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[tamilakam]

"In the year of the Rabbit, the second year of the reign of King Suryavarman, he sent an embassy to the king of the country of Chola, Rajendra Chola, requesting his help to put down a rebellion in the country. The king of Chola sent his son with an army to help the king of Cambodia, and the rebellion was put down."

Cambodian Chronicles

[tamilakam]

There are ancient inscriptions in Cambodia that mention Tamil. For example, there is an inscription at the Banteay Chhmar temple complex in Cambodia that mentions a Tamil official named Rajendravarman. The inscription describes a donation made by Rajendravarman to the temple, and refers to him as "a Tamil chief who has acquired the prestige of the great Rajendra." This suggests that there were Tamil officials and perhaps even settlers in Cambodia during this period.

ChatGPT lol

[tamilakam]

was the first political strike of India in Thoothukudi?

(due to Valliyappan Olaganathan Chidambaram Pillai’s arrest)

also, did gandhi steal from him? 

[tamilakam]

From one place in India, and from one king, namely, Pandian, or, according to others, Porus, presents and embassies were sent to Augustus Caesar. With the ambassadors came the Indian Gymnosophist, who committed himself to the flames at Athens, like Calanus, who exhibited the same spectacle in the presence of Alexander.

Strabo's (died AD 24) account at Geographia xv,i,4 

[tamilakam]

curukkā varalāṉṉu ayyā aṭiccārē! quick did not come sir whacked Anta kampu eṭutulē aṭiccāru that stick take whacked ayyayō ammā! Appā! aṭukkumā Yārukkuttāṉ patil colvēṉ turaimārē to whom answer tell dorai “…beaten for the late coming Kankani (supervisor) armed a stick to beat us Owh dear mother! Father the pain is unbearable To whom shall I answer dear superior” 

Thandayutham, kūlikkāriyin vākkumūlam, p. 23

Plantation Tamil Folk Songs

[tamilakam]

Do you like tea? Read into the women behind Ceylon tea today

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[tamilakam]

[tamilakam]

An article from 2011. Now in 2020, it’s only worsened with official Sri Lankan Govt Archaeological “Task Forces” to Sinhalise the ancient history of the island

Sri Lanka Archaeology Dept plans to take Jaffna material to Anuradhapura

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 15 June 2011, 06:45 GMT] Material excavated recently at Kantharoadai in Jaffna, belonging to pre-Buddhist Megalithic period, and could be dated to roughly 3000 years before present, are planned to be taken to Anuradhapura museum in the south, informed sources in Jaffna said. According to news reports, the excavation has been ‘jointly’ conducted by the Sri Lanka Department of Archaeology and the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Jaffna. Even on all earlier occasions, valuable material excavated from important archaeological sites of the Tamil country in the island such as Maanthai in Mannaar and Kantharoadai in Jaffna were taken to Anuradhapura or Colombo and became unavailable for Eezham Tamils to present their heritage in their own land.  The decision to take the excavated material to Anuradhapura doesn’t reflect the spirit of ‘partnership’, but show only a colonial attitude, academics in Jaffna said. If there are no facilities in Jaffna even to store and study the material locally, while massive Buddhist stupas are being built with SL government funds in the country of Eezham Tamils, why should the Sri Lanka Archaeology Department conduct the excavation at all, as though it is the utmost priority now, asked a senior academic in Jaffna. A small museum organised in the British times still exist in Jaffna, while the University of Jaffna recently re-organised a museum in the Arts Faculty, bearing the name of Professor K. Indrapala and felicitating his services. At the inception of the University of Jaffna in 1974, Professor Indrapala initiated a museum in the History Department of the university, incorporating the collections of the then existing Jaffna Archaeological Society. This museum was destroyed and plundered when the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) occupied the university campus in the late 1980s. India so far has not compensated to this cultural damage. As it is explicitly known that state in Sri Lanka conceives archaeology as a weapon of structural genocide in the island, the countries that fund archaeological ‘reconciliation’ in the north and east as a priority than restoring sovereignty of Eezham Tamils should take a note of what they are doing if they are not doing it intentionally, the Jaffna academic said. Unless the Eezham Tamils who feel themselves a nation are vested with sovereignty of their land, heritage studies of the classical nation-state model funded by the so-called postmodern world for its own benefits through state in Colombo are not only meaningless but also dangerous to the people concerned, the academic further said. He made a particular note of the Netherlands funding an archaeological project of the Jaffna Fort, without first building infrastructural facilities or arranging guarantees to keep the archaeological material of Jaffna in Jaffna under the custody of the people of Jaffna. Material dating back to Roman times has been found recently inside the fort by the Jaffna university team that excavated a rescue trench during the fort renovation project funded by the Netherlands. The SL department also has dug a trench sometimes back but details are not available. All material excavated by any party belongs to the SL department. Many of the archaeological material found in the Tamil country were ostensibly lost or were never reported. A carnelian seal with a Sanskrit legend ‘Vishnubhtisya’, found by Prof. Indrapala when he was a student and given to Dr. Paranavitana never surfaced again. The Vallipuram Gold Plate, giving the place name in Tamil in its Prakrit text, is said to be lost. A Tamil Brahmi potsherd inscription found sometimes back in the excavations at Tissamaharama in down south, was not recorded in the official excavation reports of the site. Similarly, Buddhist artifacts found in the Tamil country were sometimes dumped by the local people as their nation had no sovereignty to look after its own heritage as its own, and as the state in Colombo was always making use of such finds against their territoriality. For well over a hundred years, the excavated heritage of Eezham Tamils was not available to them but it was always interpreted against them, the academic further said adding that the case was the same with the so-called National Archives in Colombo where there are no Tamils and Tamils cannot easily find entry for studies. Recently in an international seminar hosted by Colombo as part of its current series of ‘international image building’ exercises, when a Kerala researcher touched the topic of the South India – Sri Lanka common substratum on which Buddhism was superimposed and pointed out the parallels between the monuments of Kantharoadai and Maldives, some Sinhala academics present there reacted with animosity, telling that Kantharoadai was never excavated properly. The discussion turned irrelevant and the researcher had to ask the chairperson to stop it. The current excavation at Kantharoadai has come to an end as virgin soil has been reached in the trenches. The trenches were laid close to the location where earlier a team from the University of Pennsylvania, led by Vimala Begley and Bennet Bronson excavated and found protohistoric material associated to Megalithic Culture or Iron Age of the South Indian genre. Sri Lanka Department of Archaeology took the initiative to excavate the site and included the University of Jaffna as a partner, promising that the report will be jointly written by Dr. Nimal Perera of the Archaeology Department and Prof. Pushparatnam of the University of Jaffna. Students and faculty of the University of Jaffna participated while officials and workers, brought by the SL Department, conducted the excavation. The claimed reason of the SL archaeology department for their ‘irresistibility’ of excavating Kantharoadai right now, without even preparing to store and study the excavated material in Jaffna along with their partners, was said to be to freshly fix the chronological datum line for Kantharoadai, as they had doubts over the earlier excavation by the University of Pennsylvania. But there are suspicions in Jaffna over the real intentions: against the backdrop of what the Sri Lankan state is doing at Kantharoadai over several decades now, alienating its heritage from the Eezham Tamils of the land and trying to project it to the south and to the world that it was a Sinhala-Buddhist centre occupied at later times by Tamil ‘invaders, mercenaries and traders.’ Megalithic Culture in the island was a common substratum to those who evolved into Eezham Tamil and Sinhala identities through history. In the context of unveiling the pre-Buddhist phase of the island buried by religious myths, even the very few Sinhala archaeologists known to be professional and non-parochial in the universities and in the SL Department of Archaeology, could not succeed in enlightening the public and the school children by their decades-long researches. Their research findings went only to another few in the academic world.

[tamilakam]

[tamilakam]

நீலகிரியில் இருளர் ஆண்கள், 1871-72-ல் 

Irula men from the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu (1871-1872)

[tamilakam]

[tamilakam]

The Dravidian language family was first recognized as an independent family in 1816. The term Dravidian was introduced by Robert A. Caldwell in his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages (1856).

[tamilakam]

Y-STR haplotypes shared with sub-Saharan African populations are found only in F* males of the Soliga, Irula and Kurumba may indicate a unique genetic connection between these Indian tribes and sub-Saharan Africans

[tamilakam]

the Brahui, while retaining their Dravidian language, experienced a total replacement of their genetic component with the arrival of Indo-European speakers

[tamilakam]

This Dravidian-speaking population (Brahui) resides in the Balochistan province in south western Pakistan, in the vicinity of Mehrgarh, the earliest example of sub-continental Neolithic culture.