George Luzerne Hart, III (born c. 1942) is Professor Emeritus of Tamil language at the University of California, Berkeley.
He also questions Hart's proposition that the arya metre used in Sanskrit and Prakrit poetry is related to the Tamil metre, the dating of the Gaha Sattasai (the main Prakrit work considered by Hart), the neglect of the earlier Middle Indo-Aryan texts, and the idea that the borrowings only happened at the poetic level rather than in the mixed heritage of the Indo-Aryan culture in the north.
[6] Tamil scholar Kamil Zvelebil states that Hart had set before himself "very difficult and even enormous tasks," but he has not succeeded in solving them.
The over-all thesis of the influence of southern imagery and poetic techniques on the Indo-Aryan poetry such as Sattasai and even Kalidasa are probable and "overwhelmingly convincing."
The key examples of striking similarities were the messenger poem, the motif of separation of lovers during the monsoon and the comparison of the sound of wind through a bamboo hole to the noise of a flute.
[10][11] According to Chakravarti, the Sangam literature reveals that there was a class of 'low-born' people, such as the Pulaiyar and Paraiyar, who were made to live in separate settlements at a distance from the main villages.
[14] According to Hart, when the Brahmins from north India arrived in the Tamilnadu, probably around 300 BCE, they offered an alternative source of power through Vedic sacrifices, which was already considered pure and auspicious, and to emphasise the distinction between themselves and the 'low-born' groups, the Brahmins developed conventions quite the opposite of the latter, becoming strict vegetarians and not allowing dogs and chickens into their villages.
[15] For The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom, a translation of Purananuru, Hart and his co-author Hank Heifetz were awarded the AAS South Asia Council (SAC) Ramanujan Book Prize.