The article seeks to explore the beginnings and growth of knowledge production in the Tamil language, literature and culture. Starting with the Sangam poems it discusses at length the poetics and the grammatical exegesis in Tolkāppiyam. The importance of this work lay not only in its grammar but also in its character as the first known Tamil work creating the basis for a knowledge system which the early Tamils must have required. It founded the traditional method of expounding grammar, which was later followed and developed by most grammatical works. The educational system at this early stage was not organised institutionally, but was taught from teacher to student in small groups. The main subjects taught and passed on by memory and also written down on palm-leaf manuscripts were grammar, poetics and mathematics and its ancillary astronomy. The post-Sangam period (4th-6th centuries AD), representing the transition to a new socio-economic formation and the spread of the Buddhist and Jain religions in the region, witnessed the production of the Patinenkīlkkanakku, a series of 18 didactic works on ethics, morality and social norms. A major aspect of the didactic works is that they reflect not only the influence of Sanskrit in a greater measure but contain clear evidence of the knowledge of indigenous medicine, which was developed probably by the Jain ascetics but had become familiar to the Tamils by then.
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