04-16-2005, 08:10 PM
The division of indian languages into dravidian and aryan is artificial and has no basis in indigenous studies of linguistics and etymology. This is all the more astonishing since the subject of etymology was first developed in India in antiquity under the heading of Nirukta by Yaska (just as Vyakarana was developed by Panini). That there is diversity in Indian languages is a fact taht cannot be denied. But all the South Indian languages have more than a fair share of Sanskritic words, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Claims to prior antiquity can become contentious, but suffice it to say that all the native languages of India arose in the subcntinent and environs if we include greater India. Over time they have shared vocabularies. Nobody has explained to me in a satisfactory manner , why , merely because there is affinity among indo-european languages such affinity should preclude linguistic affinity between the languages of India.
Such a dichotomy was then extended to race and now we have talk of an Aryan and a dravidian race and since carried to absurd lengths by Hitler. It is clear that the invention of the term Dravidian (divorced from its original sanskritic etymology of meaning southern) was contrived we suspect with the intent to create discord among Indians. It is too much of a coincidence that the first census o findia was instituted for the express purpose of highlighting and emphasizing the diversity of Indian ethnic groups ( by calling them castes and races) at about the same time (1870's, coincides also with the formation of the Indian national congress by an englishman named Allan Octavian Hume) that the idea of a dravidian language took root in India. Overnight the words such as Dravidian and caste took new meaning and became ubiquitous in common Indian parlance to where we are today
It is sad that we have succcumbed to this ploy.
Such a dichotomy was then extended to race and now we have talk of an Aryan and a dravidian race and since carried to absurd lengths by Hitler. It is clear that the invention of the term Dravidian (divorced from its original sanskritic etymology of meaning southern) was contrived we suspect with the intent to create discord among Indians. It is too much of a coincidence that the first census o findia was instituted for the express purpose of highlighting and emphasizing the diversity of Indian ethnic groups ( by calling them castes and races) at about the same time (1870's, coincides also with the formation of the Indian national congress by an englishman named Allan Octavian Hume) that the idea of a dravidian language took root in India. Overnight the words such as Dravidian and caste took new meaning and became ubiquitous in common Indian parlance to where we are today
It is sad that we have succcumbed to this ploy.