Essay on dravidian culture.
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The word that has come down to us as 'Dravidian' has had a very long history as a referential term for the southern portion of India. Greek geographers knew the area as Damirica or Limyrike: 'Then come Naura and Tyndis, the first marts of Damirica.The latter reference reminds one of course of the legendary Atlantis of the Indian Ocean, Lemuria, supposedly inhabited by lemurs. It will be noticed that both Greek forms, Damirica and Limyrike, have an r at the beginning of the third syllable. They too had difficulty with a Dravidian sound in the source- word, as will be seen shortly.Sanskrit sources have Dravidi and Damili, and later Dramida and Dravida, the immediate sources of our' Dravidian'. It seems likely that all these words are to be connected ultimately with a non-Indo-Aryan word, possibly in the form in which we have it today, namely, Tamil.
Of recent years, Dravidian has been the strongest contender for the language of the as yet undeciphered Mohenjo-daro seal characters. These appear on about 2,000 seals as short inscriptions accompanying rather conventionalized pictures of animals, the bull figuring prominently among them.It will at once be clear that we are speaking of an area very distinct geographically from that of present-day Dravidian languages which is that of peninsular India south of a line from, say, Goa on the west coast to Ganjam on the east. The area of the Mohenjo-daro and Harappa city-cultures is that of the Indus valley, in Sind and the Panjab.But, just as in Britain and western Europe the Celtic languages, once widely prevalent, were pushed westwards to the Atlantic coast, extending from north-west Spain to the Hebrides, by intrusive languages from the east, it has been argued that Dravidian languages were once prevalent throughout India, being pushed southwards by the invasions of Indo-Aryan speakers from the north-west, a movement that, it is pretty clear, took place between about 2500 and 1500 B.C.
Whether Dravidian languages or the speakers thereof existed in India from the beginning of man in the subcontinent, or were themselves in cursors like the Indo-Aryans and their languages later, is likely to remain unresolved in the present state of knowledge.Because of their agglutinative structure, these languages have been associated with Caucasian languages, and even with Basque. Better established is the longest-held view as to the external affiliations of Dravidian. It is that of Caldwell and Rask, that Dravidian is affiliated to what they termed Scythian languages, now usually called Turkic and Finno-Ugrian.Similarly there remains ignorance of what languages were spoken by the various Stone Age cultures in India, there being the added difficulty of the coexistence of a number of these with cultures of an altogether higher order synchronically. We know nothing, for instance, of the languages of the Soan Industry in the Himalaya foot-hills or of the Madras Industry in south-east India.
It may be speculative to assign Dravidian speech to any one particular racial type but it has been suggested that brachycephalic Armenoids types in India, having affinities in Armenia, Anatolia, and Iran, brought Dravidian into India. While there are, then, reasonable hypotheses on linguistic, cultural, and anthropological grounds for suggesting that Dravidian languages originated outside India, specifically in western Asia, there is as yet no direct evidence for the existence of Dravidian outside the subcontinent, nor for its currency in the north other than that afforded by Brahul The Mohenjo-daro seals are not yet read, nor is their language or its structures identified for certain.
Of recent years, Dravidian has been the strongest contender for the language of the as yet undeciphered Mohenjo-daro seal characters. These appear on about 2,000 seals as short inscriptions accompanying rather conventionalized pictures of animals, the bull figuring prominently among them.It will at once be clear that we are speaking of an area very distinct geographically from that of present-day Dravidian languages which is that of peninsular India south of a line from, say, Goa on the west coast to Ganjam on the east. The area of the Mohenjo-daro and Harappa city-cultures is that of the Indus valley, in Sind and the Panjab.But, just as in Britain and western Europe the Celtic languages, once widely prevalent, were pushed westwards to the Atlantic coast, extending from north-west Spain to the Hebrides, by intrusive languages from the east, it has been argued that Dravidian languages were once prevalent throughout India, being pushed southwards by the invasions of Indo-Aryan speakers from the north-west, a movement that, it is pretty clear, took place between about 2500 and 1500 B.C.
Whether Dravidian languages or the speakers thereof existed in India from the beginning of man in the subcontinent, or were themselves in cursors like the Indo-Aryans and their languages later, is likely to remain unresolved in the present state of knowledge.Because of their agglutinative structure, these languages have been associated with Caucasian languages, and even with Basque. Better established is the longest-held view as to the external affiliations of Dravidian. It is that of Caldwell and Rask, that Dravidian is affiliated to what they termed Scythian languages, now usually called Turkic and Finno-Ugrian.Similarly there remains ignorance of what languages were spoken by the various Stone Age cultures in India, there being the added difficulty of the coexistence of a number of these with cultures of an altogether higher order synchronically. We know nothing, for instance, of the languages of the Soan Industry in the Himalaya foot-hills or of the Madras Industry in south-east India.
It may be speculative to assign Dravidian speech to any one particular racial type but it has been suggested that brachycephalic Armenoids types in India, having affinities in Armenia, Anatolia, and Iran, brought Dravidian into India. While there are, then, reasonable hypotheses on linguistic, cultural, and anthropological grounds for suggesting that Dravidian languages originated outside India, specifically in western Asia, there is as yet no direct evidence for the existence of Dravidian outside the subcontinent, nor for its currency in the north other than that afforded by Brahul The Mohenjo-daro seals are not yet read, nor is their language or its structures identified for certain.
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