Dravidians

“ Living in small huts on the hillside I saw a few Todas, some of the few remaining of those early inhabitants of India allied to the Dravidians, but of Scythian or Mongolian origin. Driven out by the Aryans, in their assumed invasion from Central Asia, the Dravidians and their Mongolian cousins were forced down to Southern India and Ceylon, remaining here and there among the hills. The Todas number only a little over a thousand and are said to be steadily decreasing in numbers. As they are polyandrous, it is indeed surprising that any are left at all. ”

“ These Dravidians are slightly taller than the pure Negritos, their probable ancestors; and Indian tradition considers them to be the builders of the Indian dolmens, just as Celtic tradition considers fairies and corrigans (often described as dark or even black-skinned dwarfs) to be the builders of dolmens and megaliths among the Celts. Apparently, in such folk-traditions, which correctly or incorrectly regard fairies, corrigans, or Dravidians as the builders of ancient stone monuments, there has been preserved a folk-memory of early races of men who may have been Negritos (pygmy blacks) . ”

“ Both Dravidians and Australians have dark skins approximating to black; dark eyes; black hair, either straight, wavy or curly, but not woolly or frizzly; thick lips; low nose with wide nostrils; usually short stature, though the Australians are somewhat taller than the Dravidians. When the skulls are compared with each other, whilst they correspond in some particulars, they differ in others. In both races, the general form and proportions are dolichocephalic, but in the Australians the crania are absolutely longer than in the Dravidians, owing in part to the prominence of the glabella. ”

“ Dravida, Karnata, Gurjjara, Maharashtra and Tailinga are alluded to as constituting the five Dravidian tribes and are brought in juxtaposition with the five Gauda tribes Kannoja, Gauda, Maithila, Utkala and Saraswata. If the Gurjjars and the Maharashtras have racial affinities with the five Gauda tribes, the connection between the Gaudas and the Dravidas also is established. Thus, racially and lingustically alike, ancient writers seem to have thought there were affinities with the modern Aryans of North India and the Dravidians of the South. ”

“ Anthropologists also state that there is a Dravidian element in the population of western India, from Gujarat to Coorg.
It is thus probable that Dravidian languages have once been spoken in many tracts which are now occupied by Aryan forms of speech. The existence of a Dravidian dialect in Baluchistan seems to show that Dravidian settlers have once lived in those parts. The tribe in question, the Brāhūīs, are, however, now Eranians and not Dravidians by race, and it is not probable that there has ever been a numerous Dravidian population in Baluchistan. ”

“ These are identified, as they have been by other ethnologists, with the Dravidians, and the writer remarks that ‘although the Australians are still in a state of savagery, and the Dravidians of India have been for many ages a people civilized in a great measure, and possessed of literature, the two peoples are affiliated by deeply-marked characteristics in their social system as shown by the boomerang, which, unless locally evolved, must have been introduced from India.’ But the variations in the physical characters of the natives appear to be too great to be accounted for by a single graft ”

“ Some words, common to Bengali and Dravidian, however, which are extremely indecent, and which cannot be traced to any classical origin, and which one people can learn from another if both of them happen to be close neighbours, are of importance; but they cannot certainly find a mention here. I think the list of words I append below, will go a great way to establish the social influence of the Dravidians upon us, in a past time. ”

“ The Dravidians were a non-Aryan race of Central Asia who preceded the Aryans, and those of Southern India were the most civilised. Women with them stood higher than men. They subsequently divided, some going to Egypt, others to Babylonia, and the rest remaining in India. ”

“ Dravidians, races of people who occupied India before the arrival of Aryans, and being driven S. by them came to settle chiefly in the S. of the Dekkan; they are divided into numerous tribes, each with a language of its own, but of a common type or group, some of them literary and some of them not, the chief the Tamil; the tribes together number over 20 millions.
Drawcansir, a blustering, bullying boaster in Buckingham's play the "Rehearsal"; he kills every one of the combatants, "sparing neither friend nor foe."
Drayton, Michael, an English poet, born In Warwickshire, like Shakespeare ”

“ Writing some years ago concerning the Dravidian head with reference to a statement in Taylor's "Origin of the Aryans,"* [28] that " the Todas are fully dolichocephalic, differing in this respect from the Dravidians, who are brachycephalic," I published † [29] certain statistics based on the measurements of a number of subjects in the southern districts of the Madras Presidency. These figures showed that "the average cephalic index of 639 members of 19 different castes and tribes was 74.1 ”

“ She should affix the stamp of her genius to whatever she lays her hands upon and accepts, otherwise her work will not be a creation, but a mere repetition. The pro- cess of assimilative synthesis has been the characteristic of India from the beginning of her history. When first the original Aryans settled at the foot of the Himalayas, the Dravidian civilisation was indented upon to a large ex- tent. " Let none, however, imagine that non- Aryans have contributed nothing of value to Indian life. The ancient Dravidians were not indeed deficient in civilisation. ”

“ Like most of the Dravidian tribes, they live in great misery, and show every sign of their condition in their attenuated figures. One of this tribe measured by Rousselet was five feet in height. It may here be remarked that the stature of the Dravidian races exceeds that of the purer Negritos, a fact due, no doubt, to the influence of crossing. Farther south, in the Nilgherry Hills, and in the neighbourhood of the Todas and Badagas, dwell the Kurumbas. ”

“ Their hair is dark, generally soft, never woolly. The eyes and skin are dark, the beard often well developed, the nose broad and flat, the lips coarse, and jaws heavy. This race is believed to form the basis of the people of the Indian peninsula, and of some of the hill tribes of central India, to whom the name Dravidian has been given, and by its admixture with the Melanochroic group to have given rise to the ordinary population of the Indian provinces. ”

“ The original name for the Dravidian family, it may be noted, was Tamulic, but the term Dravidian was substituted by Bishop Caldwell, in order that the designation Tamil might be reserved for the language of that name. Dravida is the adjectival form of Dravida, the Sanskrit name for the people occupying the south of the Indian Peninsula (the Deccan of some European writers) . ”

“ The Dravidas resemble in some points the Australians, Malays, and Mongolians, as well as the Mediterraneans. The color of the skin is shaded from light brown to dark brown; the hair is neither straight nor woolly, but more or less curly, and the beard is well developed; the face is oval, the forehead high, the nose prominent and thin, and the lips are not thick. Their language is now strongly intermixed with Indo-European elements, but seems to descend from a peculiar primitive tongue. ”

“ The name Dravidian is, accordingly, identical with Tamulian, which name has formerly been used by European writers as a common designation of the languages in question. The word Dravida forms part of the denomination Andhra-Drāvida-bhāshā, the language of the Andhras (i.e., Telugu) , and Dravidas (i.e., Tamilians) , which Kumārila Bhatta (probably 7th Century A.D.) employed to denote the Dravidian family. In India Dravida has been used in more than one sense. Thus the so-called five Dravidas are Telugu, Kanarese, Marāthi, Gujarāti, and Tamil. ”

“ In Scythian may be included not only the hordes of White Huns, Gujjars, and Kusháns, but even some remote trace of earlier conquerors of Aryan race: Dravidian is little more than a collective name for the dark peoples who, before the dawn of history, were in possession of the Indian continent. From the two races in mixed and varying proportion are sprung the artisans and respectable cultivators of India, probably even the untouchable and degraded castes that cluster in dirty hovels on the outskirts of every village. In the far south they are almost, if not quite, Dravidian ”

“ I’ve drilled the men and shown the people how to stack their oats better; and I’ve brought in those tinware rifles from Ghorband—but I know what you’re driving at. I take it Kings always feel oppressed that way.’
“‘There’s another thing too,’ says Dravot, walking up and down. ‘The winter’s coming, and these people won’t be giving much trouble, and if they do we can’t move about. I want a wife.’
“‘For Gord’s sake leave the women alone!’ I says. ‘We’ve both got all the work we can, though I am a fool. ”

“ Philologists have discredited his hypothesis that, driven at a very early period into the extreme south, and cut off from intercourse with other peoples, the Dravidian nations have preserved their original vocabulary, and that true Dravidian roots, common to the three great branches, Tamil, Telugu, and Canarese, are pure Aryan. ”

“ Then all the people comes down and shouts like the devil and all, and Dravot says: 'Go and dig the land, and be fruitful and multiply,' which they did, though they didn't understand. Then we asks the names of things in their lingo—bread and water and fire and idols and such, and Dravot leads the priest of each village up to the idol, and says he must sit there and judge the people, and if anything goes wrong he is to be shot. ”

“ That at least the Telugu language had its origin in a variety of Paisaci seems to be the opinion of some of the Telugu Grammarians The term Dravidi as the name of a Prakrit has been consistently used by scholars till the time of Caldwell'. Babu Rajendralal Mitra speaks of the Dravidi as one of the recognized Prakrits equally with the ‘Sauraseni' and as being, like it, the parent cf some of the present verna. culars of India
Even if we take 'Dravida' as the name of a set of people, we come to the same conclusion. ”

“ As many tribes have lost their original speeches and speak one form or another of the Aryan speech, it is difficult to get to the origin of these words. It is not the place where I can discuss the ethnological problems but I can say on the strength of some known facts of Southern India, that the word Dravidian does not cover the whole ground, when we take even those tribes into consideration, who speak uniformly one Dravidian speech. ”

“ Spenser or Dryden would have escaped from the difficulty in a manner more in accordance with epic precedent by representing Henry’s action as the effect of a divine vision. Edward the Third or the Black Prince would have risen from the grave to urge him to renew and complete their interrupted and now almost undone work; or the ghosts of chiefs untimely slain would have reproached him with their abandoned conquests and neglected graves. Drayton has merely taken the story as he found it, without a thought of submitting its dross to the alchemy of the re-creative imagination of the poet. ”

“ Cortez at his tent door.
Indian, come forth ; your enemies are gone,
And I, who saved you from them, here alone.
Enter Orbellan, holding his face aside.
You hide your face, as you were still afraid:
Dare you not look on him who gave you aid?
Orb. Moon, slip behind some cloud, some tempest, rise,
And blow out all the stars that light the skies, To shroud my shame!
Cort. In vain you turn aside,
And hide your face; your name you cannot hide:
I know my rival and his black design.
Orb. Forgive it, as my passion's fault, not mine.
Cort. In your excuse your love does little say ”

“ However separated from each other, and scattered among the Dravidian clans with whom they have dwelt, and however distant from one another they still live, there is hardly a province in the whole of Bharatavarasha which cannot produce, if not some living remnants of this race, at least some remains of past times which prove their presence. Indeed, the Kurumbas must be regarded as very old inhabitants of this land, who can contest with their Dravidian kinsmen the priority of occupation of the Indian soil. ”

“ Who loves the fair, and is endued with might,
In such a quarrel would be proud to fight.
There breathes not scarce a man on British ground
(An isle for love and arms of old renown'd)
But would have sold his life to purchase fame,
To Palamon or Arcite sent his name:
And had the land selected of the best, 20
Half had come hence, and let the world provide the rest.
A hundred knights with Palamon there came,
Approved in fight, and men of mighty name;
Their arms were several, as their nations were,
But furnish'd all alike with sword and spear.
Some wore coat-armour, imitating scale ”

“ The Dravidian languages, Gondi, Kurukh and Khond, are of one family with Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Canarese, and their home is the south of India. The word Dravida comes from an older form Damila or Dramila, and was used in ancient Pali and Jain literature as a name for the people of the Tamil country.75 Afterwards it came to signify generally the people of southern India as opposed to Gaur or northern India. ”