Pro-Tamil Tiger commentators as well as Tamil moderates in the island feel that the change brought about through a resolution of the Tamil Nadu state assembly in February, does not have a justifiable basis even from Karunanidhi’s Tamil nationalist standpoint.
“I have not come across anywhere that Thai Pongal was considered to be the beginning of a New Year,” said Prof. S Pathmanathan, a renowned Sri Lankan Tamil historian and a former head of the history department in Peradeniya University at Kandy.
“In the Sangam era literature, there is no mention of the New Year. Sangam literature was secular and dealt with matters other than the religious. The question of the New Year is essentially a religious one, and politicians should not interfere,” he told this website's newspaper.
Padmanathan, who has written seminal works on Hindu temples in Sri Lanka and the history of the Jaffna kingdom, said the Tamil New Year was an integral part of Tamil Hinduism and had been part of the Hindu ritual calendar for over a thousand years.
“From the time of the indigenous Tamil kings, the Tamils of India and Sri Lanka have considered Chittirai Thirunaal as the New Year, based on astronomical and religious considerations,” Pathmanathan said.
“The calculation for the commencement of the New Year and the calendar based on it are entirely astronomical,” added a commentator on the pro-LTTE website www.tamilnet.com who goes under the name Ampalam.
There is a combination of solar and stellar perspectives in the calculation of the New Year.
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