when did the languages(panjabi,tamil) flourish?

Question

in which period people started to talk in languages like panjabi,tamil .and how they came from sanskrit?

Answer 1

You must remember that Tamil had an independent origin and belong to the Dravidian family of languages which is distinct from Sanskrit, that is part of the Indo-European languages. Punjabi branched out from the latter family.

Answer 2

hehe good joke, Tamil didnt come from Sanskrit, but Sanskrit came from the influence of Tamil, Tamil was present even way before 5000bc from the time of Lemuria the lost land .

Tamil was present even Way before 5000BC

Sanskrit is no match to Tamil when it come to comparison of age .
It is way much older
Sanskrit was made in India by the Aryans, or brought in by the Aryans, Sanskrit is indeed a permanent resident of the Indian soil, Sanskrit gave birth to Hindi, Punjabi and other Indo-Aryan languages.........

Answer 3

People started talking Tamil in the mid 18th century and they started talking Punjabi in the 19th century.I think people added some words from Sanskrit to their languages and that is how new languages came up.

Answer 4

Literature in Gujarati can be divided mainly into Prose and Poetry. In the medieval period, poetry was actually the means of expressing religious sentiments and the first poetry of the language was Bharateswara Bahubali Rasa. It was composed by Shalibhadrasuri, a 7th century Jain monk. A number of Jain Sadhus followed his example and composed short story poems called Rasas till the end of the 18th century. All this while in the 15th century, Narsingh Mehta was bringing in a new era of Vaishnava poetry. His poems portray Krishna as a playful child, a lover, a friend and the poet’s muse. He became a source of inspiration for his successors in composing not only similar poetry but also philosophical poems.

Raje, Raghunathdas, Pritam, Ratno and Muktananda were some of the great contributors to devotional poetry. In the 18th century, Vallabh left his artistic touch in devotional songs like Garbo and Garbi. They are popular even in today’s age. Premananda, the greatest medieval poet introduced the famous ‘Akhyana’. He had a wonderful command over the language, treated the subject in an outstanding way and moreover had a great understanding of human nature. Jains and non-Jains have written narrative poems using Sanskrit as well as Prakrit fiction as the source. Nayasundar among the Jains and Samal amongst the non-Jains were popular narrators.

With the advent of the British in the 19th century, poetic literature soared to new heights. Narmad and Dalpat were the pioneers of this age. In 1886, Narsingharao’s collection of lyrical poems Kusummala, was published. Poetry was getting restricted to the elite class and Mahatma Gandhi urged poets to write for the masses. The noted poets of this century like Kalapi, Kant, Nanalal and Balavantrai Thakor were all greats in their respective style of writing. Literature produced under Gandhi’s influence is known as Gandhian literature and the era as Gandhian era.

Poets of this time wrote about social order, the struggle for independence and especially about Gandhi himself. Umashankar, Sundaram, Shesh, Snehrasmi, Betai and many more were the principal poets of this era. During the 40s, there was a rise in communistic poetry and this inspired a movement for progressive literature. Meghani, Bhogilal Gandhi, Swapnastha and others preached class conflict and hatred of religion through their writings. Highly inspired by Tagore’s dialogue poems, Umashankar Joshi enriched the existing Gujrati literature by writing in the same manner. His two such poems are Prachina and Mahaprasthan.

Poetry of post-independence era is more subjective and brutal, discarding old imageries and symbols and replacing them with new ideas. The main representatives of this age are Suresh Joshi, Gulam Mohamed Sheikh, Harinder Dave, Chinu Modi, Nalin Raval, Adil Mansuri and others.

Gujarati literary prose in the real sense begins from the 19th century. Narmad was the leader in this field and began by writing essays meant to be read before an audience. His essays dealt mainly with social revolution, but he also wrote on literary, social, political and religious subjects. Narmad coined new words and phrases, using them to explain his ideas. His contemporary was Dalpat, an essayist and dramatist. The era starting from Narmad is called the social reform era. Naval Ram of this age was a critic of distinction besides writing literary essays and book reviews. Nand Shankar was the first novelist of his time and wrote Karanghelo a historical fiction. Govardhanram is another great novelist whose Saraswati Chandra is a classic not only in Gujarati literature but also in Indian literature. It was the first social novel, which mentioned contemporary problems and their solutions. During this period, the Gujarat Vidyapith became the centre of all literary activities where new values emerged and more emphasis was given on Indianisation. Novels, short stories, diaries, letters, plays, essays, criticisms, biographies, travel books and all kinds of prose began to flood Gujarati literature. However, Kanhaiyalal Munshi was absolutely untouched by this change and made a mockery of the Gandhian principles, whereas Ramanlal Desai, novelist, dramatist, literary critic and short storywriter all rolled into one is the true representative of the Gandhian era. His works include ‘Divya Chakshu’ and ‘Bharelo Agni’. Kaka Kalelkar was a voluminous writer and subjects included travel, culture, nature, sociology and biography. Other pioneers of this era were Kishorelal Mashruwala (essayist), Ramnarayan Pathak (critic and short story writer), and Darshak (dramatist).

The post independence prose literature had two distinct trends that of traditional and modern. The former deals more with ethical values and its main writers were Gulabdas Broker, Mansukhlal Jhaveri, Vishnuprasad Trivedi and others. While existentialism, surrealism and symbolism have influenced the latter. The modernists want to do away with moral values and religious beliefs. The eminent writers of this trend are Chandrakant Baxi, Suresh Joshi, Madhu Rai, Raghuvir Chowdhury, Saroj Pathak and others. Gujarati prose has recorded growth and literary feats quite rapidly in less than two hundred years and now can be counted among the front benchers in Indian literature.

Tamil is the oldest and purest of the four Dravidian languages.

Ancient Indian literature is not all about the Vedas; it’s about Sangam literature too. Tamil, the oldest and truest of the Dravidian speeches, boasts of this literary tradition of more than 2,200 years, the most remarkable body of secular poetry extant in India. While other pre-Aryan languages were happily courting Sanskrit and Prakrit (600 BC-600AD), Old Tamil stood firm in its corner refusing to yield. However, the evolutionary story of the language and script are a controversy among scholars even today.

The Sangam compositions are anthologies of poems grouped into two - the Eight Collections (Ettuttokai) and the Ten Idyls (Pattu-p-pattu). There are also few individual long narrative poems (Kavyas). Based on two distinct themes, akam (romantic) and puram (martial), the poems are replete with imageries of seasons, places, plants and animals, enabling scholars to know the world of these ancient poets. The literary output till about 500AD is simply amazing.

By the next century, Shaiva (in praise of Shiva) and Vaishanva (in praise of Vishnu) writers began rising from sleep, leading to a religious renaissance. It was the turn of devotional literature to hog the limelight. The corpus of Shaiva hymns, sung till today, were compiled in Tirumurarais (early 11th century). The Vaishnava saints lay the foundation of the Bhakti cult not only for South India (500-1000AD), but for the whole of India. Their songs were put together in the colossal Nal-ayira-p-pirapantam or the ‘Book of 4000 Hymns’.

Some of the great Tamil poets lived in the times of the mighty Chola kings (10th-13th centuries), a period of literary revival. Kampan’s Ramayana is the best in Tamil till today; Ottakkuttan wrote the Uttara Kanda, the last canto of the Ramayana; Pukazhenti popularized the Mahabharata with his simple adaptations in Tamil, and Chayam Kontar wrote a long war poem Kalingattu Parani, in the Sangam style. Didactic works, grammatical treatises and lexicons were produced from time to time by Jain writers.

The following centuries were the age of learned commentaries on Sangam poetry, Shaiva and Vaishnava philosophies, and literature influenced by Sanskrit. Some of these were the esteemed Bharatham by Villiputthurar, Thiruppuhazh (hymns) by Arunagirinathar and translations of many Puranas. Some brilliant stray verses of this period have been collected in late anthologies like Kalamegham, Satthimutthapulavar and Padikkasu Thambiran. European Christian missionaries also took to Tamil in the 16th century, and the first book was printed in 1579. Muslim poets like Sakkari Pulavar and Umaru Pulavar brought new themes in Tamil writings in the 18th century.

A modern trend in Tamil literature was begun in the 19th century by a group of writers influenced by English, Vedanayakam Pillai (1824-1889) being among them who wrote the first original novels and dramas. A literary giant of the 20th century was Subramania Bharathi, whose poems and patriotic songs are well known. Although the development of prose has been pretty slow, the historical romances of C R Srinivasa Aiyangar, social novels like Padmavati and Vijaya Marttandam of A. Madhavayya, Kamalambal by Rajam Iyer and S. Venkataramani’s Murugam are prominent. The short story was popularized by V V S Iyer and Rajaji, while Sambanda Mudaliar’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays contributed to Tamil drama greatly.

Truly a fountainhead, if one surveys its three thousand years of its existence. The story of the origin of Sanskrit began right from the Vedic age, sailing through the post-Vedic years and centuries later till today. The Aryans collected the mass of hymns, rituals and poems about their gods in the four Vedas (10th century BC) which document the various dialects that they brought to India (but that wasn’t the Sanskrit we know of today). From the Punjab, where the Aryans settled first after they came from Central Asia, their speech spread along the east as far as present Bihar by about 600 BC. Obviously this Vedic or Old Indo-Aryan language met with the language of the Dravidians (who were then not restricted to just the southern regions) and Austrics, and some give and take happened. The result was Prakrit or Middle Indo-Aryan dialect which soon engulfed the whole country in the north, east and centre. The Aryan invasion was moving towards completion.

Meanwhile, the ‘pure’ Aryans in Punjab were very unhappy about their sacred language getting ‘defiled’. So between 8th and 4th century BC, they came up with Classical Sanskrit, based on the old Vedic speech. But for all practical purposes, the origin of the language is taken to be the old Vedic Sanskrit.

But Prakrit dialects were already on their steady journey of spreading and mixing. Buddhists picked up one of these dialects around the 6th century BC and developed it into Pali. The process of simplification of the dialects continued throughout the Middle Indo-Aryan stage, culminating in the Apabhramsa stage in 600AD. Further modification of the regional Apabhramsas during 600-1000AD gave rise to the New Indo-Aryan languages of the present day.

But even while other languages were taking shape, Sanskrit continued to be the vehicle of creative and all other scholarly work. The sheer volume of work in Sanskrit is formidable. With the Vedas was laid the foundation stone of Vedic literature and all Sanskrit literature thereafter. From religion and philosophy to grammar, phonetics, etymology, lexicography, astronomy, astrology, sociology, sex, politics, arts and aesthetics, Sanskrit ruled. Sanskrit is also the language of India’s two most talked about epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Puranas are perhaps the most interesting collection of works in Sanskrit. There are 18 major books, the Bhagavad Gita being among them, and numerous minor ones. The Puranas contain all the fodder for stories about the Hindu gods and goddesses.

Literary activities burst forth with the playwright Bharata’s (200BC) Natya Shastra, the Bible of dramatic criticism. The earliest plays were those of Bhasa, but were soon overshadowed by Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, a model for ages. History tells us that Kalidasa was the greatest of fools in his early years. He is known to have hacked at the very branch he was sitting on! Anyway, Shakuntala was a heroic play, while Shudraka’s Mrichchhakatika, was a play of the social class. Bhavabhuti (circa 700AD) was another well-known figure, his best being Malatimadhava and Uttaramacharita, the latter based on the story of the Ramayana.

The great Sanskrit poems are five – Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsa and Kumarasambhava, Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi (550AD), Sishupalavadha of Magha (7th century AD) and Naishadhiyacharita of Sriharsha (12th century AD). All of them draw from the Mahabharata, the source for many writers even today. Shorter poems of great depth were composed on a single theme like love, morality, detachment and sometimes of grave matters. The earliest and best collections of such verses called Muktakas are those of Bhartrihari and Amaruka.

Much of the early prose work in Sanskrit has not survived. Of the remaining, some of the best are Vasavadatta of Subandhu, Kadambari and Harshacharita of Bana (7th century AD) and Dasakumaracharita of Dandin (7th century AD). The Panchatantra and Hitopadesha are collections of wit and wisdom in the Indian style, teaching polity and proper conduct through animal fables and aphorisms.

With a glorious life of over 3000 years, Sanskrit continues to be a living language even today, bobbing up during Hindu ceremonies when mantras (ritual verses) are chanted. And though restricted, it’s still a medium of literary expression, but ‘great works’ have long stopped being written.