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It has been suggested that Dravidas be merged into this article. (Discuss)

The terms Dravidians and Dravidian Race are sometimes given to the peoples of southern and central India and northern Sri Lanka who speak Dravidian languages, the best known of which are Tamil (தமிழ்), Telugu (తెలుగు), Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ),Malayalam(മലയാളം) and Tulu(ತುಳು).

Ethnology

The term arose from assumptions by nineteenth century Western scholars that Dravidian speakers were earlier inhabitants of India than the speakers of the Indo-Aryan languages in the north of the country. It was supposed that the generally darker-skinned Dravidians constituted a distinct race. This notion corresponded to racial hierarchies of the time according to which darker skinned peoples were more primitive than light-skinned whites. Accordingly, Dravidians were envisaged as primitive early inhabitants of India who had been partially displaced and subordinated by more advanced Aryans. The term Dravidian is taken from the Sanskrit "drāvida", meaning "Southern". Thus the name itself is Indo-Aryan, and is not derived from any Dravidian language. It was adopted following the publication of Robert Caldwell's Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages (1856), which established it as one of the major language groups of the world.

This concept has affected thinking in India about racial and regional differences and has informed aspects of Tamil nationalism, which has at times appropriated the claim that Dravidians are the earliest inhabitants of India in order to argue that other populations were oppressive interlopers from which Dravidians should liberate themselves. The discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization in the 1920s, which was attributed to the displaced Dravidians of the north, further fuelled such Dravidianist ideas since it implied that the Indo-Aryans were uncivilised barbarians rather than a "superior race".

Classical anthropology viewed them as an own race of the about 40 human races ("Weddid race").Indeed they differ from northern Indians in many respects (often very dark skin. However, it should be noted that there is a clinal variation of skin colour from North-West of India to South-East of India.)and were considered by some authorities as somewhat pedomorphous.It has to be kept in mind that a serious scientific debate is not possible nowadays because of the widespread Boasian multiculturalism. So most recent historians have rejected the concept of a distinct Dravidian race, though some geneticists do assert that southern Indians have a distinctive genetic history that differentiates them from Indo-Aryans. Others argue that there is no significant ethnic or racial distinction between northern Indians and southern Indians and that differences in skin color are simply caused by climate, comparable to the fact that the Mediterraneans (southern Europeans) have darker skin, eye and hair color than the Nordics (northwestern Europeans), but they are otherwise very similar. The somewhat darker skins of the Dravidians may be explained by their adaptation to the hotter and sunnier climate.

Geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza maintained in his book The History and Geography of Human Genes that the proto-Dravidians of the Indian subcontinent were a Caucasoid people, preceded by an Australoid-type people whose linguistic origins remain unknown, and followed by Indo-European-speaking migrants sometime later.

Dravidian languages and Dravidian peoples

The Dravidian languages are grouped into Northern, Central and Southern categories. The Northern is mainly Brahui which is spoken in Southern or Southwestern Pakistan. The southern is the most active and mainly consists of the languages Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam. It should be noted that Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada are highly influenced by Sanskrit both in vocabulary and grammar. This could be attributed to the dominance of Brahmins in the past and also to the adaptation of Sanskrit as the principal language of Buddhism, Jainism and Saivism in those societies. In Hindu tradition the creation of the Tamil language is credited to the Rig Vedic sage Rishi Agastya, a view that secular linguists would interpret as a myth designed to link Dravidians to Vedic Indo-Aryan culture. These languages are called Dravidian for purely linguistic reasons; the peoples who use them are of varying racial types.

Some believe that Dravidian-speaking peoples may have been spread throughout the Indian subcontinent and even in southwestern Iran (Elam, which may have had a language similar to the Dravidian languages) before the Aryans settled much of India. The early Indus Valley civilization (Harappa and Mohenjo Daro) is often presumed to have been Dravidian. A theory, which is controversial now, suggests that its peoples were then forced southwards by the invasion of the Aryans.

Most scholars believe that the Dravidians were not indigenous to India and migrated to India from the Northwest, although, according to Tamil tradition, the Tamils came from a submerged island in the Southeast. Anthropology supports this thesis of their origin because they have much in common morphologically and genetically with the Palaemongolid race in Indochina.

Some scholars like J. Bloch and M. Witzel believe that the Dravidians intruded upon an Indo-Aryan speaking area after the oldest parts of the Rig Veda were already composed (see Bryant 2001: chapter 5). This theory might be supported if a higher antiquity of the Indo-Aryan languages could be established. However, since this theory is mainly a linguistic hypothesis, the Dravidian influence on Aryan languages must not necessarly be equated to a movement of populations. A small number of individuals, rather than populations, could have influenced the Sanskrit language. The influence of Sanskrit itself on the Dravidian languages was the result of individual Sanksrit speakers (and not of whole populations) migrating to South India.

Into the 21st century, Indians, with possible justification, continue to accuse the British Raj of exaggerating differences between northern and southern Indians beyond anthropological differences to help sustain their control of India. The British Raj ended in 1947, yet all discussion of Aryan or Dravidian "races" remains highly controversial in India.

Dravidian and Vedic culture

The Dravidians and South Indians have been in some respects the best preservers of ancient Vedic culture and traditions, especially when the north of India was dominated by Buddhism and later was affected by Islam. Some modern theories of the origins of both Hinduism and Buddhism focus on the resultant mixture of the "Aryan" and "Dravidian" cultures.

According to the Puranas, the Dravidians are descendants of the Vedic Turvasha people. According to the Matsya Purana, Manu is considered as a south Indian king. In Hindu tradition the creation of the Tamil language is credited to the Rig Vedic sage Rishi Agastya, a view that secular linguists would interpret as a myth designed to link Dravidians to Vedic Indo-Aryan culture.

Tamil literature and Tamil epics and classics have many references to Vedic gods and culture. The Tolkaappiyam mentions non-Vedic, early-Vedic (Indra, Varuna) and Puranic (Vishnu) gods. The Paripadal (8; 3; 9 etc.), one of the "Eight Anthologies" of poetry (or ettuttokai), has homages to Vishnu, Lakshmi, Brahma, the twelve Adityas, the Ashwins, the Rudras, the Saptarishis, Indra, the Devas etc. The Kural, written by Tiruvalluvar, mentions gods like Indra (25) and Lakshmi (e.g. 167).

The Tamil epic Shilappadikaram, begins with invocations to Chandra, Surya, and Indra, and has homages to Agni, Varuna, Shiva, Subrahmanya, Vishnu-Krishna, Uma, etc. The epic states that “Vedic sacrifices being faultlessly performed” and has many references to Vedic culture and Vedic texts. In the Buddhist work Manimekhalai, the submersion of the city Puhar in Kumari Kandam is attributed to the neglect of the worship to Indra.

Kumari Kandam

According to Tamil Tradition, the Dravidians originally came from a submerged island Kumari Kandam in the south of India. The Epics Shilappadikaram and Manimekhalai describe the submerged city of Pumbuhar. Kumari Kandam has also been linked to Lemuria.

At Mahabalipuram, near Chennai, submerged ruins have been found in the ocean.

The Eastern Ethiopians

Herodotus, Homer and other Greek authors called the Dravidians the Eastern Ethiopians. Greek writers sometimes identified the Aethiopians of Egypt with the Eastern Aethiopians. Also the Egyptian and Indian geography were sometimes compared or identified: Arrian (vi. i.) mentions that the Indus River was thought by some ancient Greeks to be the source of the Nile. It is usually assumed that by 'Aethiopian' Herodotus simply means 'black person', so that the term really only functions to characterise southern Indians as Eastern black people.

Herodotus wrote about the Dravidians: They differed in nothing from the other Ethiopians, save in their language, and the character of their hair. For the Eastern Ethiopians have straight hair, while they of Libya are more woolly-haired than any other people in the world. (Herodotus: from The History of the Persian Wars, VII.70., c.430 BCE)

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, however, took up this connection between Dravidians and Ethiopians in order to claim a direct racial and cultural link between the two peoples. She was attempting to show that Indian culture influenced Ancient Egypt via Ethiopia. She described many parallels between Egypt and India in her works. After the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation Gottfried de Purucker remarked (referring to Secret Doctrine, vol.2, p.417): A highly advanced urban civilization of Mohenjo Daro has been discovered on the Indus "between Attock and Sind," exactly the location mentioned in The Secret Doctrine as the abode of the Aethiopians.(Encyclopedic Theosophical Glossary).

Dravidian tradition and Hinduism

Interestingly, the original Indo-Aryan gods like Indra, Agni, Vayu etc. are not the principal gods of present day Hindus. Those Indo-Aryan gods have their equivalents in other Indo-European gods in European countries. Those gods occupied the highest position, until the advent of Christianity in those societies, driving the Pre-Indo-European deities to minor position. However, this situation was reversed in India. Here the phallus worship, associated with Shiva, and goddess worship remained supreme throughout India along with two other gods, Brahma and Vishnu, that don't have parallels with other Indo-European gods.

The decidedly Dravidian phallus worship (Shiva lingam) and goddess (Shakti or Devi) worship (basically "yoni" to complement phallus) raises many questions as to the origins of the priestly class of Hindus, the Brahmins.

One scenario would place the invasion/migration of the Indo-Aryans in a specifically Indian context requiring the merging of Dravidian priestly classes with Indo-Aryan priestly classes, creating a proto-caste system somewhere in the North-West of the Indian subcontinent.

By this time, Indo-Aryans did have a structured religious system in their Indo-European language. The rapid adaptation of this system and its spread in North Indian Dravidian population led to linguistic Aryanisation of that population. However, the influence of Dravidian priestly class might also have ensured a dominant place for Dravidian religious practices and symbols.

Those South Indian Brahmins who were migrants from North India, invariably speak Dravidian languages and culturally have been totally integrated with Dravidian society. This might show that transition from Dravidian to Indo-European languages was a gradual process. The later migrants to South India like Konkani Saraswat Brahmins and Sourashtrians have kept their linguistic identities intact showing the clear linguistic boundaries of the later period.

Southern Maharashtra was thought to be linguistically Dravidian until a millenium back, considering that a number of stone scriptures of that period were actually written in Kannada. Also, there are many examples in South India itself to show how the language of religion becomes mother-tongue of a whole community. The Dravidian muslim converts have made Urdu their mother-tongue in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

It is also worth noticing that even linguistically Indo-European Brahmins like Saraswat Brahmins and Kashmiri pandits were historically known to be Shiva and Shakti worshippers.

A possible conclusion of all these arguments would be that Hindu India was basically a product of the traditions of the Dravidian race, with North-West Indians and Brahmins (since they were the one first merged their identities with Indo-Aryans) showing higher Indo-Aryan admixture.

References

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External links

• The Aryan-Dravidian Controversy Article by David Frawley
• Vedic roots of early Tamil culture by Michel Danino
• An Atlantis in the Indian Ocean - Tamil Kumarikhandam

• Ancient peoples
• Dravidian people