However, until before the bhakti trend set in, before the so-called 'dark ages', in the Tamil classical age, in the age of Murugan, the Tamil man see… - Kamil Zvelebil

the pitfall of the simplistic view of Indian cultural development, which reduces everything to the tension between autochthonous features (primarily Dravidian) and imported Indo-Aryan traits. ... [the indigenous Tamil framework] was invaded, partly violated and raped, partly adopted and adapted, by the attempts of later commentators to force Tamil ideology into the procrustean mould of the Brahminic-Sanskritic models.

As Wheeler pointed out long ago, Harappan civilization is the most spatially extensive of all the early civilizations we know.

Tamilnadu has known no "real" [R]enaissance-like development . . . there was no development comparable to the European rinascimento of the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, to European rationalism of the seventeen–eighteenth centuries or to European empiricism and positivism of the nineteenth century.