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closest of relations to each other. Though superficially Kannada and Telugu may appear to bear a closer resemblance, the internalities of the grammatical and linguistic structures of Old Kannada and Tamil are closer to each other than to those of the other languages.

Professor Settar’s monograph traces the more seminal commonalities between the two languages, even while noting the rivalries and contentions in their historic and literary relationship. In his own words, his book presents not so much judgmental and final findings as ideas intended to provoke and encourage further explorations of his themes.

Seven of these broadly inter-related themes are discussed in nine chapters. Their arguments are dense and complex. Indeed, each of these chapters could deserve the full treatment of a book. So, instead of merely summarising the contents of the book, which would be a poor duplication of the excellent summaries provided by the author at the beginning of each chapter, I will deal briefly with two or three of these themes that have some relevance to the historic relations between the two languages and their users which in recent times have become fraught and contentious.

The book begins with a brief comparative consideration of the territoriality, language and culture, very broadly the zeitgeist (yugadharma), of the land and people of Tamil and Kannada, as represented in two of the earliest extant works on the grammar and poetics of the two languages: Tolkappiam (Ancient Collection, circa First Century AD) and Kavirajamarga (The Royal Road of the Poet/Poetry, Ninth Century AD). Eschewing the all too typical propensity of nationalist historians on every side of the divide to exaggerate and diminish the attainments of oneself and of the Other, Professor Settar notes that the Tamil work, comprising 1,602 verses with the range of an encyclopaedia of linguistics, preceded the Kannada work by over 800 years; and that far more significant and substantial work has been done by Tamil scholars in interpreting and explicating the Tamil classic than by Kannada scholars in respect of the Kannada classic.

Further, the poetics of the Tamil classic inspired and influenced a tradition of Tamil writing known as Sangam classics (‘opened up new avenues for a copious flow of Tamil poetry’) while in contrast the Kannada classic failed to inspire such attainments from those who inherited that tradition.

More tellingly, even a superficial student is struck by the fact that the very title of the Tamil work is in pure Tamil while that of the Kannada work could well suggest that its language is Sanskrit. Thus, the phenomenon of at least two grammars of ancient Kannada even after Kavirajamarga being composed in Sanskrit while the earliest book of Tamil grammar and poetics is in a language uncontaminated by any Sanskritic influence. However, Professor Settar also notes that the later Tamil poets following the poetic principles set out by the author of Tolkappiam could not entirely escape the creeping Sanskritisation of Tamil tradition – a point of view that will no doubt be disputed by Tamil scholars.

Chapter Four, on the “composite Brahmi script of southern India”, has some interesting propositions about the relation between a language and literature thriving as an oral tradition without a script. According to Professor Settar, Sangam Tamil (and Scriptural Sanskrit) present two notable instances of a vibrant oral literature thriving over generations without the seemingly necessary attribute of a distinct script. In contrast, the people of the Kannada and Telugu country adopted a form of Brahmi script through the mediation of Prakrit literature which too had reached these lands long before the Ashokan inscriptions. Despite the highly technical nature of the arguments, the thesis itself is interesting and is sure to provoke further investigations into the field.

The arguments of the last chapter, on the contribution of the poets of the Kannada land to Sangam literature, and the translations into Kannada verse of 26 poems of the Sangam period are perhaps the most interesting to the common reader unable to follow the technical

complexities of the earlier chapters. Disputing the claims of the pre-5th Century B.C. antiquity of Sangam literature, or its unbroken continuity for a millennium to 5th Century AD, and its autonomous growth and development (the late Professor B.G.L. Swamy has a most amusing satirical refutation of such claims in his Among Tamil Intellectuals (Tamilu Thalegala Naduve), Kavyalaya, Mysore, 2007), Professor Settar suggests Sangam literature was substantially enriched by praise poems composed by wandering minstrels from the Kannada borderlands in the Vaduga (present Badaga) and Konkana country.

A most interesting question that Professor Settar raises (pp. 190 ff) is whether these minstrels had also composed verses in their own tongues – Kannada, Tulu, Konkana. Any consideration of such questions would lead one back to the beginnings of recorded Kannada poetic tradition before the author of Kavirajamarga, the starting point of Professor Settar’s polemic.

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