The honourable chief minister of Tamil Nadu making statements how their party is only against “Aryan hegemony” but not “spiritualism” shows how politics has whitewashed all truth in a glaring attempt to divide. Aryans and Dravidians as some kind of different “races” has been one of our most divisive narratives. Archaeology, linguistics, textual sources, and many genetic studies have rejected the whole idea of invading or migrating Aryans from Central Asia to India around 1500 BCE and driving away the Indigenous inhabitants. Despite no evidence, we have built a huge edifice of conclusions based on the Aryan assumption.
Scholars and politicians believe that the people driven south and into the forests became the “Dravidians” and the “tribals,” respectively. Those who stayed back became the “Shudras” (especially the untouchables). Most Breaking India narratives take the help of these three identities—Dravidians, tribals, and Dalits (scheduled castes or ex-untouchables)—in a most focused manner. These groups, always in opposition to the dominant, upper caste Hindus, remain uninterrupted in our narratives since the colonial times. Accordingly, the “majority” is always trying to exploit and subsume the former into a Vedic-Sanskritic-Brahmanical culture.
The Periyar-initiated Dravidian movement hinges on this theory. This turns most North Indians and Brahmins into descendants of the invading Aryans and Tamils as the indigenous Dravidians. This is along with other claims, like that Tamil is older than its deadly rival, Sanskrit. Again, archaeology, epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), numismatics (the study of coins), and literature (the Sangam literature) disprove all these ideas. Archaeology has so far fixed the emergence of urban civilization in Tamil Nadu two and a half millennia after the appearance of Indus cities. The earliest Tamil kingdoms were established around the fourth century BCE.
Particularly, the rich Sangam literature (300 BCE–300 CE) shows an absence of any great clash between Aryans and Dravidians. Vedic and Puranic themes inextricably weave into the most ancient culture of the Tamil land. Today, the Tamil language has assimilated and uses between 20 and 40% of the commonly used vocabulary from Sanskrit. Surprisingly, there are no references to the word “Dravida” in Tolkappiyam, the oldest surviving work on Tamil grammar. The first Tamil use was by the sage Tayumanvar in the 18th century. In the Vedic-Puranic-Itihaasic literature, “Arya” denoted a noble person, and “Dravida” was in a purely geographical sense. As one scholar shows, “Dravida” is not of Tamil origin at all because Tamil grammar neither provides for a word beginning with a sonant (hence cannot begin with d) nor with a half-syllable. The word has most likely Prakrit or Sanskrit roots.
There was every sign of deep cultural interaction between the North and South. Modern-day scholars continue the colonial divisive narratives of great conflicts without questioning. “Dravidian” has a meaning either in the old geographical or in the modern linguistic senses; racial and separate cultural meanings are unscientific and irrational. We need unity and not divisions based on selective understandings of history for narrow political gains.
RANDOM MUSINGS 