Iravatham Mahadevan on the composite nature of Indian culture

by Guest Fri Jun 03, 2011 8:18 pm

Ruling out the Aryan authorship of the Indus civilisation does not of course automatically make it Dravidian. However there is substantial evidence favouring that supposition. I mention the most important aspects of the evidence without going into details:

# The survival of Dravidian languages like Brahui in North India.

# The presence of Dravidian loan words in the Rig Veda.

# The substratum influence of Dravidian languages on the Prakrit dialects of North India.

The evidence indicates that Dravidian languages were once spoken widely in North India and one or more of Dravidian dialects could well be the language of the Indus texts.

Let me state with all the emphasis I can command that `Aryan' and `Dravidian' are names of languages and not of races. Speakers of one language can, and frequently did, switch over from one language to another. We should not allow research into the Indus civilisation and language to be vitiated by false notions of racial or ethnic identities.

Speakers of the Aryan languages indistinguishably merged with speakers of Dravidian and Munda languages millennia ago — creating a composite Indian society, culture, and religious traditions containing elements inherited from every source. It is thus more than likely that Indus artistic and religious motifs and craft traditions have survived and can be traced in the Sanskrit literature from the days of the Rig Veda, and also in the old Tamil traditions recorded in the Sangam poetry. This is the basic assumption that underlies my own work on the interpretation of the Indus Script through bilingual parallels drawn from Sanskrit and Old Tamil works.

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/02/04/stories/2007020400260500.htm[u]

by Kayalvizhi Fri Jun 03, 2011 8:49 pm

India, as a country, by any name, never existed before the British colonial rule in all history, in spite of the oft-repeated false propaganda of the long history, one-ness and unity of India. - Dr. Thanjai Nalangkilli

Read full article at

http://www.tamiltribune.com/99/0402-why-tamil-nadu-independence.html

Iravatham Mahadevan on the composite nature of Indian culture

Iravatham Mahadevan on the composite nature of Indian culture

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