Environment and Culture

By P. T. SRINIVASA AIYANGAR

"It is the task of ethnology to study the manifestations of life among a definite portion of mankind, whereas that of anthropology is the study of the human organism . . . The manifestations of human life have their source in the human organism, and they . . . ultimately react on the human organism . . . All human impulses have as their ultimate aim self-preservation and the propagation of the species. But . . . the manifestations of human life are conditioned not only by the human organism, but also by the milieu. Even where the human organism is the same, a change of milieu produces a change in the manifestations of life; and these in turn react on the human organism."¹

Hence anthropological methods have so far but led to an ever-changing series of classifications of the human species into the varieties called races; whereas ethnology, which studies the life of people from the geographical point of view has been more fruitful of results. It is proposed in this study to follow the ethnological method and trace the growth of human culture in South India in ancient times as conditioned by the physiographic environment in which the people lived.

The ancient Tamils noted that the habitable parts of the earth's surface were divisible into five regions or Tinais² as they named it. Tinai seems to be derived from a root tit,³or tin,⁴which means a stretch of land and has given birth to the words tittu⁵a sand-bank, a little hill, a dry spot in a river bed, tittai,⁶ tidar,⁷ tidal ⁸a sand-bank, a flat shoal, highland, tinnai ⁹a raised platform. The root tin also means strength, firmness, and the word tinai, was used also in the sense of the earth in general. The ancient Tamils observed that the land-surface of the earth consisted of five natural regions and the manifestations of human life were conditioned by the characteristics of the milieu in which the tribe has grown. The five tinais were called (I) Palai, ¹⁰ dry waterless sandy regions, (2) Kurinji,¹¹ the hill country (3) Mullai,¹² the jungly tracts that intervene between the uplands and the lowlands, (4) Marudam,¹³ the lower courses of rivers, the peneplain worn down by centuries of erosion till its level has become approximately the same as that of the river in flood, and (5) Neydal,¹⁴ the littoral tract, that which skirts the sea. All these five kinds of natural regions are found in the Tamil country, though in a small scale, and as man has continuously inhabited South India since he first appeared on the globe, he successively passed from region to region and developed therein the stages of culture which each was calculated to produce.

The earliest region to be inhabited by man was the Kurinfi, the tracts where stand the low hills resulting from the age-long erosion of the Deccan plateau by the never failing yearly monsoon rains. Below the hilly regions was the thickly wooded tropical forest named after the demon Dandaka, in which abounded the rivals of early man in the struggle for existence-his big-limbed foes, the lion, the tiger, the elephant, the wild buffalo, the python, as well as the minute insect pests which are even more destructive of human life than the larger animals. In the Kurinji early man could easily find shelter from the sun and the rain and from his animal foes, behind boulders and within natural caves. He had not then invented pots for storing water, but he found reservoirs of water in the rocky pits which abounded in the hilly region when the natural spring failed him. The pebbles that he could pick up from under his feet served him as a primitive tool and the abundant supply of flints of various shapes stimulated his inventiveness and he learnt to shape the axes, and the spears, the choppers and the scrapers that he needed. Hence was evolved in this region the earliest stage of human culture, that called palæolithic; the artefacts belonging to this stage are chiefly found in the kurinji regions which abound in the Cuddapah, Nellore, North Arcot and Chingleput districts.

Early man in kurinji land at first subsisted on fruits, nuts and tubers. But the variations in the supply of these articles of food due to seasonal changes soon impelled him to add the flesh of animals to his dietary. This fact, more than the necessity for guarding himself against his animal foes, made him an expert hunter. Hence man's first profession was that of the hunter, and his earliest mode of life, that of the nomad. Palæolithic implements all the world over are of the same patterns and this proves that the early man was a great wanderer over the surface of the earth.

This environment in the kurinji regions also led to two other very great inventions of the hunter-stage of human culture, namely the bow and arrow, and the process of making fire. The bamboo grows abundantly in the kurinji regions of Southern India and the kuravar,¹⁵as the inhabitants of that land were called, shrewdly noted the elasticity of the trunk of the bamboo and bent split bamboos, tied a bit of dried creeper to them and learnt to shoot thence long thorns. This was the origin of the bow in the use of which the Indian hillman has always been an expert, as is proved by the facts that the Indian bow-man was a much prized component of the armies of Darius and. Xerxes, and the Indian shikari to-day can kill a tiger by discharging a single arrow from his bow.

The other invention of the early kuravar, the greatest of human inventions, was the making of fire. Early in the palæolithic age, the inhabitants of the kurinji land noted the origin of forest fires by the violent friction of bamboo stems against one another during the fierce monsoon winds and learnt therefrom that he could start a fire by rubbing together two pieces of wood. The first use to which fire was put was the roasting of the meat of the animals which they hunted.

While the males of the settlement were out hunting, the women were engaged in picking fruits, digging for roots, and garnering the seeds of the cereals that grew of their own accord around their places of abode, especially wild rice,¹⁶ bamboo-rice,¹⁷ and panicum.¹⁸

The other duty, of women was to look after their children. Man at this stage of culture did not learn to build houses. They were scarcely necessary, for the South Indian climate was so beneficent that no shelter other than the covert afforded by trees or big boulders or natural caves was needed for protection from sun and rain. Houses were first built by man not so much for shelter as for the safe storage of primitive wealth in the form of food- stuffs and the early palæolithic man had not yet felt the need of storing provisions. The necessities of a nomad life and the want of permanent homes did not encourage the free development of domestic instincts on the part of the men; hence the matriarchal form of tribal life was first developed.

Another circumstance encouraged the formation of this type of life. Primitive man was not encumbered with elaborate forms of the marriage-rite. Love at first sight and its immediate consummation, followed in some cases very leisurely by a tribal feast, constituted the wedding ceremony. The marriage tie, we may take it, was not always of a very permanent character. All these causes, and more especially the want of development of personal property and a sense of attachment to a permanent house, encouraged the persistence during long periods of the matriarchate.

Love of personal adornment has always characterised men and more especially, women. The kurava women spent their leisure moments in picking shells and stringing them together for purpose of making garlands of them for decorating their persons. Their lovers presented them with trophies of hunt, like the claws of the tiger which they shot, and these, worn round the neck, became, in much later times, the proto-type of the tali, so much prized in South India as a symbol of a married woman. Another kind of personal adornment was the leaf-garment, a number of leaves tied together with a bit of dried creeper and worn round the waist, a custom which still prevails among the most primitive of the jungle tribes.

The palai, the dry sandy desert, can scarcely be considered as a subdivision of the habitable regions of the earth's surface. When drawn by the chase of the wild animals, the sturdy hunter would be compelled to make a temporary abode in the palai region. But the call of the desert finds an echo in the bosoms of those who are born with a love of adventure, and wander-lust is the main motive power that impels the lives of many men who possess strong sinews and a stout heart. The men who lived in the desert region for a short time or all their lives were Maravar,¹⁹ men of Maram,²⁰ heroism, and Kalvar,²¹ the strong men, (from kal,²²strength, hence kaliru,²³ the elephant, the strong animal par excellence, also the shark and kal,²⁴ liquor, the strength-giver, and kalam,²⁵ the field of battle). The palai region being infertile and its men being noted for prowess in arms, the maravar and the kallar took in later times the profession of soldiering and of preying on the rich but weakly inhabitants of other regions and maram has come to mean cruelty, and kallar, thieves. But in early times men took to the palai regions chiefly on account of their love of adventure. Life in these regions must have accentuated the, matriarchal organisation of tribal life, for while the men were roving through the desert, the women and children were thrown in each other's company to enjoy whatever domestic amenities were available.

When human beings multiplied in the kurinji regions and the available food supply began to shrink, they began to migrate to the next region, the mullai or forest land. By, that time they had taken the next great step in the advancement of human culture, the domestication of animals like the buffalo, the cow, the sheep and the goat,-the dog having already been domesticated in the kuravar stage. This led to the growth of the second rung in the ladder of human progress, the pastoral culture. Cattle breed fast, especially, in the mullai, and hence arose the institution of private property the possession of which facilitated the fission of tribes into families.

The primitive form of what may be called natural marriage-the union of lovers at first sight, unimpeded by the observance of marriage-rites and formalized merely by the presentation of a tali of tiger's claws and a garment of strung leaves for the waist, was called kalavu²⁶ in early Tamil literature, and was, in the pastoral regions, replaced by karpu²⁷, in which the marriage-ritual preceded the consummation of love. The essential portion of this ceremony was the feasting of the men and women of the tribe underneath a pandal, the ordinary tenement of pastoral men decorated with flowers and leaves.²⁸

The institution of the karpu form of marriage and the development of private property led to the evolution of the patriarchal form of society, as the father of the family, being the possessor of a large growing herd of cattle, acquired the great influence of wealth. The joint family system now arose because pasture lands parcelled out into tiny bits would become too small to maintain a flock: and the family which resulted from the sub-division of the tribe, could maintain itself against competition only if its members held together and constituted a growing unit. The patriarchal head of a large family developed into a king. That the institution of kingship first arose among the pastoral tribes in mullai land is- proved by the facts that the Tamil word for a king, kon,²⁹ also means a cowherd and that for a queen, aychchi,³⁰ means a cowherdess.

Pastoral life outside India, as in the steppes of Central Asia, differed from the life of the idaiyar³¹ of the mullai land, i.e. the people of the mid-region, between the hills and the plains, in two respects: (I) the use of tents, (2) the constant shifting of the herdsmen tribes from one patch of grass land to another. The invention of tents was needless in South India on account of the equability of the climate all the year round. A few fan-like palmyra tree leaves thrown on a frame of dried sticks propped up by some bamboo pillars and topped by a broken which proved enough to afford shelter to man and beast. The fertility of the soil and the periodicity of the monsoon ensured the growth of pasture on the same spot year after year. So that it was not necessary as in the steppes to break tent when the grasses round a settlement was eaten up by the herd or parched up by the summer sun and to seek pastures new. The pastural life in South India hence was not semi-nomad but was a settled life capable of developing the amenities of civilisation.

The life of ease made possible by the leisurely tendance of cattle in the forest led to the invention of the flute, the kulal. ³²The flute was a bit of bamboo with a few holes drilled along its length and from it was produced mellifluous music which relieved the cowherd of the ennui due to the long hours of waiting while the cattle grazed.

One section of the pastoral people were the kurumbar³³ who tended the short-legged well-fleeced variety of sheep called the kurumbadu.³⁴ They learned to weave kambalis from the wool of their sheep and even to-day these Kurumbar inhabit the mullai regions of the Madras Presidency and follow their traditional occupation of kambali weaving, though the irrepressible steam-engine has now established itself in mullai tracts and the weaving of wool with the power-loom is depriving the kurumbar as also other kinds of handicraftsmen of their age-long means of earning their daily bread.

The next region to be occupied was the neydal, the sea- board. The broad bosom of the sea, heaving and falling as if animated, invited the adventure-loving men with broad chests and finely-chiselled muscles to court its dangers and venture forth to obtain its inexhaustible wealth of tasty fish. From fishing near the coast, they went on to fish in deeper waters. Hence the environment turned the paradavar,³⁵ as the inhabitants of the littoral tracts were called, into boat-builders and fishermen. The first boats were primitive canoes made of two logs tied together. Catamarans of several logs bound together to form a float or toni, wicker-work basket covered with hide, followed next. The chief produce of this region was fish and salt. The paradavar had to take them into the interior and barter them for other forms of food-stuff. Their environment again made the paradavar turn merchants. Placing their wares in double bags on the s of oxen as their modern day descendents, the balajis, do to-day, they trudged along the marshy paths and exchanged their goods for the produce of riverine plains. From the paradavar also rose the race of ancient Indian sailors who later carried Indian goods in boats to Africa and Arabia in the West and to Malaya and China in the East.

The last region to be occupied was the marudam, the low-lying plains between the mullai and the neydal, and that was at the close of the palæolithic period. With the neolithic age began modern civilization. The domestication of plants especially the rice, the plantain, the sugar-cane and the mango, probably begun in the relatively settled life of the pastoral age, was completed.

The arability of the land in this region taught the ulavar,³⁶ the ploughmen of the marudam, the method of raising cereals after ploughing the ground and the easy slope of the land in the margin of the rivers taught, the Vellalar,³⁷ the rulers of the flood, the method of conveying the life-giving water to their fields. Thus were the arts of agriculture developed to such perfection in early days that modern science can add but little to the traditional wisdom of the South Indian farmer. Beyond the river- valleys lay the land whose soil was made by the mixture of the rain-washed detritus of the trap rock of the Western Ghats and the decaying vegetation of the Dandaka forest. This was the birth-place of the cotton plant and neolithic man learnt to spin the cotton fibre into thread and weave the thread into cotton cloth.

Men now began to build houses of timber wherein to stock their superfluous store of food grain and cotton cloth. The barter of superfluous articles for things which were not easily available in the marudam region, like the salt and the sea-fish, with the paradavar, and milk and milk-products, especially ghee, with the idayar, and stones and stone tools (and after the discovery of iron, iron-tools) with the kuravar, led to the development of carts for transport by land, and the circle of the evolution of civilisation was complete. The perfection of neolithic culture and the arts and industries of the marudam region represent the last great step of human civilisation, for, since neolithic times no new food-producing plants have been domesticated and no new process of making cloth to cover the body has been invented. The discovery of metals, from iron in ancient times to aluminium in our own times, and the invention of steam and oil gas engines have but rendered, quick and easy, ancient methods of agriculture and manufacture and speeded up transport, but they have not produced either new food-stuffs or means of shielding the skin from the sun and rain and changes of atmospheric temperature.

The five subdivisions of the habitable regions occur contiguous to each other and in a small fraction of the earth's surface in India south of the Vindhyas. It is therefore easy to understand how increase of population and alterations in the natural supply of food-stuffs brought about here at different periods the migration of men from region to region arid the consequent development of the different stages of human culture, the hunter, the nomad, the pastoral, the coastal and the agricultural, due to the differing stimuli provided by the changing milieu. In other words, the geographic control of the growth of human civilization can be worked out and set forth clear as on a map by a study of man's progress in this restricted portion of the surf ace of the earth. Outside India, these five natural regions occur on a vast scale, e. g. the mullai, the vast steppe land extending from the Carpathians to the foot hills of the Altais, the kurinji or the great mountain chain from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas and beyond forming a grand girdle round the waist of mother earth, the neydal, the coasts of the Mediterranean sea, the Indian and the Atlantic oceans, and the palai, the great desert of Sahara and its continuation in Arabia, Persia and Mongolia. Did the passage from stage to stage of civilisation; first occur in the restricted region of South India and thence spread to the vaster tracts beyond or vice versa? The problem is almost insoluble at present. But it may be pointed out that the migration of population from region to region and the consequent development of higher and higher forms of culture is more likely to have taken place in a restricted portion of the earth's surface where migration from region to region is easy, than in tracts of immense extent. It will help us to understand the ancient history of man if we imagine that nature's laboratory, was, and her first experiments in human culture with the geographic forces available to her were conducted in, Dakshinapatha, India south of the Vindhyas, and not in the great physiographic division of Eurasia and Africa. It is more likely that these different cultures of ancient times sent out offshoots to appropriate regions outside India so that Nature might reproduce on a larger scale what she had succeeded in achieving on a smaller scale in India, than that she produced these cultures on a magnificent scale outside India and then squeezed minified copies of each stage of civilisation into Southern India so as to make it a complete anthropological museum.

Many writers of Indian history seem to hold it as an incontrovertible axiom that the fertile land of India with her wonderful wealth of minerals underground and vegetables and animals overground should yet depend on importations from barren countries beyond her borders for her human inhabitants and for the various cultures that adorn the pages of her history. Some writers conduct the ancient "Dravidians" with the accuracy of a Cook's guide through the north-eastern or north-western mountain passes to the western or the eastern coast of India and drop them with a ready-made foreign culture on the banks of the Kaveri or the Vaigai. Others discover an Aryan race and an Aryan culture redolent of the Indian soil but yet crossing the north-west gates of India and creeping slowly along banks of the Sindhu and. the Ganga without leaving a trace of that culture in the imagined land of its birth. But the above account of the continuous evolution of South Indian Culture-whose growth in South India is evidenced by the presence of artefacts of the palæolithic, neolithic and early iron ages throughout the country, and is traceable in the earliest strata of Tamil language and literature, shows us that the growth of civilization in the Tamil land is entirely due to geographical causes operating in situ and not to historical events such as incursions of foreigners.

Besides cooking and clothing, another great invention of man is speech. Speech may be either rhythmic or arhythmic. Whether prose preceded poetry in speech as is assumed by most people, or whether, as is more probable, poetry and prose were later differentiations of an original method of speech which was partly rhythmic and partly arhythmic, it is difficult to determine; but it is certain that in the development of literature, poetry preceded prose by long ages. The words pan³⁸ and pan³⁹ meaning, a piece of music, (whence padu, ⁴⁰sing, pattu,)⁴¹belong to the earliest stratum of Tamil, thus proving that singing was one of the earliest recreations of the Tamils. The panar,⁴²originally singers and after the institution of kingship in the pastoral stage of culture, royal bards and panegyrists, followed an ancient and honoured, though ill- rewarded, profession among the Tamils. The ancient panars were the friends and counsellors of kings during the long ages when the pure Tamil culture flourished, but when Aryan culture from North India mingled with that of South India during historic times, the persistence of the panar in the over-indulgence in meat-fold and drinking of ardent spirits brought about their social degradation into one of the lowest and most untouchable castes of South India.

¹M. Schmidt, The Primitive Races of Mankind, tr. by A. K. Dallas, 23.