@Nilgiri are you Bengali or Tamil? Just curiosity.
Tamil....more properly Thamizh
A proud Indian should stick to the Indian part of the forum instead of trolling this one
My intent is to not troll. I wish the best towards Bangladesh and its citizens. They are good people that I would like to see prosper and grow.
Regular people get along just fine and share many bonds:
'Indian' is a very loose identity,artificial one constructed in recent decades.If you read Bengali literature from 18th/19th century then you will rarely see those writer considered themselves Indian but always Bengali or Bangladeshi one.They also considered their motherland is Bengal not India,and you find thousands of songs,poems devoted to Bengal or Bengali but very very few about being Indian.
You are right to an extent. If you back to earlier times, the only permanent things were a people's culture and language etc...so we of course identified more along those terms since empires and kingdoms came and went.
Regarding concept of India, the word itself does not have an old pure-Tamil word for it ...closest I can think of is Bharatam from Bharat....and that is Sanskrit based word. Words like "Inthiya" "Theesiya Nadu" etc etc are quite recent additions in Tamil vocabulary.
This does not mean however our concept of nationhood and patriotism should take a 2nd or 3rd class seat in our minds. It is side by side with our Tamil identity....for our great Chola Empire reached a large expanse and influence beyond our immediate cultural hearth....we have always had a great cultural exchange with rest of the subcontinent....concept of the greater land is not unknown in the older literature.
One of our greatest poets/freedom fighters (Bharatiyar as we call him) after all had this has his great subject matter. The words he wrote still resonate in all of us who love our country....he had a great respect for Bengali culture and language....fluent in it and many other languages (Indian and western). This and other factors has led to many Tamil elites always looking up to Bengali culture....we see this another culture within the greater area of subcontinent that has a similar deep and distinct heritage like Tamil culture and history.....and that era of great Bengali thinkers, poets, reformers, scientists and mathematicians is still studied (or at least used to be, I dont know the current situation) as the renaissance that sparked the freedom movement for the country at large. Thats why you talk to the older generation of Tamils, they have a certain reverence for Bengalis....as very smart, shrewd, educated especially in maths.
I really wish the whole country was not fractured by religious lines in the first place. But what has happened as happened and we must move on. Thats why we have to put aside the differences and suspicions (Bangladesh and India) and develop faster and faster...till the boundaries truly do not matter anymore.
