i’m struck by the continuity in style across 2 millennia and regions of the subcontinent

The Paanan of the Sangam era is the same Paanans (singers) of the MUshika dynasty and the one which comes in 'Parayi petta Panthirukulam'(the children of 12 castes of the Paraya woman). {mezhathol agnihotri, Rajakan, Thacchan, Paanan, Paakanaar, Vaduthala Nair, Uppukotton, Naranathu Braanthan, Karaikal Amma, Vaayilla Kunnilappan, Ochira Chaathan and Valluvan} This malayalam shloka is from an age old folklore, later adapted by Madhusudhanan nair in his award winning poem, "Naranathu Branthan". Paanans are portrayed in the old malayalam movies ' Oru Vadakkan Veera Katha', 'Aromal Unni', 'Unniyarcha' and many more. Paanans sing songs with 'Udukku / Udukkai' as musical instruments. They also use rare age old musical instruments like 'Ona Villu' made of Areca nut, Palm and Coconut tree parts. Aromal Chekavar - Unniyarcha - Chanthu - Puthooram Veedu - Kalari - Kolathiris - Mushika dynasty - Ezhi mala

Gonds call Baṛā Dev as Mahadev and Shambhu, both names of ŚĪva. His emblem is the trishul, planted under the sacred sāja tree. The parallelism is deeper than just names. ŚĪva's tree is the pīpal, Baṛā Dev's is the sāja, and both are sacred, both forbidden to cut. ŚĪva as Dakṣiṇāmūrti sits beneath the tree, the silent guru, sometimes holding a veena. Pardhān bard's bānā, played to summon Baṛā Dev from the tree, echoes that same divine instrument. The evolution of Hinduism must be read in layers; the common ancestor of the Indus religion and narratives could have emerged as two or more distinct strands, with one evolving in the heartland of Kuru and the other among the Gonds.

The M-430 seal depicts a deity in a tree, a kneeling worshipper with an offering on a pedestal, an animal identified as a markhor, and seven figures in a row. This could be explained by the origin stories that the ān bards sing; Gond's high god, Baṛā Dev (Shambu Mahadeo), lives inside the trunk of the sāja tree. A Pardhan bard coaxes him out with his fiddle, and a goat is offered, the same scene the seal shows - deity in the tree, kneeling worshipper, a goat waiting. And those seven figures? The Gonds descend from seven primal brothers who first established worship of Baṛā Dev under that tree. Seven on the seal, seven in the myth. It isn't just the scene but the costume. The tree-deity and the worshipper wear a horned headdress with a leafy branch at the center, the exact headgear of the Bison-Horn Maria Gonds of Bastar. Even today, one can witness it performed in Madhya Pradesh, the bard plays, the god descends from the sāja tree, the priest kneels in plumes and a headscarf, and the goat, which must nod its head to consent, is offered. They wait until it nods. The same god? The same tree? The same seven ancestors? The same headdress? Four thousand years apart.

📜 Pardhān of the Gonds to the Pāṇars of the Sangam Tamil The Pardhāns are the hereditary bards, genealogists, and priest-musicians of the Gond, the second-largest tribal people of India, and they are at once indispensable and despised. No clan-deity can be summoned, no marriage sealed, no funeral closed, without the Pardhān and his three-stringed fiddle, the bānā. And for precisely that service, he is held the lesser man. Sacred and low, in one body. That inversion is worth sitting with, because it turns out to be more than a local curiosity. The Gonds speak a Dravidian language, and when their bard is set beside the ancient Tamil Pāṇar of the Sangam poems, the same sacred string-instrument, the same patron economy, the same slow fall into a stigmatized caste, the resemblance stops looking accidental. It begins to look like the central-Indian survival of an institution that once stretched across the whole Dravidian south. And the deepest clue lies in a single word: the bards' own name for themselves, which their patrons' Sanskrit later buried under a courtier's title. What follows traces that buried name, the god hidden in the tree, the curse a cheated bard could lay by simply removing the deity from a household, and the strange final act in which a dying bardic line laid down the fiddle, took up the brush, and carried its gods onto gallery walls from Bhopal to Paris. naavalam.substack.com/p/pardhan-bard…

4. Pardhāns of Gond x.com/naavalam/statu…

3. Rāṭhvā Bhīls x.com/naavalam/statu…

🧵Tracing the stories of the people of Nāvalaṃ, one at a time. 1. Yādavas x.com/naavalam/statu…