South Indian literary languages remain understudied compared to contemporaneous Sanskrit literature

Evidence

For Kannada, the earliest inscription is from the fifth century AD, though large bodies of writing came only much later. We have only scant studies, available in other Indian languages, of the process whereby languages of the South got their differentiated identities; of the role of Sanskrit in the succeeding centuries in affecting the linguistic–literary, as distinct from the religious, ambience of these languages (8 per cent of the vocabulary in Malyalam is said to be of Sanskrit origin, but what is the literary significance of this linguistic property?); or of bodies of literature, notably Sangam literature3 in Tamil, which remains much less studied in both literary and historiographic aspects than the contemporaneous Sanskrit literature. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 491

Categorization

• QUESTION: The parenthetical — 8% Sanskrit vocabulary in Malayalam but what does that mean literarily — is a sharp open question: when does a loan-vocabulary percentage carry literary significance at all?
• XREF: connects to: Orientalist translation freed Sanskrit texts from sectarian control despite its biases. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1138

Related

• Orientalist Sanskrit bias excluded Tamil literature from the Indian canon (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist translation freed Sanskrit texts from sectarian control despite its biases. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist scholarship constructed ‘Indian Literature’ as Sanskritic, religious, and North Indian, excluding Tamil. (similarity 0.80)