Islam in South India did not arrive through conquest. It arrived through trade. Arab merchants settled along the Malabar and Coromandel coasts centuries before the Delhi Sultanate existed. They married locally, learned the language, adopted food, dress, and social habits, and became Tamil, Malayali, or Konkani Muslims. Religion changed. Civilisation did not.

This is why South Indian Islam does not behave like a foreign layer imposed on a hostile society. It is woven into the local fabric. Tamil Muslims are Tamil first in language, culture, and political instinct. Their solidarities are shaped by region before theology. This is not syncretism as rebellion. It is indigeneity as habit.

Tamil identity in Tamil Nadu routinely transcends religion. I was reminded of this years ago in Chennai, asking my dentist, who was Christian,about her name. Like many South Indian Christians, it was a mix of Hindu and Christian forms. I asked whether they were also Tamil. She looked at me as if the question made no sense. Of course she was Tamil, “very Tamil.”

That response explains more than a thousand editorials.

In Tamil Nadu, religion is real but it is not totalising. Tamilness is older, deeper, and more organising. This applies to Hindus, Christians, and Muslims alike. Political expression follows that logic. A Tamil Muslim expressing Tamil nationalist sentiment is not a contradiction. It is normal.

This is what happens when South India is constantly interpreted through North Indian assumptions. Islam is assumed to be oppositional. Symbols are assumed to be exclusive. Politics is assumed to be communal by default. None of this holds in the Tamil world.

Tamil lands occupy a distinct face of Indian civilisation. Fully part of India, yet unmistakably their own. Deeply Indian, yet not reducible to Gangetic history or North Indian templates. This is not fragmentation. It is civilisational strength.

India has always had multiple faces. The Tamil one is maritime, linguistic, ancient, and self-assured. It absorbed religions without surrendering itself to them. That is why its Muslims do not behave like guests. They behave like natives.

The reel was never the problem. The inability to see India’s southernmost face was.

Chennai, without any doubt, is one of the better cities in the country. I agree with many of the issues raised by XTM here. Along with Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore, Chennai continues to fare better in many aspects of life compared to Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and even Pune.

My Experience

While I appreciated the cleanliness and infrastructure of Chennai, I cannot say I came away with the same impression as XTM. Of all the Indian cities I have visited, I found Chennai less hospitable than Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, or Delhi. Even as a fluent English speaker, I struggled to hail autos or get directions. Surprisingly, I did not face this issue in the rest of Tamil Nadu. For older Hindi speakers with limited English, the experience is even worse. The issue is not simply language, but linguistic chauvinism (also present in Karnataka and Maharashtra, though to a lesser extent). A non-Tamil speaker often looks for Muslim individuals to ask for help in Chennai.

I had a wonderful time in Mamallapuram, enjoying the Pallava ruins and the beach, thanks to a very helpful Muslim auto driver. But enough of auto-wala stories.

Culture and Politics

Without comparing cities directly, it is important to recognize that culture may play a role in Chennai’s successes. However, correlation should not be confused with causation, and credit should not be misplaced. Any link between Chennai’s well-being and Dravidianism is tenuous or purely incidental at best. While successive Tamil Nadu governments aligned with Dravidianism have been relatively successful (especially compared to the North) in providing welfare nets, what direct connection do these well-run policies have with Dravidianism?

Let us compare Tamil Nadu with the rest of India on the metric that Dravidian progressivism claims to address: CASTE

Link:

Scroll piece : Caste endogamy is also unaffected by how developed or industrialised a particular state is, even though Indian states differ widely in this aspect. Tamil Nadu, while relatively industrialised, has a caste endogamy rate of 97% while underdeveloped Odisha’s is 88%, as per a study by researchers Kumudini Das, Kailash Chandra Das, Tarun Kumar Roy and Pradeep Kumar Tripathy. 

Put differently: caste endogamy seems unaffected by how anti-Brahminical or “progressive” a state claims to be. Tamil Nadu, the heart of the Dravidian movement, remains at below 3%, while Gujarat—often seen as Brahmanical and vegetarian—stands around 10% (15% in a 2010 study, though possibly overstated). However one frames it, Gujarat has more inter-caste marriages than Tamil Nadu.

Surprisingly, even Haryana and Punjab—traditionally associated with Khap Panchayats and honor culture—show significant inter-caste marriages, along with Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Kerala.

While data on Haryana, Punjab, and Goa is contested, Tamil Nadu consistently lags, whereas its neighbor Kerala consistently leads, along with Maharashtra.

Crossing from Kerala into Tamil Nadu, the difference is stark: one in five marriages in Kerala are inter-caste, compared to fewer than one in thirty in Tamil Nadu. Would it be fair to blame Dravidian politics for this? That claim has more merit than attributing Tamil Nadu’s successes to Dravidianism. Tamil Nadu ranks alongside Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Kashmir, while Karnataka, Kerala, and even Andhra/Telangana are far ahead.

Even Kashmir, with a 65% Muslim population, has an inter-caste marriage rate just below 2%, lower than Dravidian-ruled Tamil Nadu. So, after 500 years under a “casteless” religion and 100 years of “progressive” Dravidianism, both Kashmir and Tamil Nadu lag behind Gujarat, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh.

Link:

Additional Observations

This data does not fit neat narratives. I was surprised to see higher percentages of rural inter-caste marriages. Rates are negatively correlated with wealth and income (more strongly with assets such as land). Landed communities show stronger caste endogamy, for historically and pragmatically clear reasons. That Brahmins, as a group, have the highest inter-caste marriage rates is unsurprising, given how progressive (some might say deracinated) Brahmins have become in India.

One social metric where Tamil Nadu performs well is female foeticide. Tamil Nadu and Kerala are among the leading states less affected by sex-selective abortions compared to the rest of India.

Tamil Brahmins have generally been more socially aloof compared to Brahmins elsewhere in India (both anecdotally and objectively) and disproportionately occupied government posts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Justice Party movement, which arose in response, was initially a elite-feudal project, though Periyar’s early movement (also virulently anti-Brahmin) was more inclusive of Dalits and non-dominant castes. Over time, while retaining its anti-Brahmin rhetoric, the movement became a proxy for domination by landed and wealthy communities. Dravidianism today (or perhaps always) resembles what it claimed to oppose—Brahmanism. The dominant elites have simply shifted from Brahmins and the British to others who hold power today. Hatred alone does not create positive change.

It seems Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh understood the incentives for reform, while Tamil Nadu did not.

Anecdotes or caste violence are often dismissed when praising the Dravidian model of social progressivism. Comparative caste violence data is brushed aside under claims of underreporting or lack of Dalit assertion in other regions. But caste endogamy cannot be ignored. If anything that truly encapsulates Caste is endogamy.

Post Script:

Tamil politicians, both DMK and AIADMK, have run better governments in terms of welfare, industrialization, and infrastructure, and they deserve credit for that. However, linking these achievements to culture may not be wise. Geography is a more convincing explanation.

This is not nostalgia. It is observation.

A Different Social Reflex

In much of the world shaped by late-stage capitalism, interaction is transactional by default. Help is conditional. Suspicion precedes generosity. Risk is individualised. In Chennai, the reflex is still different. People intervene without being asked. Strangers stop when something is wrong. Assistance is offered before motives are assessed. Money is often refused. This is not charity. It is social instinct. That instinct survives even in moments that theory says it should not: late nights, urban settings, infrastructural failure, ambiguity. The absence of alcohol matters. The presence of peer groups matters.

But more than anything, the cultural baseline matters.

Why Tamil Nadu Resists Homogenisation

Tamil Nadu’s resistance is not accidental, and it is not recent.

1. Language as a wall

   Tamil is not ornamental. It is enforced socially. This slows cultural flattening. It resists pan-Indian and global monocultures. It keeps local meaning dense.

2. Dravidian political memory

   Tamil society internalised an early suspicion of centralisation; religious, linguistic, or political. That suspicion created buffers long before the current political moment.

3. Pluralism without performance

   Religious difference is normalised rather than staged. Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism exist as lived traditions, not symbols in a culture war. This reduces siege psychology.

4. Weak penetration of chains

   Unlike Mumbai or Bengaluru, Chennai never fully surrendered its retail and social space to global chains. Local commerce still dominates daily life. That preserves face-to-face norms.

5. Family and neighbourhood density

   Gated isolation exists, but it is not total. Multi-generational presence and informal accountability remain strong.

Together, these factors produce something rare: modernity without total alienation.

The Dravidian Exception

Across South Asia, regions most exposed to imperial circuits, tourism corridors, financial hubs, Anglophone enclaves, develop a subtle sorting mechanism. Attention becomes differential. Westoxication, proximity to capital, or symbolic globality acquire value. Tamil Nadu largely escapes this logic. The reason is not moral superiority. It is insulation. Empire does not fully enter Chennai’s interior life. Compare this with places overwhelmed by external valuation; where service becomes calibrated, where the gaze changes, where people learn to distinguish between bodies. Tamil Nadu has been spared that training.

For now.

Capitalism Without Total Capture

Tamil Nadu is not anti-capitalist. It is industrial. It exports. It builds. But it has not fully internalised the idea that value must be proven through dominance, speed, or self-assertion. Accommodation still carries status. Adjusting to others is not read as weakness.

This is the opposite of the imperial ethic, where friction is resolved through power.

A Warning, Not a Celebration

None of this is permanent. The post-1990s generation shows strain. Gated living grows. English replaces intimacy. Phones replace neighbourhoods. Hyper-individualism seeps in. Capital does not destroy cultures all at once. It corrodes reflexes. Tamil Nadu’s strength lies in the fact that many people still remember another way of being, and can model it unconsciously. Once that memory fades, no policy can restore it.

Why This Matters Beyond India

What survives in Chennai is not “Indian culture” in the abstract. It is a pre-imperial social grammar: presence, mutual recognition, non-transactional help, emotional attunement. These traits exist wherever Empire has not fully won; whether in parts of the Global South, or in marginal spaces within the West itself. They are not backward. They are not inefficient. They are not sentimental. They are human.

And once lost, they are almost impossible to rebuild.

A fellow TamBram writes about it; https://nereview.com/article/the-trials-of-subu-vedam.

The word Brahmin is mentioned 4 times in the non-paywall foreword.

Subu’s father was an academic, a physics professor and materials scientist at Penn State, who would have blended seamlessly with my parents’ friends in North Carolina, who were all vegetarian and spoke Brahminical Tamil with its idiosyncratic conjugations and vocabulary.

Dr. V

But calm at the table contrasts with what I read in the news. The Delhi order to remove stray dogs is disturbing. I cannot look at the pictures of the removals.

Across the Trans-Wagah line, another current runs. The Pakistan Cricket Board may change its revenue-sharing with players. A small story, yet it speaks of a larger one: Pakistan may gain small tactical wins by tying its path as the flexible adversary to India. But for the top ten percent of its economy, the block is clear. They cannot flow into India’s success. They remain tied to Western patrons.

Meanwhile, old arguments are stirred again. Audrey Truschke has been active with fresh claims on Aurangzeb. The same week, Kabir wrote that Western philosophy outweighs Dharmic wisdom, and that Greek thought shaped Buddhism (I can’t remember if it was him). I wonder who first wrote this propaganda. It is damaging, and it lingers.

India’s stories stretch from the taste of rasam to the fate of stray dogs, from cricket boards to Aurangzeb’s ghost, from Kabir to the Greeks. Each is part of the same struggle: who owns the narrative of Bharat, and how it is told.

Links:

To the Dutch, a German Shepherd holds more worth: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNYEoQForz2/?igsh=MTVrZW1kZW94NHdieQ==

Serial Killing at a Famous Karnataka Temple: https://youtube.com/shorts/YexL_ASaGqE?si=mQ-Kdj6jSMzNPrAx

Could be Social Media Frenzy: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/dharmasthala-burial-case-political-temperature-soars-as-no-major-recovery-after-digging-17-spots/article69937387.ece

Not one Football: https://youtube.com/shorts/DR8SFCTCaoQ?si=tut2ymQB3EcDHTY6

In the 15th century, Venetian explorer Niccolò de’ Conti coined the phrase “The Italian of the East” for Telugu, captivated by its melody and rhythm. He famously asked, “Is this language or music?”

Telugu boasts around 96 million speakers and ranks 16th globally, while Italian, with approximately 60-70 million speakers, falls outside the top 20, usually around 21st or 22nd.

Despite its cultural prominence, Italian’s global reach may be possibly smaller than Telugu’s owing to this upcoming election between the beautiful & elegant Dravidians of the United States.

Maybe in light of the emerging 21st century power dynamics, it’s more appropriate to consider Italian as the “Telugu of the Mediterranean?” 🙂

But less on geopolitics and back to linguists; much like Italian, Telugu’s frequent use of vowel-ending words creates a natural rhythm, blurring the lines between speech and melody. Many thanks to the excellent video below for so much of the source content of the post.

Tl;dr Four Reasons Why Telugu is So Poetic:

1. Vowel-Endings: Nearly every word in Telugu ends with a vowel, making it rhythmically pleasing and easy to rhyme.
2. Vowel Harmony: Telugu’s phonetic structure ensures that vowels are adjusted for a more aesthetically pleasing flow, creating a melodic cadence.
3. Verb Flexibility: Telugu verbs can take on thousands of forms from a single root (e.g., choodu becomes choosaanu, choosthunnanu, choosindi), allowing for nuanced expression and sound variation.
4. Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Dravidian Influence: The layering of these linguistic traditions adds depth and variety to Telugu, enriching its poetic and musical capabilities.

See more detail after the jump.

1. A Language of Vowels

Telugu, known as the “Achuntu” or “language of vowels,” has a structure where nearly all words end in vowels, similar to the Italian language. Take the Telugu words illu (house), cheyi (hand), and puli (tiger). The consistent vowel-ending in these words makes them flow seamlessly into conversations and songs. This pattern, combined with vowel harmony, gives Telugu a unique rhythm that is distinctly musical. Words often transition smoothly without abrupt consonantal stops, enhancing the overall melodic feel.

2. Vowel Harmony

This is reminiscent of another Indian language, Bengali, where vowels in words are fine-tuned to ensure smooth transitions in sound. Bengali, similarly celebrated for its sweetness, also emphasizes harmonious sound patterns, although Telugu’s emphasis on verb transformation makes it more flexible.

3. Verb Flexibility

Similarly, the verb transformation system allows flexibility, where from a root verb like choodu (to see), you can derive hundreds of forms like choosthunnanu (I am seeing), choosindi (it was seen), and choosaanu (I saw). This flexibility allows a speaker to play with sounds and rhythm, transforming the language into something that sounds like a musical composition (in the video above there are some phenomenal examples of the poetic, prose and rap culture in the Telugu language sphere, which I haven’t referenced here).

4. Deep Historical and Cultural Influence

Telugu’s phonetic beauty is a result of its long linguistic evolution, drawing heavily from Sanskrit and Prakrit.

These influences are reflected in words like gurinchi (about) and pilicheeyanu (I call), where the Sanskrit and Dravidian layers blend to create a rhythmic and melodic quality.

The word gurinchi (about), for example, shows its Sanskritic roots (gṛhītam), while retaining the inherent “dancing vowels” of Telugu.

Dialectical Variations with Sonorosity

In Telangana Telugu, for instance, you hear words like nenu (I) and meeru (you) paired with Urdu borrowings like adab (greeting), which adds a distinct flavor to the dialect, maintaining lightness through soft, vowel-laden pronunciations.

Phonetic Comparisons with Italian

Italian is often recognized for its musical flow due to words like arrivederci or spaghetti with soft, rolling consonants and vowel endings. Similarly, Telugu words such as pachchi (green/raw) or butti (basket) have that gentle flow, creating a naturally pleasing auditory experience. Additionally, Telugu’s verb forms, such as pilicheeyanu (I call), carry the same fluid cadence as Italian’s chiamare (to call). The rhythmic pattern found in both languages explains why de’ Conti drew the parallel.

Global Recognition

Films like RRR have captured global attention, drawing audiences into its lyrical flow & iconic dance moves.

Telugu’s rightful status

In conclusion, Telugu’s musicality, rooted in its vowel endings, verb transformations, multiple registers, and vowel harmony, allows it to flow like a continuous stream of sound, akin to music. This inherent rhythm is not just functional but a core part of its identity, echoing the awe Niccolò de’ Conti felt centuries ago.

It’s telling of colonial influence that languages like French, Italian, Persian and Urdu are often deemed “poetic,” while scientifically & structurally, Indian languages like Telugu and Bengali are naturally suited for musicality and poetry. This underscores how historical power dynamics shape perceptions, often obscuring true linguistic richness.

Appendices

The video presents several fascinating graphics (which I’ve interspersed through the post) showcasing the phonetic beauty of Telugu, the 16th most widely spoken language globally. I’ve excerpted a few below and elsewhere what I found to be interesting.

Notably, Telugu speakers in the U.S. now match the historically dominant Gujarati American population, demonstrating the increasing influence of this language within the Indian diaspora.

The value of gunny bags of cocoa beans stacked unevenly, without a great deal of care, is currently more than Rs 12 lakh and almost guaranteed to go up to Rs 15 lakh soon.

The lottery of climate change is such that the misery of farmers in one country is an opportunity to make windfall gains for others in a different continent.

The price of cocoa beans, the primary raw material for chocolate, has more than tripled in the last year. In March 2024 alone, it rose from $7100 a ton to $10455. In fact, chocolate prices now trade higher than industrial metals such as copper.

Can Indian cocoa farmers like her take advantage of rising global cocoa prices?

Read the full story here 

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Dr Omar Ali joins me and we talk to K Jayaraman (KJ) on political movements and politics in Tamil Nadu.

KJ talks about the origin of the Dravidian movement, the evolution of the movement to a political force, the decline of Congress and BJP’s chances in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

I spoke to Swetha Warrier on her journey as the finalist in two of the premier dancing talent hunt TV shows in India namely – India’s Best Dancer & Dance India Dance. She also spoke about her passion for Bharatnatyam Fusion

The Indic Explorer YouTube channel focusses on the interplay of Indic culture with modernity explored through different facets in the socio-cultural sphere.

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On the 35th Episode of The Indic Explorer Show, I spoke to Theatre Director Ajit Chitturi on the status of Contemporary English Theatre in Chennai.

The Indic Explorer YouTube channel focusses on the interplay of Indic culture with modernity explored through different facets in the socio-cultural sphere.

Do subscribe to the channel at https://www.youtube.com/theindicexplorer

and follow me here

Twitter- https://twitter.com/theindicexplor1

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Spotify – https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/MobfQp83uzb