and made themselves attractive. Their clothes were of cotton, wool, silk, and even rat's hair.1 One mode of their decoration was the painting of their bodies with scented pastes and powders and the wearing of garlands of flowers..... If the town life was rich, the village life was equally so. The villagers, of whom the agriculturists, cowherds and shepherds formed the majority, led a simple life attending to their hereditary professions of cultivation and cattle-tending. The villages were not altogether cut off from the activities of town life. There were means of transport which were, primarily, bullock-carts on land and boats on water. Between the villages, or more properly between two great towns, thick forests abounded with wild animals and serpents, streams and springs of water, fruit trees and trees of other kinds, cornfields and flower gardens. Iḷango-Aḍigaḷ gives us a vivid picture of all this when describing the route from ancient Puhār to Madura.2 The monotonous life of the villager was often enlivened by rural amusements of a varied character. Every village had a common dancing-hall (kaḷam).3 Even the village women took part in these public performances like the tuṇangai, a kind of dance.4 Having enough to eat and drink, the villagers led a contented and happy life. Notwithstanding the security and peace afforded by the kings of the land, theft was not uncommon. The Maṛavar who lived in forests and desert tracts, otherwise known as the Eiynar, who were often employed as soldiers in wars by the Tamil kings, had for their chief profession highway robbery.5 They often deprived the unwary wayfarer of his belongings: cattle lifting was one feature of their thieving. They were addicted to liquor and ate from a common table. They hunted the wild hog, boar and deer, whose flesh they ate, using their skins as clothes and their ivory teeth and nails as ornaments. VII. Rural Government The village formed a strong nucleus of social and administrative life in the ancient period, and continued to do so into the modern period. From literature we obtain a few glimpses of the life of rural communities. T. V. MAHALINGAM, Professor of Archaeology, University ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Canto xiv, 11. 205-7, comm. 2 Cantos x-xi. 3Maṇi., canto iv, 1. 6. 4 Canto v, 1. 70. 5 See also Dikshitar's paper ‘The Eiynar' in Sentamil, Vol. XXXI, No. 1. |