Vembur
On the menhir trail
The destruction of menhirs
in Vembur in the Varusha Nadu region is typical of the fate of megalithic
burial sites in other parts of Tamil Nadu. By T.S. SUBRAMANIAN
THERE were fewer than 10
menhirs jutting out of a scrub jungle on the knoll. Most of the scrub jungles,
and with them the menhirs, had been cleared to make way for cultivation. All
we—a group of archaeology buffs on a tour of archaeological sites in the Cumbum
valley in Tamil Nadu, arranged by the Tamil Nadu chapter of the Indian National
Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH)—could see were tell-tale tyre
marks left by earthmovers.
In the hilly terrain of
Vembur village, about 60 kilometres from Andipatti in Theni district, knolls
and scrub jungles had once been part of the landscape. But no more. “I first
came here about 25 years ago to do a survey of menhirs. There were scores of
menhirs here at that time. They are getting destroyed fast. At this pace of
destruction, in another 10 years everything will be gone,” rued V. Vedachalam,
retired senior epigraphist, Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology. Vedachalam
then pointed to Kallathupatti village, nestled among hills a few kilometres
away, and said hopefully: “Perhaps, the menhirs there have survived.” It was
getting dark, so we could not go there to verify.
“There were many menhirs
and ‘goodarams’, made of stone slabs, here during my childhood. But they have
all disappeared,” reminisced 70-year-old Seeni Ammal of Vembur. “Goodarams” are
underground cists used for burial and lay adjacent to the menhirs.
The destruction witnessed
in Vembur, situated in the Varusha Nadu region, is typical of the destruction
of megalithic burial sites in many other parts of Tamil Nadu. Under the
increasing assault of urbanisation, megalithic burial sites, be they menhirs,
cairn circles with cist burials, stone circles, dolmens or dolmenoid cists,
have vanished rapidly.
Menhirs are tall, majestic,
monolithic stone slabs planted in memory of the dead—that is, memorial stones
that mark graves. In Tamil, menhirs are called “nedunkal”, meaning tall stone
slabs. The Tamil Sangam literature refers to them as “natta polum nada
nedunkal”.
Menhirs are datable from
1000 BCE to 300 BCE. The tallest menhir in Tamil Nadu is more than nine metres
in height and is situated at Kumarikalpalayam, near Perunthurai in Erode
district. The shortest are about one metre tall and are found in several
places.
There are menhirs that
stand singly, those erected adjacent to cairn circles entombing cist burials,
and those planted close to dolmenoid cists. The “goodarams” in Vembur indicate
that the place probably had menhirs in association with cairn circles and cist
burials. They must have been destroyed by cultivation.
The Megalithic Age, or Iron
Age, is datable to circa 1000 BCE. Mega means big and lith stone. Megalithic
burials involved the use of big granite slabs for erecting menhirs and building
cists and boulders for laying cairn circles. Menhirs were generally erected for
chiefs of clans, the elite in society or those who died in cattle-lifting
raids. They denoted the economic power or social status of the dead person.
K. Rajan, Professor of
History, Pondicherry University, in his book South Indian Memorial Stones
(published in 2000 by Manoo Pathippakam, Thanjavur) says: “The sepulchral
monuments raised in memory of the dead comprise different types in Tamil Nadu
and Kerala. Some of the monuments were exclusively raised for the heroes who died
for noble causes. The basic theme connected with memorial stones in Tamil Nadu
is cattle-lifting or cattle-retrieving.” These memorial stones showed the
“veneration and devotion” that the makers of these monuments had for the dead
and their “belief in post-mortem existence besides the benefits of their
periodical propitiation by ritual and worship”.
V.P. Yathees Kumar,
Assistant Archaeologist, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), said menhirs
were found in the Coimbatore-Tiruppur-Erode-Karur region, and in Vellore,
Tiruvannamalai, Dharmapuri, Theni and Sivaganga districts of Tamil Nadu. The
villages where they are located in the Coimbatore-Tiruppur-Erode-Karur region
include Kodumanal, Mukkudi Velampalayam, Pattalingam Palayam, Ammapatti, Prabhu
Nagar, Kothampalayam, Jagadadhi (also known as Bommadhi Kinathupatti),
Nattukkalpalayam, Michampalayam, Sundampatti and Kodidasanur. In Sivaganga
district, they are found at Natham Porukki village. Menhirs are not found in
the southern districts of Ramanathapuram, Tirunelveli and Kanyakumari.
“Menhirs are associated
with megalithic graves. In general, these burials are associated with two
menhirs, one east-facing and the other west-facing. They were planted just
outside the cairn circle, one facing the east and the other the west. In
between them lay the cairn circle. But in most graves, only one menhir survives
now,” said Yathees Kumar, who has studied and documented several menhir sites
in Tamil Nadu. When the circle was packed with cairns, the menhirs stood firmly,
he explained. No menhirs were found adjacent to stone circles, nor were they
found adjacent to urn-burial sites, Yathees Kumar said.
K.T. Gandhirajan, explorer
and art historian, calls menhirs “universal monuments” because they are found
all over the world. Their shape—they are tall, rectangular unpolished stone
slabs—was the same wherever they were found, be it in France, Sweden, Ireland,
Armenia, Iran, Serbia, South America or India, he said. He estimated that many
hundred menhirs were found in France alone. They were an “early form of
memorial stones” belonging to the Megalithic Age, Gandhirajan said.
Erecting tall, monolithic
menhirs entailed a lot of manpower because it involved slicing out slabs from
granite rocks and transporting them to the places where they had to be erected,
Vedachalam said. “The megalithic monuments by their very nature of construction
would have involved the efforts of the entire community, since the construction
of each one of them involved the transport and erection of huge slabs and
boulders of stones,” says Rajan in his book. Gandhirajan called the erection of
menhirs “a joint venture” as they involved “team-work”. It showed that people
had started living and functioning in groups by then.
In Tamil Nadu, the earliest
evidence of memorial stones is found in Tamil Sangam literature, and they are
described by more than 25 poets. (The Sangam literature is datable to the early
part of the Common Era). The Sangam works such as Tolkappiyam,Akananuru,
Purananuru, Malaipadukadam, Ainkurunuru, and Pattinapalai deal with memorial
stones in a detailed manner.
Yathees Kumar’s latest
discovery of a menhir was in a village called Nattukkalpalayam, 13 km west of
Dharapuram in Tamil Nadu, in June 2013. The menhir is three metres tall and
about 1.20 m broad. A big amount of cairn packing is found around it.
A menhir has been found in
another village by the same name near Pollachi. “Nattukkal” in Tamil means a
planted stone, an obvious reference to the menhir.
Yathees Kumar said that
when he mapped the locations of the menhirs found in western Tamil Nadu, he
found that they were situated on the trade route from Karur in the State via
the Palghat Gap to Muziris, the ancient, celebrated port in Kerala. On this
trade route, menhirs were found at Kottampalayam, Pallipatti, Nattukkalpalayam
(near Dharapuram), Somavarapatti, Aravakurichi, and Nattukkalpalayam (near
Pollachi), all of which are located in Tamil Nadu. One had to cross the
Amaravathy river on this route. On the Kerala side, menhirs are found at
Perattukkavu, Kavasseri, Pulimannam, Kodannur and Kottanallur near Muziris.
Tamil inscriptions also spoke about “peru vazhi” (the highway).
These menhirs are found
near manufacturing hubs or trade centres where trade guilds thrived. The
menhirs must have been erected for wealthy merchants or chiefs of clans who
lived in these places, Yathees Kumar said. There was also trade from Karur to
Muziris via the Noyyal river. Four menhirs have been found on this trade route
at Kodumanal, which was a great manufacturing centre of beads.
Five stages
There were five stages in
the evolution of the megalithic burials, said Rajan. They were (1) megalithic
cairn circles, (2) cairn circles with tall menhirs, (3) tall menhirs with
Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions on them, (4) short menhirs, about one or two metres
tall, with Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions, and (5) the culmination of shortened
menhirs into hero-stones with Tamil Vattelluttu inscriptions of the fifth and
sixth century ACE.
In the first stage,
megalithic burials (datable to circa 1000 BCE) involved building an underground
cist (box-like structure) made of granite slabs. A capstone formed the cist’s
roof. The cist generally faced east. Stone slabs again divided the cist into
chambers. The chamber walls had portholes in the form of a circle or a
trapezoid. The dead body was lowered into the chamber. If the body had been
exposed to the elements, its remains were collected and placed inside the
chamber. Inside the chamber were kept ritual pottery that contained paddy and
beads made of semi-precious stones such as carnelian, agate and quartz. Swords,
knives, daggers, stirrups (of horses) and favourite items used by the dead
person were arranged around these ritual pots.
The cist itself was packed
with mud on the sides and top. The burial was marked on the surface above, with
boulders arranged in the form of a single circle. Inside the circle, the earth
was packed with a lot of small stones called cairns. Hence, it is called a
cairn circle. Sometimes, there was a double circle. If no cairns are packed
inside the circle(s), it is called a stone circle. Thus cairn circles entombed
a cist burial below. Such cairn circles are datable to before the fifth century
BCE. Sangam literature called such cairn circles “paral uyar padukkai”. If the
chamber, made of stone slabs, was built above the ground, it is called a dolmen
and if it was half-buried, it is called a dolmenoid cist.
“In the second stage [also
before the fifth century BCE], the megalithic cists/dolmens [above the ground]
were raised and menhirs were planted for people who died generally in cattle
raids,” Rajan said.
The third stage, circa
fifth/fourth century BCE, saw the erection of tall menhirs with Tamil-Brahmi
inscriptions, mentioning the name of the person for whom they were erected. “In
the whole of India, we have only one menhir with an inscription [that is, in
Tamil-Brahmi] and it is found at Thathapatti near Andipatti,” Rajan said.
As the recent excavations
at Porunthal and Kodumanal, both done by a Pondicherry University team headed
by K. Rajan, have shown, the Thathapatti site is datable to the fourth century
BCE (Frontline, October 8, 2010, and August 10, 2012).
The height and size of the
menhirs came down in the fourth stage (fourth century BCE) to the level of
memorial stones. They have Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions on them mentioning the
name of the hero who died in cattle raids. However, these short menhirs do not
have carvings of the heroes for whom they were erected. An example of this
stage is the three memorial stones, with Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions, discovered
in 2006 by Rajan, Yathees Kumar and S. Selvakumar at Pulimankombai village, 15
km from Andipatti. (Yathees Kumar and Selvakumar are students of Rajan. Both
Thathapatti and Pulimankombai are on the banks of the upper Vaigai river.)
In the last and fifth
stage, the menhirs were reduced to hero-stones, each with the engraving of the
hero who was killed in a cattle raid. Such hero-stones, during the
transformation period of Tamil-Brahmi into Tamil Vattelluttu script, belong to
the fourth century ACE. They have Tamil Vattelluttu inscriptions, and are found
in the Chengam area of present-day Tiruvannamalai district, and in Dharmapuri
district.
Yathees Kumar, who
discovered the one-metre-tall menhir with the Tamil-Brahmi script at
Thathapatti, estimated that the script belonged to the fourth century BCE. The
thick stone slab, in which the script was incised, was found broken. Hence the
full inscription is not available. The incomplete inscription reads, “… n Adi
On Bagal Paliy Kal…” It means the memorial stone was erected for the servant
(Adi On) of a chieftain (whose name is lost because the memorial stone was broken).
“Paliy” means grave and “kal” stone. “It must have, therefore, been a memorial
stone planted in Adi On’s grave. This is among the earliest memorial stones
found in India,” Vedachalam said. In Gandhirajan’s assessment, “Thathapatti
discovery is unusual in terms of palaeography and the context of burial
culture.”
The script on the three
hero-stones found at Pulimankombai can be dated to the fourth century BCE and
the words are in pure Tamil, without an admixture of Prakrit words, said Rajan.
One of the three scripts that reads “Kal petu tiyan antavan kutal ur a kol”
refers to a person named Antavan who lost his life in a cattle raid (a kol)
that took place in a village Kutalur (5 km away from Pulimankombai). This is
perhaps the earliest inscription about a cattle raid. The other two
inscriptions read “…an ur atan… n an kal” and “vel ur avvan patavan.”
As Rajan pointed out, these
hero-stones at Pulimankombai, however, have only scripts and there is no image
of the hero carved on them. Later on, the figure of the hero got engraved on
these memorial stones, marking the fifth and final stage in the evolution of
menhirs.
The last major discovery
was the two hero-stones at Irulapatti village, near Harur, bearing images of
the heroes and Tamil-Vattelluttu inscriptions of the fifth century ACE. This
marked the beginning of another form of hero-stones in Tamil, which continued
until the 16th century ACE (the Vijayanagara period).
வருஷநாடு மலைப்பகுதியில் பெருங்கற்கால கல்திட்டை
வருஷநாடு குமணந்தொழு அருகே கோயில் காடுப் பகுதியில் உள்ள பெருங்கற்கால கல் திட்டைகள் அழிந்து வருகிறது. இதை பாதுகாக்கப்பட்ட பகுதியாக அறிவிக்க அரசு நடவடிக்கை எடுக்க வேண்டும்.தேனி மாவட்டம் கடமலை-மயிலை ஒன்றியம், குமணந்தொழு ஊராட்சிக்கு உட்பட்ட மண்ணுாத்து, வெம்பூர், கணேசபுரம் ஆகிய மலைக்கிராமங்களில் சுமார்
2,500 ஆண்டுகளுக்கு முன்பு
மனிதர்கள் வசித்துள்ளனர். அதற்கு அடையாளமாக,இந்த பகுதியில் இறந்தவர்களை புதைத்து,அதன் மேல் சுமார் 15
முதல் 20 அடி உயரம் கொண்ட கல்திட்டை வைத்துள்ளனர். இந்த இடத்தை பெருங்கற்கால மனிதர்கள் தெய்வமாக வழிபட்டுள்ளனர். இந்த பகுதியை கோயில்காடு என முன்னோர்கள் குறிப்பிட்டுள்ளனர். தற்போது இந்த கல் திட்டை ஆங்காங்கே சுமார் 3 ஏக்கர் பரப்பில் உள்ளது.இதன் வரலாற்று முக்கியத்துவம் குறித்து அறியாத இந்த பகுதி மக்கள் பெரும்பாலான கல் திட்டைகளை அழித்து, சேதபடுத்தி விட்டனர். கல் திட்டைகளை மேலும் அழியாமல் பாதுகாக்க அரசு நடவடிக்கை எடுக்க வேண்டும். இந்த நிலையில், கடந்த ஆக.,15ல் நடந்த குமணந்தொழு ஊராட்சி கிராம சபை கூட்டத்தில்,கோயில்காடு பகுதியை பாதுகாக்கப்பட்ட பகுதியாக அறிவிக்க வேண்டும் என தீர்மானம் நிறைவேற்றியுள்ளனர்.
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