Tamil

Tamil, people originally of southern India who speak Tamil, one of the principal languages of the Dravidian family. Numbering about 64 million in the early 21st century (including about 3 million speakers in northern and eastern Sri Lanka), Tamil speakers make up the majority of the population of Tamil Nadu state and also inhabit parts of Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh states, all situated in the southernmost third of India. Emigrant Tamil may be found in some parts of Madagascar, the Malay Peninsula, Myanmar (Burma), Indochina, Thailand, eastern Africa, South Africa, the Fiji and Mauritius islands, and the West Indies.

The Tamil area in India is a centre of traditional Hinduism. Tamil schools of personal religious devotion (bhakti) have long been important in Hinduism, being enshrined in a literature dating back to the 6th century ce. Buddhism and Jainism were widespread among the Tamil, and these religions’ literatures predate the early bhakti literature in the Tamil area. Although the present-day Tamil are mostly Hindus, there are Christians, Muslims, and Jains among them. In the recent past, the Tamil area was also the home of the Dravidian movement that calls for the desanskritization and debrahmanization of Tamil culture, language, and literature.

The Tamil have a long history of achievement; sea travel, city life, and commerce seem to have developed early among them. Tamil trade with the ancient Greeks and Romans is verified by literary, linguistic, and archaeological evidence. The Tamil have the oldest cultivated Dravidian language, and their rich literary tradition extends back to the early Christian era. The Chera, Chola, Pandya, and Pallava dynasties ruled over the Tamil area before the Vijayanagar empire extended its hegemony in the 14th century, and these earlier dynasties produced many great kingdoms. Under them the Tamil people built great temples, irrigation tanks, dams, and roads, and they played an important role in the transmission of Indian culture to Southeast Asia. The Chola, for example, were known for their naval power and brought the Malay kingdom of Sri Vijaya under their suzerainty in 1025 ce. Though the Tamil area was integrated culturally with the rest of India for a long time, politically it was for most of the time a separate entity until the advent of British rule in India.

The Tamil in Sri Lanka today are of various groups and castes, though they are predominantly Hindus. The so-called Ceylon Tamil, constituting approximately two-thirds of them, are concentrated in the northern part of the island. They are relatively well educated, and many of them hold clerical and professional positions. The so-called Indian Tamil of Sri Lanka were brought there by the British in the 19th and 20th centuries as workers on the tea estates, and they have been regarded as foreigners by the other ethnic groups. The Ceylon and Indian Tamil are organized under different caste systems and have little social intercourse with each other.

In the 1980s, growing tensions between the Ceylon Tamil and the Sinhalese Buddhist majority in Sri Lanka prompted Tamil militants to undertake a guerrilla war against the central government in hopes of creating a separate Tamil state for themselves in the north and northeast. The Tamil rebels’ organization, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, continued their insurgency into the 21st century. A major government offensive in 2009 overran the final Tamil Tiger strongholds and destroyed the organization’s leadership. It was estimated that as many as 80,000 people were killed in the fighting.