u/e9967780

Mysore, officially Mysuru, is traditionally explained as the town of Mahishasura, the buffalo-shaped asura killed by the goddess Chamundeshwari on Chamundi Hill. The Mysuru district administration derives the name from Mahishasurana Uru, meaning “the town of Mahishasura,” and notes that inscriptions from the seventeenth century onward use the form Mahishuru. This tradition explains the connection between the city, Chamundi Hill and Mahishasura, but it may not preserve the earliest form of the name.

The traditional view is that the Sanskrit word mahisha means “buffalo,” particularly the water buffalo. In Vedic Sanskrit, it can also mean “mighty” or “powerful.” Mahishasura is a compound of mahisha, “buffalo,” and asura, giving the meaning “Buffalo Asura” or “buffalo demon” (Monier-Williams, 1899; Whitney, 1889). But it has no IE cognates, hence it could be a native loanword as well. (Ganesan, 2018, pp. 1-18).

The earliest reliable records of the place-name appear in medieval Kannada inscriptions. An inscription dated to 1021 CE mentions Maysur-nadu, while another attributed to about 990 CE may refer to Maysur-nadu Seventy, an administrative group of villages. These records show that a name resembling Maysur or Maisur existed by the late tenth or early eleventh century. They are important because they are older than the known inscriptions using Mahishuru (Fleet, 1910, pp. 429–430).

J.F. Fleet argued that Mahishuru may have been a later Sanskrit interpretation of the existing vernacular name Maisur. In this reconstruction, Maisur did not necessarily develop from Mahishuru. Instead, an older name was reinterpreted through Sanskrit mahisha and the Mahishasura tradition. Fleet concluded that the original meaning of Maisur could not be determined with certainty (Fleet, 1910, pp. 435–437). Although some of Fleet’s views on the date of Tamil literature are outdated, his inscriptional evidence remains relevant.

Sangam Tamil literature provides another possible connection. Tamil erumai means “buffalo,” and the Akananuru refers to a ruler and territory called Erumai or Erumaiyur. Akananuru 36 names Erumaiyuran, the ruler of Erumaiyur. Akananuru 115 associates Erumai with Kudanadu, which some historians identify with Kodagu. Akananuru 253 refers to Erumai Nannadu, “the good country of Erumai,” and connects it with a northern Vadukar ruler and the Ayiri River. The Tamil Virtual Academy places this territory north of ancient Kongu country, within the wider Kodagu and southern Karnataka region.

The similarity between the names is clear. Tamil erumai and Sanskrit mahisha both mean “buffalo.” Erumaiyur and Mahishuru can both be understood as names associated with a buffalo, a ruler called Buffalo, or a buffalo-rich settlement. These may be Tamil and Sanskrit forms of a shared regional name. One may also have been translated or reinterpreted through the other language. However, the Sangam poems do not prove that Erumaiyur was the exact site of modern Mysuru. They may describe a larger territory covering parts of Kodagu, the Nilgiris, northern Kongu and southern Karnataka. Erumai may also have been the name or title of a ruler rather than a literal reference to buffaloes.

Some writers add Tamil Maiyur to the proposed development. The Patirruppattu mentions Maiyur Kizhan, a minister connected with the Chera ruler Ilamcheral Irumporai. Old Tamil commentary can occasionally use mai for a dark animal, but the regular Tamil word for buffalo is erumai. Mai usually refers to blackness, pigment or ink. There is also no firm evidence that the Maiyur associated with Maiyur Kizhan was modern Mysuru. The sequence Erumaiyur to Maiyur to Maisur is possible, but inscriptions have not confirmed it.

Mysuru has also been identified with Mahishamandala, a territory mentioned in Buddhist accounts of missions sent after the Third Buddhist Council. This is sometimes described as an Ashokan reference to Mysore, but no Ashokan inscription directly identifies modern Mysuru as Mahishamandala. Fleet placed Mahishamandala near ancient Mahishmati in central India, while other historians have located it in southern Karnataka. Its location remains disputed, so it cannot establish that Mysuru was called Mahishuru during the Mauryan period.

The available evidence supports a careful conclusion. Maysur or Maisur is securely attested in Kannada inscriptions by the late first millennium CE. Mahishuru appears later and may represent a Sanskrit and religious interpretation connecting the name with mahisha and Mahishasura. Sangam Tamil literature records an Erumai or Erumaiyur territory in the wider Kodagu and southern Karnataka region, which may preserve a related buffalo-based name. A direct change from Erumaiyur to Mysuru, however, has not been demonstrated. The British spelling Mysore represented the local name Mysuru or Maisuru. Mysuru became the official English spelling in 2014.

References

District Administration Mysuru (2026) ‘History of Mysuru’. Available at: https://mysore.nic.in/en/history/ (Accessed: 27 September 2026).

Fleet, J.F. (1910) ‘Mahishamandala and Mahishmati’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 42(2), pp. 425–447. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25189684 (Accessed: 27 September 2026).

Naga Ganesan (2018) ‘Some K-initial Dravidian loan words in Sanskrit: preliminary observations on the Indus language’, International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 47(2), pp. 1-18. Available at: https://ia803108.us.archive.org/27/items/NGanesan_IJDL_2018/NGanesan_IJDL_2018.pdf (Accessed: 27 September 2026)

Indian Express (2016) ‘Mahishasura was seen as demon with good qualities, say historians’, 27 February. Available at: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/mysore-name-connection-mahishasura-was-seen-as-demon-with-good-qualities-say-historians/ (Accessed: 27 September 2026).

Monier-Williams, M. (1899) A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Available at: https://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/MWScan/2020/web/webtc/indexcaller.php (Accessed: 27 September 2026).

Tamil Virtual Academy (n.d.a) ‘Akananuru 36: Erumaiyuran’. Available at: https://www.tamilvu.org/ta/library-l1270-html-l1270c32-126223 (Accessed: 27 September 2026).

Tamil Virtual Academy (n.d.b) ‘Erumaiyur and Erumai Nadu in Sangam literature’. Available at: https://www.tamilvu.org/slet/ln00101/ln00101pag.jsp?bookid=294&pno=43 (Accessed: 27 September 2026).

Tamil Virtual Academy (n.d.c) ‘Patirruppattu: Ninth Decad’. Available at: https://www.tamilvu.org/slet/l1241/l1241all.jsp?sno=98&x=91&y=98 (Accessed: 27 September 2026).

Whitney, W.D. (1889) A Sanskrit Grammar: Including Both the Classical Language, and the Older Dialects of Veda and Brahmana. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, section 1197. Available at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Sanskrit_Grammar_by_Whitney_p1.djvu/481 (Accessed: 27 September 2026).

In the replies, correct any of the mistakes with references and fill in the blanks please

In a coconut grove near Amballur, Vellore district, stands a veerakkallu (hero stone). It doesn’t commemorate a warrior. It commemorates two dogs.

The 9th-century stone carries a five-line inscription. The top of the stone is broken, so the opening lines are lost. Below the text there’s a relief carving of two dogs fighting two wild boars. According to the inscription, a villager named Kovan owned two dogs, Muzhagan and Vanthika Kathi. A wild boar entered the village. The dogs fought it off and killed it, but both died from their wounds afterward. Kovan had this stone made in their memory. About 1,200 years later, their names are still legible.

This isn’t a one-off. Hero stones for dogs show up in a few places across South India, across different centuries and languages.

In Ettanur, Tamil Nadu, in the 6th century CE, a hero stone here shows a warrior heading into battle with his dog behind him. Robbers kill the warrior. The dog then fights and kills both robbers before dying itself. The stone has two separate inscriptions, one for the man and one for the dog, which is named Kovivan. It’s linked to the reign of the Pallava king Mahendravarman.

In Thandarampattu, Tamil Nadu, a similar dog hero stone has been recorded nearby, though not much detail survives about the story behind it.

In Atakur, Karnataka, 949–950 CE., this is the best documented case outside Tamil Nadu. A hound named Kali belonged to the Western Ganga king Butuga II. The dog helped a warrior named Manalarata during the Battle of Takkolam against the Cholas. As a reward, Butuga gave the dog to the warrior. Later, during a hunt near Beltur, Kali fought a wild boar in a trench and both animals died. Manalarata put up a memorial stone for his dog. Historians point to this as one of the few known cases of a hero stone made for an animal rather than a person.

In Melagani, Karnataka, in the 10th century two memorial stones here are for hounds named Loga and Dhalaga. Loga is credited with killing 70 wild boars in its lifetime, and Dhalaga with 50.

In Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra hero stones exist in both regions and generally follow the same format as those in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, but I couldn’t find specific dog examples from these areas in the sources available.

What ties these together is that the hero stone tradition across South India wasn’t limited to human warriors. In a number of recorded cases, dogs that died defending a village, fighting off attackers, or hunting dangerous animals were given the same kind of memorial: a carved stone with an inscribed name.

References

1. Vikatan (திருச்சி பார்த்தி), “நடுகல் அற்புதங்கள் 2: நாய், கோழி, புலி” — vikatan.com, 15 June 2022.
2. Atakur inscription, Wikipedia.
3. Karnataka Itihasa Academy, “Memorial Stones.”
4. Swarajya Magazine, “Karnataka’s Heritage Veeragallus.”
5. Tamil and Vedas (London Swaminathan), “Hero Stone Worship in North India” (Post No. 4286).
6. Sarma, I.K. (1992). Temples of the Gangas of Karnataka. Archaeological Survey of India.
7. Singh, Upinder (2009). A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century. Pearson Education.
8. Hero stone, Wikipedia.

Since the 1930s, archaeological excavations in the port city of Quanzhou (Fujian) have recovered a substantial corpus of South Indian temple sculpture and architectural fragments, most famously associated with the so-called Chedian shrine (dedicated to Guanyin/Ainurruvar Nayanar). The carvings, which include Narasimha and Shiva reliefs, were produced in the South Indian style and share close similarities with 13th-century temples constructed in the Kaveri Delta region of Tamil Nadu. Notably, nearly all the carvings were made from greenish-grey granite widely available in the nearby hills and used in local architecture, suggesting local production for a resident community rather than imported stonework.

This fits into the broader, well-documented presence of a small Hindu community in medieval China, concentrated in the southeast, particularly through the Tamil merchant guilds of Ayyavole and Manigramam. Guy’s foundational study on the subject is The Lost Temples of Nagapattinam and Quanzhou: A Study in Sino-Indian Relations (Silk Road Art and Archaeology, vol. 3, 1994: 291–310), later developed in Tamil Merchant Guilds and the Quanzhou Trade (in Schottenhammer, ed., The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou 1000–1400, Brill, 2001: 283–308; reprinted in Wade, ed., China and Southeast Asia, Routledge, 2009, vol. 1: 232–60).

The single most important piece of physical evidence is a late thirteenth-century bilingual Tamil and Chinese inscription found associated with the remains of a Shiva temple in Quanzhou, generally dated to 1281 CE. The donor named in the inscription is a Tamilian merchant named Sambandhaperumal, whose full honorific title may connect him, per Himanshu Ray’s analysis, to a specific merchant lineage prefix in the Tamil text.
Crucially, this material wasn’t scattered incidentally. It was concentrated at the Kaiyuan Temple itself. As the introduction to The Emporium of the World notes, the existence of Hindu remains in Quanzhou has been known since Gustave Ecke first drew attention to the “Hindu” pillars and foundation stones at the Kaiyuan temple, and this architectural and sculptural material, combined with the bilingual 1281 inscription, is generally taken as evidence of a thriving connection between the Quanzhou port and Tamil-speaking merchant communities.

More recent scholarship has pushed on the question of who had agency here. A 2025 FLAME University research piece argues that the Tamil merchant guilds operating along the maritime Silk Route were active agents of cultural production, at times independent of direct state sponsorship, and that Quanzhou’s inscriptions and temple relics testify to the agency of these merchant communities in shaping religious and artistic expression outside the framework of courtly influence. This pushes back against a purely dynasty-patronage-driven reading of South Indian temple art.

References
∙ Guy, John. “The Lost Temples of Nagapattinam and Quanzhou: A Study in Sino-Indian Relations.” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 3 (1994): 291–310.
∙ Guy, John. “Tamil Merchant Guilds and the Quanzhou Trade.” In The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000–1400, edited by Angela Schottenhammer, 283–308. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Reprinted in Geoff Wade, ed., China and Southeast Asia, vol. 1, 232–60. London: Routledge, 2009.
∙ Guy, John. “Tamil Merchants and the Hindu-Buddhist Diaspora in Early Southeast Asia.” In Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia, edited by Pierre-Yves Manguin and A. Mani, 243–62. Singapore: ISEAS / New Delhi: Manohar, 2011.
∙ “Hinduism in China.” Wikipedia, citing Guy (1994) and Kulke, Kesavapany & Sakhuja, Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa (2009).
∙ “From Merchants to Modern Networks: The Tamil Legacy in China.” FLAME University Research (2025).

Marathi is genealogically Indo-Aryan: most of its inherited vocabulary and morphology descend from Middle Indo-Aryan. At the same time, Marathi contains an old Dravidian substrate in its vocabulary, phonology, semantics and syntax.

Franklin Southworth argued that this substrate was not produced solely by borrowing between established languages. He proposed that many local Dravidian speakers adopted an Indo-Aryan Prakrit but retained much of their original grammatical structure. Their restructured Prakrit later contributed to the formation of Marathi.\[1\]

Southworth’s model
Southworth proposed two interacting varieties:

Old Indo-Aryan → Maharashtrian Prakrit
and
Prakrit + local Dravidian languages → Maharashtrian Pidgin Prakrit

The first was associated with established Indo-Aryan speakers. The second developed among local populations learning Prakrit while continuing to use grammatical patterns from their original languages.

The two varieties later converged:
Maharashtrian Prakrit + restructured local Prakrit
-> creolized Maharashtrian Prakrit → Marathi

Southworth called this “prior creolization.” Indira Junghare later described Marathi as a possible “quasi-creole”: a language with mainly Indo-Aryan vocabulary but extensive Dravidian structural influence.\[1\]\[2\]

The older terms “pidgin” and “creole” are debatable. The same process can be described as language shift, substrate transfer, nativization and convergence.

Why this is not ordinary borrowing
Borrowing adds foreign words or constructions to an established language. Substrate transfer occurs when a population adopts another language but carries features of its former language into the new one.

Under Southworth’s model, local Dravidian speakers adopted Prakrit words and morphemes but often arranged them according to Dravidian grammatical patterns. Marathi therefore did not merely borrow some Dravidian words after it had formed. Dravidian-speaking populations may have helped shape Marathi during its formation.

Junghare argues that Marathi frequently uses inherited Indo-Aryan material inside Dravidian-patterned constructions. Formal Marathi often preserves more Indo-Aryan syntax, while colloquial Marathi shows more Dravidian-style structures.\[2\]

Tamil–Marathi grammatical correspondences
The grammatical parallels extend across several constructions. Both Tamil and Marathi place chains of genitive modifiers before the noun and use circumstantial postpositions after it. Their associative constructions combine a post-nominal collective marker with a locative form, while purposive expressions stack dative and purposive elements. Both languages can turn postpositional phrases into noun modifiers—compare Tamil *-sārnta/-āna* with Marathi *-viṣayīcā/-sāṭhīcā*. They also form light-verb predicates by combining an adverbialized noun or adjective with a verb, and construct complex predicates using a main verb followed by an auxiliary. Taken together, these recurring structural correspondences suggest a deep Dravidian substrate in Marathi rather than isolated lexical borrowing.

Other syntactic evidence
Junghare compares Marathi with Hindi and Telugu and identifies several Marathi patterns that resemble Telugu more closely than Hindi:
• participial and reduced relative clauses;
• omission of recoverable pronouns;
• topic–comment organization;
• flexible topicalization;
• reduced reliance on passive constructions;
• negative auxiliaries;
• sequences of non-finite verbs.
Marathi retains the Indo-Aryan relative-correlative construction represented by Hindi *jo…vo*. It also permits participial clauses in which a non-finite verb directly modifies a noun, a major Dravidian strategy.
Junghare argues that these similarities reach too deeply into syntax to be explained as ordinary lexical borrowing. They involve Indo-Aryan forms being used according to Dravidian grammatical rules.\[2\]

Sjoberg places these patterns within the wider history of Dravidian influence on Indo-Aryan phonology, vocabulary and grammar.\[5\] Levman discusses related features in Old and Middle Indo-Aryan, including retroflex consonants, participial sequences, postposed quotatives and dative-experiencer constructions.\[7\]

Daven Hobbs argues that dative-subject constructions spread in early New Indo-Aryan partly through Dravidian contact, while stressing the need for historical and geographic evidence before identifying any shared feature as contact-induced.\[6\]
**Marathi’s Dravidian core vocabulary**
Southworth estimates that about **five percent of Marathi’s basic vocabulary is Dravidian in origin**.\[4\]

This is significant because basic words—kinship terms, body parts, directions and common actions—are generally harder to borrow than specialized cultural vocabulary.
His examples include words connected with:
• “mother”;
• body parts;
• “left” and “side”;
• actions such as “scorch,” “pinch” and “sprinkle”;
• the postposition *kaḍe*, used for direction, location and possession.
Many appear to come from the Kannada–Kodagu–Tulu branch or an extinct sister language. Others point toward Telugu-related, Central Dravidian, Munda or unidentified sources.\[4\]

This suggests that pre-Marathi developed in a multilingual region. It does not require one Dravidian language to have been spoken throughout Maharashtra.

Earlier Dravidian languages in Maharashtra
Southworth cites place names and river names as evidence that one or more Dravidian languages were formerly spoken in Maharashtra. He identifies a “Proto-Kannada”-like language or an extinct relative as the main source of Marathi’s Dravidian vocabulary, with further contact involving Telugu-related and Central Dravidian languages.\[4\]

The presence of core vocabulary, verbs and a postposition points to daily interaction and widespread bilingualism, not merely recent border contact.

Southworth also discusses an archaeological proposal that some agricultural populations associated with the Jorwe cultural region may have been Dravidian-speaking before the arrival of Indo-Aryan groups. He treats this as a working hypothesis, not a proven identification.\[4\]

His studies of Proto-Dravidian agricultural and rice vocabulary use reconstructed words for livestock, crops and cultivation to investigate early Dravidian movements.\[8\]\[9\] These studies provide background for a Dravidian presence in the Deccan but do not independently prove the quasi-creole model.
Kolipakam and colleagues estimate that the Dravidian family is approximately 4,500 years old and recover four major branches: North, Central, South I and South II.\[10\] This supports the family’s antiquity but cannot identify the exact language once spoken in Maharashtra.

What is established and what remains disputed?
The old Dravidian substrate in Marathi is supported by evidence from basic vocabulary, phonology, semantics and syntax. The contact was deep enough to affect sentence structure, which is consistent with bilingualism and language shift.

What remains disputed is Southworth’s specific claim that a pidginized Prakrit became a creole or quasi-creole. Long-term bilingual convergence could produce some of the same results without a distinct pidgin stage.

Conclusion
Marathi is Indo-Aryan by descent but contains a deep Dravidian substrate. Southworth’s language-shift model explains how Dravidian speakers may have helped form Marathi, although the proposed pidgin-to-creole pathway remains debated.

References

1. Southworth, Franklin C. 1971. “Detecting Prior Creolization: An Analysis of the Historical Origins of Marathi.” In Dell Hymes, ed., *Pidginization and Creolization of Languages*, pp. 255–273. Cambridge University Press.
2. Junghare, Indira Y. 2009. “Syntactic Convergence: Marathi and Dravidian.” *Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov* 2(51), Series IV.
3. [https://webbut.unitbv.ro/index.php/Series\_IV/article/download/7541/5708/15195](https://webbut.unitbv.ro/index.php/Series_IV/article/download/7541/5708/15195)
4. Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju. 2003. *The Dravidian Languages*. Cambridge University Press.
5. Southworth, Franklin C. 2005. “Prehistoric Implications of the Dravidian Element in the NIA Lexicon, with Special Reference to Marathi.” *International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics* 34(1): 17–28.
6. [https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/\~fsouth/DravidianElement.pdf](https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~fsouth/DravidianElement.pdf)
7. Sjoberg, Andrée F. 1992. “The Impact of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan: An Overview.” In Edgar C. Polomé and Werner Winter, eds., *Reconstructing Languages and Cultures*, pp. 507–530.
8. [https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110867923.507](https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110867923.507)
9. Hobbs, Daven. 2016. “Dravidian Influence on Indo-Aryan: The Case of the Dative-Subject Construction.” Undergraduate honors thesis, Ohio State University.
10. [https://telibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Dravidian-influence-on-indo-aryan.pdf](https://telibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Dravidian-influence-on-indo-aryan.pdf)
11. Levman, Bryan G. 2023. “The Influence of Proto-Dravidian on Indo-Aryan Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, Part 2.” *International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics* 52(1).
12. [https://www.academia.edu/98592475/THE\_INFLUENCE\_OF\_PROTO\_DRAVIDIAN\_ON\_INDO\_ARYAN\_PHONOLOGY\_MORPHOLOGY\_AND\_SYNTAX\_Part\_2](https://www.academia.edu/98592475/THE_INFLUENCE_OF_PROTO_DRAVIDIAN_ON_INDO_ARYAN_PHONOLOGY_MORPHOLOGY_AND_SYNTAX_Part_2)
13. Southworth, Franklin C. “Proto-Dravidian Agriculture.” Presented at the Seventh ESCA Harvard–Kyoto Round Table and later published in Toshiki Osada, ed., *Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past in South Asia*.
14. [https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/\~fsouth/Proto-DravidianAgriculture.pdf](https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~fsouth/Proto-DravidianAgriculture.pdf)
15. Southworth, Franklin C. 2011. “Rice in Dravidian.” *Rice* 4: 142–148.
16. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s12284-011-9076-9](https://doi.org/10.1007/s12284-011-9076-9)
17. Kolipakam, Vishnupriya, et al. 2018. “A Bayesian Phylogenetic Study of the Dravidian Language Family.” *Royal Society Open Science* 5: 171504.
18. [https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171504k](https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171504)

A possible alternative history for the Indian words for “fresh ginger” begins not with Sanskrit, but with maritime contact between Southeast Asia and South India.

Proto Malayo Polynesian is reconstructed with *laqia, “ginger,” reflected in forms such as Malay halia. Tom Hoogervorst proposes that this Austronesian word travelled west through Indian Ocean trade and is ultimately connected with Middle Indo Aryan allaya and South Asian forms such as Tamil allam, Telugu allamu, Marathi āle and Konkani ālle.[1][2]

The proposed route is:
Malay halia → coastal Dravidian allam/allamu → Prakrit allaya → Sanskrit ārdraka

Why a South Indian intermediary is plausible
South Indian merchants and port communities were major intermediaries in commerce between India and Southeast Asia.

Archaeological evidence indicates that maritime networks connecting peninsular India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia were developing by the middle of the first millennium BCE. By the second and first centuries BCE, these connections formed part of an extensive Bay of Bengal trading system.[3][4]

In this contact environment, Malay halia could have lost its initial h and been adapted to Dravidian phonology and morphology. Tamil allam contains the common Dravidian nominal ending am, while Telugu allamu has the corresponding Telugu ending amu. These adaptations are plausible, although they are not themselves proof of borrowing.

The resulting form could then have passed from multilingual South Indian trading communities into a regional Prakrit as allaya. This would explain why the same word family appears in both southern Dravidian and western Indo Aryan languages:

Tamil allam
Telugu allamu
Kannada alla
Prakrit allaya
Marathi āle
Konkani ālle

The modern Indo Aryan distribution is also noteworthy. Descendants conventionally connected with the same broader complex survive from northwestern India to Assam:

Kashmiri, Dogri, Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu adrak
Nepali aduvā
Gujarati ādu
Marathi āle
Konkani āle/ālle
Odia adā
Bengali ādā
Assamese ādā

This distribution demonstrates the success of the word family within Indo Aryan, although it cannot by itself determine whether the direction was Sanskrit to Prakrit or Prakrit to Sanskrit.

Sanskrit hypercorrection
Sanskrit hypercorrection occurs when a regional or foreign word is reshaped according to sound correspondences and grammatical patterns expected in Sanskrit. The reconstructed form may consequently appear older and more transparently Sanskrit than the vernacular word from which it was created.

A prominent example is the name Tamil:
Tamil tamiḻ → Pali and Prakrit damila/damiḷa/daviḍa → Sanskrit dramiḍa/draviḍa
Bhadriraju Krishnamurti describes Sanskrit draviḍa as a Sanskritization of earlier Pali and Prakrit forms, including the hypercorrect insertion of r.[5] The modern linguistic term “Dravidian” therefore ultimately derives from the name Tamil after its transmission through Indo Aryan and its subsequent Sanskritization.

A comparable case has been proposed for the word meaning “pumpkin”:
Vernacular or Middle Indo Aryan kumhaṇḍa → Sanskrit kuṣmāṇḍa

The Sanskrit form contains the learned looking cluster ṣm, while the simpler Middle Indo Aryan and modern forms have been interpreted as evidence that kuṣmāṇḍa may represent a Sanskritized reconstruction rather than the original source of the word.[6]

Another relevant example is Sanskrit śṛṅgavera, “ginger.” It was traditionally interpreted as a compound of Sanskrit śṛṅga, “horn,” and vera, supposedly describing the hornlike shape of the rhizome. An alternative explanation connects it with a Dravidian expression represented by Tamil and Malayalam iñci, “ginger,” and vēr, “root”:
Dravidian iñci vēr, ginger root” → Middle Indo Aryan siṅgivera → Sanskrit śṛṅgavera
Under this interpretation, the unfamiliar initial portion was reshaped and reinterpreted as the familiar Sanskrit word śṛṅga, “horn.” This would be an example of folk etymological Sanskritization closely related to hypercorrection.[1][7]

The derivation remains a proposal rather than a universally accepted conclusion, but it demonstrates the kind of process that could also have affected allaya.

From allaya to ārdraka

Hoogervorst proposes that Prakrit allaya was Sanskritized through a reconstructed form resembling *allaka. Sanskrit speakers then associated it with ārdra, “wet, moist or fresh,” producing ārdraka. The final form appeared to be a transparent Sanskrit derivative meaning approximately “the moist or fresh one,” an appropriate designation for fresh ginger.
The proposed development is therefore:

Malay halia → Dravidian allam/allamu → Prakrit allaya → hypercorrected *allaka → Sanskritized ārdraka

This interpretation does not require Sanskrit to be the source of every Prakrit or Dravidian form. Sanskrit absorbed vocabulary from regional languages as well as donating vocabulary to them. Borrowed words could be altered so thoroughly that they appeared to possess native Sanskrit derivations.

Independent evidence of Malay contact
Malay influence in Tamil is independently demonstrated by recognized historical loans such as Tamil kākkaṭṭuvāṉ from Malay kakaktua, “cockatoo,” campāṉ/sambān from sampan, caku/sagu from sagu, “sago,” and kajāṅku from kajang.[8]

These examples do not prove that allam was borrowed during the same period. Some belong to considerably later phases of maritime contact. They nevertheless demonstrate that vocabulary could travel from Malay speaking Southeast Asia into Tamil through commercial networks.

Turner’s reverse reconstruction
Ralph Lilley Turner reconstructs the development in the opposite direction:
Sanskrit ārdraka → *ārdlaka → *āllaka → Prakrit allaya → Telugu allamu
In this model, ārdraka is the original Sanskrit form, while Prakrit allaya results from regular Middle Indo Aryan simplification. Telugu allamu is then interpreted as a later borrowing from Prakrit.[6]

The difficulty is that Turner’s intermediate forms *ārdlaka and *āllaka are reconstructed rather than directly attested. His entry also does not explore the possibility that allaya entered Indo Aryan from a South Indian commercial language and was subsequently Sanskritized.

The alternative argument is therefore not that Turner’s sound changes are impossible. It is that his reconstruction begins by assuming Sanskrit priority and consequently leaves the opposite borrowing route unexplored.

Chronological addendum
The chronology is more complicated than a simple Sanskrit first or Dravidian first sequence.

Prakrit allaya, “ginger,” is reportedly attested in the Niśītha Cūrṇi, attributed to Jinadāsa Gaṇi and generally dated to approximately the seventh century CE. Its language is more precisely described as Jaina Māhārāṣṭrī or a mixed Jain Prakrit. This is presently the earliest cited attestation of allaya, although the exact edition, passage and manuscript history should accompany the citation.

Tamil allam is securely attested in the Piṅkala Nigaṇṭu, approximately the tenth century CE, in the entry:

iñciyiṉ peyar nallam, allam, naṟumaruppu
“The names of ginger are nallam, allam and naṟumaruppu.”

The University of Madras Tamil Lexicon also cites the Tivākaram for allam, potentially placing the Tamil word in the eighth or ninth century. The date and textual history of the Tivākaram, however, remain uncertain.
Telugu allamu occurs in Nannaya’s Mahābhārata at the beginning of the eleventh century. Kannada alla is securely documented in Maṅgarāja’s lexicon of 1398. The first dated literary attestations of Marathi āle and Konkani ālle still require identification.

Claims that the plant name Sanskrit ārdraka is securely attested in the earliest layers of the Caraka and Suśruta Saṃhitās require caution because both are composite works preserved through later redactions. The form associated with Pāṇinian grammar refers to something “born under the constellation Ārdrā,” not necessarily to ginger, and therefore cannot automatically be counted as an early attestation of the plant name.

The currently documented sequence is consequently:

Prakrit allaya, seventh century → Tamil allam in the Tivākaram, eighth or ninth century → Telugu allamu, early eleventh century → Kannada alla, 1398

This chronology does not prove the proposed Malay to Dravidian to Prakrit route because the earliest currently cited occurrence is Prakrit rather than Dravidian. It does, however, show that allaya/allam/allamu/alla were circulating centuries earlier than Pushpadanta’s tenth century Apabhraṃśa usage and that the southern forms are not merely recent dictionary words.

Conclusion
A South Indian intermediary offers a historically and morphologically credible alternative to a purely Sanskrit first explanation. Maritime contact provides a plausible route for Malay halia to enter coastal South India, while Sanskrit hypercorrection provides a mechanism by which allaya could have been transformed into the apparently transparent Sanskrit ārdraka.

The proposal remains unproven. Its strongest future confirmation would be a securely dated South Indian occurrence of allam, alla or allamu earlier than the seventh century Niśītha Cūrṇi, together with a convincing account of the phonological developments connecting halia, allam and allaya. Until then, the South Indian route should be presented as a serious alternative hypothesis rather than an established etymology.

References
[1] Tom G. Hoogervorst, “If Only Plants Could Talk: Reconstructing Premodern Biological Translocations in the Indian Ocean”⁠, in The Sea, Identity and History, 2013, pages 67 to 92.
[2] Tom G. Hoogervorst, Southeast Asia in the Ancient Indian Ocean World⁠, University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 2012. DOI: 10.5287/ora-amnazwpo6⁠.
[3] Himanshu Prabha Ray, “Early Maritime Contacts Between South and Southeast Asia”⁠, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 20.1, 1989, pages 42 to 54.
[4] K. Rajan, “Emergence of Early Historic Trade in Peninsular India”⁠, in Early Interactions Between South and Southeast Asia, 2011, pages 177 to 196.
[5] Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, The Dravidian Languages, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pages 1 to 2.
[6] Ralph Lilley Turner, A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo Aryan Languages⁠, particularly entries 1341, 3302 and 6632.
[7] Thomas Burrow and Murray B. Emeneau, A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary⁠, entries 429 and 5535.
[8] Tom G. Hoogervorst, “Tracing the Linguistic Crossroads Between Malay and Tamil”⁠, Wacana 16.2, 2015, pages 249 to 283.
[9] Piṅkala Nigaṇṭu, entry 2916; University of Madras, Tamil Lexicon, entry அல்லம்.

Inspired by u/AleksiB1⁠’s post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AustroTai/s/lKd6aHkwMi

Thanks to u/Reasonable_Value6180⁠ for drawing attention to the Niśītha Cūrṇi attestation and other chronological citations.

The second Jewish inscription in Tamil Nadu was discovered by history enthusiasts on Saturday in Anandur, near Pochampalli, Krishnagiri district. The Krishnagiri District Government Museum, the Historical Research and Documentation Society, and the Tamil Nadu Ancient Studies Research Institute have been jointly discovering, researching, and documenting various historical relics in the Krishnagiri district.

Regarding the discovery of this rare inscription concerning Jews in Anandur, C. Govindaraj, Secretary of the Tamil Nadu Ancient Studies Research Institute and retired government curator, stated:

"Although Jews settled in Kochi, Kerala, a thousand years ago, an inscription regarding Jews had previously been discovered in Tamil Nadu only at Valantharai near Velapattinam in Ramanathapuram district. Following that, an inscription mentioning Jews has now been discovered in Anandur.

When bushes surrounding the Tanthondreeswaram Temple in Anandur were cleared by the public, they noticed this inscription and informed us, prompting us to examine it. Earlier, a merchant guild inscription from the period of Kulothunga and three hero stones were discovered in this temple area. The newly found inscription is also a merchant guild inscription.

This inscription records that four merchant guilds—namely Soothakar (Sudakar), Mandala Vanikaar, Thennilangai Valanjiyar, and Ezhunootruvar—joined together to build a hall at the local Tanthondreeswara Nayanar Temple.

Among the four merchant guilds mentioned, the first one listed is Soothakar. 'Jews' have been referred to here as Soothakar. It is of great historical significance that Jews are mentioned as one of the trading guilds in this 13th-century inscription.

During the 12th and 13th centuries, as the Crusades took place in multiple phases in and around Europe, Jews lost their lands and were displaced. Those who fled lived as artisans, dyers of cloth, and merchants in coastal port towns across various parts of the world.

As evidence that these merchants formed trading guilds, joined with other merchant guilds, and carried out trade in the interior parts of the country, we can cite the construction of this hall at the Anandur Tanthondreeswarar Temple.

Three contemporary Kaatha stones have been found so far along the Adhiyaman highway running from Thagadur to Navarthavalam. Researching these to identify Navarthavalam revealed it to be Puthalapattu in Chittoor taluk, Andhra Pradesh. Many merchant guild inscriptions have been found along this highway and its adjoining villages. Anandur was a settlement located along this major route. Therefore, it appears that these four merchant guilds jointly built this hall at the temple to facilitate resting spaces for merchants.

Thus, the 13th-century Periyapattinam and Anandur inscriptions serve as evidence that during the Crusades period—falling between their settlement in the Kochi region of Kerala in the 10th century and their settlement in Chennai alongside the British in the 17th century—Jews came to the Tamil Nadu region and operated as a trading guild."

Translated from a Tamil Article

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