Tamil country

The deep south, and the oldest continuously attested literary culture in India outside Sanskrit. Tamil has an unbroken written tradition from the Sangam poems of roughly two thousand years ago, secular verse about love and war that predates most of what survives in any Indian language, and it is the only classical language of the subcontinent still spoken as a mother tongue by tens of millions in essentially continuous form. Three dynasties - Chera, Chola and Pandya - are named in those poems and in Ashoka's inscriptions. The Cholas under Rajaraja and Rajendra in the eleventh century did what no other Indian power attempted, sending fleets to conquer Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya in Sumatra, and building the Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur. Their bronze casting and temple architecture set the southern standard. The region was never held long by the Delhi Sultanate or the Mughals, which is one reason its social order and language survived unaltered by Persianate influence. Under the British it became the Madras Presidency. The twentieth century's defining movement was Dravidian: anti-Brahmin, anti-caste, and above all anti-Hindi, resisting the imposition of a northern language with agitations in 1937 and 1965 that turned violent and permanently ended any prospect of Hindi as sole national language. Dravidian parties have governed the state continuously since 1967. Chennai is a major industrial centre. Madurai's Meenakshi temple has been rebuilt on the same site for centuries. Tamil is an official language of Singapore and Sri Lanka as well as India. Puducherry nearby was French until 1954. The Thirukkural remains the tradition's most quoted text.

• Existed: 300 BCE – present
• Type: Entity